Laudator Temporis Acti

But they were altogether unwilling to put to death a man of the royal blood, and decided to confine him in a castle which it is their habit to call the "Prison of Oblivion." For if anyone is cast into it, the law permits no mention of him to be made thereafter, but death is the penalty for the man who speaks his name; for this reason it has received this title among the Persians.

οἱ δὲ κτεῖναι ἄνδρα τοῦ βασιλείου αἵματος οὐδ᾿ ὅλως ἔγνωσαν, ἀλλ᾿ ἐν φρουρίῳ καθεῖρξαι ὅπερ τῆς Λήθης καλεῖν 8νενομίκασιν. ἢν γάρ τις ἐνταῦθα ἐμβληθεὶς τύχῃ, οὐκέτι ὁ νόμος ἐφίησι μνήμην αὐτοῦ εἶναι, ἀλλὰ θάνατος τῷ ὠνομακότι ἡ ζημία ἐστί· διὸ δὴ καὶ τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν ταύτην πρὸς Περσῶν ἔλαχεν.

This admission, Socrates, does not remove the objection which I have to meddlesome censors calling themselves philanthropists, but abounding only in their own conceit, and wedded to their nostrums.

From the beginning we are compelled to put up with our parents, our country, our times, and the relentless approach of old age and death; and on the way we are lucky if we escape disease, deformity, crossed hopes, or desperate poverty.

They say that there are poisons to which an organism may accustom itself, so that they may become elements of defence within it against other evils, perhaps more deadly. Christianity among us is one of these domesticated evils or tonic poisons, like the army, the government, the family, and the school; all of them traditional crutches with which, though limping, we manage to walk.

I thanked the gods when I was alive for having been born a Greek and not a barbarian, and now that I am dead I thank them that I died in time, lest I should have become a Christian.

'But competition, competition—new invention, new invention—alteration, alteration—the world's gone past me.'

'I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again. Even the noise it makes a long way ahead, confuses me.'

And let me ask here in regard to your use of the alphabet, what man of what nation, ancient or modern, could imagine the existence of a people on the same globe with himself, who employ the letters e a u x to express a sound which he and all others would express by the single vowel o, and that furthermore oient should signify neither more nor less than another single vowel e? And what is your barbarity to the most beautiful of the liquids! In fils you disinherit it: in Versailles you pour two of them into a gargle. If there is a letter that ought to have more force and strength in it than any other, it is the letter x, which in fact is composed of two stout ones, k and s: yet you make nothing of it.

Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men's dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkies in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational.

He had a rough mouth, was talkative, and was more of a discord than a man.

durae buccae fuit, linguosus, discordia, non homo.

Socrates. Is there not often a lifelong and tender affection between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters?

The Stranger. There is: sometimes sugary, sometimes seasoned with a little sarcasm.

Socrates. At least young children, red-cheeked and vigorous, running and romping about with shrill cries, must be a perfect delight to you?

The Stranger. Yes, for half an hour.

Socrates. You find more peace, no doubt, among wrinkled white-bearded elders sitting in the sun or tottering on knotted staves, well pleased with themselves and their old saws?

The Stranger. They, too, are picturesque, but at their best in the background. Otherwise such old men are a danger to philanthropy.

Socrates. I see that your preference, like mine, is decidedly for the plastic and generous temper of young men, who embody human health and freedom to perfection.

The Stranger. Yes, but our preference in this matter is three-quarters illusion. In reality, what is a youth but a tadpole? And what can be more odious than their conceit when they have some cleverness and transgress their sphere?

A few years later Hume broached the subject with Blair, the minister of the biggest and most prestigious church in Scotland, St. Giles' Cathedral. "Whenever I have had the pleasure to be in your company," he writes, "if the discourse turned upon any common subject of literature or reasoning, I always parted from you both entertained and instructed. But when the conversation was diverted by you from this channel towards the subject of your profession; tho I doubt not but your intentions were very friendly towards me, I own I never received the same satisfaction: I was apt to be tired, and you to be angry." Hume thus offers a proposal: "I would therefore wish for the future, wherever my good fortune throws me in your way, that these topics should be forborne between us. I have, long since, done with all inquiries on such subjects, and am become incapable of instruction."⁴⁰

40. David Hume to Hugh Blair, autumn 1761?, in HL I, 351.

O age of lead, perverse time, sky of brass,
Land without fruit, sterile and profitless,
People accursed, with every sorrow full! —
Is it not right that I should mourn you all?
For I see nothing in tomorrow's world,
Grievously sad and all disorderly,
Comprising every evil in its deeds.
Today the time of tribulation comes.

Age de plomb, temps pervers, ciel d'arain,
Terre sanz fruit, et sterile et brehaingne,
Peuple maudit de toute doleur plain,
Il est bien drois que de vous tous me plaingne:
Car je ne voy riens au monde qui viengne
Fors tristement et a confusion,
Et qui tous maulx en ses faiz ne compraingne,
Hui est li temps de tribulacion.

Six hours are most suitable for labour, and the four that follow, when set forth in letters,¹ say to men "Live."

¹ The letters of the alphabet were used as figures: ΖΗΘΙ (meaning "live") is 7,8,9,10.

Ἓξ ὧραι μόχθοις ἱκανώταται· αἱ δὲ μετ' αὐτὰς
    γράμμασι δεικνύμεναι ΖΗΘΙ λέγουσι βροτοῖς.

Of the twenty-four equal hours into which they divide the day and the night, the Utopians devote only six to work. They work three hours before noon, when they go to lunch. After lunch, they rest for two hours, then go to work for another three hours. Then they have supper, and about eight o'clock (counting the first hour after noon as one) they go to bed, and sleep eight hours.

cum in horas viginti quattuor aequales diem connumerata nocte dividant, sex dumtaxat operi deputant: tres ante meridiem, a quibus prandium ineunt, atque a prandio duas postmeridianas horas cum interquierint, tres deinde rursus labori datas cena claudunt. cum primam horam ab meridie numerent, sub octavam cubitum eunt; horas octo somnus vindicat.

If all men and women would labor six hours in the twenty-four, some mentally, some corporeally, setting apart one day in the seven, all the work would be completed that is requisite for our innocent and rational desires.

Government among us is certainly not an art, but a fatality. In so far as it is not a matter of mere tradition and routine, it results from contrary purposes and parties pulling against each other in a tug-of-war, for the sake of office or of some immediate reform or relief. Whether the effects of government are beneficent in the end nobody can tell, because nobody can foresee the infinite radiations of those effects in the future; nor even in the present have we any clear or authoritative notion of the uses of government, or any criterion by which to measure the various goods that various people might regard as ultimate, such as health, friendship, knowledge, laughter, or heaven. And so far is government among us from regarding any ultimate good, that many are inclined to look in other directions for true guidance in their allegiances, and for the means to happiness; and they regard politics with aversion, and politicians with contempt, thinking that government, at best, is a nuisance.

Against the Trojans' will daylight ebbed, but to the Achaians
most welcome, much prayed for, was dark night's arrival.

Τρωσὶν μέν ῥ᾿ ἀέκουσιν ἔδυ φάος, αὐτὰρ Ἀχαιοῖς
ἀσπασίη τρίλλιστος ἐπήλυθε νὺξ ἐρεβεννή.

Everybody knows that the dunghill stinks worst when it's stirred.

Ein Dreck je mehr er wirdt geschürt / Je mehr er eim die Nase rührt.

I sometimes wonder whether anybody ever reads the Greek Testament for pleasure, pleasure in the Greek. For myself, I have never met anyone who did, not so much as a clergyman. Just as literature, and for mere language, the English is better, the German is better. Tindale, you may say, translated the New Testament so well because he was rather like an apostle or an evangelist. That certainly might help. But I can think of a more obvious reason. If Tindale is better than his original, that, I suggest, may mean not much more than that he disposed a better language, his sixteenth-century English, a better language than the Hellenistic Greek. From the New Testament I should infer, for the theory of translation, no more than that a translation made in a good language from an original made in an inferior language is likely to be better worth reading than the original.

I think our boys are making the same mistake as those classical dons who used to say that the teaching of the Greek and Latin languages was maintained because it taught men to think clearly, to write clear English, to become competent civil servants or what not. Apart from being largely balls, the reasons are utile and so-called 'practical'. What the dons ought to have said was that the classics were an integral part of our Western heritage and should be fought for on that ground alone. Our Church leaders have even more reason to guard that heritage—for it is saturated with the sacral. It's not a matter of knowledge but of love. It's a terrible thought that the language of the West, of the Western liturgy, and inevitably the Roman chant, might become virtually extinct.

"I would always rather use a knife than a revolver; I think it is a more elegant weapon."

"I dare say it is only a matter of habit," answered Ashenden. "Perhaps you are more at home with a knife."

"Anyone can pull a trigger, but it needs a man to use a knife."

I lie here, Amandus, who enjoyed every kind of luxury.
I lived like a god for a great number of years.

ἐνθάδε κεῖμε Ἄμανδος, τρυφῆς πάσης ὁ μετασχών,
   ἰσοθέως ζήσας πουλὺν ἐτῶν ἀριθμόν.

But all men necessarily love their country.

ἀλλ᾿ ἀναγκαίως ἔχει / πατρίδος ἐρᾶν ἅπαντας.

If every person commemorated for exceptional achievement is to be pulled down from his plinth because he is subsequently found to have been less than a saint (according to current conceptions of sanctity), we shall end up honoring no one except ourselves.

There are, then, two worlds & these twain can never be one flesh. They are not complementary to one another; they are, in the liveliest sense of the words, mortal enemies. On the one hand is the world of mechanised industry claiming to be able to give happiness to men and all the delights of human life — provided we are content to have them in our spare time and do not demand such things in the work by which we earn our livings; a world regulated by the factory whistle and the mechanical time-keeper; a world wherein no man makes the whole of anything, wherein the product is standardised and the man simply a tool, a tooth on a wheel. On the other is the languishing but indestructible world of the small shopkeeper, the small workshop, the studio and the consulting room — a world in which the notion of spare time hardly exists, for the thing is hardly known and very little desired; a world wherein the work is the life & love accompanies it.

A person dependent on somebody else for everything from potatoes to opinions may declare that he is a free man, and his government may issue a certificate granting him his freedom, but he will not be free. He is that variety of specialist known as a consumer, which means that he is the abject dependent of producers. How can he be free if he can do nothing for himself? What is the First Amendment to him whose mouth is stuck to the tit of the "affluent society"? Men are free precisely to the extent that they are equal to their own needs. The most able are the most free.

I was accustomed to family prayers and I noticed that some of the prayers Augustus read sounded strangely in my ears. Then I discovered that he had neatly inked out many lines in the Prayer Book he read from. I asked him why.

'I've crossed out all the passages in glorification of God,' he said. 'God is certainly a gentleman, and no gentleman cares to be praised to his face. It is tactless, impertinent and vulgar. I think all that fulsome adulation must be highly offensive to him.'

At the time this notion seemed odd to me and even comic, but since then I have come to think that there was some sense in it.

Something must be said about the word "intertextual", which has crept into classical scholarship but which may do more harm than good. The first half of the compound suggests mutuality and a completely symmetrical relationship, as with "international" or "interpersonal": if Nation A can commit an act of war against Nation B, so can Nation B against Nation A, if Person A can extend sympathy to Person B, Person B can reciprocate. This is possible because both nations and persons are ongoing agents who share the same space over time. Works of literature, by contrast, are not ongoing agents, and they take a fixed form at the moment when their creation is finished. They are arranged in time in such a way that later works may allude to earlier ones but earlier works may not allude to later ones except under quite unusual circumstances. Thus the Aeneid may allude to the De Rerum Natura, but the De Rerum Natura may not allude to the Aeneid. Only if the author knows what he intends to write or what one of his acquaintances intends to write can there be an allusion of sorts, though since readers cannot understand it until the other work appears, it would be better to speak of a forecast. This, for obvious reasons, is far rarer, and any language that suggests that reference in one direction is pretty much on the same footing with reference in the other is bound to induce critical confusion.

Under the shelter of this tomb the earth holds Cydimachus, who was rich and well on in years when he sailed into harbor. For he looked on his children's children, and his old age was free from care. Now he is dead and has the fate that all share.

Κυδίμαχο[ν] χθὼν [ἥδε τ]α[φ]ῆς στε[γέεσ]σι καλύπ[τει,
ὄλβι[ο]ν εὐαίω[ν]α βί[ου] πλεύσαντα πρὸς ὅρμον·
παῖδα[ς γὰρ] παίδω[ν ἐ]σιδὼν καὶ γῆρα[ς ἄ]λ[υπον]
τὴν πάντων κοινὴν μοῖραν [ἔχει] φ[θ]ίμ[ε]νος.

Κυδίμαχο[ν] χθὼν ἥδε [π]ατρὶς στέρ[νοι]σι καλύπ[τε]ι
ὄλβιον εὐαίωνα β[ίου] πλεύσαντα πρὸς ὅρμον·
παῖδας [γὰρ] παίδων ἐσιδὼν καὶ γῆρας ἄλ[υπον]
τὴν πάντων κοινὴν μοῖραν [ἔχει] φθίμενος.

"Do you like macaroni?" said R.

"What do you mean by macaroni?" answered Ashenden. "It is like asking me if I like poetry. I like Keats and Wordsworth and Verlaine and Goethe. When you say macaroni, do you mean spaghetti, tagliatelli, rigatoni, vermicelli, fettucini, tufali, farfalli, or just macaroni?"

"Macaroni," replied R., a man of few words.

"I like all simple things, boiled eggs, oysters and caviare, truite au bleu, grilled salmon, roast lamb (the saddle by preference), cold grouse, treacle tart and rice pudding. But of all simple things the only one I can eat day in and day out, not only without disgust but with the eagerness of an appetite unimpaired by excess, is macaroni."

In the center of one side is a naked youth, against whom the name Antiphon is written. He is beginning the arm swing preparatory to throwing the discus and appears to be under instruction from another youth ("Hipp[ar]chos"). Hipparchos is draped in a himation, holds a trainer's wand, and points firmly with a long right arm, as if to reinforce a spoken point. This pair is flanked to the right by a youth ("Polyllos"), who folds his himation and is about to give it to an implausibly tiny boy, and to the left by another equally small boy ("ho pais" "the boy"). This small boy has some item of clothing over his shoulder and extends his arm as if to urge care on the youth with a thong who prepares to secure, or more probably has just untied, his penis. Beside this youth is written "Leagros [k]alos" "Leagros is fair." The stature of the boys is plausibly meant as an indicator of their slave status.

Although I have become, among other things, a teacher, I am skeptical of education. It seems to me a most doubtful process, and I think the good of it is taken too much for granted. It is a matter that is overtheorized and overvalued and always approached with too much confidence. It is, as we skeptics are always discovering to our delight, no substitute for experience or life or virtue or devotion. As it is handed out by the schools, it is only theoretically useful, like a randomly mixed handful of seeds carried in one's pocket. When one carries them back to one's own place in the world and plants them, some will prove unfit for the climate or the ground, some are sterile, some are not seeds at all but little clods and bits of gravel. Surprisingly few of them come to anything. There is an incredible waste and clumsiness in most efforts to prepare the young. For me, as a student and as a teacher, there has always been a pressing anxiety between the classroom and the world: how can you get from one to the other except by a blind jump? School is not so pleasant or valuable an experience as it is made out to be in the theorizing and reminiscing of elders. In a sense, it is not an experience at all, but a hiatus in experience.

Mankind are, in all ages, caught by the same baits: the same tricks played over and over again, still trepan them.

Just one thing I urge upon you: never consent to live and go into slavery when you can choose to die as befits a free man.

ἓν δέ σοι μόνον προφωνῶ· μὴ ᾿πὶ δουλείαν ποτὲ
ζῶν ἑκὼν ἔλθῃς παρόν σοι κατθανεῖν ἐλευθέρως.

All that a mortal man can do is blame the gods.

μέμψασθαι δὲ θεοῖς ἀρκεῖ μόνον ἄνδρα γε θνητόν.

Disputes with Persons, pertinaciously obstinate in their Principles, are, of all others, the most irksome; except, perhaps, those with Persons, who really do not believe at all the Opinion they defend, but engage in the Controversy, from Affectation, from a Spirit of Opposition, or from a Desire of showing Wit and Ingenuity, superior to the rest of Mankind. The same blind Adherence to their own Arguments is to be expected in both; the same Contempt of their Antagonists; and the same passionate Vehemence, in inforcing Sophistry and Falshood. And as reasoning is not the Source, whence either Disputant derives his Tenets; 'tis in vain to expect, that any Logic, which speaks not to the Affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder Principles.

Extinguish all the warm Feelings and Prepossessions in favour of Virtue, and all Disgust or Aversion against Vice: Render Men totally indifferent towards these Distinctions; and Morality is no longer a practical Study, nor has any Tendency to regulate our Lives and Actions.

The one thing needful. — There is one thing one has to have: either a cheerful disposition by nature or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.

Das Eine, was Noth thut. — Eins muss man haben: entweder einen von Natur leichten Sinn oder einen durch Kunst und Wissen erleichterten Sinn.

Ten times a day you must laugh and be cheerful.

Zehn Mal musst du lachen am Tage und heiter sein.

But tho' industrialism has now won an almost complete victory, the handicrafts are not killed, & they cannot be quite killed because they meet an inherent, indestructible, permanent need in human nature. (Even if a man's whole day be spent as a servant of an industrial concern, in his spare time he will make something, if only a window box flower garden.)

It is in Hume's Essays and History that we find the reporter of all sides, the doubter of exclusive claims, the distruster of systems, the person determined to find some possible truth in a variety of view­points and exclusive and absolute truth in none.

Now all barbarian peoples are by nature so constituted that even when they are subjects of the Romans they are far removed in spirit from them and, chafing at the imposition of the rule of law, they incline instinctively to turbulent and seditious behaviour. There is nothing they would like better than to continue living as their own masters, subject to no outside jurisdiction and a law unto themselves.

ἅπαν μὲν οὖν ἀεὶ βάρβαρον φῦλον, εἰ καὶ κατήκοον ᾖ τοῖς Ῥωμαιοις, ἀλλὰ τῷ τῆς γνώμης ἀλλοτριωτάτῳ διεστηκὸς καὶ τῇ τάξει τῶν νόμων ἀχθόμενον, ἐπὶ τὸ νεωτεροποιὸν καὶ ταραχῶδες φέρεσθαι πέφυχεν· καὶ ἥδιστα μὲν ἂν ἐφ' ἑαυτοῦ βιοῦν διατελοίη μηδαμῶς ὑφ' ἑτέροις ταττόμενον, ὡς μηδὲ τῶν ἀδικημάτων εὐθύνας ὑπέχειν.

There are enow of zealots on both sides who kindle up the passions of their partizans, and under pretence of public good, pursue the interests and ends of their particular faction. For my part, I shall always be more fond of promoting moderation than zeal; though perhaps the surest way of producing moderation in every party is to increase our zeal for the public. Let us therefore try, if it be possible, from the foregoing doctrine, to draw a lesson of moderation with regard to the parties, into which our country is at present divided; at the same time, that we allow not this moderation to abate the industry and passion, with which every individual is bound to pursue the good of his country.

Those who either attack or defend a minister in such a government as ours, where the utmost liberty is allowed, always carry matters to an extreme, and exaggerate his merit or demerit with regard to the public. His enemies are sure to charge him with the greatest enormities, both in domestic and foreign management; and there is no meanness nor crime, of which, in their account, he is not capable. Unnecessary wars, scandalous treaties, profusion of public treasure, oppressive taxes, every kind of maladministration is ascribed to him. To aggravate the charge, his pernicious conduct, it is said, will extend its baleful influence even to posterity, by undermining the best constitution in the world, and disordering that wise system of laws, institutions, and customs, by which our ancestors, during so many centuries, have been so happily governed. He is not only a wicked minister in himself, but has removed every security provided against wicked ministers for the future.

On the other hand, the partizans of the minister make his panegyric run as high as the accusation against him, and celebrate his wise, steady and moderate conduct in every part of his administration. The honour and interest of the nation supported abroad, public credit maintained at home, persecution restrained, faction subdued; the merit of all these blessings is ascribed solely to the minister. At the same time, he crowns all his other merits by a religious care of the best constitution in the world, which he has preserved in all its parts, and has transmitted entire, to be the happiness and security of the latest posterity.

When this accusation and panegyric are received by the partizans of each party, no wonder they beget an extraordinary ferment on both sides, and fill the nation with violent animosities.

There is a great deal of hypocrisy in our judgement of others. We make an ideal picture of ourselves and measure our fellows by it. But when we read the Diary of Pepys or the Confessions of Rousseau, in which a little of the truth is told, when we study the life of Wagner, we are horrified: we forget; we will not look at our private selves. I do not believe that there is any man, who if the whole truth were known of him, would not seem a monster of depravity; and also I believe that there are very few who have not at the same time virtue, goodness and beauty.

Evil men from without are troubling our Church. Take steps against them. Only nails drive out nails.

λυποῦσι τὴν ἐκκλησίαν ἀλλότριοι πονηροί. διάβηθι κατ' αὐτῶν· οἱ πάτταλοι γὰρ παττάλοις ἐκκρούονται.

The two notions of public good and illegal violence have from time immemorial been diametrically oppposed.

πάλαι γὰρ ἀλλήλοιν ἀποκεκριμένω τνγχάνετον ὠφέλεια καὶ παρανομία.

[H]e soon prompted, or accepted, the sacrifice of a virgin, who professed the religion of the Greeks and cultivated the friendship of Orestes. Hypatia, the daughter of Theon the mathematician, was initiated in her father's studies; her learned comments have elucidated the geometry of Apollonius and Diophantus; and she publicly taught, both at Athens and Alexandria, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. In the bloom of beauty, and in the maturity of wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples; the persons most illustrious for their rank or merit were impatient to visit the female philosopher; and Cyril beheld, with a jealous eye, the gorgeous train of horses and slaves who crowded the door of her academy. A rumour was spread among the Christians that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the praefect and the archbishop; and that obstacle was speedily removed. On a fatal day in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames. The just progress of inquiry and punishment was stopped by seasonable gifts; but the murder of Hypatia has imprinted an indelible stain on the character and religion of Cyril of Alexandria.

Speed, I bid you, speed the earth
Onward with a shout of mirth,
Fill your eager eyes with light,
Put my face and memory
Out of mind and out of sight.
Nothing I have caused or done,
But this gravestone, meets the sun:
Friends, a great simplicity
Comes at last to you and me!

Yet human nature is so weak that the cure lags behind the disease. As our bodies, which grow so slowly, perish in a flash, so too the mind and its interests can be more easily crushed than brought again to life. Idleness gradually becomes sweet, and we end by loving the sloth that at first we loathed.

natura tamen infirmitatis humanae tardiora sunt remedia quam mala; et ut corpora nostra lente augescunt, cito extinguuntur, sic ingenia studiaque oppresseris facilius quam revocaveris: subit quippe etiam ipsius inertiae dulcedo, et invisa primo desidia postremo amatur.

My master, precious to a man is money, more precious still is his life, but most prized of all are his children.

ὦ δέσποτα, ποθεινὰ μὲν ἀνθρώπῳ χρήματα, ποθεινοτέρα δὲ ἡ ψυχή, πάντων μέντοι ἀξιώτατα τέκνα.

[I]t is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.

But Plutarch seemed to be exactly the food that suited my mind. I shall never forget the Lent of 1763, at which time I was nine years of age, when I carried it to church instead of my prayer-book.

So savage and hostile to virtue are our times.

tam saeva et infesta virtutibus tempora.

So savage and hostile to merit has this age been.

supply sunt.

sc. 'fuerunt'.

Kl. You seem to us to be saying, friend, that spending time drinking together is a great contribution to education, if it is done correctly!

Ath. Why not?

Kl. Well, could you explain next how what's just been said is true?

Ath. Stranger, to be sure of the truth in these matters, when so many disagree, would belong to a god.

Κλεινίας
δοκεῖς ἡμῖν, ὦ φίλε, τὴν ἐν τοῖς οἴνοις κοινὴν διατριβὴν ὡς εἰς παιδείας μεγάλην μοῖραν τείνουσαν λέγειν, ἂν ὀρθῶς γίγνηται.

Ἀθηναῖος
τί μήν;

Κλεινίας
ἔχοις ἂν οὖν τὸ μετὰ τοῦτ᾽ εἰπεῖν ὡς ἔστιν τὸ νῦν εἰρημένον ἀληθές;

Ἀθηναῖος
τὸ μὲν ἀληθές, ὦ ξένε, διισχυρίζεσθαι ταῦτα οὕτως ἔχειν, πολλῶν ἀμφισβητούντων, θεοῦ...

Do not bring anything for me to drink, for I drank when I was alive, and it does no good: nor anything to eat, I need nothing. All that is nonsense. But if for the sake of remembrance and the life we had together, you bring saffron or frankincense, then, friends, you are giving appropriate gifts to those who have taken me into their keeping. These things belong to the gods below; dead men have nothing to do with the living.

μή μοι πεῖν φέρεθ' ὧδε, μάτην πέποται γάρ, ὅτ' ἔζων,
   μηδὲ φαγεῖν· ἀρκεῖ· φλήναφός ἐστι τάδε.
εἰ δ' ἕνεκεν μνήμης τε̣ καὶ ὧν ἐβίωσα σὺν ὑμεῖν
   ἢ κρόκον ἢ λιβάνους δῶρα φέρεσθε, φίλοι,
τοῖς μ' ὑποδεξαμένοις ἀντάξια ταῦτα διδόντες,
   ταῦτ' ἐνέρων· ζώντων δ' οὐδὲν ἔχουσι νεκροί.

The apodosis, ταῦτ' ἐνέρων, does not really follow the protasis; the condition is blurred by the presence of two thoughts. First, a gesture of friendship for old times' sake is acceptable, and becoming to the dead man's friends; but, second, offerings will reach the gods below, not the corpse. The existence of the καταχθόνιοι as divinities is accepted, but they are sharply distinguished from the dead individual who has no part in immortality.

Bestow not scent and crowns on stone columns, nor set the fire ablaze; the outlay is in vain. Give me gifts, if thou wilt, when I am alive, but by steeping ashes in wine thou wilt make mud, and the dead shall not drink thereof.

μὴ μύρα, μὴ στεφάνους λιθίναις στήλαισι χαρίζου,
   μηδὲ τὸ πῦρ φλέξῃς· ἐς κενὸν ἡ δαπάνη.
ζῶντί μοι, εἴ τι θέλεις, χάρισαι· τέφρην δὲ μεθύσκων
   πηλὸν ποιήσεις, κοὐχ ὁ θανὼν πίεται.

I consider it unjust as well as unprofitable to do violence to the laws of our community, which we set out to cherish, on account of the wrong-doing of one or perhaps two individuals and to do away with the whole of our familiar pattern of life which means so much to us, on so slender a pretext. We would also be branding ourselves as the betrayers of those who are guarding our land and imperilling their own lives so that we can live in comfort...

ἄδικον οὖν οἶμαι καὶ πρός γε ἀξύμφορον ἑνὸς ἒξ ἁπάντων ἀνδρὸς ἥ καὶ δυοῖν τυχὸν ἡμαρτηκότοιν ἐξυβρίσαι μὲν εἰς τοὺς κοινοὺς νόμους, οὕς στέργειν προυθέμεθα, πολιτείαν δὲ ξύμπασαν καὶ δίαιταν ξυνήθη καὶ φίλην οὕτω πως ῥᾳδίως ἀποσκευάσασθαι, τῶν δὲ τὴν χώραν φρουρούντων καὶ πολλοὺς ὅσους κινδύνων ἀναδεχομένων, ὡς ἂν ἡμῖν ἐν εὐπαθείᾳ βιοτεύειν ἐξῇ, προδότας δειχθῆναι...

Wholly a blessed time: when jargon might abate, and here and there some genuine speech begin.

God! Good Fortune! Zeus lord over Dodona I send this gift to you from me: Agathon, the son of Echephylos, and his offspring, proxenoi of the Molossians and their allies throughout thirty generations from Troy, the race of Kassandra, Zakynthians.

θεός ∶ τύχα· Ζεῦ, Δωδώνης μεδέων· τόδε σοι δῶρον πέμπω παρ' ἐμοῦ ∶ Ἀγάθων Ἐχεφύλου καὶ γενεὰ πρόξενοι Μολοσσῶν καὶ συμμάχων ἐν τριάκοντα γενεαῖς ἐκ Τρωΐας Κασσάνδρας γενεά, Ζακύνθιοι.

We must next ask what especial importance Agathon attached to what is, after all, the most conspicuous feature of the plaque, the male genitalia. This has mostly been left unexplained (as by Egger and Christ) or taken as apotropaic (by Herter) or explained as an oblique way of referring to the rape of Kassandra by Ajax, but these latter alternatives, as we have seen, face substantial difficulties. On the other hand, Greifenhagen's explanation that the organ represents the continuing life-force of the Trojan stock of Agathon, is no doubt correct up to a certain point. However, if it is to be regarded as the total explanation, then the life-force must be that embodied in the thirty generations of descent from Kassandra. But the barren figure of Kassandra cannot seriously be understood as representing that force. Can we then alter the point of reference of the life-force, and yet preserve its essential significance? The answer seems straightforward. If the life-force is that embodied in the thirty generations supposedly descended from Kassandra, the only individual to whom it can specifically refer is Agathon: it is as the symbol of his own role that the phallus is represented, for it guarantees the future of the γενεά. It is then looking no less to the future than the past.

That may seem a sufficient answer to our γρῖφος. There is, however, a more recondite possibility, which would add a more allusive point to the riddling gift, but yet retain the concept of the life-force. Helenos and Kassandra, the children of Priam, were, we have seen, twins, δίδυμοι. Agathon the Zakynthian could effectively indicate pictorially that he was linked to both of them by representation of the genitalia, and especially the very prominent testicles, which indeed might seem to take pride of place, in Agathon's concept, to the organ itself. The explanation of this requires an excursion into the realm of anatomical vocabulary.

Galen tells us that Herophilos, the great Alexandrian anatomist, called both the testicles and the ovaries δίδυμοι, and so, not surprisingly, did others. I have pointed out elsewhere that Herophilos liked to take the terminology of his anatomical vocabulary from items of everyday life, according to their resemblance to the part of the body that he wished to illustrate. Here, then, perhaps, is an instance slightly earlier than that of Herophilos. Agathon drives home his kinship with the Trojans and the Molossians by the physical representation of the 'twins' which lie at the root of human continuity, whether they represent Kassandra and Helenos or Kassandra and Agathon.

Make haste, mortals, and gladden your hearts whenever you can. For a man's lifetime is sweet and is the measure of his existence. This, friends, is it. For what more could come afterward? Not even this remains. For it is the stone and the stele that tell you all this, not I. The gates are here, and the trodden ways to Hades by which none can come back into the light. But all pitiful wretches (long) for resurrection.

σπεύδετε, τὴν ψυχὴν εὐφραίνετε πάντοτε, [θ]νη[τοί],
   ὡς ἡδὺς βίοτος, καὶ μέτρον ἐστι ζοῆς.
ταῦτα, φίλοι μετὰ ταῦτα τί γὰρ πλέον; οὐκέτι ταῦτα·
   στήλλη ταῦτα λαλεῖ καὶ λίθος, οὐ γὰρ ἐγώ.
θύραι μὲν ἔνθα καὶ πρὸς Ἅιδαν ὁδοὶ
ἀνεξόδευτοι δ’ εἰσὶν ἐς φάος τρίβοι·
ο]ἱ δὴ δ[είλ]αιοι πάντ[ες] εἰς ἀ[νά]στασιν...

Cornish farmer. 'Oh, Mr P— was a powerful preacher. I sate four pews away from the pulpit and when he got free of his text I could feel the spittle on my face.'

The Greeks never thought it possible or desirable to love their enemies, and forgiveness is a rare word in their vocabulary except for trivial or involuntary offences. More often they found a positive pleasure in hating their enemies and enjoyed the prospect of revenge. They would see nothing wrong in a couplet attributed to Theognis: 'Think of my hatred and my violence, and know in your heart that for your offence I shall avenge myself as I can.'³¹

31. 1247-8.

φρόντισον ἔχθος ἐμὸν καὶ ὑπέρβασιν, ἴσθι δὲ θυμῷ
   ὥς σ᾿ ἐφ᾿ ἁμαρτωλῇ τείσομαι ὡς δύναμαι.

'What is the use', the Howl may ask indignantly, 'when civilization is rocking upon its foundations, of giving us the doctrine of the enclitic De?' Not very much in itself, maybe; but it is surely of great use to acquire the scholarly judgement that can settle any doctrine upon the evidence without haste, without passion, and without self-interest. The integrity of mind that money cannot buy; the humility in face of the facts that self-esteem cannot corrupt: these are the fruits of scholarship, without which all statement is propaganda and all argument special pleading.

He settled Hoti's business—let it be!—
        Properly based Oun—
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
        Dead from the waist down.

Now I have a home, and I like it. I like planting trees, building walls, collecting eggs from my hens. I like scything down the grass and pitchforking the hay. I like splitting logs, I like the sunset over the field, I like the silence and the birdsong. I like building up, slowly, a wildlife haven and a family haven. I would rather be here than anywhere else.

Our house is small and a bit damp. It is not surrounded by breathtaking mountain scenery or sweeping white beaches, because we could never afford to live anywhere like that. It is quite an ordinary little place— modest compared to many new rural homes—which suits me somehow, because I feel I am quite an ordinary person, and I could never live in a big house. The land around it is gentle: crooked fields, still owned by small farmers, home to beef cows, a few sheep, the odd goat, and occasionally a strip of wheat or barley. The fields are divided by hedges of thorn, elder, oak, ash, sycamore, lime, under which streams run and past which old lanes wind. It is a pleasant, unspectacular, nooky, modest sort of landscape. It is my home, though I am still a stranger in it.

I have come to hate idealists like the one I used to be, as a born-again non-smoker hates the smell of tobacco. Ideals are a pox on humanity: if you have ideals, you will go out into the world as a destroyer.

The Scotch-Irish are the most inflexible people in the world when they are right, and the most vexatiously pig-headed and mulish when wrong, on the face of the earth.

Full of these reflections and despondent as they were, but few of them tasted food at evening, few kindled a fire, and many did not come that night to their quarters, but lay down wherever they each chanced to be, unable to sleep for grief and longing for their native states and parents, their wives and children, whom they thought they should never see again. Such was the state of mind in which they all lay down to rest.

ταῦτ᾽ ἐννοούμενοι καὶ ἀθύμως ἔχοντες ὀλίγοι μὲν αὐτῶν εἰς τὴν ἑσπέραν σίτου ἐγεύσαντο, ὀλίγοι δὲ πῦρ ἀνέκαυσαν, ἐπὶ δὲ τὰ ὅπλα πολλοὶ οὐκ ἦλθον ταύτην τὴν νύκτα, ἀνεπαύοντο δὲ ὅπου ἐτύγχανον ἕκαστος, οὐ δυνάμενοι καθεύδειν ὑπὸ λύπης καὶ πόθου πατρίδων, γονέων, γυναικῶν, παίδων, οὓς οὔποτ᾽ ἐνόμιζον ἔτι ὄψεσθαι. οὕτω μὲν δὴ διακείμενοι πάντες ἀνεπαύοντο.

And another of his disciples said unto him, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.

But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.

While he yet talked to the people, behold, his mother and his brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him.

Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren stand without, desiring to speak with thee.

But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my mother? and who are my brethren?

And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!

For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.

Even if some should find my writings thoroughly shoddy and superficial and indeed the typical products of an undisciplined mind, yet I may still succeed in pleasing myself, just as people with no ear for music enjoy their own singing.

εἰ γάρ τῳ καὶ δόξειεν εἶναι τάμὰ νόθα γε ὡς ἀληθῶς καὶ ἀνεμιαῖα, καὶ οἶα ψυχῆς ἐς πλεῖστα μεριζομένης κυήματα, ἀλλ' ἐμαυτὸν γοῦν ἴσως ἀρέσκοιμι ἂν, καθάπερ τῶν ᾀδόντων οἱ ἀμουσότατοι.

• Dishonest and Lying Narcissists
  
• Few, One, or None
  
• Write the Book You Want To Read
• An Audience of One
• Tolkien on Writing for Oneself
• To Write for Oneself
• Soliloquies
• Mihi et Musis
• Says I to Myself

Clerk told to have a new hymn, but gives out as usual 'All people that &c.' Irate parson: 'D——— all people that on earth do dwell.' Lord Stowell: 'a very compendious anathema.'

For no one loves life so much as he who is growing old.

τοῦ ζῆν γὰρ οὐδεὶς ὡς ὁ γηράσκων ἐρᾷ.

His face had a healthy hue of exposure and an expression of careless hardihood; and, as I looked at him, it seemed to me that the war had brought good fortune to the youth of this epoch, if to none beside; since they now make it their daily business to ride a horse and handle a sword, instead of lounging listlessly through the duties, occupations, pleasures — all tedious alike — to which the artificial state of society limits a peaceful generation. The atmosphere of the camp and the smoke of the battlefield are morally invigorating; the hardy virtues flourish in them, the nonsense dies like a wilted weed. The enervating effects of centuries of civilization vanish at once, and leave these young men to enjoy a life of hardship, and the exhilarating sense of danger, — to kill men blamelessly, or to be killed gloriously, — and to be happy in following out their native instincts of destruction, precisely in the spirit of Homer's heroes, only with some considerable change of mode. One touch of Nature makes not only the whole world, but all time, akin. Set men face to face, with weapons in their hands, and they are as ready to slaughter one another now, after playing at peace and good-will for so many years, as in the rudest ages, that never heard of peace-societies, and thought no wine so delicious as what they quaffed from an enemy's skull.

It is a pity that old men grow unfit for war, not only by their incapacity for new ideas, but by the peaceful and unadventurous tendencies that gradually possess themselves of the once turbulent disposition, which used to snuff the battle-smoke as its congenial atmosphere. It is a pity; because it would be such an economy of human existence, if time-stricken people (whose value I have the better right to estimate, as reckoning myself one of them) could snatch from their juniors the exclusive privilege of carrying on the war. In case of death upon the battle-field, how unequal would be the comparative sacrifice! On one part, a few unenjoyable years, the little remnant of a life grown torpid; on the other, the many fervent summers of manhood in its spring and prime, with all that they include of possible benefit to mankind. Then, too, a bullet offers such a brief and easy way, such a pretty little orifice, through which the weary spirit might seize the opportunity to be exhaled! If I had the ordering of these matters, fifty should be the tenderest age at which a recruit might be accepted for training; at fifty-five or sixty, I would consider him eligible for most kinds of military duty and exposure, excluding that of a forlorn hope, which no soldier should be permitted to volunteer upon, short of the ripe age of seventy. As a general rule, these venerable combatants should have the preference for all dangerous and honorable service in the order of their seniority, with a distinction in favor of those whose infirmities might render their lives less worth the keeping. Methinks there would be no more Bull Runs; a warrior with gout in his toe, or rheumatism in his joints, or with one foot in the grave, would make a sorry fugitive!

So they would often congregate towards evening, in all probability after some drunken orgy, and blithely embark upon an impromptu discussion of the most exalted and intangible topics. Such discussions invariably degenerated into the sort of inconclusive hair-splitting which results neither in persuasion nor in enlightenment.

Each man would cling tenaciously to his own views till in the end tempers rose at the thought of each other's intransigence and they would resort to open abuse, using foul language like people brawling over a game of dice. Eventually the debate would be adjourned, the contestants being parted with difficulty and the whole fruitless exercise serving merely to make enemies out of friends.

τοιγάρτοι τὰ πολλὰ περὶ δείλην ὀψίαν ἀπὸ κραιπάλης, ὡς τὸ εἰκὸς, καὶ ἀκολασίας ξυναλιζόμενοι, οὕτω δὴ ἐκ τοῦ παρείκοντος ἐκείνων τῶν ὑπερτέρων ἀπάρχονται λόγων καὶ ζητήσεως θεσπεσίας, ἀεί τε περὶ ταὐτὰ στενολεσχοῦντες οὔτε πείθονται ὑπο σφῶν οὔτε ἄλλως μεταμανθάνουσι τὰ προεγνωσμένα, ὁποῖα ἄττα καὶ τύχοιεν ὄντα.

ἔχονται δὲ διὰ παντὸς τῶν αὐτῶν οἱ αὐτοὶ, καὶ τελευτῶντες τῆς φιλονεικίας χαλεπαίνουσι κατ' ἀλλήλων καὶ ἀναφανδὸν διαλοιδοροῦνται, φωνὰς ἀσχήμονας ἀφιέντες, ὥσπερ ἐν κύβοις διαμαχόμενοι. οὕτω τε λύπαι αὐτοῖς ὁ ἀγὼν, καὶ μόλις ἀπαλλάττονται, ὀνήσαντες μὲν οὐδ' ὁπωστιοῦν ἢ ὀνηθέντες, ἔχθιστοι δὲ ἀντὶ φίλων γεγενημένοι.

I remember how charmed I was with these new acquaintances, to whose house I had been taken that afternoon to call. I remember the gardens through which we sauntered, with peaches ripening on the sunny walls; I remember the mellow light on the old portraits in the drawing-room, the friendly atmosphere and tranquil voices; and how, as the quiet stream of talk flowed on, one subject after another was pleasantly mirrored on its surface;—till, at a chance remark, there was a sudden change and darkening, an angry swirl, as if a monster were raising its head above the waters.

What was it about, the dreadful disputation into which we were plunged, in spite of desperate efforts to clutch at other subjects? Was it Tariff Reform or Table-rapping—Bacon and Shakespeare, Disestablishment, perhaps—or Anti-Vivisection? What did any of us know or really care about it? What force, what fury drove us into saying the stupid, intolerant, denunciatory things we said; that made us feel we would rather die than not say them? How could a group of humane, polite and intelligent people be so suddenly transformed into barking animals?

Why do we let these Abstractions and implacable Dogmatisms take possession of us, glare at each other through our eyes, and fight their futile, frenzied conflicts in our persons? Life without the rancours and ever-recurring battles of these Bogeys might be so simple, friendly, affectionate and pleasant!

Less often than Rabelais, but quite strikingly, he plays with onomatopoeia ("tichi tich et tichi toch" for a donkey's hoofbeats, "tararan tantara tara" for a flourish of trumpets) and fantaisie verbale: an enraged Charon bellows "Cra cra: tiftrafnot: sgneflet: canatauta: riogna" (217).

And the trumpet in terrible tones taratantara blared.

at tuba terribili sonitu taratantara dixit.

I should like to illustrate, with quite trivial examples drawn from personal experience, the various ways by which both fact and opinion can be distorted, so that a kind of smear of unreality is spread over the whole newspaper page, from reports of public affairs down to the most casual items of daily gossip.

1. Sensational Headlines; False Emphasis; and Suppression of Context....

2. Garbling....

3. Inaccurate Reporting of Facts....

4. Plain Reversal of the Facts....

5. Random and Gratuitous Invention....

6. Deliberate Miracle-mongering....

7. Flat Suppression.

Nesfield's name is often to be glimpsed on the shelves of that under-rated research resource, the second-hand bookshop.

The British Library was unable to locate a relevant copy; but luckily, what the library system could not find, the second-hand bookshops provided. (There is a serious methodological problem here. By 1900 the publishing of textbooks had become separated from general publishing to the extent that libraries treated them differently. They were often stored separately, at times not even catalogued, and little attention was paid to collecting different editions. The result is that in this field it is at times more difficult to locate relevant copies of 19th and early 20th century books than it is for much earlier periods.)

The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas.

[T]he rabbis regarded trivialities as part, as the very heart of Torah, God's revealed will. It is not because they were themselves small-minded, or because they had nothing better to do than investigate the reason behind, the logic for, niggling details. It is because to them "life" as an abstraction is nothing, but all the things that, together, add up the way of living—these are everything.

The secularizing of old churches, abbeys, convents and the like sometimes leads to queer anomalies. Over in Mainz three years ago we spent an evening in a fine prosperous beer-hall called the Cafe of the Holy Ghost. The name attracted us in the first instance, and we went in to find out about it. The place was originally a convent and had been secularized or "disaffected," as the French say which is a fine word for it; we like that word in this connexion, for some reason and the minions of Gambrinus promptly took it over. They had the good sense to let the building stay intact, and the general effect is interesting; also one can see that it is probably more cheerful now than it was under its original auspices. The only structural change that the church authorities insisted on when the building was "disaffected" was that the stained-glass windows should be removed. This seems a strange proviso; maybe the glass was good, and the far-sighted authorities knew of a place where it would come handy.

I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top.—You need take no notice of these ebullitions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but myself.

If any one should ask you whether our city seems to you more glorious in our own time or in the time of our fathers, you would all agree, in the time of our fathers. And were there better men then than now? Then, eminent men; but now, far inferior.

εἰ γάρ τις ὑμᾶς ἐρωτήσειε, πότερον ὑμῖν ἐνδοξοτέρα δοκεῖ ἡ πόλις ἡμῶν εἶναι ἐπὶ τῶν νυνὶ καιρῶν ἢ ἐπὶ τῶν προγόνων, ἅπαντες ἂν ὁμολογήσαιτε, ἐπὶ τῶν προγόνων. ἄνδρες δὲ πότερον τότε ἀμείνους ἦσαν ἢ νυνί; τότε μὲν διαφέροντες, νυνὶ δὲ πολλῷ καταδεέστεροι.

Labels: typographical and other errors

We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.

Sometimes some learned men would produce a defense of agnosticism or an assault on Christianity. That was the signal for Lewis to reply. I heard him deliver extempore a satisfying devastation of such an attempt by A.L. Rowse, a distinguished man of letters. "Mr. Rowse", I recall Lewis saying, "reminds me of a friend of mine called Bulver, whose wife has perfected what I call the technique of Bulverism. When Mr. Bulver remarked to his wife that the three angles of a triangle together add up to 180 degrees, Mrs. Bulver replied, 'You say that because you're a man.'"

But if all to be heard from the prophets or the rabbis were what we already learn from the politics, economics, and social philosophy of our own day and of our own sector, generally on the leftward wing, of modern life, why listen at all to prophets or rabbis of old? What need do we have to make over into our own image the saints of ancient times? What moral authority is left to them if their message is supplied to them by us, and if in doing so, we distort, misinterpret, or simply obscure their particular meanings? Is this not a peculiarly sophisticated kind of fetishism, something that, for us, is a dishonest ritual? It is false because, if honest, we know we have made the prophets and the rabbis over into what we want them to be, rather than making ourselves over so as to be able to perceive what they were and mean even now. Like the carpenter described by II Isaiah (44:9-17), who plants a cedar and raises it, then chops it down and uses part for fuel, and part for a graven image, who roasts meat over part and turns the rest into a god, his idol, then prays to it and says, "Deliver me, for thou art my god," so are those who turn the prophets into liberal democrats and say, "These are our authorities." "We were right all the time."

Our task is simply to read the chapter in its entirety, step by step and line by line. We shall ask for information external to the analysis and argument only so far as it is intrinsic to the task of "learning." Our primary problem is not what the chapter teaches us about history of the Jews or of Judaism, theology, history of religions, philology, or related sciences. We simply want to know, What does the chapter say?

Who wants one's country cluttered up and vulgarized by enormous annual irruptions of inquisitive foreigners? Who wants one's city pawed over, nosed into and corrupted by ignorant aliens with more dollars than sense?

This trait also runs back pretty directly to the days of Louis XI. The peasant-bred workman or shopman who detested paper, who could not read or write and had a great horror of any one who could, always knew goods. His idea of business was the very simplest and soundest: the production and exchange of goods. Mere paper-business, credits, stock-transactions, money-changing, underwriting and the like, at which people got rich without handling any goods or doing any real productive work all this he knew nothing at all about and had no love for. To him, goods were made to be used; that was his first thought about them. Only secondarily did he think of them as made to be sold. His successors have the same point of view. The more modern theory of business, on the other hand, seems to be exactly the reverse of this. Goods are made, first and foremost, to be sold, be it by hook or crook. Secondarily they are made to be used, and good salesmanship thinks little about their use if only they may be sold.

Chinon struck us as even more nearly self-sufficing than most French towns we have seen. Pretty nearly everything the inhabitants use is made on the spot, including furniture. There is a shop here that whittles out first-rate handsome furniture all by hand, and of any sort you want, apparently, and it does a good business. The Chinonese raise their own food and drink, doing their own slaughtering in a small abattoir of very up-to-date appearance on the edge of town, instead of bringing their meat in refrigerator-cars from some central stock-yards. It gave us a queer sensation to see so many people who were each capable of doing something all the way through, making a product from beginning to end, like the old Flemish painters who ground their own colours, made their own brushes, cut and prepared the wooden panels on which they painted. Americans seldom have this complete mastery of an art or craft, and one would think that pride of workmanship would suffer considerably as an effect of close specialization.

Here again, as in Tours, though by a different line of approach, we confronted evidence that the doctrine of quantity-production "ain't what it useter be, and it never was." In fact, one would say that if anything worth keeping is ever going to be salvaged out of our civilization, it will be through the dogged French antipathy to modern industrial ideas and practices. What the French really stand out against is the idea that man can live by things alone—things that are made to sell, and sold for profit—and that if he can only have never enough things, and can occupy his mind exclusively with wanting more things and getting more things, he will be really happy. The French and Americans disagree radically about that; they have an entirely different notion of what human happiness consists in. Maybe the French will come around to our way of thinking, but they show no signs of it yet, and events seem to be bearing out their view.

Eliot and Hayward shared a highly-developed sense of the ridiculous and a love of parody. Eliot suggested a modern version of common errors based on Sir Thomas Browne's seventeenth-century Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Modern errors might include: 'All Policemen have big feet,' or 'A fart, strained through bath water, loses both odour and inflammability,' or 'A cigarette, smoked before breakfast, is sovereign against costiveness.' He told Hayward how disappointed he was in the French translation of Murder in the Cathedral, and included his own pastiche and a footnote to appeal to the scholarly editor:

That bird wych in the dark time of the yeerë
Sitteth in dudgeon (1) on the aspen bouwë
And cryeth arsehole arsehole lhoude and cleerë ...

1. The word does not appear in this sense till 1573.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Arguably the most important publication of this remarkable, though brief, golden age was Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry, Brooks Otis's first book, published at the age of 55. Even in this sterling crowd, the book's importance was attested almost immediately by lengthy reviews and frequent citations, by Otis' promotion to Olive Palmer Professor of Humanities at Stanford University in 1964, and by the American Philological Association's 1966 Goodwin Award.

He fails to give a convincing interpretation of the poet, because his approach is too narrow and his interest in the traditional methods of classical scholarship too superficial. He fails because he often projects his own ideas into the text of Virgil and states them as facts. He rejects the views of others and proposes new ones categorically, without discussing the evidence in detail.

André Bellessort and Theodor Haecker, to mention only these two, have written fine books on Virgil without making use of an elaborate scholarly apparatus. One enjoys reading them as one would enjoy conversing on Virgil with a man of taste and culture. But if you claim to write as a scholar — and Mr. Otis does — you must expect to be judged by the standards of scholarship. And if you write a book on Virgil, these standards are high.

In the preface (p. vii), Mr. Otis intimates that he realized after reading the Latin and Greek Fathers of the fourth century, that no classical scholar before had clearly understood « what was the magic in the Latin language and milieu » that made Virgil's achievement possible. This could be a significant discovery, and if Mr. Otis had just expanded this statement, he might have made a contribution, but nowhere in the book does he refer to this again, and neither Augustine nor Ambrose are ever quoted, as far as I can see; they are not even included in the « General Index » (pp. 421-31).

Now and then there are observations on metrics, but they either reflect purely personal impressions or are downright wrong: p. 47 on Aen. 5, 320: « The striking fifth foot spondee here vividly expresses the distance between Salius and Nisus »; p. 114 « Then the 'tear-jerking' synaloephae of vidi ut, perii ut are followed by the inexorable dactyls of me malus abstulit error », on Ecl. 8, 41. There is no synaloepha between perii and ut, and I fail to see why these dactyls should be « inexorable ».

While Mr. Otis lacks interest in the proper business of classical scholarship, he shows a regrettable attitude of condescension towards the work of other scholars. What has been done, so far to explain the achievement of Virgil is, according to Mr. Otis, « at best vague and at worst misleading » (p. vii). Richard Heinze, for example, « fails to deal » with something which is « surely ... not in the least doubtful » (p. 264, n. l), and he « quite misunderstood » (p. 355, n. 2; cf. 246, n. 1) or « misinterpreted » (p. 244, n. 1) other problems. Eduard Norden « quite missed » the « literary, poetical and even Roman meaning » of Virgil's underworld in Book VI (p. 290, n. 1). Bruno Snell has « correctly seen the ideal character of Virgil's Arcadia » but added a « quite unnecessary hypothesis » (p. 119, n. 1). No evidence is produced in any of these instances; we just have to take Mr. Otis' word for it. The contributions to the problems of the sixth Eclogue (Franz Skutsch, Günther Jachmann, Zeph Stewart and others) are summarily dismissed (pp. 137, n. 1; 406 f), because these scholars did not (and could not) know the chronological plan of the Eclogues which is proposed by Mr. Otis in this book (pp. 131 ff) and which is — to say the least — improbable. Mr. Otis does not give those men an opportunity to speak for themselves, and he answers none of the arguments which they thought valid. Anyone may sometimes disagree with the most eminent scholars, but Mr. Otis disagrees so often and so emphatically that one registers his reluctance to state any reasons with increasing uneasiness.

We are left with the impression that little work of value has been done on Virgil before Mr. Otis.

This is dangerous: take a number of words, such as « objectivity » and « subjectivity », « continuity », « symbolism », « structure », « Homeric » and « un-Homeric », « ideology », « empathy » and « sympathy », combine them in different ways, and you will have a series of statements on Virgil. Remember certain verbs, such as « editorialize », « subjectivize » (p. 56) and « Augustanize », and avoid the precise word if you can think of two meaning roughly the same thing : « Hellenistic or post-classical » (p. vii); « literary or written style » (p. 3) ; « idea or ideal » (p. 6); « romantic or amatory » (p. 62); « 'model' or at least inspiration » (ibid.) ; « narrative or feeling-tone » (p. 63). If you proceed in this fashion, you may easily lose touch with your text.

[....]

On most pages of this book, the reader will find one or several of the following words or phrases : « obviously », « certainly », « undoubtedly », « clearly », « surely », « plainly », « manifestly », « there is every reason to believe », « there is no reason to suppose », etc. We all use these expressions and probably use them too often. But when they appear in such numbers (the reader can easily verify this), they cease to be merely implements of style. They form the picture of a closely reasoned scholarly discourse, based on well-established premises and proceeding logically step by step. This picture is misleading, because most of the things that Mr. Otis calls « certain » and « plain » are far from being plain or certain.

At a time when classical studies in many countries fight for their existence, this book with its dogmatic attitude, its unconcern for genuine issues of scholarship, its easy generalizations, its neglect of accepted methods and its loose writing compares unfavourably with much of what students of Virgil have been trying to do in the past and are trying to do now. To many readers who know the great poet and love him, Mr. Otis' Virgil may appear as an unfamiliar and uninteresting figure. By its sheer, relentless effort to arrive at a new image of Virgil by structural analysis, this book is no doubt remarkable, but neither its methods nor its results will find general acceptance.

The critical reception of the literary judgments in Otis's book was very positive. R.D. Williams called it "a book of outstanding importance in Virgilian studies, and indeed in many aspects of the literary appreciation of Hellenistic Latin poetry."² Remarking on the debt to Heinze's stylistic analysis and Pöschl's elucidation of structural unity, L.P. Wilkinson credited Otis with "a far more satisfactory and complete exegesis than could be made from a combination of these two."³ Charles Segal set it in the context of current criticism: "It sometimes happens that a single book embodies and, as it were, completes a mood and a direction that have animated a decade or more of scholars working in a given field." For Segal, the value of the book lay in "consolidation, on a large scale, of a number of tendencies in recent critical approaches to Vergil and, second, in his combination of a conventional literary, historical, and philological approach with some contemporary modes of criticism."<sup>4

2</sup> Classical Philology 60 (1965): 30.
³ Classical Review 79 (1965): 184.
⁴ Arion 4 (1965): 126.