Laudator Temporis Acti

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 35.3 (1914) 361-369 (at 363-364):

The Anabasis is not often quoted. Like the commentaries of Julius Caesar, the associations are too painful. Outside of 'Gallia omnis' and Κῦρος ἐξελαύνει, which serve the purpose of 'Arma virumque', there is seldom an allusion to either of these classic engines of torture. The boasted ἀφέλεια of Xenophon does not commend itself to the average schoolboy; the humour is very thin, and it is only the advanced student that tastes out the foreign tang in the honey of the Attic bee, or takes to heart the encomium of Aristeides. When it was my fortune to teach the Anabasis and correct Greek exercises based on the Anabasis, a favorite pedagogic device, I prepared, as much I must confess for my own sake as for the alleviation of my pupils, a special series of my own in which I narrated the adventures of a camp-follower of the Ten Thousand, whose report, couched in the language of Xenophon and treating of the same events, was not over-favorable to Themistogenes. My restlessness under the task made me anticipate Dürrbach. There is one passage, however, that everybody knows and everybody cites, the θάλαττα θάλαττα passage (4, 7, 24). One would think that celebrity and brevity would secure the famous cry from misquotation, but I was shocked the other day to find it cited as θάλασσα θάλασσα. At first the change seems to be a brutal change, but such are the refinements of modern scholarship that I asked myself whether it had not been made wittingly, and σσ substituted for ττ because of the Arcadians and other rough fellows who composed the Ten Thousand and who were not up to the refinements of the new Attic dialect.

Dürrbach = Félix Dürrbach, L'apologie de Xénophon dans l'Anabase (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1893).