Laudator Temporis Acti

Giacomo Leopardi, letter to his father (December 9, 1822; tr. Prue Shaw):

As for men of letters, about whom you ask, in truth I have met few of them, and those few have destroyed any wish on my part to meet others. They all expect to achieve immortality in a coach and pair, the way bad Christians think they can get to Heaven. According to them the summit of human wisdom, or rather man's sole true science, is antiquarianism. I still have not managed to meet a Roman man of letters who understands by the term literature anything other than archeology. Philosophy, ethics, politics, knowledge of the human heart, eloquence, poetry, philology: all this is foreign to Rome, and seems child's play, compared with finding out whether some bit of copper or stone belonged to Mark Anthony or Mark Agrippa. The joke is that a Roman who has a real mastery of Latin or Greek is not to be found; without a perfect knowledge of those languages, you are well aware what the study of antiquity can amount to. They gossip and argue all day long, they jeer at each other in the journals, they form cabals and cliques, and that is how Roman literature lives and moves forward.