Laudator Temporis Acti

Virginia Woolf, "A Dialogue Upon Mount Pentelicus," The Complete Shorter Fiction (San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1989), pp. 63-68 (at 64; they = a party of English tourists):

And to prove themselves duly inspired, they not only shared their wine flask with the escort of dirty Greek peasant boys but condescended so far as to address them in their own tongue as Plato would have spoken it had Plato learned Greek at Harrow. Whether they were just or not shall be left for others to decide; but the fact that Greek words spoken on Greek soil were misunderstood by Greeks destroys at one blow the whole population of Greece, both men and women and children. At such a crisis one word came aptly to their lips; a word that Sophocles might have spoken, and that Plato would have sanctioned; they were 'barbarian'. To denounce them thus was not only to discharge a duty on behalf of the dead but to declare the rightful inheritors, and for some minutes the marble quarries of Pentelicus thundered the news to all who might sleep beneath their rocks or haunt their caverns. The spurious people was convicted; the dusky garrulous race, loose of lip and unstable of purpose who had parodied the speech and pilfered the name of the great for so long was caught and convicted.