Laudator Temporis Acti

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), "Characteristics," Essays on Politics and Society (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), pp. 23-53 (at 29):

So, too, when the generous Affections have become wellnigh paralytic, we have the reign of Sentimentality. The greatness, the profitableness, at any rate the extremely ornamental nature of high feeling, and the luxury of doing good; charity, love, self-forgetfulness, devotedness, and all manner of godlike magnanimity, are everywhere insisted on, and pressingly inculcated in speech and writing, in prose and verse; Socinian Preachers proclaim ‘Benevolence’ to all the four winds, and have Truth engraved on their watch-seals: unhappily with little or no effect. Were the Limbs in right walking order, why so much demonstrating of Motion? The barrenest of all mortals is the Sentimentalist. Granting even that he were sincere, and did not wilfully deceive us, or without first deceiving himself, what good is in him? Does he not lie there as a perpetual lesson of despair, and type of bedrid valetudinarian impotence? His is emphatically a Virtue that has become, through every fibre, conscious of itself; it is all sick, and feels as if it were made of glass, and durst not touch or be touched: in the shape of work, it can do nothing; at the utmost, by incessant nursing and caudling, keep itself alive.

Homer, Odyssey 18.381-383 (tr. Peter Green):

But you're so incredibly arrogant and rigid-minded—
I suppose you think you're a great and powerful fellow
because those you consort with are mean and common?

ἀλλὰ μάλ᾽ ὑβρίξεις, καί τοι νόος ἐστὶν ἀπηνής·
καί πού τις δοκέεις μέγας ἔμμεναι ἠδὲ κραταιός,
οὕνεκα πὰρ παύροισι καὶ οὐκ ἀγαθοῖσιν ὁμιλεῖς.

Horace Walpole, letter to the Countess of Ossory (August 9, 1773):

Every scrap of Latin Lord Edgecumbe heard at the Encænia at Oxford he translated ridiculously; one of the themes was Ars Musica: he Englished it, Bumfiddle.

Hat tip: Bill Vallicella.

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Labels: noctes scatologicae

Isaiah 5:20-21 (KJV):

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!

Theognis 403-406 (tr. Douglas E. Gerber):

Often a man is zealous of merit, seeking gain, a man whom divinity on purpose leads astray into great wickedness, and easily makes what is bad seem to him to be good, and what is worthwhile seem to be bad.

σπεύδει ἀνὴρ κέρδος διζήμενος, ὅντινα δαίμων
    πρόφρων εἰς μεγάλην ἀμπλακίην παράγει,
καί οἱ ἔθηκε δοκεῖν, ἃ μὲν ἦι κακά, ταῦτ' ἀγάθ' εἶναι        405
    εὐμαρέως, ἃ δ' ἂν ἦι χρήσιμα, ταῦτα κακά.

Homer, Odyssey 18.261-264 (tr. A.T. Murray):

For the Trojans, men say, are men of war,
hurlers of the spear, and drawers of the bow,
and drivers of swift horses, such as most quickly
decide the great strife of equal war.

καὶ γὰρ Τρῶάς φασι μαχητὰς ἔμμεναι ἄνδρας,
ἠμὲν ἀκοντιστὰς ἠδὲ ῥυτῆρας ὀϊστῶν
ἵππων τ᾽ ὠκυπόδων ἐπιβήτορας, οἵ κε τάχιστα
ἔκριναν μέγα νεῖκος ὁμοιΐου πολέμοιο.

263 κε codd.: τε Monro

Deborah Steiner ad loc.:

Anatole France (1844-1924), The Aspirations of Jean Servien (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1922), p. 10:

"Here is your son, is it not so? He is like you" — and laying his hand on Jean's head, who clung to his father's coat-tails in wonder at the red waist-coat and the sing-song voice, he asked if the child learned his lessons well, if he was growing up to be a clever man, if he would not soon be beginning Latin.

"That noble language," he added, "whose inimitable monuments have often made me forget my misfortunes.

"Yes, sir, I have often breakfasted on a page of Tacitus and supped on a satire of Juvenal."

---

«Voici votre fils, n'est-il pas vrai? Il vous ressemble.» Et posant la main sur la tête de Jean, qui, pendu à la veste de son père, s'étonnait de ce gilet rouge et de ce parler chantant, il demanda si l'enfant apprenait bien ses leçons, s'il devenait un savant, s'il n'étudierait pas bientôt la langue latine.

«Cette noble langue, ajouta-t-il, dont les monuments inimitables m'ont fait si souvent oublier mes infortunes.

«Oui, monsieur, j'ai souvent déjeuné d'une page de Tacite et soupé d'une satire de Juvénal.»

Erasmus, Adagia II viii 52 (tr. R.A.B. Mynors, with his notes):

Equo senescenti minora cicela admove
On ageing horses set a lighter brand

Ἵππῳ γηράσκοντι τὰ μείονα κείκελα ἐπίβαλλε, Apply the lighter brand to an ageing horse. The lesson of this adage is that, when a man's powers begin to fail through old age, he should be given some degree of rest and respite from his labours; as his strength decreases, so his load of work should be reduced and his leisure lengthened. Taken, they say, from cavalry-horses, to which a lighter trisippion was applied as they grew old. A trisippion was a sort of small wheel, a public branding-iron, which used to be heated in the fire and applied to a horse's jaws. Zenodotus shows that this proverb was found in Crates the comic poet, in his Samians. It looks like a hexameter line, provided that you read κύκλ’ ἐπίβαλλε;¹ for κείκελα I have not yet found in any ancient author except Zenodotus. The trisippion is mentioned by Hesychius,² and the keikelon seems to have been something not unlike it.

52 Zenobius 4.11, citing Crates, the Old-Comedy poet frag 30; in Suidas 1586 no source is named. The last three sentences are of 1526.
1 κύκλ’] This is indeed the accepted reading now.
2 Hesychius] T 1632. The word is trysippion.

---

Equo senescenti minora cicela admove

Ἵππῳ γηράσκοντι τὰ μείονα κείκελα ἐπίβαλλε, id est Equo senescenti minora cicela admoue. Admonet adagium, vbi vires per aetatem fatiscunt, respirationem ac refocillationem quandam a laboribus dandam et decrescente robore minuendos labores, augendam remissionem. Ductum aiunt ab equis militaribus, quibus senescentibus leuiusτρισίππιον admouebant; est autem τρισίππιον ceu rotula quaedam, publica nota, quae igni candefacta malis equorum imprimi consueuit. Zenodotus ostendit prouerbium extitisse apud Cratetem comicum in Samiis. Videtur carmen heroicum, si tantum legas κύκλ’ ἐπίβαλλε. Nam κείκελα nondum reperi apud vllum autorem praeterquam apud Zenodotum. Trisippii meminit Hesychius. Videtur autem κείκελον aliquid esse non dissimile trisippio.

On Crates, fragment 33 Kassel-Austin (ἵππῳ γηράσκοντι τὰ μείονα κύκλ’ / ἐπίβαλλε), see Serena Perrone, Cratete. Introduzione, Traduzione e Commento (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019 = Fragmenta Comica, 2), pp. 173-176.