Laudator Temporis Acti

'It is a bad business', Eduard cried, 'that we cannot nowadays learn anything that will last a lifetime. Our forefathers stuck to the teaching they were given when they were young, but we have to unlearn everything every five years if we are not to go completely out of fashion.'

„Es ist schlimm genug“, rief Eduard, „daß man jetzt nichts mehr für sein ganzes Leben lernen kann. Unsre Vorfahren hielten sich an den Unterricht, den sie in ihrer Jugend empfangen; wir aber müssen jetzt alle fünf Jahre umlernen, wenn wir nicht ganz aus der Mode kommen wollen“.

While Germanos the chief prelate was baptizing Leo's successor (in both his evil and his rule) Constantine [V], the boy because he was so young, gave a terrible, foul-smelling harbinger: he defecated in the holy font, as say those who were accurate eyewitnesses.¹⁷⁸ This made the patriarch Germanos prophetically say, "This is a sign that in the future great evil shall befall the Christians and the church because of him."

178. This is the origin of the derisive title Kopronymos ("Dung-name").

Labels: noctes scatologicae

[These] men — how very like unto a fart [they are!]

...Homines crepitui quam simillimi ventris...

Labels: noctes scatologicae

In youth you are free to sleep all night with an age-mate
and satisfy your craving for lovemaking;
you may carouse and sing with a piper.
No other pleasure compares with these
for men and women. What are wealth and respect to me?
Pleasure combined with good cheer surpasses everything.

ἐν δ᾿ ἥβῃ πάρα μὲν ξὺν ὁμήλικι πάννυχον εὕδειν,
    ἱμερτῶν ἔργων ἐξ ἔρον ἱέμενον·
ἔστι δὲ κωμάζοντα μετ᾿ αὐλητῆρος ἀείδειν·        1065
    οὐδέν τοι τούτων ἄλλ᾿ ἐπι τερπνότερον
ἀνδράσιν ἠδὲ γυναιξί. τί μοι πλοῦτός τε καὶ αἰδώς;
    τερπωλὴ νικᾷ πάντα σὺν εὐφροσύνῃ.

You do not shame your ancestry.

προγόνους οὐ καταισχύνεις σέθεν.

[41] In what terms to describe the coast of Campania taken by itself, with its blissful and heavenly loveliness, so as to manifest that there is one region where nature has been at work in her joyous mood! And then again all that invigorating healthfulness all the year round, the climate so temperate, the plains so fertile, the hills so sunny, the glades so secure, the groves so shady! Such wealth of various forests, the breezes from so many mountains, the great fertility of its corn and vines and olives, the glorious fleeces of its sheep, the sturdy necks of its bulls, the many lakes, the rich supply of rivers and springs flowing over all its surface, its many seas and harbours and the bosom of its lands offering on all sides a welcome to commerce, the country itself eagerly running out into the seas as it were to aid mankind. I do not speak of the character and customs of its people, its men, the nations that its language and its might have conquered. [42] The Greeks themselves, a people most prone to gushing self-praise, have pronounced sentence on the land by conferring on but a very small part of it the name of Great Greece!

[41] qualiter Campaniae ora per se felixque illa ac beata amoenitas, ut palam sit uno in loco gaudentis opus esse naturae! iam vero tanta ea vitalis ac perennis salubritas, talis caeli temperies, tam fertiles campi, tam aprici colles, tam innoxii saltus, tam opaca nemora, tam munifica silvarum genera, tot montium adflatus, tanta frugum vitiumque et olearum fertilitas, tam nobilia pecudi vellera, tam opima tauris colla, tot lacus, tot amnium fontiumque ubertas totam eam perfundens, tot maria, portus, gremiumque terrarum commercio patens undique et tamquam iuvandos ad mortales ipsa avide in maria procurrens.  neque ingenia ritusque ac viros et lingua manuque superatas commemoro gentes. [42] de ea iudicavere Grai, genus in gloriam suam effusissimum, quotam partem ex ea appellando Graeciam Magnam!

Whosoever throws refuse into the street shall pay a fine of fifty-one drachmas.

ὃς ἂν βάλλῃ τὰ ἐκκαθάρματα ἄνωθεν τῆς ὀδοῦ μίαν καὶ πεντήκοντα δραχμὰς ὠφέλετο τῷ θέλοντι πρ[ῆ]χ[σαι.

Anyone who throws the dirty waters after the sacrifice from the top of the street shall owe fifty-one drachmas to the person who will prosecute him.

This appears to be a sign. There is a rule about throwing rubbish above a road with a penalty of fifty-one drachmas (lines 1-10), but it allows volunteers to impose the fine (lines 10-12).

Not being able to refute my arguments,
you chatter at random and exert yourself to no purpose.

καὶ σύ γ᾽ ἐλέγξαι μ᾽ οὔπω δύνασαι περὶ τούτου,
ἀλλὰ φλυαρεῖς καὶ πτερυγίζεις.        575

Such personal or State commissions to architects and sculptors are an important feature of Archaic Greece. The artist is hired to do a job, to please or impress mortals or divinities. 'Art for art's sake' was an unnecessary conception.

Go your ways, and honor Peace, fairest of goddesses.

ἴτε νυν καθ᾽ ὁδόν, τὴν καλλίστην
θεῶν Εἰρήνην τιμῶντες.

fairest of deities, Peace: the ancient commentator sees this as a comment on the prolongation of the war (cf. 772 n.). However, Euripides had praised Peace in the same terms before 422 B.C. (Cresphontes fr. 71 Austin); cf. also Supp. 1188 ff. On Peace as a goddess cf. Dodds on Ba. 419-20 and my n. on Hes. Th. 902.

Then we came to the top of a ridge and a grand panorama unfolded before us: Naples in all its glory, rows of houses for miles along the flat coast line of the Gulf, promontories, headlands, cliffs, then the islands and, beyond them, the sea. A breathtaking sight!

A horrible noise, more a screaming and howling for joy than a song, startled me out of my wits. It came from the boy who was standing behind me. I turned on him furiously. He was a good-natured lad, and this was the first time he had heard a harsh word from either of us.

For a while he neither moved nor spoke; then he tapped me on the shoulder, thrust his right arm between Kniep and myself, pointed with his forefinger and said: "Signor, perdonate! Questa è la mia patria!" which means: "Sir, forgive me. This is my native land!" And so I was startled for the second time. Poor northerner that I am — something like tears came into my eyes.

---

Nun erreichten wir eine Höhe; der größt e Anblick tat sich vor uns auf. Neapel in seiner Herrlichkeit, die meilenlange Reihe von Häusern am flachen Ufer des Golfs hin, die Vorgebirge, Erdzungen, Felswände, dann die Inseln und dahinter das Meer war ein entzückender Anblick.

Ein gräßlicher Gesang, vielmehr Lustgeschrei und Freude — geheul des hinten aufstehenden Knaben erschreckte und störte mich. Heftig fuhr ich ihn an; er hatte noch kein böses Wort von uns gehört, er war der gutmütigste Junge.

Eine Weile rührte er sich nicht, dann klopfte er mir sachte auf die Schulter, streckte seinen rechten Arm mit aufgehobenem Zeigefinger zwischen uns durch und sagte: Signor, perdonate! questa è la mia patria! Das heißt verdolmetscht: Herr, verzeiht! ist das doch mein Vaterland! Und so war ich zum zweiten Male überrascht. Mir armen Nordländer kam etwas Tränenartiges in die Augen!

Be eager for learning, even if it comes from the snout of a hog.

Maybe, but all I know is that he scares the pants off me.

οὐκ οἶδ᾿· ἐγὼ δ᾿ ἐκεῖνον ὀρρωδῶ πάνυ.

New York, for example, like London, seems to be a Cloacina of all the depravities of human nature.

I have again begun my German and do half an hour every morning before beginning my other work. I am still at Novalis — you will wonder how I have not finished it long ago, and even to myself I seem to have been reading it almost all my life. As I go at about the pace of a schoolboy translating Caesar I expect it will last me for the rest of my days. (I am like the man in the story. 'Why not buy a book?' 'Oh I have one already.')

My tendency to look at the world through the eyes of the painter whose pictures I have seen last has given me an odd idea. Since our eyes are educated from childhood on by the objects we see around us, a Venetian painter is bound to see the world as a brighter and gayer place than most people see it. We northerners who spend our lives in a drab and, because of the dirt and the dust, an uglier country where even reflected light is subdued, and who have, most of us, to live in cramped rooms — we cannot instinctively develop an eye which looks with such delight at the world.

Meine alte Gabe, die Welt mit Augen desjenigen Malers zu sehen, dessen Bilder ich mir eben eingedrückt, brachte mich auf einen eignen Gedanken. Es ist offenbar, daß sich das Auge nach den Gegenständen bildet, die es von Jugend auf erblickt, und so muß der venezianische Maler alles klarer und heiterer sehn als andere Menschen. Wir, die wir auf einem bald schmutzkotigen, bald staubigen, farblosen, die Widerscheine verdüsternden Boden, und vielleicht gar in engen Gemächern leben, können einen solchen Frohblick aus uns selbst nicht entwickeln.

The art of mosaic, which gave the Ancients their paved floors and the Christians the vaulted Heaven of their churches, has now been degraded to snuff boxes and bracelets. Our times are worse than we think.

Die Kunst, welche dem Alten seine Fußboden bereitete, dem Christen seine Kirchenhimmel wölbte, hat sich jetzt auf Dosen und Armbänder verkrümelt. Diese Zeiten sind schlechter, als man denkt.

"I think it's good to have a more representative body of texts and not just works by so-called 'old white men,'" she told DW. "It would certainly help to make the experiences, perspectives, and voices of women or people with roots outside of Germany more visible and valued, but it's also important to choose a diversity of literary genres with high quality and relevance regardless of the author."

In every activity one man is worse, another better.
No one on his own is skilled in everything.

ἔστιν ὁ μὲν χείρων, ὁ δ᾿ ἀμείνων ἔργον ἕκαστον·
    οὐδεὶς δ᾿ ἀνθρώπων αὐτὸς ἅπαντα σοφός.

CHREMYLUS
I honoured the gods and did what was right, and yet I was none the less poor and unfortunate.
CARIO
I know it but too well.
CHREMYLUS
Others amassed wealth — the sacrilegious, the demagogues, the informers, indeed every sort of rascal.
CARIO
I believe you.

ΧΡΕΜΥΛΟΣ
ἐγὼ θεοσεβὴς καὶ δίκαιος ὢν ἀνὴρ
κακῶς ἔπραττον καὶ πένης ἦν.
ΚΑΡΙΩΝ
                                                         οἶδά τοι.
ΧΡΕΜΥΛΟΣ
ἕτεροι δ᾿ ἐπλούτουν, ἱερόσυλοι, ῥήτορες        30
καὶ συκοφάνται καὶ πονηροί.
ΚΑΡΙΩΝ
                                                        πείθομαι.

BIGOT, n.: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

It's so obvious, even a blind man could see it: in our age, the key to real success is to avoid every wholesome practice.
     
                               δῆλον ὁτιὴ καὶ τυφλῷ
γνῶναι δοκεῖ τοῦθ᾿, ὡς σφόδρ᾿ ἐστὶ συμφέρον
τὸ μηδὲν ἀσκεῖν ὑγιὲς ἐν τῷ νῦν γένει.

50 γένει γρV: βίῳ R: ἔτει V: χρόνῳ Π1 γρV cett.

in the present state of the world: lit. "in the present race (genos)", i.e. in this last and worst of the five Hesiodic ages of the world with their five different human races (gold, silver, bronze, heroic, iron: Works and Days 109-201), the fifth of which is developing towards a state in which "there will be no gratitude for a man who keeps his oath [cf. 61 below] or for a good or honest man, but rather they will honour a man who does outrageous evil; the only justice will be violence, and there will be no shame" (ibid. 190-3). Cf. Critias fr. trag. 21 "there is no justice in the present genos", Men. Thph. F 1.14-15 "If a man is good, well-born, really noble, it's no help to him in the present genos". The true reading genei (dative case of genos) is preserved only as a marginal variant in V; it seems to have been early corrupted into the nonsensical etei "year" (V in text), of which khronōi "time" (most mss., and a fifth-century papyrus) and biōi "life" (R) arc attempted corrections. R's reading (for which cf. Men. Kolax 1) gives good sense, but does not help to explain how the other readings arose.

What is Classical philology? The best point of reference for an American audience may be this: it looks a lot like textualist and originalist approaches to constitutional interpretation. Classical philology, as we were trained to do it, is the attempt to understand a text as it was produced in its historical context, with as few anachronistic preconceptions as possible. The Classical philologist unpacks each word or phrase by comparing it with other uses of the word or phrase in a given author's corpus — and in the broader corpus of texts to which that author would have been exposed.

What characterizes a good library and makes it easier for one to take its measure is as much the books that are not there, that are not worthy of it and that not only would not add anything to it but would spoil it, as the books that are there. In the same way a good museum and, a fortiori, a good art gallery, which has less space at its disposal, establishes its quality as much by the works that one does not see there, that it is out of the question that one should see there, as by those that hang on its walls. It is sad to say and dull to recall that each of us has at his disposal, as I have said before, a narrowly circumscribed time on earth, and all our efforts and all our care will do nothing to render this time infinitely extendable. And I do not regret having elsewhere proposed, as one of the possible definitions of culture, "the clear awareness of the preciousness of time." The cultivated man never has too much time; in fact, he never has enough time to read, see, hear, know, learn, understand, and love.

Nature made thee a fool, to think thou knowest better than the god.

σκαιὸς πέφυκας τοῦ θεοῦ πλείω φρονῶν.

The violence of newspaper talk at that time, both on the part of editors and anonymous correspondents, cannot fail to impress the modern reader even though he be inured to political invective....The political tricks of the day — name-calling, allegations of guilt by association, and the like — were so similar to those employed within present memory that twentieth-century demagogues of either the right or left would have felt very much at home, no doubt, if translated to the late eighteenth century.

Yesterday I threw up.

χθὲς ἤμεσα.

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.

"In other words, a much-edited text with revisions superimposed on earlier versions – a text layered like an archaeological dig."

That the Pléiade poets are not currently a part of the core curriculum of American colleges and universities should not be surprising. Students of French literature are familiar with them, of course, but this is a dismal time for the study of literature and what Walter Pater said of them—in praise—in The Renaissance suggests the reason for their present neglect: he refers to "the qualities, the value, of the whole Plead [sic, read Pleiad] school of poetry, of the whole phase of taste from which that school derives—a certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasure of which is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in which a thing slight in itself is handled."

That "silvery grace of fancy" is not much in fashion now among academics. It is "elitist." It assumes a knowledge of and a love for the classics. To put it more clearly and aggressively, these were poets of aristocratic elegance, mannered and civilized, whose playful performances were intended as diversions for themselves and like-minded friends from whom they could expect a level of cultural poise and sophistication that students and some faculty members these days cannot provide.