Laudator Temporis Acti

C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warren (March 21, 1940):

Why should quiet ruminants as you and I have been born in such a ghastly age? Let me palliate the apparent selfishness of this complaint by asserting that there are people who, while not, of course, liking actual suffering when it falls to their own share, do really like the 'stir', the 'sense of great issues'. Lord!, how I loathe great issues. How I wish they were all adjourned sine die. 'Dynamic' I think is one of the words invented by this age which sums up what it likes and I abominate. Could one start a Stagnation party—which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place.

Homer, Odyssey 11.36-41 (tr. A.T. Murray):

                                              Then there gathered
from out of Erebus the spirits of those that are dead,
brides, and unwedded youths, and toil-worn old men,
and tender maidens with hearts yet new to sorrow,
and many, too, that had been wounded with bronze-tipped spears,
men slain in fight, wearing their blood-stained armour.

                                                  αἱ δ᾽ ἀγέροντο
ψυχαὶ ὑπὲξ Ἐρέβευς νεκύων κατατεθνηώτων.
νύμφαι τ᾽ ἠίθεοί τε πολύτλητοί τε γέροντες
παρθενικαί τ᾽ ἀταλαὶ νεοπενθέα θυμὸν ἔχουσαι,
πολλοὶ δ᾽ οὐτάμενοι χαλκήρεσιν ἐγχείῃσιν,        40
ἄνδρες ἀρηίφατοι βεβροτωμένα τεύχε᾽ ἔχοντες.

Alfred Heubeck ad loc.: W.B. Stanford ad loc.:

This noble passage was condemned as spurious by Zenodotus, Aristophanes, and Aristarchus, on grounds of inconsistency with the later description of the ghosts approaching one by one. Luckily, whether an interpolation or not, it survived their censure, to be imitated by Virgil twice (Georgics 4, 475 ff., Aen. 6, 306 ff.) and to find echoes in Dante and Milton.

Giorgio Pintzas Monzani, "Pasteli, the Sweet Snack of Greece, Dates Back to Homer," Greek Reporter (May 24, 2026):

The first thing we know about this iconic Greek sweet is that it dates back to the Homeric era. In the Odyssey and in the Iliad, a sweet called ιτριον (itrion) is mentioned. A dish made of honey and sesame, it was used to give energy to Greek warriors who were battling in the Trojan War.

The word ἴτριον doesn't occur in Homer.

Labels: typographical and other errors

Peter Green (1924-2024), Armada from Athens (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970), p. 151:

Nothing is harder for a modern individual to understand than ancient concepts of loyalty and treachery. Those who have read so far will be uncomfortably aware that patriotism, in our sense, is a quality more or less irrelevant to Greek civic morality during the fifth century B.C. On very exceptional occasions — the Persian Wars are a good example — patriotism could burst its normal partisan bounds, and become something we all can recognise; but in the ordinary way loyalty was to one's family clan, one's religious or political group, rather than to that comparatively recent institution the polis. What one scholar describes as our passion for "the transcendental power of Greek city-state patriotism" is largely the pursuit of a modern myth. There was seldom a time when an oligarchic group was not ready to betray a democratically controlled city — or vice versa — to the foreign enemy at the gates. As for distinguished individual traitors, there was no shortage of them either in Athens or in Sparta: Hippias and Pausanias are only the first two names that come to mind. The number of Spartan rulers who defected, collaborated, or plotted against the state would make a very impressive roll-call on its own.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warren (February 18, 1940):

[T]he world, as it is now becoming and has partly become, is simply too much for people of the old square-rigged type like you and me. I don't understand its economics, or its politics, or any dam' thing about it.

Walter Scott (1771-1832), The Antiquary, chap. XIV (Jonathan Oldbuck speaking):

I love the reversion of a feast better than the feast itself. I delight in the analecta, the collectanea, as I may call them, of the preceding day's dinner...

Juvenal, Satires 10.232-236 (tr. Susanna Morton Braun):

But worse than any physical decline is the dementia. It doesn't remember the names of slaves or recognise the face of a friend who dined with him the previous evening or the children he fathered and raised himself.

                                                       sed omni
membrorum damno maior dementia, quae nec
nomina servorum nec voltum agnoscit amici
cum quo praeterita cenavit nocte, nec illos        235
quos genuit, quos eduxit.

Walter Scott (1771-1832), The Antiquary, chap. XXVIII (Jonathan Oldbuck and Edie Ochiltree speaking):

'I do bethink me you were the first person we met when Sir Arthur made his successful attack upon Misticot's grave, and also that when the labourers began to flag, you, Edie, were again the first to leap into the trench, and to make the discovery of the treasure. Now you must explain all this to me, unless you would have me use you as ill as Euclio does Staphyla in the Aulularia.'

'Lordsake, sir,' replied the mendicant, 'what do I ken about your Howlowlaria?—it's mair like a dog's language than a man's.'

Homer, Odyssey 22.226-230 (Athena speaking; tr. A.T. Murray):

Odysseus, no longer hast thou steadfast might nor any valor,
such as was thine when for high-born Helen of the white arms
thou didst for nine years battle with the Trojans unceasingly,
and many men thou slewest in dread conflict,
and by thy counsel was the broad-wayed city of Priam taken.

οὐκέτι σοί γ᾽, Ὀδυσεῦ, μένος ἔμπεδον οὐδέ τις ἀλκή
οἵη ὅτ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ Ἑλένῃ λευκωλένῳ εὐπατερείῃ,
εἰνάετες Τρώεσσιν ἐμάρναο νωλεμὲς αἰεί,
πολλοὺς δ᾽ ἄνδρας ἔπεφνες ἐν αἰνῇ δηϊοτῆτι
σῇ δ᾽ ἥλω βουλῇ Πριάμου πόλις εὐρυάγυια.

On the epithet λευκώλενος (white-armed) applied to Helen, see Lowell Edmunds, Toward the Characterization of Helen in Homer: Appellatives, Periphrastic Denominations, and Noun-Epithet Formulas (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 92-102. See also Th. Vlachodimitris, entry for λευκώλενος, in Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos, Bd. 2, Fasc. 14 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), cols. 1672-1673.

Detail of Jacques-Louis David, Les Amours de Pâris et d'Hélène (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. 3696): Lupita Nyong'o, cast as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie The Odyssey: Related posts:

• The Dead, Then and Now
• Pale Women and Dark Men
• Perusta Solibus
• Pale Skin
• Pallor
• Umbrellas
• White Lead

Xenophon, Apology of Socrates 6 (tr. O.J. Todd):

But now, if my years are prolonged, I know that the frailties of old age will inevitably be realized, that my vision must be less perfect and my hearing less keen, that I shall be slower to learn and more forgetful of what I have learned.

νῦν δὲ εἰ ἔτι προβήσεται ἡ ἡλικία, οἶδ ̓ ὅτι ἀνάγκη ἔσται τὰ τοῦ γήρως ἀποτελεῖσθαι καὶ ὁρᾶν τε χεῖρον καὶ ἀκούειν ἧττον καὶ δυσμαθέστερον εἶναι καὶ ὧν ἔμαθον ἐπιλησμονέστερον.

[J.] Enoch Powell (1912-1998), No Easy Answers (London: Sheldon Press, 1973), p. 123:

Day by day we are surrounded by the din, and often by the violence, of those who propose to make men better and happier, and who are sure they know how to do it, if only others would have the sense to give them the necessary powers.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warren (Jan. 28, 1940):

This week I have been reading an Elizabethan, Hall's Satires (as dull as ditchwater) and Cicero's De Legibus. The latter you might suppose to be rather a bromide, but it is perfectly delightful. It's in dialogue form, held out of doors. Isn't this nice?—'Now we have reached the island. I don't know a more charming spot. Look how the stream divides as if round the bow of a ship.' And again 'But I've another reason for liking this place which can't affect you in the same way. My brother and I are "on our native heath" here. We come of an old family hereabouts: all round here you find our sacred places, our own people, and all the relics of our forebears. You see the house as it now is, rebuilt by the care of my father, who was an invalid and spent pretty well all his life here among his books. But in this very spot, in my grandfather's time, there was a little house in the old style—like the one Curius has down in the Sabine country—and in it I was born.'

All very ordinary and obvious, of course, but, like Boswell, so full of sense and leisure and happiness. Does it occur to you that people have written of that sort of thing in almost all ages but our own? I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it may seem, really don't.

Related post: Cicero's Birthplace.

Sarah Raza, " Millions of Americans may now also be considered Canadian under a new law," AP (April 23, 2026):

Previously, Canadian citizenship by descent could only be passed down to one generation, from a parent to a child. But the new law opened up citizenship to anyone born before that date who could prove they have a direct Canadian ancestor — a grandparent, great-grandparent or even more distant ancestor.

According to DNA analysis, my ancestry is 48% French Canadian. My nearest relative born in Canada is my maternal grandmother, Yvonne Aurore Hélie (1900-1999), a native of Quebec. Quebec didn't issue birth certificates until recently, but the church register of L'église de la Visitation-de-la-Sainte-Vierge, in Pointe-du-Lac, contains the record of my grandmother's baptism (thanks to a Canadian friend for deciphering the handwriting; click once or twice to enlarge, entry B-37 at lower right corner, on second page):

Le vingt sept août mil neuf
cent. nous, prêtre, curé, soussigné
avons baptisé Marie Aurore
Yvonne, née le même jour de
baptisme. mariage de Alphonse
Helie et de Marie Louise Benoit
de cette paroisse. Parrain
Emile Dupont. Marraine
Aurore Benoit qui ont signé
avec nous. Le père a déclaré
ne savoir signer.

    Aurore Benoit
    Emile Dupont
        J. Caron, Ptr curé

Ptr = presbyter or prêtre. For the identity of the priest who performed the baptism see Jean-Baptiste-Arthur Allaire, Dictionnaire biographique du clergé canadien-français: Les contemporains (St Hyacinthe: Imprimerie de "La Tribune", 1908), p. 104:

CARON (L'abbé Joseph), né à Louiseville, comté de Maskinongé, le 25 avril 1855, de Thomas Caron, cultivateur, et d'Émélie Lesieur-Désaulniers, fit ses études à Saint-Hyacinthe; fut ordonné dans sa paroisse natale par Mgr Laflèche, le 29 août 1880. Professeur, directeur des élèves, des séminaristes, et aumônier des Sœurs Sainte-Marthe au séminaire de Saint Hyacinthe (1880-1891); curé de Régina dans la Saskatchewan (1891-1894); exécuta le tour du monde en 1894; aumônier de l'hôpital des Trois-Rivières (1894-1898); depuis 1898, curé de la Pointe-du-Lac, où il a parachevé le presbytère en 1898 et l'église en 1900. Maître-ès-arts de l'université de Québec (1891).

Photograph of L'église de la Visitation-de-la-Sainte-Vierge in Pointe-du-Lac: My grandmother also appears in the 1901 census of Canada, under the name Ivonne Helie (click once or twice to enlarge, row number 3): Row number 1 is my grandmother's sister Alice (1898-2002), whom I also remember fondly.

According to my grandmother's obituary in the Portland Press Herald (April 24, 1999), p. 19, she was born in Yamachiche. See the following map for the proximity of Yamachiche to Pointe-du-Lac:

[J.] Enoch Powell (1912-1998), No Easy Answers (London: Sheldon Press, 1973), p. 116:

From pulpits throughout the land they [the Christian laity] hear homilies on trade unions and industrial relations, on housing, on economics and productivity, on politics and trade—all of them subjects in which the clergy as such have no special competence and about which in consequence many of those whom they address understand a great deal more than they do. 'Why?' ask the laity. 'Surely it is to avoid having to talk to us about that which is the sole reason and justification for their calling: the doctrine and sacraments of the Church. It is their escapism.' This more and more fervent desire of the clergy to be heard talking about, and concerning themselves in, the business of the hour—and incidentally, in doing so, to be seen wearing the fashionable clothing of the hour—is the symptom of a flight from their own business.

Id., p. 118:

More and more the Church—and not, so far as I see, only in England—has tried to be heard by saying and doing anything and everything but what it alone can say and do. Not surprisingly, it is heard less and less. Is it too late for it to be itself again?

Related post: Politics and the Pulpit.

Plato, Laws 10.888a-b (tr. Trevor J. Saunders):

Now then, my lad, you're still young, and as time goes on you'll come to adopt opinions diametrically opposed to those you hold now.

ὦ παῖ, νέος εἶ, προϊὼν δέ σε ὁ χρόνος ποιήσει πολλὰ ὧν νῦν δοξάζεις μεταβαλόντα ἐπὶ τἀναντία τίθεσθαι.

Lucan, Pharsalia 3.55-56 (tr. J.D. Duff):

He knew that the causes of hatred and mainsprings of popularity are determined by the price of food.

gnarus et irarum causas et summa favoris
annona momenta trahi.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), "The Universal Exhibition of 1855: the Fine Arts," Selected Writings on Art and Literature, tr. P.E. Charvet (1972; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 115-139 (at 118):

Everyone can easily understand that, if the men whose function it is to express beauty were to conform to the rules laid down by the self-appointed pedagogues, beauty itself would disappear from the earth, since all types, all ideas, all sensations would merge into one vast monotonous and impersonal unity, as limitless as boredom and nothingness. Variety, that indispensable condition of life, would be expunged from life. So true is it that in the manifold productions of art, there is something always new, something that will eternally escape from the rules and the analyses of the school! Surprise, which is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment produced by art and literature, derives from this very variety of forms and sensations. The self-appointed pedant, a species of tyrant-mandarin, always reminds me of an impious wretch setting himself up as God.

Tout le monde conçoit sans peine que, si les hommes chargés d'exprimer le beau se conformaient aux règles des professeurs-jurés, le beau lui-même disparaîtrait de la terre, puisque tous les types, toutes les idées, toutes les sensations se confondraient dans une vaste unité, monotone et impersonnelle, immense comme l'ennui et le néant. La variété, condition sine quâ non de la vie, serait effacée de la vie. Tant il est vrai qu'il y a dans les productions multiples de l'art quelque chose de toujours nouveau qui échappera éternellement à la règle et aux analyses de l'école! L'étonnement, qui est une des grandes jouissances causées par l'art et la littérature, tient à cette variété même des types et des sensations. — Le professeur-juré, espèce de tyran-mandarin, me fait toujours l'effet d'un impie qui se substitue à Dieu.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warren (Dec. 18, 1939):

During the evening Ridley read to us a Swinburne ballad and, immediately after it, that ballad of Kipling’s which ends up 'You’ve finished with the flesh, my Lord'.

Nobody except me knew who the second one was by, and everyone agreed that it just killed the Swinburne as a real thing kills a sham. I then made him read 'Iron, cold iron' with the same result and later he drifted into McAndrew's Hymn. Surely Kipling must come back? When people have had time to forget 'If' and the inferior Barrack Room Ballads, all this other stuff must come into its own. I know hardly any poet who can deliver such a hammer stroke. The stories, of course, are another matter and are, I suppose, even now admitted to be good by all except a handful of Left idiots.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warren (Dec. 3, 1939):

After years of estrangement I found myself this week going back to Horace, who has at least this advantage that a single ode makes just the right length of reading for the odd five minutes before a pupil appears, or between the last pupil and dinner. I suppose the first lines would still wake in you as they do in me a flood of reminiscence—Solvitur acris hiems—O fons Bandusiae—Vides ut alta stet nive candidum: and even the first lines of odes one never read at school such as Cum tu Lydia Telphi [sic, read Telephi].

[Walter Scott], anonymous review of The Forester's Guide and Profitable Planter. By Robert Monteath. (With Plates.) Second Edition. Edinburgh, 1824, in Quarterly Review 36 (October 1827) 558–600, rpt. in The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. I (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1841), pp. 32-49 (at 34, col. 2):

We have ourselves seen an account of a sale of growing trees upon an estate in this district where the proceeds amounted to no less than six thousand pounds, a very large sum considering that the country was overstocked with wood, the demands for it confined to those of rural economy, and the means of transporting it extremely imperfect. There must have been a fall of large and valuable timber to have produced such a sum under such circumstances. The guardians of the noble proprietor, when they made the sale, seem to have given directions for enclosing the natural wood, with a view to its preservation. Nevertheless, about seventy or eighty years afterwards, there was scarcely in existence, upon the whole property, a twig sufficient to make a walking-stick, so effectually had the intentions of the guardians been baffled, and their instructions neglected. It may be some explanation of this wilful waste, that a stocking of goats (of all other creatures the most destructive to wood) had been put upon the ground after cutting the trees. But to speak the truth, agriculture, as Mr Shandy says of the noble science of defence, has its weak points. Those who pursue one branch of the art are apt to become bigoted and prejudiced against every thing which belongs to another, though no less essential, department. The arable cultivator, for example, has a sort of pleasure in rooting up the most valuable grass land, even where the slightest reflection might assure him that it would be more profitable to reserve it for pasture. The store-farmer and shepherd, in the same manner, used formerly to consider every spot occupied by a tree as depriving the flock of a certain quantity of food, and not only nourished malice against the woodland, but practically laboured for its destruction; and to such lamentable prejudices on the part of farmers, and even of proprietors, is the final disappearance of the natural forests of the north chiefly to be attributed. The neglect of enclosure on the side of the landlord; the permitted, if not the authorized, invasions of the farmer; the wilful introduction of sheep and cattle into the ground where old trees formerly stood, have been the slow, but effectual, causes of the denuded state of extensive districts, which, in their time, were tracts of what the popular poetry of the country called by the affectionate epithet of "the good green wood." Still, however, the facts of such forests having existed, ought now, in more enlightened times, to give courage to the proprietor, and stimulate him in his efforts to restore the silvan scenes which ignorance, prejudice, indolence, and barbarism combined to destroy.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Labels: arboricide

Walter Scott (1771-1832), The Antiquary, chap. III:

'These little Elzevirs are the memoranda and trophies of many a walk by night and morning through the Cowgate, the Canongate, the Bow, Saint Mary's Wynd, — wherever, in fine, there were to be found brokers and trokers, those miscellaneous dealers in things rare and curious. How often have I stood haggling on a halfpenny, lest, by a too ready acquiescence in the dealer's first price, he should be led to suspect the value I set upon the article! — how have I trembled, lest some passing stranger should chop in between me and the prize, and regarded each poor student of divinity that stopped to turn over the books at the stall, as a rival amateur, or prowling bookseller in disguise! — And then, Mr. Lovel, the sly satisfaction with which one pays the consideration, and pockets the article, affecting a cold indifference, while the hand is trembling with pleasure! — Then to dazzle the eyes of our wealthier and emulous rivals by showing them such a treasure as this — (displaying a little black smoked book about the size of a primer) — to enjoy their surprise and envy, shrouding meanwhile under a veil of mysterious consciousness our own superior knowledge and dexterity — these, my young friend, these are the white moments of life, that repay the toil, and pains, and sedulous attention, which our profession, above all others, so peculiarly demands!'

Yamanoue Okura (660?–733?), "The impermanence of human life," tr. Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite:

We are helpless in this world.
The years and months slip past
Like a swift stream, which grasps and drags us down.
A hundred pains pursue us, one by one.
Girls, with their wrists clasped round
With Chinese jewels, join hands
And play their youth away.
But time cannot be stopped,
And when their youth is gone
Their jet-black hair — black as fish's bowels —
Turns white, like a hard frost.
On their sun-browned, glowing faces,
Wrinkles are etched — by whom?
Boys, with their swords at their waists,
Clutching the hunting bow,
Mount their chestnut horses
On saddles linen-spun,
And ride on in their pride.
But is their world eternal?
He pushes back the door
Where a girl sleeps within,
Gropes to her side and lies
Arm on her jewel arm.
But how few are those nights
Before, with stick at waist,
He goes shunned and detested —
The old are always so.
We grudge life moving on
But we have no redress.
I would become as those
Firm rocks that see no change.
But I am a man in time
And time must have no stop.

Prudentius, Against Symmachus 2.807-811 (tr. H.J. Thomson):

Life is common to all, but merit is not. And accordingly Roman, Dahan, Sarmatian, Vandal, Hun, Gaetulian, Alamannian, Saxon, Galaulian, all walk on the same earth, all have the same sky and the same ocean bounding our world.

vivere commune est, sed non commune mereri.
denique Romanus, Daha, Sarmata, Vandalus, Hunnus,
Gaetulus, Garamans, Alamannus, Saxo, Galaula,
una omnes gradiuntur humo, caelum omnibus unum est,        810
unus et oceanus, nostrum qui continet orbem.

Line 809 is a hexameter consisting entirely of ethnonyms in asyndeton. For similar hexameter lines in Greek and Latin see:

• Some Lines in Lucretius
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters (includes eight other examples from Prudentius)
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters in Sidonius
• Verse-Filling Asyndeton
• Verse-Filling Asyndeton: Some Greek Examples
• Another Greek Example of Verse-Filling Asyndeton
• More Examples of Asyndeton Filling Hexameters
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters in Corippus
• Twelve Gods
• Seven Cities
• A Hexameter Consisting of Nouns in Asyndeton
• More Hexameters Consisting of Words in Asyndeton
• Hexameters Consisting of Words in Asyndeton: Dracontius
• Zopyrus' Victims
• A Latin Hexameter Consisting of Adjectives in Asyndeton
• Hexameters Consisting Entirely of Words in Asyndeton: More Greek Examples
• A Sojourn in the Country
• Destruction
• Hexameters Consisting Entirely of Words in Asyndeton: A Horatian Example
• Asyndeton Filling Hexameters: Bernard of Cluny, De Contemptu Mundi, Book I
• A Good Land
• A Greek Hexameter Consisting of Adjectives in Asyndeton
• Trifles
• Some Hexameters in Heiric of Auxerre's Life of St. Germanus
• Volturnalem Palatualem Furinalem
• Hexameters Consisting of Nouns in Asyndeton in a Medieval Poem

'Then 'twas the Roman, Now ’tis I', Anecdotal Evidence (April 30, 2026):

A.E. Housman died ninety years ago today, on April 30, 1936, at age seventy-seven. The poet was a classical scholar who edited Juvenal, Lucan and Propertius, and is famous for his five-volume critical edition of the minor Roman poet Manilius' Astronomicon.

This is misleading. Although Housman prepared an edition of Propertius, it was never published. See S.J. Heyworth, "Housman and Propertius," in D.J. Butterfield and C.A. Stray, edd., A.E. Housman: Classical Scholar (2009; rpt. London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 11-28 (at 11):

Fixed points are provided by Housman's letter to Macmillan offering the edition (11 December 1885 = Burnett 1.58-9: 'The collection and arrangement of materials for the commentary will naturally demand further time and labour; and I therefore judge it best that the text with its apparatus criticus should be issued separately'), and by the publication in the Journal of Philology in 1892-3 of the three papers laying out his view of 'The Manuscripts of Propertius', for this effectively marked the end of his efforts to get an edition published (Cambridge University Press having followed Oxford and Macmillan in declining to publish a book: cf. University Library, Cambridge, Pr.B.13.9.59). Yet Housman's manuscript survived the scholar himself, and Professor Sandbach told more than once the story of visiting A.S.F. Gow, Housman's colleague at Trinity, in his rooms in 1936, and finding him stoking the fire in which he was burning the famously unpublished edition.

Theognis 1191-1194 (tr. Douglas Gerber with his text and apparatus):

I do not crave to lie on a couch fit for a king when I'm dead; rather, may something good be mine while I'm alive. Thorns are as good a bed for the dead as rugs. It's all the same to him whether the bed is hard or soft.

οὐκ ἔραμαι κλισμῷ βασιληΐῳ ἐγκατακεῖσθαι
    τεθνεώς, ἀλλά τί μοι ζῶντι γένοιτ᾿ ἀγαθόν.
ἀσπάθαλοι δὲ τάπησιν ὁμοῖον στρῶμα θανόντι·
    τῷ ξυνόν, σκληρὸν γίνεται ἢ μαλακόν.

1194 τὸ ξύλον ἢ codd., corr. West

Apparatus from Douglas Young's Teubner edition: T. Hudson-Williams ad loc.: Related posts:

• Funeral Wishes of Charles Dickens
• Funeral Wishes of Philip Whalen
• Favorite Books
• Burial Wishes of Robinson Jeffers
• Burial Wishes of Cyril Connolly
• Burial Wishes of Samuel Butler
• Burial Wishes of Richard Burton
• Burial Wishes of James Howell
• Disregard of Funeral Instructions
• My Bed of Death
• Funeral of a Lover of Horace
• Cactus Ed's Funeral Instructions
• Kierkegaard's Tomb