Laudator Temporis Acti

A friend, on his travels in Spain, saw the following Latin inscription at Peñaflor (ancient Celti): This is Année Épigraphique, vol. 1975, number 503:

D(is) M(anibus) s(acrum). Atimeti lib(erta) Fabia Merope annorum LXXV pia in suis h(ic) s(ita) e(st). s(it) t(ibi) t(erra) l(evis).
si quantum pietas potuit tantum fortuna dedisset
    litteris auratis scribere hunc titulum.

There is an English translation in R. Carande Herreron and Fernández Martínez, "Epitaph of Fabia Merope," Carmina Epigraphica Online (CLEO), number 22/01/0020:

Consecrated to the Manes. Fabia Merope, freedwoman of Atimetus, of 75 years, devoted to her own. She lies buried here; may the earth rest lightly on you. If fortune had let me do as much as affection allowed, I would have inscribed this with letters of gold.

To the excellent CLEO commentary I have little to add, except to note that the phrase pia in suis seems to be a formula common in inscriptions from this part of Spain — Géza Alföldy, "Epigraphica Hispanica IX: Inschriften aus Ciudad Real," Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 67 (1987) 225-248 (at 229):

Pius/pia in suis ist eine in den Grabinschriften der Baetica allgemein verbreitete Formel (vgl. die Belege in CIL II p. 1177).

See also Silvia Tantimonaco, "La fórmula epigráfica pius in suis," Anuari de Filologia. Antiqua et Mediaevalia 8 (2018) 839‐858.

Giuseppe Verdi, quoted by Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (New York: Vintage Books, 1956; rpt. 1962), p. 46:

Let us return to old times, and that will be progress.

Juvenal 3.166 (tr. Susanna Morton Braund):

Pathetic lodgings cost a lot...

magno hospitium miserabile...

Ronald Syme (1903-1989), Colonial Élites: Rome, Spain and the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 27:

When men pass judgment on the past, they tend to award the palm to high culture, which has normally (and indeed exclusively) been the product of cities and of minorities. Athens is praised, and Rome—while the slaves and serfs and the voiceless earth-coloured rustics are conveniently forgotten.

Aristophanes, Birds 1058-1071 (tr. Stephen Halliwell):

To me, all-seeing deity,
All-puissant god, the human race
Will sacrifice with pious prayers.
My eyes survey the whole of earth,
I keep its copious fruits quite safe
By killing teeming broods of beasts
Who feed on all that grows in soil,
Crushing the produce of plants in omnivorous jaws,
And sitting on branches devouring the fruit of the trees.
I also kill the ones which blight
All fragrant gardens with their stains.
All manner of insects which creep and which bite
Are caught in the sweep of my wings
And fall to destruction in bloodshed.

ἤδη ᾿μοὶ τῷ παντόπτᾳ
καὶ παντάρχᾳ θνητοὶ πάντες
θύσουσ᾿ εὐκταίαις εὐχαῖς.        1060
πᾶσαν μὲν γὰρ γᾶν ὀπτεύω,
σῴζω δ᾿ εὐθαλεῖς καρποὺς
κτείνων παμφύλων γένναν
θηρῶν, ἃ πᾶν τ᾿ ἐν γαίᾳ
ἐκ κάλυκος αὐξανόμενον γένυσι παμφάγοις        1065
δένδρεσί τ᾿ ἐφημένα καρπὸν ἀποβόσκεται.
κτείνω δ᾿ οἳ κήπους εὐώδεις
φθείρουσιν λύμαις ἐχθίσταις·
ἑρπετά τε καὶ δάκετα <πάνθ᾿> ὅσαπερ
ἔστιν, ὑπ᾿ ἐμᾶς πτέρυγος        1070
ἐν φοναῖς ὄλλυται.

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 327-329 (Oceanus to Prometheus; tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):

You keep quiet and don't speak too impetuously;
or do you not know very well, exceptionally intelligent as you
are, that foolish words lead to punishment being inflicted?

σὺ δ᾿ ἡσύχαζε μηδ᾿ ἄγαν λαβροστόμει.
ἢ οὐκ οἶσθ᾿ ἀκριβῶς, ὢν περισσόφρων, ὅτι
γλώσσῃ ματαίᾳ ζημία προστρίβεται;

λαβροστόμει is a hapax legomenon. Joseph Edward Harry ad loc.:

One probably shouldn't judge a book by its table of contents, but it was at this point that I stopped reading.

Dear Mike,

Boardman’s so far slightly doddery and occasionally Rhadamanthine autobiography (published in his crotchety 90s) arrived last week.

John Boardman, A Classical Archaeologist´s Life: The Story So Far (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020) p. 32:

Cambridge Classics was but a mild extension of school, although I did come to see the value of working hard at translation into English, to improve my English rather than just render the Greek, and got no little pleasure from writing Greek and Latin verse. The Master, A.B. Ramsay ('the Ram'), made us have 'saying lessons' (as he would have done at Eton) each morning, and I got Demosthenes 'First Olynthiac Oration' off by heart, as well as long stretches of Virgil, Cicero and Sophocles. 'What do I want from my boys?' — 'Accuracy, eloquence and deportment, Master'. This did no harm and helped composition since they gave one inbuilt criterion for good prose. A fellow undergraduate at Magdalene was Maurice Pope, later Professor of Classics at Cape Town. He and I could still manage the first few sentences of the Demosthenes in 2004: Anti pollon an, o andres Athenaioi... — the whole took about 20 minutes. In Greece in 1949, in a taverna at Nauplion, I came across a Greek soldier who had also learned the Oration and we exchanged recitals over the dinner table with vastly different pronunciations.

Ramsay’s interrogation was evidently not confined to a single question, according to the reminiscence of a near contemporary, Braham Myer, Magdalene Memories, Issue 35:

Once a week during our first two terms every undergraduate reading Classics had to appear before him and recite a portion of the prescribed classical text — in our case a Demosthenes oration. Every week an extra section was added so that finally one recited the complete work. Strange though this was, the formal preliminaries were even odder — taking the form of an inquisition. To the first question ‘What do I expect of my boys in their saying lessons?’, the required answer was ‘accuracy, eloquence and deportment, Master’ and to the next question ‘And what do I expect of my boys in their work?’, the answer had to be ‘diligence and obedience, Master’. In 1939 we did not protest.

Best wishes,
Eric [Thomson]

The Gospel of Matthew, Volume I (Chapters 1 to 10). Revised Edition. Translated with an Introduction and Interpretation by William Barclay (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1975), p. 173 (on φιλεῖν):

It is the word which is used in the famous saying of Meander: "Whom the gods love, dies young."

For Meander read Menander. The famous saying is fragment 4 of his Dis Exapatōn, in Kassel and Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci, vol. VI.1, pp. 61-62:

ὃν οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν ἀποθνῄσκει νέος.

From Eric Thomson:

There's another egregious blunder in the same paragraph in the Insufficiently Revised Version:

I’m sure not every man would be overjoyed to have hot philountes but each to his own.

And here’s the 2001 Revised Version: the <n> restored in Menander and the <t> of Hot removed but still getting it wrong doesn’t seem to matter to them one iota:

Labels: typographical and other errors

Augustine, Sermons 331.5 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 1462; tr. Edmund Hill):

Observe how much the lovers of gold are prepared to suffer. They commit themselves to sea voyages in the roughest winter weather; they are so heated up with avarice, that they don't dread any cold; they are tossed about by the winds, hoisted up and dumped down by the waves; pursued by unimaginable dangers to the point of death.

Amatores auri videte quanta patiantur. Hiemalibus asperitatibus se navigando committunt: sic fervent avaritia, ut nulla formident frigora; iactantur ventis, suspenduntur et deprimuntur fluctibus; ineffabilibus periculis usque ad mortem agitantur.