Laudator Temporis Acti

Greek Anthology 11.47.1-3 (Anacreon, tr. W.R. Paton):

I care not for the wealth of Gyges the King of Sardis, nor does gold take me captive...

οὔ μοι μέλει τὰ Γύγεω,
τοῦ Σαρδίων ἄνακτος,
οὔθ᾽ αἱρέει με χρυσός...

Greek Anthology 11.58.1-2 (Macedonius the Consul, tr. W.R. Paton):

I wish not for gold, nor for the myriad cities of the world, nor for all that Homer said Thebes contained...

ἤθελον οὐ χρυσόν τε καὶ ἄστεα μυρία γαίης,
  οὐδ᾽ ὅσα τὰς Θήβας εἶπεν Ὅμηρος ἔχειν...

Jim Garland (1905-1978), lyrics to be sung to the tune "East Virginia":

I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.

Now, I don't want your Rolls-Royce, Mister,
I don't want your pleasure yacht.
All I want's just food for my babies,
Give to me my old job back.

We worked to build this country, Mister,
While you enjoyed a life of ease.
You've stolen all that we built, Mister,
Now our children starve and freeze.

So, I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.

Think me dumb if you wish, Mister,
Call me green, or blue, or red.
This one thing I sure know, Mister,
My hungry babies must be fed.

Take the two old parties, Mister,
No difference in them I can see.
But with a Farmer-Labor Party
We could set the people free.

So, I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.

Are we sincere when we recite these lines of Greek poetry, or when we sing this song?

According to Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer, Songs of Work and Protest (New York: Dover Publications, 1973), p. 161, Woody Guthrie (1912-1967), who recorded "I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister" with the Almanac Singers in 1941, confessed, "If we'd only admit it, we do want the man's millions and diamond ring and his yacht and everything else."

Here is a poem by Wang Wei (699-759), translated by Kenneth Rexroth in One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese: Love and the Turning Year (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 58, with the title Deep in the Mountain Wilderness:

Deep in the mountain wilderness
Where nobody ever comes
Only once in a great while
Something like the sound of a far off voice,
The low rays of the sun
Slip through the dark forest,
And gleam again on the shadowy moss.

The poem is more often known by the title Deer Park. Here is another translation, from Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei. Translations by Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, Xu Haixin (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991), p. 27:

Nobody in sight on the empty mountain
but human voices are heard far off.
Low sun slips deep in the forest
and lights the green hanging moss.

David Hinton, The Selected Poems of Wang Wei (New York: New Directions, 2006), discusses the poem on pp. xviii-xx and translates it as follows on p. 40:

No one seen. Among empty mountains,
hints of drifting voice, faint, no more.

Entering these deep woods, late sunlight
flares on green moss again, and rises.

There is an entire book (which I haven't seen) devoted to translations of this poem — Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated. Exhibit & Commentary by Eliot Weinberger. Further Comments by Octavio Paz (Mount Kisco: Moyer Bell, 1987). There are also several translations into English and other languages here, and a good analysis in Zong-qi Cai, ed., How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 207-209.

Thanks to Eric Thomson for introducing me to an interesting poem on the theme of arboricide, by Catharine Savage Brosman, with the title "Bristlecone Pines," first published in Sewanee Review 114.4 (Fall 2006) 514, and reprinted with minor modifications in her Range of Light: Poems (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), p. 56 (line numbers added by me):

— In the southern Snake Range

They are the old men of the forest, of the world—
gnarled, wizened, stripped of all the inessentials,
living longest in the heights, along the borders
with the iron sky, embracing cold. Their being,
granite hard, is dense enough to break a blade;    5

their limbs and torsos writhe, the sculpted flesh
as twisted as Laocoon. Below, the mountains fall
away into the basin; rivers snake, then disappear
in alkaline oblivion; the greasewood flats reach on
to the horizon. Everything seems vain—the rocks,    10

memorials to nothingness; the wind, a mockery.
Or do the pines remember us, companions—recall
how Jedediah Smith was fed by Indians on rushes
near their grove, and Lehman hammered through
the mountain's hollow limestone heart, to find    15

his predecessors there—or Frémont, following
a vision westward, gazed on the Great Basin?
And will they forgive, compassionate, the ones
who immolated here an ancient, venerable tree,
to violate its core and count the five millennia    20

recorded in its circles? But the druid spirits weep,
I think; the nymphs and sylvan deities still mourn
their forest elders, grown already before Greece
was young—those ravaged boughs dismembered
on the stone, Iphigenia sacrificed in greatest age.    25

The older I get, the less interested I am in man-made attractions (museums, cathedrals, etc.), and the more interested in scenes of natural beauty, such as the places mentioned in this poem, all located within the 77,100 acres of Great Basin National Park, in east central Nevada, near the Utah border. I just took an armchair tour of the park with the aid of Dwight Holing, The Smithsonian Guides to Natural America. The Far West: California and Nevada (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 1996), pp. 212-221, who describes the Snake Range, with its highest point, Wheeler Peak; Lehman Caves; and the bristlecone pines (Pinus longaeva).

As their scientific name indicates, some bristlecone pines are among the world's oldest living trees. One of them, nicknamed Prometheus, was older than the pyramids of Egypt when it was cut down in 1964 by geographer Donald Rusk Currey (1934-2004), then a graduate student at the University of North Carolina. See his article "An Ancient Bristlecone Pine Stand in Eastern Nevada," Ecology 46.4 (July 1965) 564-566. This is the tree mentioned in lines 18-21 of Brosman's poem.

Labels: arboricide

From the Mahabharata, tr. Arthur William Ryder:

All lives begin from nothingness,
  Stir for a time, and then
(No cause for grief) sink into less
  Than nothingness again.

Death has no enemy nor friend;
  Each in his turn must pass,
Must helpless to that bidding bend
  As wind-blown blades of grass.

Our goal is—there. And every day
  The one long caravan
Moves on with death to point the way.
  Why should it grieve a man?

For all the saints and scholars old
  Since first the world began
Are gone, with every fighter bold.
  Why should it grieve a man?

I think this comes from book 11, section 9 of the Mahabharata. Cf. the prose translation of K.M. Ganguli:

Time drags all kinds of creatures. There is none dear or hateful to Time, O best of the Kurus! As the wind tears off the ends of all blades of grass, even so all creatures, O bull of Bharata’s race, are brought by Time under its influence. All creatures are like members of the same caravan bound for the same destination. What cause of sorrow is there if Time meets with one a little earlier than with another? Those again, O king, that have fallen in battle and for whom thou grievest, are not really objects of thy grief, since all those illustrious ones have gone to heaven.

Jerome K. Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow: A Book for an Idle Holiday (London: The Leadenhall Press, 1890), p. 122:

Foolish people—when I say "foolish people" in this contemptuous way, I mean people who entertain different opinions to mine. If there is one person I do despise more than another, it is the man who does not think exactly the same on all topics as I do.

Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, chapter 26 (called "the prayer of the scientist"):

God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretence and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished. God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error. God give me strength not to trust to God!

Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, chapter 21:

While she talked he tried to discover whether she had any brains whatever.

I often see men or boys dining with their hats on, usually baseball caps, sometimes worn backwards. The sight shocks and horrifies me. When I was a boy, if I had ever sat down to a family meal with my cap on, my mother would have knocked it off my head and boxed my ears to boot. When I was a boy, did I say? My mother is now ninety-one years old, and I still wouldn't dare to sit down to eat with a hat on in her presence. Hats off in the house—that was, and is, the rule.

Autres temps, autres moeurs. I read in Tighe Hopkins, An Idler in Old France (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1899), p. 93:

In the eighteenth century (and within eighteen years of the nineteenth) you sit down to table with your hat on—removing it only if your health is toasted by "a person of quality"...

Thanks to Eric Thomson for the following description of Balfour's reading habits, from Blanche E.C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour K.G., O.M. F.R.S., Vol. 1. (G.P. Putnam's Sons: New York, 1937), pp. 135-136. Blanche Dugdale was Arthur Balfour's niece.

Nothing ever interfered with his reading. He always had several books on hand at once. The latest work on science might be found propped up on the mantelpiece of his bedroom to vary the process of dressing, and Lady Frances once declared that she suspected him of "making a raft of his sponge" to support a French novel while he took his bath. It was seldom that some work by Edgar Wallace or P.G. Wodehouse was absent from his bedside after these authors rose to fame, and the table by his arm-chair was always heaped with books of history, or Memoirs. It would be difficult to define the limits of his reading. Its range could astonish even his oldest friends, as for instance when, staying with Lord and Lady Desborough at Taplow Court on the eve of a General Election, he carried off to his bedroom a manual on chess, a game which since his boyhood he was never seen to play. Serious fiction was perhaps the only class of book upon which he was cautious of embarking. He never began a new novel until he was assured that it ended well. If no such assurance was forthcoming, he fell back upon Scott, Jane Austen, Kipling, and Stevenson.

He chose "The Pleasures of Reading" for the subject of his Rectorial Address to St. Andrews University in 1887, and there gave his personal answer to that most personal of questions—what to read and how to read it. Mr. Frederic Harrison had lately given forth some portentous warnings against "gorging and enfeebling" the intellect by over-indulgence in carelessly chosen literature. Balfour suggested that the analogy between the human mind and the human stomach might be pressed too far. He had never himself met the person whose natural gifts had been overloaded with learning. No doubt many learned people were dull, but not because they were learned. "True dullness is seldom acquired. It is a natural grace, the manifestations of which, however modified by education, remain in substance the same." People should not be afraid to read what they enjoyed. Idle curiosity, so-called, was a thing to be encouraged. Here follows a passage which might well mislead posterity into supposing Balfour a newspaper addict, ingeniously defending his favourite vice. The exhaustive study of the morning and evening papers was "only a somewhat unprofitable exercise of that disinterested love of knowledge that moves men to penetrate the Polar snows, or to explore the secrets of the remotest heavens.... It can be turned, and it should be turned into a curiosity for which nothing...can be wholly alien or uninteresting."

Such being his views, Balfour was naturally a lavish book-buyer. The library at Whittingehame is a large room, well stocked before his day with standard works of every kind. Soon it overflowed, and other rooms were lined with shelves. His own sitting-room was packed from floor to ceiling, mainly with books on philosophy and theology, and its sofas were heaped with flotsam and jetsam of current publications. The books at Whittingehame had an alert look about them, as if expecting to be pulled out at any moment. They were, in fact, often temporarily lost, for the ever-growing library was too large to be kept in order by the family's spasmodic efforts at arrangement, continually begun, but never ended. If Balfour was found wandering down the corridor at unwonted hours he was most likely in search of some book, and his relations would rush to proffer conflicting evidence about the present position of the missing volume.

"Read everything you find interesting and nothing that you don't," was nearly the sum-total of his advice to the younger generation with regard to literature. It sounded easy, yet to try to keep up with him along any of his primrose paths to knowledge, was to discover how deceptive was that apparently leisurely pace.

Carl Spitzweg, The Bookworm

R.W. Daniel, "Laughing Stones: Literary Parallels to ΠΕΡΔΕ in the New Acclamations from Aphrodisias," Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 61 (1985) 127-130 (at 130):

It seems that a fart was also apotropaic. In this connection, note that in the Charition mime, P. Oxy. III 413, πορδή is personified and elevated to the rank of a savior goddess. Cf. also Crusius' restoration of Col. I, lines 1-3 of this mime (Herondae Mimiambi Novis Fragmentis Adiectis, p. 101f.):

              ἵνα μὴ τρ]ωθῇς, πορδήν βάλε
                                                     ]. Β. πορδήν;
ἰσχυρόταται γὰρ αὖτ]αι δοκοῦσι ἀποτροπαί.

I translate Otto Crusius' restoration as follows:

              Lest you be wound]ed, let a fart.
                                                     ] B. A fart?
For most powerful these] averters of evil seem.

In the first line, where Crusius supplied ἵνα μὴ τρ]ωθῇς ("lest you be wounded"), Tadeusz Zieliński conjectured ἵνα σ]ωθῇς and Georg Knoke ἵνα διασ]ωθῇς, i.e. "in order that you might be saved (or preserved)."

The Greek feminine noun πορδή (pordē) means fart, and R.W. Daniel thinks that Pordē is here personified as a savior goddess. John J. Winkler, Auctor & Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius' Golden Ass (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 290, amusingly suggests the name "Fartemis" for such a goddess.

The adjective ἀποτρόπαιος (apotropaios = averting evil) is often an epithet of gods.

On the salvific power of breaking wind, cf. the Greek Anthology 11.395 (Nicarchus, tr. W.R. Paton):

A fart which cannot find an outlet kills many a man; a fart also saves, sending forth its lisping music. Therefore if a fart saves, and on the other hand kills, a fart has the same power as kings.

Πορδὴ ἀποκτέννει πολλοὺς ἀδιέξοδος οὖσα·
  πορδὴ καὶ σώζει τραυλὸν ἱεῖσα µέλος.
οὐκοῦν εἰ σώζει, καὶ ἀποκτέννει πάλι πορδή,
  τοῖς βασιλεῦσιν ἴσην πορδὴ ἔχει δύναµιν.

The action of the Charition mime takes place in India. I don't know whether anyone has ever compared the putative goddess Pordē in the Charition mime with reports of an ancient Egyptian god of flatulence, attested in the following sources.

Theophilus, To Autolycus 1.10.1 (tr. Marcus Dods):

Why should I further recount the multitude of animals worshipped by the Egyptians, both reptiles, and cattle, and wild beasts, and birds and river-fishes; and even wash-pots and disgraceful noises?

Τί μοι λοιπὸν καταλέγειν τὸ πλῆθος ὧν σέβονται ζώων Αἰγύπτιοι, ἑρπετῶν τε καὶ κτηνῶν καὶ θηρίων καὶ πετεινῶν καὶ ἐνύδρων νηκτῶν, ἔτι δὲ καὶ ποδόνιπτρα καὶ ἤχους αἰσχύνης;

Minucius Felix, Octavius 28.10 (tr. R.E. Wallis):

These same Egyptians, together with very many of you, are not more afraid of Isis than they are of the pungency of onions, nor of Serapis more than they tremble at the basest noises produced by the foulness of their bodies.

Idem Aegyptii cum plerisque vobis non magis Isidem quam ceparum acrimonias metuunt, nec Serapidem magis quam strepitus per pudenda corporis expressos contremescunt.

Pseudo-Clement, Homilies 10.16.2 (tr. M.B. Riddle):

For some of them taught the worship of an ox called Apis, some that of a he-goat, some of a cat, some of a serpent; yea, even of a fish, and of onions, and rumblings in the stomach, and common sewers, and members of irrational animals, and to myriads of other base abominations they gave the name of god.

οἱ μὲν γὰρ αὐτῶν παρέδοσαν βοῦν τὸν λεγόμενον Ἄπιν σέβειν, οἱ δὲ τράγον, οἱ δὲ αἴλουρον, οἱ δὲ ὄφιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἰχθὺν καὶ κρόμμυα καὶ γαστρῶν πνεύματα καὶ ὀχετοὺς καὶ ἀλόγων ζῴων μέλη <σὺν> καὶ ἄλλοις μυρίοις πάνυ αἰσχροῖς ἀτοπήμασιν.

Pseudo-Clement, Recognitions 5.20.3 (tr. Thomas Smith):

For some taught that their ox, which is called Apis, ought to be worshipped; others taught that the he-goat, others that cats, the ibis, a fish also, a serpent, onions, drains, crepitus ventris [farts], ought to be regarded as deities, and innumerable other things, which I am ashamed even to mention.

nam alii eorum bovem, qui Apis dicitur, colendum tradidere, alii hircum, alii cattas, nonnulli ibim, quidam serpentem, piscem quoque et caepas et cloacas, crepitus ventris pro numinibus habendos esse docuerunt et alia innumerabilia quae pudet etiam nominare.

St. Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah 13.46 (my translation):

For also several of their cities take their names from wild beasts and livestock, Kynopolis from the dog, Leontopolis from the lion, Thmouis from the goat in the Egyptian language, Lykopolis from the wolf, not to mention the dreadful and terrible onion and the noise of a swollen belly, which is an object of veneration in Pelusium.

nam et pleraque oppida eorum ex bestiis et iumentis habent nomina, κυνῶν a cane, λέων a leone, lingua Aegyptia θμοῦϊς ab hirco, λύκων a lupo, ut taceam de formidoloso et horribili coepe, et crepitu ventris inflati, quae Pelusiaca religio est.

It should be noted that some scholars think that occurrences of the word πορδή in the Charition mime don't refer to a goddess, but are rather stage directions, i.e. instructions to actor(s) to make farting noises. D.L. Page, ed., Select Papyri, Vol. III: Literary Papyri. Poetry (1941; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 339, opines:

The word πορδ(ή), once associated with the remarks of the Clown, is surely a stage direction: it may have played an integral part in the action of the farce (Winter, p. 45: artillery to repel the approach of the barbarians, cf. vv. 45-46).

Unfortunately I don't have access to recent editions and discussions of this mime, such as Jeffrey Rusten and I. C. Cunningham, edd., Theophrastus: Characters; Herodas: Mimes; Sophron and Other Mime Fragments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), and Stefania Santelia, Charition Liberata (P. Oxy. 413) (Bari: Levante, 1991). A demand for user name and password blocks me when I try to look at an image of P. Oxy. 413 at the Oxyrhynchus Online database.

Related posts:

• Gastromancy
  
• Matshishkapeu

Hat tip: Ian Jackson, who sent me a copy of R.W. Daniel's article.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

From Ian Jackson:

The opening lines of the Jeffers poem quoted in What's the best life for a man (8th Nov) suggest to me not that RJ had Sophocles and Petronius at his fingertips, but that he was modishly conversant with such modern poets as Yeats and Eliot. (I have no edition of Jeffers in the house, let alone an annotated text to check, so I have no way of knowing whether my remark is idle folly or conventional wisdom).

Petronius's passage about the Sibyl appears in Eliot's "Waste Land", and is, I suspect, RJ's source. The Sophocles was translated, more or less, by Yeats. I was about to send the text to you, but found that you had posted it (s.v. Yeats and Sophocles) six years ago. Jeffers was, of course, highly influenced by WBY, not least in his politics and his tower-fixation. There is an excellent short book by Theodore Ziolkowski, The View from the Tower: origins of an anti-modernist image (Princeton U.P. 1998), which deals with the towers of Yeats, Jeffers, Rilke and Jung.

Robert J. O'Hara also mentioned the Waste Land connection to me.

I've been asked a few times what H.C. Beeching meant when he wrote about "the habit of reading in the Balfour position." I'm not sure, but perhaps it refers to the occasion, during the Boer War, when an important dispatch was delivered to Arthur Balfour. He was in the bathtub at the time.

Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism. Edited and with an Introduction by Silvia Berti. Translated by Maura Masella-Gayley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 54, n. 9, in a review of E.R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (square brackets in the footnote):

When it comes to details, Goodenough is at times naive. See, for example, his interpretation of a grotesque lamp from Naples (4:1 144, fig. 112). He also believes that πίε ζήσαις ἀεὶ ἐν ἀγαθοῖς [pie tessis sei eu agatois] on a glass means "drink and thou shalt live forever among the good" (that is, "among the saints"), and he comments, "the phrase is definitely eschatological" (2:117).

The transliteration of the Greek occurs only in the English translation, not in the original Italian, Pagine ebraiche (Torino: Einaudi, 1987), p. 59, which didn't appear in print until after Momigliano's death. As it stands, the transliteration is complete gibberish. It should be pie zēsais aei en agathois.

This is just one of many misprints in the English translation. Several involve improper English equivalents for names in the original Italian. For example, on p. 12 there is a citation of "Geronymus, Chronica," and on p. 89 we read about "St. Girolamo"—in both places read "Jerome." In an essay on Leo Strauss, mention is made of "Xenophon's Hyeron" and (three times) of someone named "Gerone" (p. 182)—these are garbled references to the Syracusan tyrant Hiero. On p. 22 there is a citation to Babilonese Sotah, i.e. tractate Sotah in the Babylonian Talmud (missing from the "Index to Biblical and Talmudic References" on p. 241). In the index on p. 242 there is an entry for "Manius Sergius of Polybius," as if Polybius were a place name, rather than the name of a Greek historian. On p. 43:

One of the most respected pupils of Callimachus Istro of Paphos wrote at least two books on the epiphaneiai of Appollos (A. Tresp, Griech. Kultschriftsteller, p. 198).

Change this to:

One of the most respected pupils of Callimachus, Istrus of Paphos, wrote at least two books on the epiphaneiai of Apollo (A. Tresp, Griech. Kultschriftsteller, p. 198).

On p. 80, n. 1, read "Du bon usage de la trahison," not "Du bon usage de la trabison." These are just a few of the misprints disfiguring this book, issued by a "respected" university press.

Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 2: Seminumerical Algorithms, 3rd ed. (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1998), p. vii:

I have corrected every error that alert readers detected in the second edition (as well as some mistakes that, alas, nobody noticed); and I have tried to avoid introducing new errors in the new material. However, I suppose some defects still remain, and I want to fix them as soon as possible. Therefore I will cheerfully pay $2.56 to the first finder of each technical, typographical, or historical error.

Knuth makes the same offer in other books, e.g. in Ronald L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth, and Oren Patashnik, Concrete Mathematics, 2nd ed. (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1994), p. ix:

We have tried to produce a perfect book, but we are imperfect authors. Therefore we solicit help in correcting any mistakes that we've made. A reward of $2.56 will gratefully be paid to the first finder of any error, whether it is mathematical, historical, or typographical.

In the event that there aren't new editions, Knuth posts corrections on his web site. I doubt that Knuth's bank account suffers much by payment of these rewards. First, he is so careful and painstaking that he makes few mistakes. Second, I suspect that most of those lucky enough to receive a $2.56 check from Knuth don't cash it, but rather save it as a prized possession.

Knuth's passion for accuracy is admirable and worthy of imitation. My modest proposal is that university presses make similar offers to readers who find mistakes. But I doubt that any publisher would dare to follow Knuth's example. Some might go bankrupt if they did.

Labels: typographical and other errors

Robinson Jeffers, statement to the American Humanist Association (March 25, 1951):

Man is a part of nature, but a nearly infinitesimal part; the human race will cease after a while and leave no trace, but the great splendors of nature will go on. Meanwhile, most of our time and energy are necessarily spent on human affairs; that can’t be prevented, though I think it should be minimized; but for philosophy, which is an endless research of truth, and for contemplation, which can be a sort of worship, I would suggest that the immense beauty of the earth and the outer universe, the divine “nature of things,” is a more rewarding object. Certainly it is more pleasant to think of than the hopes and horrors of humanity, and more ennobling. It is a source of strength; the other of distraction.

Related post: Toadstools by the Wayside.

From Don Marquis, The Almost Perfect State:

Personally we look forward to an old age of dissipation and indolence and unreverend disrepute. In fifty years we shall be ninety-two years old. We intend to work rather hard during those fifty years and accumulate enough to live on without working any more for the next ten years, for we have determined to die at the age of one hundred and two.

During the last ten years we shall indulge ourself in many things that we have been forced by circumstances to forego. We have always been compelled, and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to be prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, industrious, respectful of established institutions, a model citizen. We have not liked it, but we have been unable to escape it. Our mind, our logical faculties, our observation, inform us that the conservatives have the right side of the argument in all human affairs. But the people whom we really prefer as associates, though we do not approve their ideas, are the rebels, the radicals, the wastrels, the vicious, the poets, the Bolshevists, the idealists, the nuts, the Lucifers, the agreeable good-for-nothings, the sentimentalists, the prophets, the freaks. We have never dared to know any of them, far less become intimate with them.

Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall be the ribald, useless, drunken, outcast person we have always wished to be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a bucket of hot water, a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and write ribald songs against organized society; strapped to one arm of our chair will be a forty-five calibre revolver, and we shall shoot out the lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off; when we want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through the front window and be damned to it; we shall address public meetings (to which we have been invited because of our wisdom) in a vein of jocund malice. We shall ... but we don’t wish to make any one envious of the good time that is coming to us ... We look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonoured, and disorderly old age.

Don Marquis didn't live until the age of a hundred and two, or even until ninety-two. He died at the age of fifty-eight. Therein is a warning. I intend to start on my "disreputable, vigorous, unhonoured, and disorderly old age" this very day.

Gabriel Metsu (1629–1667), The Old Drinker
Related post: Procrastination.

Thanks to Michael Hendry for sending additional references on the ancient idea that it is best never to be born.

Bacchylides 5.160-162 (said by Meleager in Hades, tr. David A. Campbell):

Best for mortals never to be born, never to set eyes on the sun's light.

θνατοῖσι μὴ φῦναι φέριστον,
μηδ᾽ ἀελίου προσιδεῖν
φέγγος.

Euripides, fragment 285, lines 1-2 (from the play Bellerophon, tr. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp):

I myself affirm what is of course a common word everywhere, that it is best for a man not to be born.

ἐγὼ τὸ μὲν δὴ πανταχοῦ θρυλούμενον
κράτιστον εἶναι φημὶ μὴ φῦναι βροτῷ.

Euripides, fragment 908, line 1 (from an unknown play, tr. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp):

Not to be born is better than life for mortals.

τὸ μὴ γενέσθαι κρεῖσσον ἢ φῦναι βροτοῖς.

Aristotle, fragment 44 Rose (from the dialogue Eudemus, or On the Soul, preserved by [Plutarch], Consolation to Apollonius 27 = Moralia 115 C-E, tr. Frank Cole Babbitt):

"And in addition to this you observe how the saying, which is on the lips of all men, has been passed from mouth to mouth for many years." "What is this?" said he. And the other, again taking up the discourse, said: "That not to be born is the best of all, and that to be dead is better than to live. And the proof that this is so has been given to many men by the deity. So, for example, they say that Silenus, after the hunt in which Midas of yore had captured him, when Midas questioned and inquired of him what is the best thing for mankind and what is the most preferable of all things, was at first unwilling to tell, but maintained a stubborn silence. But when at last, by employing every device, Midas induced him to say something to him, Silenus, forced to speak, said: 'Ephemeral offspring of a travailing genius and of harsh fortune, why do you force me to speak what it were better for you men not to know? For a life spent in ignorance of one's own woes is most free from grief. But for men it is utterly impossible that they should obtain the best thing of all, or even have any share in its nature (for the best thing for all men and women is not to be born); however, the next best thing to this, and the first of those to which man can attain, but nevertheless only the second best, is, after being born, to die as quickly as possible.' It is evident, therefore, that he made this declaration with the conviction that existence after death is better than that in life."

"καὶ ταῦθ᾽ οὕτως ἀρχαῖα καὶ παλαιὰ παρ᾽ ἡμῖν, ὥστε τὸ παράπαν οὐδεὶς οἶδεν οὔτε τοῦ χρόνου τὴν ἀρχὴν οὔτε τὸν θέντα πρῶτον, ἀλλὰ τὸν ἄπειρον αἰῶνα διατελεῖ νενομισμένα. πρὸς δὲ δὴ τούτοις διὰ στὸματος ὂν τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ὁρᾷς καὶ ἐκ πολλῶν ἐτῶν περιφέρεται θρυλούμενον." "τί τοῦτ᾽;" ἔφη. κἀκεῖνος ὑπολαβών "ὡς ἄρα μὴ γενέσθαι μέν" ἔφη "ἄριστον πάντων, τὸ δὲ τεθνάναι τοῦ ζῆν ἐστι κρεῖττον. καὶ πολλοῖς: οὕτω παρὰ τοῦ δαιμονίου μεμαρτύρηται. τοῦτο μὲν ἐκείνῳ τῷ Μίδᾳ λέγουσι δήπου μετὰ τὴν θήραν ὡς ἔλαβε τὸν Σειληνὸν διερωτῶντι καὶ πυνθανομένῳ τί ποτ᾽ ἐστὶ τὸ βέλτιστον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις καὶ τί τὸ πάντων αἱρετώτατον, τὸ μὲν πρῶτον οὐδὲν ἐθέλειν εἰπεῖν ἀλλὰ σιωπᾶν ἀρρήκτως: ἐπειδὴ δέ ποτε μόγις πᾶσαν μηχανὴν μηχανώμενος προσηγάγετο φθέγξασθαί τι πρὸς αὐτόν, οὕτως ἀναγκαζόμενον εἰπεῖν 'δαίμονος ἐπιπόνου καὶ τύχης χαλεπῆς ἐφήμερον σπέρμα, τί με βιάζεσθε λέγειν ἅὑμῖν ἄρειον μὴ γνῶναι; μετ᾽ ἀγνοίας γὰρ τῶν οἰκείων κακῶν ἀλυπότατος ὁ βίος. ἀνθρώποις δὲ πάμπαν οὐκ ἔστι γενέσθαι τὸ πάντων ἄριστον οὐδὲ μετασχεῖν τῆς τοῦ βελτίστου φύσεως ἄριστον ὰρα πᾶσι καὶ πάσαις τὸ μὴ γενέσθαι: τὸ μέντοι μετὰ τοῦτο καὶ πρῶτον τῶν ἀνθρώπῳ ἀνυστῶν, δεύτερον δέ, τὸ γενομένους ἀποθανεῖν ὡς τάχιστα.' δῆλον οὖν ὡς οὔσης κρείττονος τῆς ἐν τῷ τεθνάναι διαγωγῆς ἢ τῆς ἐν τῷ ζῆν, οὕτως ἀπεφήνατο."

---

Analogous is the idea that one should mourn when a child is born and rejoice when a man dies, e.g. Herodotus 5.4 (tr. A.D. Godley):

The Trausi, who in all else conform to the customs of other Thracians, do as I will show at the times of birth and death. When a child is born, the kinsmen sit around it and lament all the ills that it must endure from its birth onward, recounting all the sorrows of men. The dead, however, they bury with celebration and gladness, asserting that he is rid of so many ills and has achieved a state of complete blessedness.

τούτων δὲ τὰ μὲν Γέται οἱ ἀθανατίζοντες ποιεῦσι, εἴρηταί μοι: Τραυσοὶ δὲ τὰ μὲν ἄλλα πάντα κατὰ ταὐτὰ τοῖσι ἄλλοισι Θρήιξι ἐπιτελέουσι, κατὰ δὲ τὸν γινόμενόν σφι καὶ ἀπογινόμενον ποιεῦσι τοιάδε: τὸν μὲν γενόμενον περιιζόμενοι οἱ προσήκοντες ὀλοφύρονται, ὅσα μιν δεῖ ἐπείτε ἐγένετο ἀναπλῆσαι κακά, ἀνηγεόμενοι τὰ ἀνθρωπήια πάντα πάθεα: τὸν δ᾽ ἀπογενόμενον παίζοντές τε καὶ ἡδόμενοι γῇ κρύπτουσι, ἐπιλέγοντες ὅσων κακῶν ἐξαπαλλαχθεὶς ἐστὶ ἐν πάσῃ εὐδαιμονίῃ.

and Euripides, fragment 449 (from the play Cresphontes, tr. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp):

We would do better to assemble and bewail a newborn child for all the troubles he is entering, and when a man dies and has his rest from hardships to see him from his home with joy and cries of gladness.

ἐχρῆν γὰρ ἡμᾶς σύλλογον ποιουμένους
τὸν φύντα θρηνεῖν εἰς ὅσ᾽ ἔρχεται κακά,
τὸν δ᾽ αὖ θανόντα καὶ πόνων πεπαυμένον
χαίροντας εὐφημοῦντας ἐκπέμπειν δόμων.

Latin translation of Euripides' lines by Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.48.115:

nam nos decebat coetus celebrantis domum
lugere, ubi esset aliquis in lucem editus,
humanae vitae varia reputantis mala;
at, qui labores morte finisset gravis,
hunc omni amicos laude et laetitia exsequi.

---

On the persistence of this idea, Robert J. O'Hara writes in an email:

A verse that appears on a few 18th-century gravestones of children is one that derives ultimately, through several poetical intermediates, from those lines of Theognis. It's striking because it's a very non-Puritan sentiment to find in these late-Puritan New England burying grounds.

I attach two photos here of the gravestone of Nathaniel Thurston of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, who died 24 January 1772, aged one day. The verse reads:

Happy the babe Who privileg'd by fate
To shorter labor & a ligter Weight
Recev'd but yesterday ye gift of breath
Ordored tomarrow to return to death

So there's a direct line from Archaic Greece to early New England through these brief lines.

Excerpts from Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867).

Chapter V:

No man reverences a clergyman, as a clergyman, so slightly as a brother clergyman.

Chapter IX:

None but they who have themselves been poor gentry,—gentry so poor as not to know how to raise a shilling,—can understand the peculiar bitterness of the trials which such poverty produces. The poverty of the normal poor does not approach it; or, rather, the pangs arising from such poverty are altogether of a different sort. To be hungry and have no food, to be cold and have no fuel, to be threatened with distraint for one's few chairs and tables, and with the loss of the roof over one's head,—all these miseries, which, if they do not positively reach, are so frequently near to reaching the normal poor, are, no doubt, the severest of the trials to which humanity is subjected. They threaten life,—or, if not life, then liberty,—reducing the abject one to a choice between captivity and starvation.

Chapter IX:

I know a man,—an excellent fellow, who, being himself a strong politician, constantly expresses a belief that all politicians opposed to him are thieves, child-murderers, parricides, lovers of incest, demons upon the earth.

Chapter XVI (spoken by Lily Dale):

"There is some queer-looking animal of whom they say that he is better than he looks, and I always think of that saying when I think of my uncle."

Chapter XVII (spoken by Mr. Crawley):

"I have long ceased, Mr. Robarts, to care much what any man or woman may say about my shoes."

Chapter XXIV (spoken by Miss Demolines and Mr. Eames):

"I know very well that men are friends when they step up and shake hands with each other. It is the same as when women kiss."

"When I see women kiss, I always think that there is deep hatred at the bottom of it."

Chapter XXV (spoken by Conway Dalrymple):

"You are just like some of those men who for years past have been going to write a book on some new subject. The intention has been sincere at first, and it never altogether dies away. But the would-be author, though he still talks of his work, knows that it will never be executed, and is very patient under the disappointment. All enthusiasm about the thing is gone, but he is still known as the man who is going to do it some day."

Chapter XLIX:

"He ain't got nothing to do," said the housemaid to the cook, "and as for reading, they say that some of the young ones can read all day sometimes, and all night too; but, bless you, when you're nigh eighty, reading don't go for much."

Chapter L:

It is ever so much easier to proffer kindness graciously than to receive it with grace....But the suffering spirit cannot descend from its dignity of reticence. It has a nobility of its own, made sacred by many tears, by the flowing of streams of blood from unseen wounds, which cannot descend from its daïs to receive pity and kindness. A consciousness of undeserved woe produces a grandeur of its own, with which the high-souled sufferer will not easily part.

Chapter LII:

But with all of us, in the opinion which we form of those around us, we take unconsciously the opinion of others. A woman is handsome because the world says so. Music is charming to us because it charms others. We drink our wines with other men's palates, and look at our pictures with other men's eyes.

Chapter LII:

"I'd sooner be a horse in a mill than have to go to an office every day," said Mrs. Smith...

Chapter LIX (spoken by Mrs. Thorne):

"There are moments when it is a man's duty simply to vanish, to melt into the air, or to sink into the ground,—in which he is bound to overcome the difficulties of such sudden self-removal, or must ever after be accounted poor and mean."

Chapter LXII:

Was there ever a man whose existence was so purposeless, so useless, so deleterious, as his own? And yet he knew Hebrew well, whereas the dean knew but very little Hebrew. He could make Greek iambics, and doubted whether the bishop knew the difference between an iambus and a trochee. He could disport himself with trigonometry, feeling confident that Dr. Tempest had forgotten his way over the asses' bridge. He knew "Lycidas" by heart; and as for Thumble, he felt quite sure that Thumble was incompetent of understanding a single allusion in that divine poem. Nevertheless, though all this wealth of acquirement was his, it would be better for himself, better for those who belonged to him, better for the world at large, that he should be put an end to.

Chapter LXVIII (spoken by Mr. Crawley):

"Those who are high in station strike us more by their joys and sorrows than do the poor and lowly. Were some young duke's wife, wedded but the other day, to die, all England would put on some show of mourning,—nay, would feel some true gleam of pity; but nobody cares for the widowed brickmaker seated with his starving infant on his cold hearth."

Chapter LXXIII:

"He must be the oddest man that ever lived," said Mrs. Grantly, "not to have known where he got the cheque." The archdeacon shook his head, and rubbed his hands as he walked about the room. "I suppose too much learning has upset him," said the archdeacon. "They say he's not very good at talking English, but put him on in Greek and he never stops."

Chapter LXXX:

During the whole of that day Johnny was resolving that there could be no cure for his malady but hard work. He would not only work hard at the office if he remained there, but he would take to heavy reading. He rather thought that he would go deep into Greek and do a translation, or take up the exact sciences and make a name for himself that way. But as he had enough for the life of a secluded literary man without his salary, he rather thought that he would give up his office altogether. He had a mutton chop at home that evening, and spent his time in endeavouring to read out loud to himself certain passages from the Iliad;—for he had bought a Homer as he returned from his office....On the next day he was cooler and wiser. Greek he thought might be tedious as he discovered that he would have to begin again from the very alphabet. He would therefore abandon that idea. Greek was not the thing for him, but he would take up the sanitary condition of the poor in London. A fellow could be of some use in that way.

Chapter LXXXI:

Now Dr. Filgrave was the leading physician of Barchester, and nobody of note in the city,—or for the matter of that in the eastern division of the county,—was allowed to start upon the last great journey without some assistance from him as the hour of going drew nigh. I do not know that he had much reputation for prolonging life, but he was supposed to add a grace to the hour of departure.

H.C. Beeching, To My Totem, motto (from Vergil, Eclogues 1.1) plus lines 1-4:

"Sub tegmine fagi."

Thy name of old was great:
What though sour critics teach
The beech by the Skaian gate
Was not, alas, a beech...

One of the "sour critics" was Anonymous, who wrote in the Gentleman's Magazine 3 (June 1835) 566, footnote:

The φηγὸς of Homer should not be translated the beech-tree, as Cowper and Pope have done. It is an oak, and we doubt whether the beech is to be found at all in the plains of Troy.

See, e.g., Alexander Pope's translation of Iliad 6.237-241 (Pope's lines 296-301):

Meantime the guardian of the Trojan state,
Great Hector, enter'd at the Scaean gate.
Beneath the beech-tree's consecrated shades,
The Trojan matrons and the Trojan maids
Around him flock'd, all press'd with pious care
For husbands, brothers, sons, engag'd in war.

Ἕκτωρ δ᾽ ὡς Σκαιάς τε πύλας καὶ φηγὸν ἵκανεν,
ἀμφ᾽ ἄρα μιν Τρώων ἄλοχοι θέον ἠδὲ θύγατρες
εἰρόμεναι παῖδάς τε κασιγνήτους τε ἔτας τε
καὶ πόσιας· ὃ δ᾽ ἔπειτα θεοῖς εὔχεσθαι ἀνώγει
πάσας ἑξείης· πολλῇσι δὲ κήδε᾽ ἐφῆπτο.

Liddell and Scott define Greek φηγός (transliteration phēgós) as Valonia oak (scientific name Quercus macrolepis). Lewis and Short define the cognate Latin word fagus as beech-tree (scientific name Fagus silvatica).

The mistake of Pope and Cowper can be attributed to dictionaries, e.g. Clavis Homerica (Rotterdam: Leers, 1662) p. 184, which translated Greek φηγός into Latin as fagus, a mistake repeated in other dictionaries into the 19th century.

The same Clavis derived φηγός from φαγεῖν, "quia olim homines fructibus arboreis victitabant," i.e. "because once upon a time men used to feed on mast," an etymology often accepted by modern scholars, e.g. by the aptly-named Edward S. Forester, "Trees and Plants in Homer," Classical Review 50 (July 1936) 97-104 (at 98).

But most reputable etymologists today posit separate Proto-Indo-European roots for φηγός (from bhāgo- = beech tree) and φαγεῖν (from bhag- = divide, share, get a share, i.e. of food, hence eat).

From Proto-Indo-European bhāgo- (beech tree) we get not only English beech, but also book and the buck- in buckwheat.

From Proto-Indo-European bhag- (share, get a share, eat) are derived the English prefix phago-, the suffixes -phage, -phagia, -phagous, -phagy (all via Greek φαγεῖν, e.g. dysphagia = difficulty swallowing), and baksheesh (via Persian).

Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who paraphrases Richard Bentley—"It's a pretty tree, Mr. Pope, but you mustn't call it a 'beech'."

Related posts:

• Patulae Recubans Sub Tegmine Fagi
  
• Appointment With a Beech Tree

Labels: etymology

I'm indebted to Karl Maurer for what follows (I've added the Latin stanza by stanza with his translation).

---

Michael, that's a charming poem by Honorato Fascitelli that you posted last Thursday — but does not the translation by Aldington seem rather horribly loose? E.g. he wholly omits the third stanza (perhaps because it is hard* and he didn't understand it), and in the last stanzas he seems wholly to miss the point. Here's what sense I seem to make of it:

(1) Sacred Citron-trees of the grove of Annia, and sacred Spring running on bright feet through the Grove, and Shrine that the gentle Headland has on its sacred hill,

Annii nemoris sacra
Citria, & liquido sacer
Fons fluens pede per nemus,
Quodque colle habet in sacro
    Mollis acta sacellum:    5

(2) and you, Rustic Gods and Goddesses sprung from Juppiter, to whom the cool Grove and the Spring on the ridge, and the illustrious Altar have been fitly dedicated,—

Vosque agrestia numina,
Dii deaeque genus Jovis
Frigidum quibus est nemus,
Fonsque jugis, & inclyta
    Ara rite dicata:    10

(3) if fitly in a bristling Grove, where the Spring is far distant, hanging over the sea, any altar dedicated above a steep hill catches you!—

Rite si nemore horrido
Fonte seposito procul
Imminens pelago capit
Ulla vos super arduo
    Ara colle dicata:    15

(4) how aggrieved and complaining I leave you, how gladly and happily I revisit you! and in divine leisure, rejoice to hide myself in your tender breast!

Quam relinquo dolens querens,
Quam reviso volens lubens
Vos ego! & tenerum in sinum,
Dia ad otia, gaudeo
    Memet abdere vestrum!    20

(5) whether I delight in hiding under the leaves of the black grove and, in flowing brief tunic, in chilling at the light breath of the West wind,

Sive sub nemoris nigri
Delitere comis juvat
Et fluente brevi in tuni-
ca ad vagi Zephyri levem
    Frigerarier auram:    25

(6) or in loitering by cool hollows of the sweetly babbling spring, and with now this, now that, slow hand in pushing the water that entices sleep.**

Sive dulce loquaculi
Fontis ad gelidos specus
Sessitare, & aquam hac & hac
Somnuli illecebram manu
    Usque pellere lenta.    30

(7) Then I would weary [gravem], now of strolling with a garrulous lute, now of descrying from the ridge of the hill the sails of a thousand passing ships,

Tum modo spatiarier
Garrula cithara gravem:
Collis e specula modo
Mille cernere puppium
    Vela praetereuntum:    35

(8) when with heavy heat the Dogstar rages on land and sea, or when the Great Bear is free from burning Hyperion, struck by frost and gloomy darkness.

Cum calore Canis gravi
Terra & aequore perfurit
Fervidoque Hyperione
Arctos icta vacat gelu,
    Tristibusque tenebris.    40

* The third stanza is hard; but seems to me a kind of parenthesis, qualifying 10 ‘rite dicata’. (I.e., “If one can call ‘fitly dedicated' any altar dedicated in such a place”.)

** ‘somnuli’ seems an objective genitive with ‘illecebra’.

Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, chapter 12 (describing Max Gottlieb):

But poverty kept him from fulfillment of his summer longing to sit beneath the poplars by the Rhine or the tranquil Seine, at a table on whose checkered cloth were bread and cheese and wine and dusky cherries, those ancient and holy simplicities of all the world.

Robinson Jeffers, The Silent Shepherds:

What's the best life for a man?
— Never to have been born, sings the choros, and the next best
Is to die young. I saw the Sybil at Cumae
Hung in her cage over the public street —
What do you want, Sybil? I want to die.
Apothanein Thelo. Apothanein Thelo. Apothanein Thelo...
You have got your wish. But I meant life, not death.
What's the best life for a man? To ride in the wind. To ride horses and herd cattle
In solitary places above the ocean on the beautiful mountain, and come home hungry in the evening
And eat and sleep. He will live in the wild wind and quick rain, he will not ruin his eyes with reading,
Nor think too much.
                                         However, we must have philosophers.
I will have shepherds for my philosophers,
Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night
Watching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep. And I'll have lunatics
For my poets, strolling from farm to farm, wild liars distorting
The country news into supernaturalism—
For all men to such minds are devils or gods—and that increases
Man's dignity, man's importance, necessary lies
Best told by fools.
                                         I will have no lawyers nor constables:
Each man guard his own goods: there will be man-slaughter,
But no more wars, no more mass-sacrifice. Nor I'll have no doctors,
Except old women gathering herbs on the mountain,
Let each have her sack of opium to ease the death-pains.

That would be a good world, free and out-doors.
But the vast hungry spirit of the time
Cries to his chosen that there is nothing good
Except discovery, experiment and experience and discovery: to look truth in the eyes,
To strip truth naked, let our dogs do our living for us
But man discover.
                                         It is a fine ambition,
But the wrong tools. Science and mathematics
Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
They never touch it: consider what an explosion
Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world
If any mind for a moment touch truth.

In lines 2-3, Jeffers recalls Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, in which the chorus sings (1224-1238, tr. R.C. Jebb):

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best; but, when a man hath seen the light, this is next best by far, that with all speed he should go thither, whence he hath come.

For when he hath seen youth go by, with its light follies, what troublous affliction is strange to his lot, what suffering is not therein? - envy, factions, strife, battles and slaughters; and, last of all, age claims him for her own, - age, dispraised, infirm, unsociable, unfriended, with whom all woe of woe abides.

μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νι-
κᾷ λόγον· τὸ δ᾽, ἐπεὶ φανῇ,
βῆναι κεῖθεν ὅθεν περ ἥ-
κει πολὺ δεύτερον, ὡς τάχιστα.
ὡς εὖτ᾽ ἂν τὸ νέον παρῇ
κούφας ἀφροσύνας φέρον,
τίς πλαγὰ πολύμοχθος ἔ-
ξω; τίς οὐ καμάτων ἔνι;
φθόνος, στάσεις, ἔρις, μάχαι
καὶ φόνοι· τό τε κατάμεμπτον ἐπιλέλογχε
πύματον ἀκρατὲς ἀπροσόμιλον
γῆρας ἄφιλον, ἵνα πρόπαντα
κακὰ κακῶν ξυνοικεῖ.

Sophocles in turn echoes Theognis 425-428 (tr. J.M. Edmonds):

The best lot of all for man is never to have been born nor seen the beams of the burning Sun; this failing, to pass the gates of Hades as soon as one may, and lie under a goodly heap of earth.

Πάντων μὲν μὴ φῦναι ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἄριστον
μηδ᾽ ἐσιδεῖν αὐγὰς ὀξέος ἠελίου·
φύντα δ᾽ ὅπως ὤκιστα πύλας Ἀίδαο περῆσαι
καὶ κεῖσθαι πολλὴν γῆν ἐπαμησάμενον.

In lines 3-6 Jeffers refers to Petronius, Satyricon 48 (tr. Michael Heseltine):

Yes, and I myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl hanging in a cage; and when the boys cried at her: 'Sibyl, Sibyl, what do you want?' 'I would that I were dead,' she used to answer.

nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα, τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.

Frederic Remington,
Mounted Cowboy
in Chaps with Race Horse
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• Merry It Is and Quiet
  
• Indoors
  
• Life Outdoors

[H.C. Beeching], Pages from a Private Diary (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1898), p. 119 (on a visit to a bookshop):

Folios, quartos, dumpy duodecimos, seemed to be putting out forlorn hands to me, and entreating that I should end their exile and let them co-exist with some co-appurtenant on my happy shelves. And here at home I am conscious, as never before, of great gaps; lacunae valde deflendae. But that way madness lies! I suppose every one has a grain of malice in his composition somewhere, and if he is a book-collector it is apt to show itself there; perhaps as harmless a vent as it can take.

Johannes Jelgerhuis (1770-1836),
De winkel van boekhandelaar Pieter Meijer Warnars
op de Vijgendam te Amsterdam

[H.C. Beeching], Pages from a Private Diary (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1898), p. 12:

At luncheon, Miss A., the Scotch governess, asked me if I liked buns. I replied that I liked them if they were made with sultana raisins and not currants. She blushed, and explained that she meant the poet "Buns." This, it seems, is the patriotic manner of pronouncing Burns.

[H.C. Beeching], Pages from a Private Diary (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1898), p. 28:

I have long meditated keeping an album myself of another sort, a commonplace book, what Milton calls a "topick-folio." This is one of those resolutions that come with every first of January, and too often go with it; though a very fat volume lying here on the table has its first few pages filled with the harvest of several new beginnings. Laziness has something to do with the irresolution; the habit of reading in the Balfour position perhaps more; more still the conviction at the moment that if a passage is very good there is small risk of forgetting it (a terrible mistake!); but most of all that paralysing sentence in Marcus Aurelius, "No longer delude thyself; thou wilt never read thine own notes, nor the extracts from books which thou wast reserving for thy old age" (iii. 14).

Thomas Babington Macaulay, letter to Thomas Flower Ellis (February 8, 1835):

I have gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing to myself. I have never felt anything like it. I was enraptured with Italian during the six months which I gave up to it; and I was little less pleased with Spanish. But, when I went back to the Greek, I felt as if I had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was. Oh that wonderful people! There is not one art, not one science, about which we may not use the same expression which Lucretius has employed about the victory over superstition, "Primum Graius homo—."

I think myself very fortunate in having been able to return to these great masters while still in the full vigour of life, and when my taste and judgment are mature. Most people read all the Greek that they ever read before they are five and twenty. They never find time for such studies afterwards till they are in the decline of life; and then their knowledge of the language is in a great measure lost, and cannot easily be recovered. Accordingly, almost all the ideas that people have of Greek literature, are ideas formed while they were still very young. A young man, whatever his genius may be, is no judge of such a writer as Thucydides. I had no high opinion of him ten years ago. I have now been reading him with a mind accustomed to historical researches, and to political affairs; and I am astonished at my own former blindness, and at his greatness. I could not bear Euripides at college. I now read my recantation. He has faults undoubtedly. But what a poet! The Medea, the Alcestis, the Troades, the Bacchae, are alone sufficient to place him in the very first rank. Instead of depreciating him, as I have done, I may, for aught I know, end by editing him.

William Michael Harnett, Music and Literature

John Clare, The Fens, lines 83-98:

And muse and marvel where we may
Gain mars the landscape every day
The meadow grass turned up and copt    85
The trees to stumpy dotterels lopt
The hearth with fuel to supply
For rest to smoke and chatter bye
Giving the joy of home delights
The warmest mirth on coldest nights    90
And so for gain that joys repay
Change cheats the landscape every day
No tree no bough about it grows
That from the hatchet can repose
And the orison stooping smiles    95
Oer treeless fens of many miles
Spring comes and goes and comes again
And all is nakedness and fen

85 copt (copped) = put into heaps or haycocks
86 dotterels = pollard trees

George Clausen, The End of a Winter's Day

Labels: arboricide

Miguel de Unamuno:

There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea-breaker.

Quoted by Walter Starkie in the introduction to Miguel de Unamuno, Our Lord Don Quixote, tr. Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. xv.

Greek Anthology 6.108 (Myrinus, tr. W.R. Paton):

Ye Pans, keepers of the high mountains, ye jolly horned dancers, lords of grassy Arcady, make Diotimus rich in sheep and goats, accepting the gifts of his splendid sacrifice.

ὑψηλῶν ὀρέων ἔφοροι, κεραοὶ χοροπαῖκται,
  Πᾶνες, βουχίλου κράντορες Ἀρκαδίης,
εὔαρνον θείητε καὶ εὐχίμαρον Διότιμον,
  δεξάμενοι λαμπρῆς δῶρα θυηπολίης.

For such a short poem, this contains several unusual locutions, according to A.S.F. Gow and D.L. Page, The Greek Anthology: The Garland of Philip and Some Contemporary Epigrams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), vol. II, p. 320. In what follows I've put the words in dictionary lemma form:

1 χοροπαίκτης: sporting in the choral dance, dancing merrily. Hapax legomenon.
2 Πᾶνες: Pans. The only plural occurrence in the Greek Anthology.
βούχιλος: rich in fodder, cattle-feeding. Elsewhere only in Aeschylus, Suppliant Women 540.
κράντωρ: ruler. Elsewhere only in Euripides, Andromache 508, and Greek Anthology 6.116.6 (Samius).
3 εὔαρνος: rich in sheep. Elsewhere only in Greek Anthology 7.657.9 (Leonidas).
εὐχίμαρος: rich in goats. Hapax legomenon.
4 θυηπολία: a sacrificing. Rare, first in Apollonius of Rhodes 1.1124.

---

Bronze statuette of Pan, from the Temple of Artemis at Lousoi in Arcadia, 5th century B.C. (Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Antikenabteilung, inv. no. Misc. 8624):


Another view of the same:


Winifred Lamb, Ancient Greek and Roman Bronzes (London: Methuen, 1929; rpt. Chicago: Argonaut, Inc., 1969), pp. 153-154:

Our account of Arcadian bronzes may be concluded by a description of the goat-headed Pan from Lousoi at Berlin...A creature of the wilds, he stands shading his eyes with one hand: the other may have held a pedum or short crook: his right leg is advanced as though he is ready to leap forward. He has a beautiful fringe of hair down his back: the hair on his body and eyelashes are most carefully engraved. Much care has also been expended on the modelling of the head, muzzle and hands: between the horns is a hole, in which some ornament could have been inserted. The surface shews flaws from defective casting: one hole, in the right shoulder, has been filled in, but not the others. The work is that of a skilled and practiced hand, evidently not that of an Arcadian, but nowhere else, save perhaps in the Homeric Hymn to Pan, has the spirit of Arcadia been so fitly embodied.

Pan is shielding his eyes to look at something in the distance. I haven't seen Ines Jucker, Der Gestus des Aposkopein. Ein Beitrag zur Gebärdensprache in der antiken Kunst (Zurich: Juris-Verlag, 1956).

Honorato Fascitelli (1502-1564), Carmina XXIII (De Annia Villa), lines 1-40, tr. Richard Aldington in Medallions in Clay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), p. 92 (titled The Villa Annia):

Sacred citron-trees of the grove of Annia, sacred spring rippling through the wood, shrine of the quiet sea-beach upon the hill, and you, forest gods and goddesses of the race of Zeus—sadly do I leave you and most joyfully return.

I delight to flee away to god-like idleness in your breast. Either I lie hid beneath the dark tresses of the grove, and in short loose tunic grow cool from the breath of the wavering West-Wind; or beside the murmuring of the rill I sit long and long above its cool mirror, sleepily splashing the alluring water with languid fingers. Sorrow drifts away to the sound of the trembling lute. From the height I watch the mirrored sails of a thousand passing ships. And the Dog-star burns hot over land and sea, and Arctos with his frosts and dreary clouds flies from Hyperion.

The Latin, from Jacobi...Sannazarii...Poemata...Item Gabrielis Altilii et Honorati Fascitelli Carmina Quae Exstant, 2nd ed. (Patavii: Josephus Cominus, 1731), pp. 292-293:

Annii nemoris sacra
Citria, & liquido sacer
Fons fluens pede per nemus,
Quodque colle habet in sacro
    Mollis acta sacellum:    5

Vosque agrestia numina,
Dii deaeque genus Jovis
Frigidum quibus est nemus,
Fonsque jugis, & inclyta
    Ara rite dicata:    10

Rite si nemore horrido
Fonte seposito procul
Imminens pelago capit
Ulla vos super arduo
    Ara colle dicata:    15

Quam relinquo dolens querens,
Quam reviso volens lubens
Vos ego! & tenerum in sinum,
Dia ad otia, gaudeo
    Memet abdere vestrum!    20

Sive sub nemoris nigri
Delitere comis juvat
Et fluente brevi in tuni-
ca ad vagi Zephyri levem
    Frigerarier auram:    25

Sive dulce loquaculi
Fontis ad gelidos specus
Sessitare, & aquam hac & hac
Somnuli illecebram manu
    Usque pellere lenta.    30

Tum modo spatiarier
Garrula cithara gravem:
Collis e specula modo
Mille cernere puppium
    Vela praetereuntum:    35

Cum calore Canis gravi
Terra & aequore perfurit
Fervidoque Hyperione
Arctos icta vacat gelu,
    Tristibusque tenebris.    40

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), The Woodman and the Nightingale:

A woodman whose rough heart was out of tune
(I think such hearts yet never came to good)
Hated to hear, under the stars or moon,

One nightingale in an interfluous wood
Satiate the hungry dark with melody;—      5
And as a vale is watered by a flood,

Or as the moonlight fills the open sky
Struggling with darkness—as a tuberose
Peoples some Indian dell with scents which lie

Like clouds above the flower from which they rose,      10
The singing of that happy nightingale
In this sweet forest, from the golden close

Of evening till the star of dawn may fail,
Was interfused upon the silentness;
The folded roses and the violets pale      15

Heard her within their slumbers, the abyss
Of heaven with all its planets; the dull ear
Of the night-cradled earth; the loneliness

Of the circumfluous waters,—every sphere
And every flower and beam and cloud and wave,      20
And every wind of the mute atmosphere,

And every beast stretched in its rugged cave,
And every bird lulled on its mossy bough,
And every silver moth fresh from the grave

Which is its cradle—ever from below      25
Aspiring like one who loves too fair, too far,
To be consumed within the purest glow

Of one serene and unapproached star,
As if it were a lamp of earthly light,
Unconscious, as some human lovers are,      30

Itself how low, how high beyond all height
The heaven where it would perish!—and every form
That worshipped in the temple of the night

Was awed into delight, and by the charm
Girt as with an interminable zone,      35
Whilst that sweet bird, whose music was a storm

Of sound, shook forth the dull oblivion
Out of their dreams; harmony became love
In every soul but one.

...


And so this man returned with axe and saw      40
At evening close from killing the tall treen,
The soul of whom by Nature’s gentle law

Was each a wood-nymph, and kept ever green
The pavement and the roof of the wild copse,
Chequering the sunlight of the blue serene      45

With jagged leaves,—and from the forest tops
Singing the winds to sleep—or weeping oft
Fast showers of aereal water-drops

Into their mother’s bosom, sweet and soft,
Nature’s pure tears which have no bitterness;—      50
Around the cradles of the birds aloft

They spread themselves into the loveliness
Of fan-like leaves, and over pallid flowers
Hang like moist clouds:—or, where high branches kiss,

Make a green space among the silent bowers,      55
Like a vast fane in a metropolis,
Surrounded by the columns and the towers

All overwrought with branch-like traceries
In which there is religion—and the mute
Persuasion of unkindled melodies,      60

Odours and gleams and murmurs, which the lute
Of the blind pilot-spirit of the blast
Stirs as it sails, now grave and now acute,

Wakening the leaves and waves, ere it has passed
To such brief unison as on the brain      65
One tone, which never can recur, has cast,
One accent never to return again.

...


The world is full of Woodmen who expel
Love's gentle Dryads from the haunts of life,
And vex the nightingales in every dell.      70

[Published in part (1-67) by Mrs. Shelley, “Posthumous Poems”, 1824; the remainder (68-70) by Dr. Garnett, “Relics of Shelley”, 1862.]

Edwin Frederick Holt, Redbourne Church,
Hertfordshire, with Lumber Wagon
and Labourers in Country Costume

Labels: arboricide

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist § 52 (tr. Walter Kaufmann):

Another sign of the theologian is his incapacity for philology. What is here meant by philology is, in a very broad sense, the art of reading well—of reading facts without falsifying them by interpretation, without losing caution, patience, delicacy, in the desire to understand. Philology as ephexis in interpretation —whether it is a matter of books, the news in a paper, destinies, or weather conditions, not to speak of “the salvation of the soul."

Ein andres Abzeichen des Theologen ist sein Unvermögen zur Philogie. Unter Philologie soll hier, in einem sehr allgemeinen Sinne, die Kunst, gut zu lesen, verstanden werden,—Tatsachen ablesen können, ohne sie durch Interpretation zu fälschen, ohne im Verlangen nach Verständnis die Vorsicht, die Geduld, die Feinheit zu verlieren. Philologie als Ephexis in der Interpretation: handle es sich nun um Bücher, um Zeitungs-Neuigkeiten, um Schicksale oder Wetter-Tatsachen,—nicht zu reden vom "Heil der Seele."

Ephexis is ἔφεξις, defined by Liddell-Scott-Jones (sense II) as "checking, stopping," with only a single citation—"IG12(9).207.10 (Eretria)," an inscription apparently translated into French by Brigitte Le Guen, Les associations de technites dionysiaques à l'époque hellénistique, I: Corpus documentaire (Nancy, 2001), pp. 41-56 (unavailable to me). The word comes from ἐπέχω, defined by Liddell-Scott-Jones (sense IV) as "hold back, keep in check." In this passage from Nietzsche, perhaps "restraint" would be a suitable translation.

In the preface to Daybreak (Morgenröte, tr. R.J. Hollingdale), Nietzsche says that the essence of philology is reading slowly:

It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading....For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow — it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of 'work', that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to 'get everything done' at once, including every old or new book: — this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.

Man ist nicht umsonst Philologe gewesen, man ist es vielleicht noch das will sagen, ein Lehrer des langsamen Lesens....Philologie nämlich ist jene ehrwürdige Kunst, welche von ihrem Verehrer vor Allem Eins heischt, bei Seite gehn, sich Zeit lassen, still werden, langsam werden —, als eine Goldschmiedekunst und -kennerschaft des Wortes, die lauter feine vorsichtige Arbeit abzutun hat und Nichts erreicht, wenn sie es nicht lento erreicht. Gerade damit aber ist sie heute nötiger als je, gerade dadurch zieht sie und bezaubert sie uns am stärksten, mitten in einem Zeitalter der "Arbeit", will sagen: der Hast, der unanständigen und schwitzenden Eilfertigkeit, das mit Allem gleich "fertig werden" will, auch mit jedem alten und neuen Buche: — sie selbst wird nicht so leicht irgend womit fertig, sie lehrt gut lesen, das heisst langsam, tief, rück- und vorsichtig, mit Hintergedanken, mit offen gelassenen Türen, mit zarten Fingern und Augen lesen.

Excerpts from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).

Chapter 9:

Our senator was a statesman, and of course could not be expected to cry, like other mortals; and so he turned his back to the company, and looked out of the window, and seemed particularly busy in clearing his throat and wiping his spectacle-glasses, occasionally blowing his nose in a manner that was calculated to excite suspicion, had any one been in a state to observe critically.

Chapter 12:

As to Tom, he was thinking over some words of an unfashionable old book, which kept running through his head, again and again, as follows: "We have here no continuing city, but we seek one to come; wherefore God himself is not ashamed to be called our God; for he hath prepared for us a city." These words of an ancient volume, got up principally by "ignorant and unlearned men," have, through all time, kept up, somehow, a strange sort of power over the minds of poor, simple fellows, like Tom. They stir up the soul from its depths, and rouse, as with trumpet call, courage, energy, and enthusiasm, where before was only the blackness of despair.

Chapter 12:

And he took out his pocket-book, and began adding over his accounts, a process which many gentlemen beside Mr. Haley have found a specific for an uneasy conscience.

Chapter 13:

Her face was round and rosy, with a healthful downy softness, suggestive of a ripe peach. Her hair, partially silvered by age, was parted smoothly back from a high placid forehead, on which time had written no inscription except peace on earth, good will to men; and beneath shone a large pair of clear, honest, loving brown eyes: you only needed to look straight into them, to feel that you saw to the bottom of a heart as good and true as ever throbbed in woman's bosom. So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?

Chapter 14:

Having learned late in life, Tom was but a slow reader, and passed on laboriously from verse to verse. Fortunate for him was it that the book he was intent on was one which slow reading cannot injure,—nay, one whose words, like ingots of gold, seem often to need to be weighed separately, that the mind may take in their priceless value. Let us follow him a moment, as, pointing to each word, and pronouncing each half aloud, he reads,—

"Let—not—your—heart—be—troubled. In—my—Father's—house—are—many—mansions. I—go—to—prepare—a—place—for—you."

Cicero, when he buried his darling and only daughter, had a heart as full of honest grief as poor Tom's,—perhaps no fuller, for both were only men;—but Cicero could pause over no such sublime words of hope, and look to no such future reunion; and if he had seen them, ten to one he would not have believed,—he must fill his head first with a thousand questions of authenticity of manuscript, and correctness of translation. But, to poor Tom, there it lay, just what he needed, so evidently true and divine that the possibility of a question never entered his simple head. It must be true; for, if not true, how could he live?

As for Tom's Bible, though it had no annotations and helps in margin from learned commentators, still it had been embellished with certain way-marks and guide-boards of Tom's own invention, and which helped him more than the most learned expositions could have done. It had been his custom to get the Bible read to him by his master's children, in particular by young Master George; and, as they read, he would designate, by bold, strong marks and dashes, with pen and ink, the passages which more particularly gratified his ear or affected his heart. His Bible was thus marked through, from one end to the other, with a variety of styles and designations; so he could in a moment seize upon his favorite passages, without the labor of spelling out what lay between them;—and while it lay there before him, every passage breathing of some old home scene, and recalling some past enjoyment, his Bible seemed to him all of this life that remained, as well as the promise of a future one.

Chapter 15:

There is not on earth a more merciless exactor of love from others than a thoroughly selfish woman; and the more unlovely she grows, the more jealously and scrupulously she exacts love, to the uttermost farthing.

Chapter 15:

The good mother inquired, anxiously, "if Orleans wasn't an awful wicked place," saying, "that it seemed to her most equal to going to the Sandwich Islands, or anywhere among the heathen."

Chapter 15:

The great sin of sins, in her eye—the sum of all evils—was expressed by one very common and important word in her vocabulary—"shiftlessness. Her finale and ultimatum of contempt consisted in a very emphatic pronunciation of the word "shiftless;" and by this she characterised all modes of procedure which had not a direct and inevitable relation to accomplishment of some purpose then definitely had in mind. People who did nothing, or who did not know exactly what they were going to do, or who did not take the most direct way to accomplish what they set their hands to, were objects of her entire contempt; a contempt shown less frequently by anything she said than by a kind of stony grimness, as if she scorned to say anything about the matter.

Chapter 16:

"Religion!" said St. Clare, in a tone that made both ladies look at him. "Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion? Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature? No! When I look for a religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath."

Chapter 21:

And Mr. Shelby, not knowing any other way of enforcing his ideas, raised his voice; a mode of arguing very convenient and convincing, when a gentleman is discussing matters of business with his wife.

Chapter 22:

"Come, come, Eva; you are only a child! You know nothing about these things," said Marie; "besides, your talking makes my head ache."

Marie always had a headache on hand for any conversation that did not exactly suit her.

Chapter 23:

They were always abusing each other's opinions and practices, and yet never a whit the less absorbed in each other's society; in fact, the very contrariety seemed to unite them.

Chapter 23:

"Don't the Bible say we must love everybody?"

"Oh, the Bible! To be sure, it says a great many such things; but, then nobody ever thinks of doing them—you know, Eva, nobody does."

Chapter 24:

Marie St. Clare had taken no notice of the child's gradually decaying health and strength, because she was completely absorbed in studying out two or three new forms of disease to which she believed she herself was a victim. It was the first principle of Marie's belief that nobody ever was or could be so great a sufferer as herself; and, therefore she always repelled quite indignantly any suggestion that any one around her could be sick. She was always sure in such a case that it was nothing but laziness or want of energy; and that if they had had the suffering she had, they would soon know the difference.

Chapter 28:

For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one's feeling, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still must we eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again,—still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions,— pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled.

Chapter 28:

"We does for the Lord when we does for his critturs," said Tom.

"Good theology, Tom; better than Dr. B. preaches, I dare swear," said St. Clare.

I've posted most of the following epigrams separately over the years, but A.S.F. Gow and D.L. Page, The Greek Anthology: The Garland of Philip and Some Contemporary Epigrams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), vol. II, p. 324, mention all of them together, and I thought it would be handy to see them side by side.

Greek Anthology 9.43 (Parmenion of Macedonia, tr. W.R. Paton):

The simple covering of my cloak is enough for me; and I, who feed on the flowers of the Muses, shall never be the slave of the table. I hate witless wealth, the nurse of flatterers, and I will not stand in attendance on one who looks down on me. I know the freedom of scanty fare.

Ἀρκεῖ μοι χλαίνης λιτὸν σκέπας, οὐδὲ τραπέζαις
  δουλεύσω, Μουσέων ἄνθεα βοσκόμενος.
μισῶ πλοῦτον ἄνουν, κολάκων τροφόν, οὐδὲ παρ' ὀφρὺν
  στήσομαι· οἶδ' ὀλίγης δαιτὸς ἐλευθερίην.

Greek Anthology 9.110 (Alpheius of Mitylene, tr. W.R. Paton):

I crave not for deep-soiled fields nor wealth of gold such as was Gyges.' I love a self-sufficient life, Macrinus. The saying "naught in excess" pleaseth me exceedingly.

Οὐ στέργω βαθυληίους ἀρούρας,
οὐκ ὄλβον πολύχρυσον, οἷα Γύγης.
αὐτάρκους ἔραμαι βίου, Μακρῖνε·
τὸ Μηθὲν γὰρ ἄγαν ἄγαν με τέρπει.

Greek Anthology 9.234 (Crinagoras, tr. W.R. Paton):

How long, wretched soul, upborne by empty hopes nigh to the cold clouds, shalt thou build dream upon dream of wealth? Naught falls of its own accord into the possession of man. Pursue the gifts of the Muses, and leave these dim phantoms of the mind to fools.

Ἄχρι τεῦ, ἆ δείλαιε, κεναῖς ἐπὶ ἐλπίσι, θυμέ,
  πωτηθεὶς ψυχρῶν ἀσσοτάτω νεφέων
ἄλλοις ἄλλ' ἐπ' ὄνειρα διαγράψεις ἀφένοιο;
  κτητὸν γὰρ θνητοῖς οὐδὲ ἓν αὐτόματον.
Μουσέων ἀλλ' ἐπὶ δῶρα μετέρχεο, ταῦτα δ' ἀμυδρά
  εἴδωλα ψυχῆς ἠλεμάτοισι μέθες.

Greek Anthology 10.113 (anonymous, tr. W.R. Paton):

I do not wish or pray to be wealthy, but I would live on a little, suffering no evil.

Οὐκ ἐθέλω πλουτεῖν, οὐκ εὔχομαι· ἀλλά μοι εἴη
  ζῆν ἐκ τῶν ὀλίγων μηδὲν ἔχοντα κακόν.