Laudator Temporis Acti

Derek Walcott, Omeros, chapter I, lines 46-104, in his Selected Poems, ed. Edward Baugh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), pp. 214-216 (line numbers added; a gommier is a tree, Dacryodes excelsa):

These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space
for a single God where the old gods stood before.
The first god was a gommier. The generator

began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw,
sent the chips flying like mackerel over water      50
into trembling weeds. Now they cut off the saw,

still hot and shaking, to examine the wound it
had made. They scraped off its gangrenous moss, then ripped
the wound clear of the net of vines that still bound it

to this earth, and nodded. The generator whipped      55
back to its work, and the chips flew much faster as
the shark's teeth gnawed evenly. They covered their eyes

from the splintering nest. Now, over the pastures
of bananas, the island lifted its horns. Sunrise
trickled down its valleys, blood splashed on the cedars,      60

and the grove flooded with the light of sacrifice.
A gommier was cracking. Its leaves an enormous
tarpaulin with the ridgepole gone. The creaking sound

made the fishermen leap back as the angling mast      65
leant slowly towards the troughs of ferns; then the ground
shuddered under the feet in waves, then the waves passed.

II

Achille looked up at the hole the laurel had left.
He saw the hole silently healing with the foam
of a cloud like a breaker. Then he saw the swift      70

crossing the cloud-surf, a small thing, far from its home,
confused by the waves of blue hills. A thorn vine gripped
his heel. He tugged it free. Around him, other ships

were shaping from the saw. With his cutlass he made
a swift sign of the cross, his thumb touching his lips      75
while the height rang with axes. He swayed back the blade,

and hacked the limbs from the dead god, knot after knot,
wrenching the severed veins from the trunk as he prayed:
"Tree! You can be a canoe! Or else you cannot!"

The bearded elders endured the decimation      80
of their tribe without uttering a syllable
of that language they had uttered as one nation,

the speech taught their saplings: from the towering babble
of the cedar to green vowels of bois-campêche.
The bois-flot held it tongue with the laurier-cannelle,       85

the red-skinned logwood endured the thorns in its flesh,
while the Aruacs' patois crackled in the smell
of a resinous bonfire that turned the leaves brown

with curling tongues, then ash, and their language was lost.
Like barbarians striding columns they have brought down,      90
the fishermen shouted. The gods were down at last.

Like pygmies they hacked the trunks of wrinkled giants
for paddles and oars. They were working with the same
concentration as an army of fire-ants.

But vexed by the smoke for defaming their forest,      95
blow-darts of mosquitoes kept needling Achille's trunk.
He frotted white rum on both forearms that, at least,

those that he flattened to asterisks would die drunk.
They went for his eyes. They circled them with attacks
that made him weep blindly. Then the host retreated      100

to high bamboo like the archers of Aruacs
running from the muskets of cracking logs, routed
by the fire's banner and the remorseless axe

hacking the branches.

According to the Encyclopedia of Life, the gommier can grow as high as 115 feet and reach a diameter at breast height of almost 6 feet; the oldest trees may be as much as 400 years old.

---

When I attempted yesterday to find more information about the gommier in Russell M. Burns and Barbara H. Honkala, edd., Silvics of North America, Vol. 2 (Washington: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, 1990), I was prevented by the government shutdown (http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/silvics_manual/table_of_contents.htm redirected to http://www.usda.gov/fundinglapse.htm).

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Labels: arboricide

Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Notebooks: Selections, edd. Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1951), p. 89:

It is more moral to be behind the age than in advance of it.

Horace Walpole (1717-1797), Walpoliana, ed. John Pinkerton (Dublin: B. Smith, 1800), pp. 166-167:

I sometimes wish for a catalogue of lounging books—books that one takes up in the gout, low spirits, ennui, or when one is waiting for company. Some novels, gay poetry, odd whimsical authors, as Rabelais, &c. &c. A catalogue raisonné of such might be itself a good lounging book. I cannot read mere catalogues of books; they give me no ideas.

I changed the grave accent to an acute accent and fixed the gender (catalogue in French is masculine), as others who quote this passage do.


Jehan Georges Vibert (1840-1902), Lisant Rabelais

Among the gifts which the gods gave Pandora, Hesiod (Works and Days, line 66) includes the following gifts given by Aphrodite: painful longing (πόθον ἀργαλέον) and cares that gnaw the limbs (γυιοβόρους μελεδώνας). How can these dreadful things be considered as gifts? M.L. West in his commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978; rpt. 1996), p. 159, explains:

πόθον: the longing felt by a man because of her, not longing felt by her; but it is treated as an attribute of hers. Likewise the μελεδῶναι. The transference seems strange to us because we think or desire or preoccupation as originating inside us; the Greek thinks of them as invading from outside.

From Elliott Goodman:

I'm writing to ask if it's possible for you to post something on the Laudator blog about the National Latin Survey. It would just be a short couple of sentences directing people to the survey website: www.NationalLatinSurvey.com.

A little about the survey: The last national survey of Latin students and teachers was conducted in the 1920s by the American Classical League. The purpose of the National Latin Survey is to survey middle and high school students and teachers all across the United States and find out the many different reasons why people study and teach Latin.

The immediate goal of the project is to survey approximately 1,200 Latin teachers and 4,100 Latin students. (These numbers may increase to ensure proper sampling.) The long-term goals of the project are to produce at least two reports describing the findings; one report will be a full needs analysis study including all the statistical formulae for the applied linguistics community and the other report will be written for an audience of Latin teachers with no knowledge of statistics. These reports will be submitted to peer-reviewed journals and be made available to the public for free on the project website.

Aelian, Historical Miscellany 7.15 (tr. N.G. Wilson):

When Mytilene ruled the seas it imposed a penalty on allies who rebelled: that their children should not become literate or have a cultural education. They reckoned it the most severe punishment to live in ignorance and have no acquaintance with the Muses.

ἡνίκα τῆς θαλάσσης ἦρξαν Μυτιληναῖοι, τοῖς ἀφισταμένοις τῶν συμμάχων τιμωρίαν ἐκείνην ἐπήρτησαν, γράμματα μὴ μανθάνειν τοὺς παῖδας αὐτῶν μηδὲ μουσικὴν διδάσκεσθαι, πασῶν κολάσεων ἡγησάμενοι βαρυτάτην εἶναι ταύτην, ἐν ἀμουσίᾳ καὶ ἀμαθίᾳ καταβιῶναι.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), Moine italien assis, lisant, in Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo:

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Two Monks Reading, in Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (A482):


Théophile Gide (1822-1890), Le Réfectoire de la Grande Chartreuse, la Dictée, in Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes:


François Marius Granet (1775-1845), Hermit Reading, in Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (accession number PD.65-1997):


Eduard von Grützner (1846-1925), Lesender Prämonstratenser Mönch, sold by Neumeister:


Hans Adolf Hornemann (1866-1913), Lesender Mönch, sold by Neumeister (Munich; March 12, 2008; lot 672):


Franz Reichardt (1825-1887), Pater Prior in der Klosterbibliothek, sold by Zeller (Lindau; December 6, 2012; lot 2647):


Alessandro Sani (1856-1927), In der Klosterbibliothek, sold by Van Ham (Cologne; November 16, 2012, lot 846):


Carl Schleicher, Ein lesender Mönch, sold by Dorotheum (Vienna; April 28, 2011; lot 216):


Fritz Wagner (1896-1939), Kardinal mit drei Mönchen in einer Klosterbibliothek, sold by Hampel (Munich; March 25, 2011; lot 472):


Fritz Wagner (1896-1939), Mönch bei der Lektüre, sold by Van Ham (December 15, 2001; lot 443):


Reinhard Sebastian Zimmerman (1815-1893), Monastic Library, in Victoria and Albert Museum, London (museum number 1064-1886):


Anonymous, A Smiling Monk Reading, in National Trust Collections (inventory number 744023), on exhibit at Mr Straw's House, Nottinghamshire:

Labels: books in art

J.G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., Vol. V (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1862), pp. 321-324 (from Chapter XLI):

He at this time occupied as his den a square small room, behind the dining parlour in Castle Street. It had but a single Venetian window, opening on a patch of turf not much larger than itself, and the aspect of the place was on the whole sombrous. The walls were entirely clothed with books; most of them folios and quartos, and all in that complete state of repair which at a glance reveals a tinge of bibliomania. A dozen volumes or so, needful for immediate purposes of reference, were placed close by him on a small moveable frame—something like a dumb-waiter. All the rest were in their proper niches, and wherever a volume had been lent, its room was occupied by a wooden block of the same size, having a card with the name of the borrower and date of the loan, tacked on its front. The old bindings had obviously been retouched and regilt in the most approved manner; the new, when the books were of any mark, were rich but never gaudy—a large proportion of blue morocco—all stamped with his device of the portcullis, and its motto, clausus tutus ero—being an anagram of his name in Latin. Every case and shelf was accurately lettered, and the works arranged systematically; history and biography on one side—poetry and the drama on another—law books and dictionaries behind his own chair. The only table was a massive piece of furniture which he had had constructed on the model of one at Rokeby; with a desk and all its appurtenances on either side, that an amanuensis might work opposite to him when he chose; and with small tiers of drawers, reaching all round to the floor. The top displayed a goodly array of session papers, and on the desk below were, besides the MS. at which he was working, sundry parcels of letters, proof-sheets, and so forth, all neatly done up with red tape. His own writing apparatus was a very handsome old box, richly carved, lined with crimson velvet, and containing ink-bottles, taper-stand, &c. in silver—the whole in such order that it might have come from the silversmith's window half an hour before. Besides his own huge elbow chair, there were but two others in the room, and one of these seemed, from its position, to be reserved exclusively for the amanuensis. I observed, during the first evening I spent with him in this sanctum, that while he talked, his hands were hardly ever idle—sometimes he folded letter-covers—sometimes he twisted paper into matches, performing both tasks with great mechanical expertness and nicety; and when there was no loose paper fit to be so dealt with, he snapped his fingers, and the noble Maida aroused himself from his lair on the hearth-rug, and laid his head across his master's knees, to be caressed and fondled. The room had no space for pictures except one, an original portrait of Claverhouse, which hung over the chimneypiece, with a Highland target on either side, and broadswords and dirks (each having its own story), disposed star-fashion round them. A few green tin-boxes, such as solicitors keep title-deeds in, were piled over each other on one side of the window; and on the top of these lay a fox's tail, mounted on an antique silver handle, wherewith, as often as he had occasion to take down a book, he gently brushed the dust off the upper leaves before opening it. I think I have mentioned all the furniture of the room except a sort of ladder, low, broad, well carpeted, and strongly guarded with oaken rails, by which he helped himself to books from his higher shelves. On the top step of this convenience, Hinse of Hinsfeldt—(so called from one of the German Kinder-märchen )—a venerable tom-cat, fat and sleek, and no longer very locomotive, usually lay watching the proceedings of his master and Maida with an air of dignified equanimity; but when Maida chose to leave the party, he signified his inclinations by thumping the door with his huge paw, as violently as ever a fashionable footman handled a knocker in Grosvenor Square; the Sheriff rose and opened it for him with courteous alacrity,—and then Hinse came down purring from his perch, and mounted guard by the footstool, vice Maida absent upon furlough. Whatever discourse might be passing, was broken every now and then by some affectionate apostrophe to these fourfooted friends. He said they understood every thing he said to them, and I believe they did understand a great deal of it. But at all events, dogs and cats, like children, have some infallible tract for discovering at once who is, and who is not, really fond of their company; and I venture to say, Scott was never five minutes in any room before the little pets of the family, whether dumb or lisping, had found out his kindness for all their generation.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

---

Update: Michael Hendry explains the anagram clausus tutus ero.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Notebooks: Selections, edd. Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1951), p. 52:

Mrs. Brown at Shrewsbury used to keep a tray of spoiled tarts which she sold cheaper. They most of them looked pretty right till you handled them. We are all spoiled tarts.

M.K.C. MacMahon, "Ellis [formerly Sharpe], Alexander John (1814–1890), phonetician and mathematician," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

By any criterion Ellis was an individualist to the point of idiosyncrasy. According to Alfred Hipkins's daughter, he was in later life a portly man, who wore a greatcoat (except in summer) which he called Dreadnought. It contained twenty-eight pockets, into which he stuffed manuscripts and 'articles for an emergency'. He carried with him a large bag containing a variety of tuning forks, together with two sets of nail scissors—one for each hand—a corkscrew, string, and a knife sharpener. His furled umbrella ('bumbershoot'), monocle (for formal occasions), and shoes 3 inches too large for him ('barges') were further distinguishing characteristics. A strict teetotaller, he allowed himself only a limited intake of food and drink—the latter being 'warm water and a little milk'. He weighed himself daily, with and without clothes....Despite his outward appearance, Ellis was a thoughtful, sociable, and affable person, and modest about his considerable erudition. He was driven by a genuine love of learning and the desire to put that learning at the service of others, especially the economically less advantaged members of society. His activities and published work, voluminous (about 300 publications) and crossing several disciplines, attracted the attention and approval of scholars in Britain, Europe, and North America.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

These are some notes on the translation of Ajax in Sophocles, Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus. Edited and Translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), a volume in the Loeb Classical Library series.

928-932 (pp. 116-117):

                         τοῖά μοι
πάννυχα καὶ φαέθοντ᾽
ἀνεστέναζες ὠμόφρων
ἐχθοδόπ᾽ Ἀτρείδαις
οὐλίῳ σὺν πάθει.

Such were the words, hostile to the sons of Atreus, which in the dark and in the light you groaned forth with grievous suffering.

Ll-J doesn't translate ὠμόφρων (savage-minded) in line 930. Cf. Jebb's translation (emphasis added):

Such was the omen of those complainings which by night and day I heard thee utter in thy fierce mood, bitter against the Atreidae with a deadly passion.

1062-1069 (pp. 130-131):

ὧν οὕνεκ᾽ αὐτὸν οὔτις ἔστ᾽ ἀνὴρ σθένων
τοσοῦτον ὥστε σῶμα τυμβεῦσαι τάφῳ,
ἀλλ᾽ ἀμφὶ χλωρὰν ψάμαθον ἐκβεβλημένος
ὄρνισι φορβὴ παραλίοις γενήσεται.
πρὸς ταῦτα μηδὲν δεινὸν ἐξάρῃς μένος.
εἰ γὰρ βλέποντος μὴ ᾽δυνήθημεν κρατεῖν,
πάντως θανόντος γ᾽ ἄρξομεν, κἂν μὴ θέλῃς,
χερσὶν παρευθύνοντες.

For this reason there is no man mighty enough to bury this body, but he shall be cast out upon the pale sand and become prey for the birds along the coast. Why, if we could not rule him while he was alive, at least we shall rule him now that he is dead, even if you do not wish it, controlling with our hands.

Ll-J doesn't translate line 1066 (πρὸς ταῦτα μηδὲν δεινὸν ἐξάρῃς μένος). Jebb translates it as "Then raise no storm of angry threats." More literally: "Then stir up no terrible passion."

1093-1098 (pp. 132-133; Teucer speaking):

οὐκ ἄν ποτ᾽, ἄνδρες, ἄνδρα θαυμάσαιμ᾽ ἔτι,
ὃς μηδὲν ὢν γοναῖσιν εἶθ᾽ ἁμαρτάνει,
ὅθ᾽ οἱ δοκοῦντες εὐγενεῖς πεφυκέναι
τοιαῦθ᾽ ἁμαρτάνουσιν ἐν λόγοις ἔπη.
ἄγ᾽, εἴπ᾽ ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς αὖθις, ἦ σὺ φὴς ἄγειν
τόνδ᾽ ἄνδρ᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς δεῦρο σύμμαχον λαβών;

I could never again wonder at a man's doing wrong who was nothing on account of birth, when they who are thought to be nobly born go wrong in talk by uttering words like these. Come, tell me over again, do you say you brought this man here as an ally for the Argives?

At line 1093 Ll-J doesn't translate the vocative ἄνδρες. This omission obscures somewhat the fact that in lines 1093-1096 Teucer is speaking to the chorus, but in lines 1097 ff. to Menelaus. Cf. line 1318, where Ll-J does translate the vocative ἄνδρες as "sirs" (Odysseus addressing the chorus).

1320-1321 (pp. 150-151; spoken by Agamemnon):

οὐ γὰρ κλύοντές ἐσμεν αἰσχίστους λόγους,
ἄναξ Ὀδυσσεῦ, τοῦδ᾽ ὑπ᾽ ἀνδρὸς ἀρτίως;

Why, had we not heard shameful words from this man just now?

Ll-J doesn't translate the vocative in line 1321 (ἄναξ Ὀδυσσεῦ = lord Odysseus), although he does translate the same form of address, at the same position in the line, in line 1316 (spoken by the chorus). Agamemnon is deferential to Odysseus throughout, and the polite vocative here emphasizes his deference.

1338-1341 (pp. 152-153, 155):

ἀλλ᾽ αὐτὸν ἔμπας ὄντ᾽ ἐγὼ τοιόνδ᾽ ἐμοὶ
οὔ τἂν άτιμάσαιμ᾽ ἄν, ὥστε μὴ λέγειν
ἕν᾽ ἄνδρ᾽ ἰδεῖν ἄριστον Ἀργείων, ὅσοι
Τροίαν ἀφικόμεσθα, πλὴν Ἀχιλλέως.

[B]ut though he was such in regard to me, I would not so far fail to do him honour as to deny that he was the most valiant man among the Argives, except Achilles.

Ll-J doesn't translate the words ὅσοι / Τροίαν ἀφικόμεσθα in lines 1340-1341. Cf. Jebb (emphasis added):

[Y]et, for all that he was such toward me, never would I requite him with indignity, or refuse to avow that, in all our Greek host which came to Troy, I have seen none who was his peer, except Achilles.

But this is nit-picking. The translation is excellent.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Notebooks: Selections, edd. Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1951), p. 151:

                                      'MEDIO TUTISSIMUS IBIS'

A boy in examination translated it thus: 'In the middle of them all stalks the Ibis, most cautious of birds'; and he put a note, as follows: 'By this translation I have endeavoured to give the full value of the superlative.'

Related posts:

• The Mystery of the Spicy Virgin
• Comical Construes

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), "The Minister," lines 159-166:

I wore a black coat, being fresh from college,
With striped trousers, and, indeed, my knowledge
Would have been complete, had it included
The bare moor, where nature brooded
Over her old, inscrutable secret.
But I didn't even know the names
Of the birds and the flowers by which one gets
A little closer to nature's heart.

Related posts:

• New Life and Awakening
• The Desire for Knowledge and the Names for Things

Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France, 2nd ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), p. 231:

But in this, as in most questions of state, there is a middle. There is something else than the mere alternative of absolute destruction, or unreformed existence. Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna. This is, in my opinion, a rule of profound sense, and ought never to depart from the mind of an honest reformer. I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.

The Latin phrase "Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna" means "You have received Sparta as your portion; ornament her." It is a translation of a line from Euripides (fragment 723, from Telephus, spoken by Agamemnon to Menelaus): Σπάρτην ἔλαχες, κείνην κόσμει. I don't find it in Renzo Tosi, Dictionnaire des sentences latines et grecques, tr. Rebecca Lenoir (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 2010), but there is an extended discussion by Erasmus, Adagia II v 1.

William Morris (1834-1896), The Life and Death of Jason, Book V, ad fin.:

Then did they fall to banqueting again,
Forgetting all forebodings and all pain;
And when that they had ate and drank enow,
With songs and music and a goodly show
Their hearts were gladdened; for before their eyes
Played youths and damsels with strange fantasies,
Clad as in Saturn's time folk used to be,
With green leaves gathered from the summer tree,
When all the year was summer everywhere,
And every man and woman blest and fair.

So, set 'twixt pleasure and some soft regret,
All cares of mortal men did they forget,
Except the vague wish that they might not die,
The hopeless hope to flee from certainty,
Which sights and sounds we love will bring on us
In this sweet fleeting world and piteous.

David Harvey, obituary of Geoffrey de Ste Croix, The Guardian (February 10, 2000):

He described himself as "an atheist, politely militant", and was increasingly militant with advancing years. St Paul replaced Plato as his "greatest enemy of the human race", and later that distinction went to Jahweh, the Old Testament Jehovah, whose cruelties never ceased to appal him. Yet he was always anxious not to offend sincere believers, and spoke with respect of the best Christian scholarship. He found little to quarrel with in liberation theology: Jesus was OK, his dad was appalling.

R.C.T. Parker, "Ste Croix, Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de (1910–2000), ancient historian," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

On the death of his father in 1914 his mother, Florence Annie MacGowan, daughter of a prominent protestant missionary to China, John MacGowan, took him home to England. She was a fervently committed member of an extreme protestant group, the British Israelites, who identified the British with the lost twelfth tribe of Israel. A devoted only child, he acquired a profound knowledge of the Bible at his mother's knee; it may be supposed that he acquired there too his strong feelings about religion (in later life he often described himself as a ‘politely militant’ atheist), and a certain earnestness and missionary zeal that always marked him.

David Ruhnken, letter to John Daniel Ritter (July 29, 1747), tr. in Barnas Sears et al., Classical Studies: Essays on Ancient Literature and Art. With the Biography and Correspondence of Eminent Philologists (Boston: Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1843), pp. 101-103 (at 102-103):

No class of men are held in greater detestation here, than those shameless compilers, who, though they say some useful things, are led, for the sake of making a book, to fill out their pages with commonplaces which the veriest blockhead knows. How often are these German luminaries, as they are called in their own country, the subject of merriment with Wesseling, Alberti, Wetstein, myself, and others. I wish you could be present to enjoy the fun.

The Latin, from Dav. Ruhnkenii Orationes, Dissertationes et Epistolae, Vol. II (Brunswick: L. Lucius, 1828), pp. 551-556 (at 553):

Nullum hominum genus magis detestantur, quam impudentes istos compilatores, vel etiam eos, qui, etsi aliqua tradunt haud contemnenda, tamen, ut liber fiat, ipsis dupondiis nota inculcant. Dii boni! quoties illa Germaniae lumina (sic enim a suis celebrantur) et ego, et homines amicissimi, Wesselingius, Alberti, Wetstenius, alii, ridemus. Cui risui utinam et Tibi interesse liceret.

Update from Joseph Yarbrough:

I was curious about "ipsis dupondiis nota inculcant". Unless I overlooked something elsewhere, only Forcellini gave the sense of it:

Figurate dupondius dicebatur ridiculi causa auditor seu discipulus jurisprudentiae anni primi, quemadmodum etiam nunc apud nostrates vulgo matricolino appellatur. Imp. Justinian. in Epist. 2. praemissa libris Digestor. . 2. Cujus (anni primi) auditores non volumus vetere tam frivolo, quam ridiculo cognomine dupondios appellari, sed Justinianeos novos nuncupari.

Fritz Wagner, Tobacco and Oysters

A.T. Grove and Oliver Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 171:

Where Pausanias or some other ancient author mentions a wood, sometimes there is a wood today, sometimes not. On the borders of Laconia and Arkadia he found 'the whole place full of oaks' sacred to Zeus Skotita, above the shrine of Artemis and the Nymphs at Káryai.²⁰ The site is now a great coppice-wood of deciduous oak (Fig. 11.4). Skotitas is probably the oldest named wood-lot still in existence, and the only surviving European wood harbouring its own god.

²⁰ Pausanias III.x.6.

Fig. 11.4 on the same page:


Oliver Rackham, Woodlands (2006; rpt. London: Collins, 2010), p. 135 (footnote omitted):

Reader, go to the remote byways of Mount Párnon in the Peloponnese, above the village whose modern Greek name is Káryai, previously known by the Slavonic name Arachova — both meaning 'nuts'. The sanctuary of Artemis and the Nymphs is now a chapel, with wonderful plane-trees, beside a spring. As far as I know, this is the earliest account of a named wood in Europe. Skotitas Wood was 'rediscovered' by the explorer Jochmus and a local priest in 1834. It is now probably bigger than in Pausanias's time. The dominant tree, as in other ancient woods in the Peloponnese, is the deciduous oak Quercus frainetto. It is a rather open coppice (Fig. 44), with some ancient stools, and a rich flora of shrubs and herbs in glades and newly felled areas. Some of the oaks have been shredded.

Skotitas, as far as I know, is the only surviving wood in Europe to have its own god.

There is a fuller account in Oliver Rackham, "Observations on the Historical Ecology of Laconia," in Continuity and Change in a Greek Rural Landscape: The Laconia Survey, Vol. I: Methodology and Interpretation (London: British School at Athens, 2002 = Annual of the British School at Athens, Supplementary Volume, 26), pp. 73-120 (at 85-87, 108).

Pausanias 3.10.6 (tr. W.H.S. Jones):

On the way from the Hermae the whole of the region is full of oak-trees. The name of the district, Scotitas (Dark), is not due to the unbroken woods but to Zeus surnamed Scotitas, and there is a sanctuary of Zeus Scotitas on the left of the road and about ten stades from it.

ἰοῦσι δὲ ἀπὸ τῶν Ἑρμῶν ἐστιν ὁ τόπος οὗτος ἅπας δρυῶν πλήρης: τὸ δὲ ὄνομα τῷ χωρίῳ Σκοτίταν τὸ δὲ σκότος οὐ τὸ συνεχὲς τῶν δένδρων ἐποίησεν, ἀλλὰ Ζεὺς ἐπίκλησιν ἔσχε Σκοτίτας, καὶ ἔστιν ἐν ἀριστερᾷ τῆς ὁδοῦ δέκα μάλιστά που στάδια ἐκτραπομένοις ἱερὸν Σκοτίτα Διός.

Liddell-Scott-Jones, s.v. σκοτίτας:

epith. of Zeus, whether as bringer of dark clouds (cf. κελαινεφής), or as a god of the nether world, or from the dark oak-forest surrounding the shrine (v.l. Σκοτινᾶς ap. St.Byz.), Paus.3.10.6.

Seneca, On Benefits 7.26.4-5 (tr. Aubrey Stewart):

One man is crazed with lust, another is the slave of his belly, another gives his whole soul to gain, caring nothing for the means by which he amasses it; some men's minds are disturbed by envy, some blinded by ambition till they are ready to fling themselves on the sword's point. In addition to this, one must reckon sluggishness of mind and old age; and also the opposites of these, restlessness and disturbance of mind, also excessive self-esteem and pride in the very things for which a man ought to be despised. I need not mention obstinate persistence in wrong-doing, or frivolity which cannot remain constant to one point; besides all this, there is headlong rashness, there is timidity which never gives us trustworthy counsel, and the numberless errors with which we struggle, the rashness of the most cowardly, the quarrels of our best friends, and that most common evil of trusting in what is most uncertain, and of undervaluing, when we have obtained it, that which we once never hoped to possess.

alius libidine insanit, alius abdomini servit; alius lucri totus est, cuius summam, non vias, spectat: alius invidia laborat, alius caeca ambitione et in gladios irruente. adice torporem mentis ac senium et huic contrariam inquieti pectoris agitationem tumultusque perpetuos; adice aestimationem sui nimiam et tumorem, ob quae contemnendus est, insolentem. quid contumaciam dicam in perversa nitentium, quid levitatem semper alio transilientem? huc accedat temeritas praeceps et numquam fidele consilium daturus timor et mille errores, quibus volvimur; audacia timidissimorum, discordia familiarissimorum, et, publicum malum, incertissimis fidere, fastidire possessa, quae consequi posse spes non fuit.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), "October," The Old Huntsman and other Poems (London: William Heinemann, 1917), p. 71:

Across the land a faint blue veil of mist
Seems hung; the woods wear yet arrayment sober
Till frost shall make them flame; silent and whist
The drooping cherry orchards of October
Like mournful pennons hang their shrivelling leaves
Russet and orange: all things now decay;
Long since ye garnered in your autumn sheaves,
And sad the robins pipe at set of day.

Now do ye dream of Spring when greening shaws
Confer with the shrewd breezes, and of slopes
Flower-kirtled, and of April, sweetling guest;
Days that ye love, despite their windy flaws,
Since they are woven with all joys and hopes
Whereof ye nevermore shall be possessed.

John Milne Donald (1819-1858), Autumn Leaves

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), "The Education of an Englishman," Atlantic Monthly 138 (1926) 192-198 (at 197):

We had no interest in foreign languages. It was Latin and Greek that we had to know. They were not foreign languages; they were just Latin and Greek; nothing of importance in the way of ideas could be presented in any other way. Thus we read the New Testament in Greek. At school — except in chapel, which did not count — I never heard of any one reading it in English. It would suggest an uncultivated religious state of mind. We were very religious, but with that moderation natural to people who take their religion in Greek.

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

On Saved by Horace and Saved by Horace: Update, Eric Thomson comments:

I may be completely wrong but I read 'Ce trou a été fait dans le campagne de Iéna' as a joke involving implicature. Did Stendhal even participate in the Jena campaign? Certainly not in a military capacity. He only left Paris two days after the battle was fought and by the time he reached Berlin it was all over. Nor, as far as I know, is there any mention in the letters of an incident in which he might have lost his life. I wonder if he didn't skewer his own Horace? Perhaps it was a self-aggrandizing gesture (a painless version of the soldier-manqué's self-inflicted wound) or did Horace just bore him ('je ne l'ai guère lu')?

....

There's perhaps another more plausible explanation, one suggested by Sir Walter Scott's scouring of Waterloo for mementos and by Goethe's inscribing the date of the battle of Jena on his wedding ring. The Horace might have been a souvenir of the campaign that Beyle just missed, acquired from some soldier whose life had indeed been saved by it (or not). The fact that it wasn't the only volume of Horace that he owned would lend albeit feeble support to this explanation.

T.E. Lawrence, letter to Ralph Isham (January 2, 1928):

When your letter came, I took the Odyssey down from the shelf (it goes with me, always, to every camp, for I love it) and tried to see myself translating it, freely, into English. Honestly, it would be most difficult to do. I have the rhythm of the Greek so in my mind, that it would not come readily into straight English. Nor am I a scholar: I read it only for pleasure, and have to keep a dictionary within reach.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), "Dryads," The Old Huntsman and other Poems (London: William Heinemann, 1917), p. 74:

When meadows are grey with the morn,
In the dusk of the woods it is night;
The oak and the birch and the pine
War with the glimmer of light.

Dryads brown as the leaf
Move in the gloom of the glade;
When meadows are grey with the morn,
Dim night in the wood has delayed.

The cocks that crow to the land
Are faint and hollow and shrill:
Dryads brown as the leaf
Whisper and hide and are still.

Thanks to Andrew Rickard for help in tracking down the edition (Paris: Didot, 1800) and current location (Milan, Biblioteca Comunale, Fondo Stendhaliano Bucci, 0134-01) of the volume of Horace which saved Stendhal. These photographs show the inscription in Stendhal's handwriting and the hole made by the sword or bayonet:




The book is bound together with a copy of Vergil.

Ferdinand Boyer, "Les Lectures de Stendhal," Editions du Stendhal-Club 14 (1925) 5:

Les poètes latins sont représentés par Horace et Martial. Furent-ils souvent lus? Nous sommes sûrs du contraire pour le premier; c'est un tout petit volume, relié en cuir marron, dont la couverture et les trois cents premières pages ont dû être trouées par la pointe d'une épée ou d'une baïonette. Nous lisons sur la feuille de garde:

Ce trou a été fait dans le campagne de Iéna. Ce volume ne m'a pas quitté et je ne l'ai guère lu.

I think this means something like:

The Latin poets are represented by Horace and Martial. Were they often read? We're sure the first wasn't; it's a very small volume, with a brown leather binding, of which the cover and the first three hundred pages must have been pierced by the tip of a sword or bayonet. We read on the endpaper:

This hole was made in the Jena campaign. This volume hasn't left me, and I've hardly read it.

Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1950), pp. 137-138, touches just briefly on the subject of books as "life-preservers against projectiles and other engines of war," without mentioning Stendhal. He says, "But it would seem that only Holy Books, and of our own Faith, are thus to be relied upon." For some, Horace is a kind of holy book. Holbrook Jackson, op. cit., p. 215 (footnote omitted):

Malherbe, the father of French poetry, had for sole favourite Horace, whom he called his breviary; Horace was his companion when out walking, and he laid him on his pillow at night...

Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 371 (tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones):

You are blind in your ears, in your mind, and in your eyes.

τυφλὸς τά τ᾽ ὦτα τόν τε νοῦν τά τ᾽ ὄμματ᾽ εἶ.

On the synaesthesia (Oxford English Dictionary s.v., sense 3.b: "The transfer of the meaning of a word from one kind of sensory experience to another"), see Charles P. Segal, "Synaesthesia in Sophocles," Illinois Classical Studies 2 (1977) 88-96 (at 88-89).

This line serves as an example of the accusative of respect in some grammars, e.g. Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges, § 1601.a. It also contains a good example of triple τε, on which see:

• Both ... And
• Triple Correlative Conjunctions in Aristophanes
• More Triple Correlative Conjunctions

Vladimir V. Putin, in the New York Times (September 11, 2013):

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.

Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), Zibaldone, tr. Kathleen Baldwin et al. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), p. 395 (Z 823):

Equally, there is no people so barbarous that it does not implicitly believe itself to be better, more perfect, and superior to any other, and judge itself to be a model for the nations.

Parimente non v’è popolo sì barbaro che non si creda implicitamente migliore, più perfetto, superiore a qualunque altro, e non si stimi il modello delle nazioni.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), from Venetian Epigrams, tr. David Luke:

'Out with all Jews and heathen!' — so much for the perfervid Christian's tolerance. 'A curse on Christians and heathen!' mutters a Jew in his beard. 'All Christians to be impaled, all Jews to be burnt!' sings a Turkish child, mocking Christians and Jews. — Which is the wisest? Take your choice! But if you have these fools in your palace, Deity, I shall pass it by.

Juden und Heiden hinaus! so duldet der christliche Schwärmer.
  Christ und Heide verflucht! murmelt ein jüdischer Bart.
Mit den Christen an Spieß und mit den Juden ins Feuer!
  Singet ein türkisches Kind Christen und Juden zum Spott.
Welcher ist der Klügste? Entscheide! Aber sind diese
  Narren in deinem Palast, Gottheit, so geh ich vorbei.

Pseudo-Herodotus, Life of Homer 18 (tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White; supposedly said by Homer visiting Erythraea):

Queen Earth, all bounteous giver of honey-hearted wealth, how kindly, it seems, you are to some, and how intractable and rough for those with whom you are angry.

πότνια γῆ, πάνδωρε, δότειρα μελίφρονος ὄλβου,
ὡς ἄρα δὴ τοῖς μὲν φωτῶν εὔοχθος ἐτύχθης,
τοῖσι δὲ δύσβωλος καὶ τρηχεῖ', οἷς ἐχολώθης.

Miguel Serrano (1917-2009), C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships, tr. Frank MacShane (1966; rpt. Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag, 1997), p. 14:

Even today, I would go halfway round the world to find a book if I thought it essential to my needs, and I have a feeling of absolute veneration for those few authors who have given me something special. For this reason I can never understand the tepid youth of today who wait for books to be given to them and who neither search nor admire. I would go without eating in order to get a book, and I have never liked borrowing books, because I have always wanted them to be absolutely mine so that I could live with them for hours on end.

As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them and reach them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors.

In Spanish:

Aún hoy daría la vuelta al mundo para encontrar un libro, cuando creo que este es fundamental o el alimento que mi alma necesita. Y venero a su autor con un amor superior al que nunca me hayan ofrecido "la presencia y la figura" en esta tormentosa tierra. Por eso me siento extraño entre la juventud tibia de nuestros días, que espera el regalo de las obras, que no las busca donde sea, que no venera. Yo podría no haber comido, haber robado, para obtener lo necesario para un libro. Nunca los quise prestados, porque los deseaba míos, absolutamente míos, para una convivencia íntima con ellos, de días y de horas.

Como acontece con los hombres, así sucede también con los libros; hay un destino para ellos, van como guiados hacia los seres que los esperan, llegándoles en la hora precisa. Ellos viven, mueren y reencarnan; están construidos de materia palpitante, que busca y se abre camino a través de las sombras y las espesuras, a menudo más allá del tiempo de sus autores.

Carl Schleicher, Der Bücherwurm
Hat tip: Jim K., old and loyal friend.

John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), "To a Theological Dogmatist," in The Day-Book of John Stuart Blackie (London: Grant Richards, 1901), p. 13:

What, you! a midge, a moth, a mite,
An atom in God's vast dominions!
Think you that He would take delight
To keep His Heaven all right and tight,
A rotten borough for your opinions?

Related post: They Think They Are of the Cabinet-Council of God.

N.G.L. Hammond, "Humphrey Davy Findley Kitto 1897-1982," Proceedings of the British Academy 61 (1982) 585-590 (at 588):

A student once asked him why such a fine temple had been built on a deserted mountain at Bassae. 'We build our churches where the people are', he replied. 'The Greeks built them where the Gods are'.

According to Edith Hall, in her introduction to Kitto's translation of Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Electra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; rpt. 1998), p. xxvii, Kitto was "perhaps the last of the English romantic philhellenes; at his funeral no god was allowed to be mentioned except those of the classical pantheon, and the readings were taken from his own translations, reproduced here, of choral odes from Antigone."

Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

J.C. Lawson (1874-1935), Tales of Ægean Intrigue (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1921), pp. 8-9:

Little wonder then if the political world enjoys but low esteem in naval circles. I had at one time a ship's interpreter—an illiterate youth, but quick of ear and intelligible in four or five languages—who summarised our feelings with innocent accuracy. "A gen'leman demands to see you, sir," he announced one day. "What sort of gentleman, Manóli?" I asked. "A dampol'tician, sir," he replied. "A what?" "C'est un député, Monsieur, qui demande à vous voir." "Oh, I see; a dam' politician. Your English is getting on, Manóli; where did you learn that word?" "I listen the officers how they speak, sir. They not say député, they say always 'dampol'tician.'" "And when the men are talking, Manóli, what do they say?" But Manóli blushed, and I made haste to proceed: "Well, never mind what the men say; go on studying the officers' good language; you can [sic, read can't or cannot] improve on 'dampol'tician'; c'est le mot juste." Whereon Manóli blushed again, but this time with pleasure at my commendation, and always thereafter enabled me to greet the least welcome visitor with a smile of delight, by his announcement of "a dampol'tician, sir."

---

From Ian Jackson:

Your first conjecture is correct. In my copy of the British original of Tales of Aegean Intrigue (Chatto & Windus, 1920), the verb is printed "can't". The Dutton edition on Google Books appears to reprint the original text page for page, but not line for line. (It also lacks the 8 half-tone plates). In the paragraph you quote, the American compositor has succeeded in avoiding the British break of "study-ing" between two lines, but in so doing has not found space for "'t" in the next line. Presumably he expected to do something about it but forgot and moved on.

Kathleen Freeman (1897-1959), The Greek Way, an Anthology. Translations from Verse and Prose (London, MacDonald [1947]), pp. vi-vii:

Greek is not nearly as difficult as people maintain (the alphabet, which frightens beginners, can be learnt in a week); and its literature is a veritable Aladdin's Cave. Greek is much more entertaining than bridge or cross-word puzzles (one can do the harder cross-word puzzles much more easily if one has a knowledge of Greek); and you will never find anyone who has pursued Greek to the reading stage who would part with that knowledge for any other whatsoever. I am thinking of a university teacher I know who did Greek first, and then mathematics, at Glasgow, and who is never tired of saying that if he had to choose, it would be the mathematics that he would sacrifice, not the Greek.

But then, of course, he did his Greek with Gilbert Murray. My advice includes this corollary: if you take up Greek, and if you seek help at the outset, be very careful in your choice of a tutor. Let this be the guiding principle: if he or she makes the subject seem hard or dull, he or she is a bad teacher. Scholarship and Hardship are not sisters, or if they are, they they need not always live together. It is better to study alone, with a good text-book, than to put oneself into the hands of a worshipper of grammar. Grammar can be interesting, but it is a means to an end. Conversely, enthusiasm and inaccuracy are not necessarily yoke-fellows either, though it suits the uninspired to maintain this. With good help, one can learn to read easy Greek in a year or less. Mastery of Greek is the work of a lifetime or longer; but there is enjoyment all the way.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), The Caxtons: A Family Picture, Part IX, Chapter V (My Father's Crotchet on the Hygienic Chemistry of Books):

"If," said my father,—and here his hand was deep in his waistcoat,—"if we accept the authority of Diodorus as to the inscription on the great Egyptian library—and I don't see why Diodorus should not be as near the mark as any one else?" added my father interrogatively, turning round.

My mother thought herself the person addressed, and nodded her gracious assent to the authority of Diodorus. His opinion thus fortified, my father continued,—"If, I say, we accept the authority of Diodorus, the inscription on the Egyptian library was: 'The Medicine of the Mind.' Now, that phrase has become notoriously trite and hackneyed, and people repeat vaguely that books are the medicine of the mind. Yes; but to apply the medicine is the thing!"

"So you have told us at least twice before, brother," quoth the Captain, bluffly. "And what Diodorus has to do with it, I know no more than the man of the moon."

"I shall never get on at this rate," said my father, in a tone between reproach and entreaty.

"Be good children, Roland and Blanche both," said my mother, stopping from her work and holding up her needle threateningly,—and indeed inflicting a slight puncture upon the Captain's shoulder.

"'Rem acu tetigisti,' my dear," said my father, borrowing Cicero's pun on the occasion.¹ "And now we shall go upon velvet. I say, then, that books, taken indiscriminately, are no cure to the diseases and afflictions of the mind. There is a world of science necessary in the taking them. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel, or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he was about. In a great grief like that you cannot tickle and divert the mind, you must wrench it away, abstract, absorb,—bury it in an abyss, hurry it into a labyrinth. Therefore, for the irremediable sorrows of middle life and old age I recommend a strict chronic course of science and hard reasoning,—Counter-irritation. Bring the brain to act upon the heart! If science is too much against the grain (for we have not all got mathematical heads), something in the reach of the humblest understanding, but sufficiently searching to the highest,—a new language, Greek, Arabic, Scandinavian, Chinese, or Welsh! For the loss of fortune, the dose should be applied less directly to the understanding,—I would administer something elegant and cordial. For as the heart is crushed and lacerated by a loss in the affections, so it is rather the head that aches and suffers by the loss of money. Here we find the higher class of poets a very valuable remedy. For observe that poets of the grander and more comprehensive kind of genius have in them two separate men, quite distinct from each other,—the imaginative man, and the practical, circumstantial man; and it is the happy mixture of these that suits diseases of the mind, half imaginative and half practical. There is Homer, now lost with the gods, now at home with the homeliest, the very 'poet of circumstance,' as Gray has finely called him; and yet with imagination enough to seduce and coax the dullest into forgetting, for a while, that little spot on his desk which his banker's book can cover. There is Virgil, far below him, indeed,—

                                     'Virgil the wise,
Whose verse walks highest, but not flies,'

as Cowley expresses it. But Virgil still has genius enough to be two men,—to lead you into the fields, not only to listen to the pastoral reed and to hear the bees hum, but to note how you can make the most of the glebe and the vineyard. There is Horace, charming man of the world, who will condole with you feelingly on the loss of your fortune, and by no means undervalue the good things of this life, but who will yet show you that a man may be happy with a vile modicum or parva rura. There is Shakspeare, who, above all poets, is the mysterious dual of hard sense and empyreal fancy,—and a great many more, whom I need not name, but who, if you take to them gently and quietly, will not, like your mere philosopher, your unreasonable Stoic, tell you that you have lost nothing, but who will insensibly steal you out of this world, with its losses and crosses, and slip you into another world before you know where you are!—a world where you are just as welcome, though you carry no more earth of your lost acres with you than covers the sole of your shoe. Then, for hypochondria and satiety, what is better than a brisk alterative course of travels,—especially early, out-of-the-way, marvellous, legendary travels! How they freshen up the spirits! How they take you out of the humdrum yawning state you are in. See, with Herodotus, young Greece spring up into life, or note with him how already the wondrous old Orient world is crumbling into giant decay; or go with Carpini and Rubruquis to Tartary, meet 'the carts of Zagathai laden with houses, and think that a great city is travelling towards you.'² Gaze on that vast wild empire of the Tartar, where the descendants of Jenghis 'multiply and disperse over the immense waste desert, which is as boundless as the ocean.' Sail with the early Northern discoverers, and penetrate to the heart of winter, among sea-serpents and bears and tusked morses with the faces of men. Then, what think you of Columbus, and the stern soul of Cortes, and the kingdom of Mexico, and the strange gold city of the Peruvians, with that audacious brute Pizarro; and the Polynesians, just for all the world like the Ancient Britons; and the American Indians and the South-sea Islanders? How petulant and young and adventurous and frisky your hypochondriac must get upon a regimen like that! Then, for that vice of the mind which I call sectarianism,—not in the religious sense of the word, but little, narrow prejudices, that make you hate your next-door neighbor because he has his eggs roasted when you have yours boiled; and gossipping and prying into people's affairs, and backbiting, and thinking heaven and earth are coming together if some broom touch a cobweb that you have let grow over the window-sill of your brains what like a large and generous, mildly aperient (I beg your pardon, my dear) course of history! How it clears away all the fumes of the head,—better than the hellebore with which the old leeches of the Middle Ages purged the cerebellum! There, amidst all that great whirl and sturmbad (storm-bath), as the Germans say, of kingdoms and empires, and races and ages, how your mind enlarges beyond that little feverish animosity to John Styles, or that unfortunate prepossession of yours that all the world is interested in your grievances against Tom Stokes and his wife!

"I can only touch, you see, on a few ingredients in this magnificent pharmacy; its resources are boundless, but require the nicest discretion. I remember to have cured a disconsolate widower, who obstinately refused every other medicament, by a strict course of geology. I dipped him deep into gneiss and mica schist. Amidst the first strata I suffered the watery action to expend itself upon cooling, crystallized masses; and by the time I had got him into the tertiary period, amongst the transition chalks of Maestricht and the conchiferous marls of Gosau, he was ready for a new wife. Kitty, my dear, it is no laughing matter! I made no less notable a cure of a young scholar at Cambridge who was meant for the church, when he suddenly caught a cold fit of freethinking, with great shiverings, from wading out of his depth in Spinoza. None of the divines, whom I first tried, did him the least good in that state; so I turned over a new leaf, and doctored him gently upon the chapters of faith in Abraham Tucker's book (you should read it, Sisty); then I threw in strong doses of Fichte; after that I put him on the Scotch metaphysicians, with plunge-baths into certain German transcendentalists; and having convinced him that faith is not an unphilosophical state of mind, and that he might believe without compromising his understanding,—for he was mightily conceited on that score,—I threw in my divines, which he was now fit to digest; and his theological constitution, since then, has become so robust that he has eaten up two livings and a deanery! In fact, I have a plan for a library that, instead of heading its compartments, 'Philology, Natural Science, Poetry,' etc., one shall head them according to the diseases for which they are severally good, bodily and mental,—up from a dire calamity or the pangs of the gout, down to a fit of the spleen or a slight catarrh; for which last your light reading comes in with a whey-posset and barley-water. But," continued my father, more gravely, "when some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania; when you think because Heaven has denied you this or that on which you had set your heart that all your life must be a blank,—oh! then diet yourself well on biography, the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own; and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it! You thought the wing was broken! Tut, tut, it was but a bruised feather! See what life leaves behind it when all is done!—a summary of positive facts far out of the region of sorrow and suffering, linking themselves with the being of the world. Yes, biography is the medicine here! Roland, you said you would try my prescription,—here it is;" and my father took up a book and reached it to the Captain.

My uncle looked over it,—Life of the Reverend Robert Hall. "Brother, he was a Dissenter; and, thank Heaven! I am a Church-and-State man to the backbone!"

"Robert Hall was a brave man and a true soldier under the Great Commander," said my father, artfully.

The Captain mechanically carried his forefinger to his forehead in military fashion, and saluted the book respectfully.

"I have another copy for you, Pisistratus,—that is mine which I have lent Roland. This, which I bought for you to-day, you will keep."

"Thank you, sir," said I listlessly, not seeing what great good the Life of Robert Hall could do me, or why the same medicine should suit the old weather-beaten uncle and the nephew yet in his teens.

"I have said nothing," resumed my father, slightly bowing his broad temples, "of the Book of books, for that is the lignum vitae, the cardinal medicine for all. These are but the subsidiaries; for as you may remember, my dear Kitty, that I have said before,—we can never keep the system quite right unless we place just in the centre of the great ganglionic system, whence the nerves carry its influence gently and smoothly through the whole frame—THE SAFFRON BAG!"

¹ Cicero's joke on a senator who was the son of a tailor: "Thou hast touched the thing sharply" (or with a needle, acu).

² Rubruquis, sect. xii.

On the saffron bag, see Part VI, Chapter II.

E. Lobel, review of J.M. Edmonds, ed., Lyra Graeca (London: William Heinemann, 1922), in Classical Review 36 (1922) 120-121 (in a couple of words I could not reproduce the macron together with breathing and accent):

It has hitherto been the view of scholars, both ancient and modern, that Sappho and Alcaeus (whose remains are exposed on pp. 182-307, 318-428) normally composed in the Aeolic dialect of Lesbos. Mr. Edmonds evidently does not unreservedly share this opinion. In many of his emendations and restorations there appear words, forms, and metres which are quite alien to normal Aeolic usage. As he has nowhere divulged to what dialect they belong, and I have been unable to discover for myself, I will refer to them for convenience as Triballian. That Aeolic and Triballian are quite distinct may be seen by simply turning over the pages. For instance, Aeolic has πρὸϲ, Triballian adds προτὶ (S. 1₁₀, 82₁₅, 164₂, etc.). Aeolic says ϲὺ, ϲὲ, ἔγω, Triballian adds τὺ, τὲ, ἔγων (S. 2₇, 38₁₅, 83₉, 15₁). Aeolic says ἒων, Triballian adds εἴϲ and ὢν (S. 58, A. 27₇, etc.), Aeolic πόηϲαι, Triballian also ποίηϲαι (S. 89₁; the -οι- forms of ποιεῖν are never found in Alcaeus or Sappho). Aeolic has only φάοϲ, ἔργον, κάλα, γᾶν, Triballian also φαῦοϲ (S. 85₁₄), ὄργον (A. 27₃), κᾶλα, (S. 65₃), and γάαν (e.g. S. 94₃; it appears to have a special taste for this word). There are, of course, some Triballian words which never occur in Aeolic at all. Again, in Aeolic the imperfect of ἀλέομαι would appear as ἀλήμαν, in Triballian it is ἀλλόμαν (p. 252 n.), and similarly ἤλγει (S. 41₁) seems to be Triballian for ἄλγη. Aeolic has infinitives in -ην, as πώνην, Triballian also in -εμεν, as πώνεμεν (A. 164₅). In Aeolic ο + α contract to ω, as in ὤνηρ (for ὁ ἀνήρ), but the Triballian form resembles the Attic; thus τὸ αἴρητον becomes ταἴρητον (S. 85₁₃). Aeolic rejects hiatus; Triballian welcomes such collocations as κεὖ ἐποίηϲαϲ (S. 89₁) and ἄνευ ἀρέταϲ (S. 100₁). Finally, for a specimen of Triballian metre I may refer to his number 82 of Sappho, unless indeed that is a prose poem. These facts will have to be investigated by students of Greek dialects with more attention than they have hitherto received.

I find this very funny, although I realize that my sense of humor isn't shared by everyone. A Triballian god appears in Aristophanes' Birds and speaks gibberish barely resembling Greek (1615, 1628-1629, 1678-1679).

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (© 2011; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, 2013), pp. 479-480:

In a homage to Henri Michaux (arguably the greatest poet in the French language this century), Borges made an interesting point: "A writer who was born in a big country is always in danger of believing that the culture of his native country encompasses all his needs. Paradoxically, he therefore runs the risk of becoming provincial." Naturally, the poet from Buenos Aires was in a good position to detect the secret strength of the poet from Namur (Michaux loathed his birthplace—the province of a province).

In the time of Goethe, Weimar was a town somewhat smaller than Queanbeyan today. I wonder if there was not a direct relation between the universal reach of Goethe's antennae (not only did he keep abreast of the latest developments on the English and French literary scenes, but he even displayed an enthusiastic interest in newly translated Chinese novels!) and the narrow horizon of his provincial abode. My point is not that Queanbeyan is shortly going to produce a Goethe—though this remains of course entirely possible; the emergence of genius is always arbitrary and its manifestation presents no necessity. I merely wish to underline Borges's paradox: cosmopolitanism is more easily achieved in a provincial setting, whereas life in a metropolis can insidiously result in a form of provincialism.

People who live in Paris, London or New York have a thousand convincing reasons to feel that they are "where the action is," and therefore they tend to become oblivious to the fact that rich developments are also taking place elsewhere. This is something which educated people who live in a village are unlikely ever to forget. (Still, needless to say, there is one thing worse than ignoring the outside world when in New York, and that is ignoring the outside world when in Queanbeyan.)

Culture is born out of exchanges and thrives on differences. In this sense, "national culture" is a self-contradiction, and "multiculturalism" a pleonasm. The death of culture lies in self-centredness, self-sufficiency and isolation.

[St. John Lucas (1879–1934),] The Last Arcadian, and Other Papers (London: Leonard Smithers & Co., 1899), pp. 2-3:

God knows, my only wish is to slip through the world like a shadow, leaving no trace on the lives of others. But the wealth necessary to enable one to be actually as well as mentally an anchorite has been denied me; I am poor—so poor that I have to stint and save for months in order to be able to attain to my seven precious days of freedom in the country. And the life is very hard. Caged in a stuffy office day after day, in the same dusty air, with the same maddening wheels in the street outside, writing everlastingly beneath a flickering gas-jet, or if the day is fair, by the little light that manages to penetrate the cobwebs and grime of the tight-shut windows, it is small wonder that a man's soul dies within him, that he becomes a mere automaton, joyless, hopeless, almost lifeless. I think that my nature is too dead to be discontented, yet at times I wake up to the ghastly horror of it all, and reckon up the hours and days and years of dull torment before me. It is of such moments that Hell is made.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902), The Way of All Flesh, chapter XXXII (on Althea Pontifex):

But she would say a wicked thing quietly on her own account sometimes, and called my attention once to a note in her prayer book which gave an account of the walk to Emmaus with the two disciples, and how Christ had said to them, "O fools and slow of heart to believe ALL that the prophets have spoken"—the "all" being printed in small capitals.

---

Thanks to Ian Jackson for passing along another version of the same passage, from Daniel Howard's edition of the original manuscript, as unretouched by Streatfeild, published as Ernest Pontifex, or the Way of all Flesh (Methuen 1965):

But she would say a wicked thing quietly on her own account sometimes, and called my attention once to a passage in her prayer-book which gave an account of the walk to Emmaus with the two disciples, and how Christ had called them "fools and slow of heart to believe ALL that the prophets had told them" — the "all" being printed in small capitals.

Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970), Samuel Johnson (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1944), p. 157:

Many persons of that time freely admitted to a conviction which it has since become customary to conceal—the conviction, that is to say, that, certain extravagances of Christian theory notwithstanding, the "best people" socially and intellectually are also the "best people" spiritually. Thus the Duchess of Buckingam—genuinely shocked by the Wesleyan insistence that all mankind (even including the nobility) had corrupt hearts—could write in righteous protest to the pious Countess of Huntingdon: "It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting, and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiment so much at variance with high rank and good breeding."

In the Loeb Classical Library edition of Cicero, Tusculan Disputations. With an English Translation by J.E. King (rev. ed. 1945; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), I noticed the following misprints.

P. xi (Introduction):

In answer to the question how he managed to write them so quickly he says himself in a letter to Atticus: ἀπόγραφα sunt, minore labore funt; verba tantum adfero, quibus abundo.<sup>6

6</sup> Ad Att. xii.52.3.

For funt read fiunt.

Pp. 98-99 (1.34.84):

qui et domesticis et forensibus solaciis ornamentisque privati

I have been robbed of the consolations of family life⁴ and the distinctions of a public career

⁴ Domesticus refers to the death of his daughter Tullia, forensibus to his inactivity under the absolute rule of Caesar.

For Domesticus read Domesticis.

Erasmus, letter 499 to Johannes Ulattenus (1523; tr. Conyers Middleton):

When I was a boy, I was fonder of Seneca than of Cicero, and till I was twenty years old could not bear to spend any time in reading him; while all the other writers of antiquity generally pleased me. Whether my judgment be improved by age, I know not; but am certain, that Cicero never pleased me so much when I was fond of those juvenile studies as he does now when I am grown old; not only for the divine felicity of his style, but the sanctity of his heart and morals: in short, he has inspired my soul, and made me feel myself a better man. I make no scruple, therefore, to exhort our youth to spend their hours in reading and getting his books by heart, rather than in the vexatious squabbles and peevish controversies with which the world abounds. For my own part, though I am now in the decline of life, yet as soon as I have finished what I have in hand, I shall think it no reproach to me to seek a reconciliation with my Cicero, and renew an old acquaintance with him, which for many years has been unhappily intermitted.

The Latin, from Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Epistolae, Pars Posterior (Leiden: Vander, 1706), cols. 1881-1882:

Mihi puero minus arridebat Cicero, quam Seneca: jamque natus eram annos viginti, priusquam ferrem diutinam ejus lectionem, cum caeteri pene omnes placerent. An aetatis progressu profecerim, nescio, certe nunquam mihi magis placuit Cicero, tum quum adamarem illa studia, quam nunc placuit seni: non tantum ob divinam quandam orationis felicitatem, verum etiam ob pectoris eruditi sanctimoniam. Profecto meum afflavit animum, meque mihi reddidit meliorem. Itaque non dubitem hortari juventutem, ut in hujus libris evolvendis atque etiam ediscendis bonas horas collocent potius, quam in rixosis ac pugnacibus libellis, quibus nunc undique scatent omnia. Me vero, tametsi jam vergente aetate, nec pudebit, nec pigebit, simulatque extricaro me ab his quae sunt in manibus, cum meo Cicerone redire in gratiam, pristinamque familiaritatem, nimium multis annis intermissam, renovare menses aliquot.

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.9.17 (tr. J.E. King):

I shall humour you and explain what you wish as best I can, not however as if I were the Pythian Apollo making statements to be regarded as certain and unalterable, but following out a train of probabilities as one poor mortal out of many. For further than likelihood as I see it I cannot get. Certainty will be for those who say such things can be known and who claim wisdom for themselves.

geram tibi morem et ea, quae vis, ut potero, explicabo, nec tamen quasi Pythius Apollo, certa ut sint et fixa quae dixero, sed ut homunculus unus e multis, probabilia coniectura sequens. ultra enim quo progrediar quam ut veri similia videam non habeo. certa dicent ii, qui et percipi ea posse dicunt et se sapientes esse profitentur.

H.D.F. Kitto (1897-1982), The Greeks (1951; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 35:

Hesiod himself had no great love for the climate of his native spot, and, as we have so far given the Greek climate high marks, it is only fair that so distinguished an authority should be heard on the other side. Hesiod disliked the sweltering heat of summer, and he hated the winter – 'the month of Lenaeon, evil days, cattle-flaying days, when the frosts that appear for men’s sorrow cover the earth as the breath of the north-easter from Thrace bloweth on the wide sea and stirreth it, and earth and wood bellow aloud. Many an oak of lofty foliage and many a stout pine in the mountain glens doth his onset bring low to the bounteous earth, and all the unnumbered forest crieth aloud, and the wild beasts shudder and set their tails between their legs, even they whose hide is covered with hair. Yea, even through these, shaggy-breasted though they are, he bloweth with chill breath. Through the hide of the ox he bloweth, and it stayeth him not, and through the thin-haired goat: but nowise through the sheep doth the might of Boreas blow, because of their abundant wool. But he maketh the old man bent.' Of the eight winds Hesiod hated four. The others 'are of the race of gods, a great boon to mortal men. But these are random winds, blowing fitfully on the sea; they fall on the misty deep, a great bane to mortal men, and rage with evil tempest. Different at different times they blow, and scatter ships and destroy sailors. And there is no defence against woe for men who meet those winds upon the deep. And those again over the infinite flowery earth destroy the pleasant works of men, filling them with dust and grievous turmoil.'¹

But Hesiod was a farmer, and a Boeotian, 'of Ascra, a sorry place near Helicon; bad in winter, hard in summer, never good' – and a man should not write like this of his home, even though his father has come there from Asia Minor, and no doubt told Hesiod times without number how much better it had been in Asia.

1. Transl. A.W. Mair.

The excerpts are from Works and Days 504-518, Theogony 871-880, and Works and Days 639-640.

Hat tip: Daniel Orazio.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Journal LM, p. 51, in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. X (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 312:

What wrong road have we taken that all the improvements of machinery have helped every body but the operative? him they have incurably hurt.

An operative is a factory worker.

Plutarch, Sayings of Spartan Women = Moralia 240 E (said by Gorgo, daughter of king Cleomenes, about Aristagoras of Miletus; tr. Frank Cole Babbitt):

When she had watched Aristagoras having his shoes put on and laced by one of the servants, she said, "Father, the foreigner hasn't any hands!"

τὸν δ᾽ Ἀρισταγόραν ὑπό τινος τῶν οἰκετῶν ὑποδούμενον θεασαμένη, 'πάτερ,' ἔφη, 'ὁ ξένος χεῖρας οὐκ ἔχει.'

Diogenes Laertius, 6.2.44 (said by Diogenes the Cynic; tr. R.D. Hicks):

Hence to a man whose shoes were being put on by his servant, he said, "You have not attained to full felicity, unless he wipes your nose as well; and that will come, when you have lost the use of your hands."

ὅθεν πρὸς τὸν ὑπὸ τοῦ οἰκέτου ὑποδούμενον, 'οὔπω,' εἶπε, 'μακάριος εἶ, ἂν μή σε καὶ ἀπομύξῃ· τοῦτο δ᾽ ἔσται πηρωθέντι σοι τὰς χεῖρας.'

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 29.8.19 (tr. W.H.S. Jones):

We walk with the feet of others, we recognise our acquaintances with the eyes of others, rely on others' memories to make our salutations, and put into the hands of others our very lives; the precious things of nature, which support life, we have quite lost. We have nothing else of our own save our luxuries.

alienis pedibus ambulamus, alienis oculis agnoscimus, aliena memoria salutamus, aliena et vivimus opera, perieruntque rerum naturae pretia et vitae argumenta. nihil aliud pro nostro habemus quam delicias.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), "Gesellschaft," tr. David Luke:

A quiet scholar once left a large party and went home. He was asked: 'How did you like it?' 'If they were books,' he said. 'I should not read them.'

The same, tr. John Frederick Nims:

Once, at a party, a taciturn prof
Met hordes of new people, but soon hurried off.
When asked how he liked them, their manners, their looks,
Said, "I wouldn't read them, if they had been books."

In German:

Aus einer großen Gesellschaft heraus
Ging einst ein stiller Gelehrter zu Haus.
Man fragte: Wie seid Ihr zufrieden gewesen?
»Wären's Bücher,« sagt' er, »ich würd' sie nicht lesen.«

John Dalton (1709-1763), Comus: A Masque. (Now Adapted to the Stage) as Alter'd from Milton's Masque (London: A. Millar, 1762), p. 51 ("Euphrosyne sings"):

                       1.
Preach not to me your musty rules,
  Ye drones that mould in idle cell;
The heart is wiser than the schools,
  The senses always reason well.

                       2.
If short my span, I less can spare
  To pass a single pleasure by;
An hour is long, if lost in care;
  They only live, who life enjoy.

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 28.5.25 (tr. W.H.S. Jones):

Some people, to calm mental anxiety, carry saliva with the finger to behind the ear.

alius saliva post aurem digito relata sollicitudinem animi propitiat.

See Frank W. Nicolson, "The Saliva Superstition in Classical Literature," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 8 (1897) 23-40 (this remedy on p. 33).

[St. John Lucas (1879–1934),] The Last Arcadian, and Other Papers (London: Leonard Smithers & Co., 1899), pp. 54-56:

To the country-nurtured, this steady advance of the outskirts of cities seems nothing better than matricide. Will it ever cease, or will the whole country be urbanized,—worse still, suburbanized,—in a century or two? Surely, before that happens, in life, as in literature an hundred years ago, a romantic revival shall take place. Some new Wordsworth, greater in action than he of Rydal, shall arise. A Coleridge, whose zeal on Nature's behalf shall never flag, shall move the nation to the love of simplicity and botany. Then shall their armies march on London, armed with ploughshares and—for the time of pruning-hooks is not yet—packets of seed. Clematis shall hide the shame of the National Gallery, and Virginia-creeper shall make the Nelson Column to blush in its embrace. No cottage more than one storey high shall be built in London. No loom shall be worked but by hand in Manchester. Nothing shall stand in Oxford and Cambridge save the Colleges, such Churches as may have the good fortune to pass a severe physical examination, and perhaps the shops of the tobacconists. Corn shall grow on the Aston Villa football ground at Birmingham, and the Thames shall be navigated by hollowed-out tree-trunks only. Brighton shall disappear. Hastings shall be swept away. Llandudo shall perish utterly. Anybody not putting garden-seats on railway-lines will be fined heavily for each offence. Anybody who possesses an income of £1,000 a year will be liable to a fine of £990; and this rule will, in proportion, apply to all incomes greater than my own. The coins thus accumulated will be kept as playthings for the erstwhile plutocrats, who will inhabit the lunatic asylums. The penal establishments will still be used as hotels for the incorrigibly idle; latch-keys, however, will be provided for the inmates. All shady company-promoters and directors will be allotted to their shareholders, each of whom will be provided with a specially-sharpened knife. All philologists will be boiled. Thus shall the true Millenium [sic] arrive.

St. John Lucas (1879–1934), "Villanelle of the British Museum," Poems (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., Ltd., 1904), pp. 37-38:

O gods who crowned the Parthenon
Of Pheidias and Pericles,
How is your ancient glory gone!

Our blinkard antiquaries con
Your grand Panathenaic frieze,
O Gods who crowned the Parthenon!

The cultured maid, the painful Don,
Unblasted, mete your nose and knees.
How is your ancient glory gone!

In troops of twenty gaze thereon
Folk nasal-voiced from over-seas,
O Gods who crowned the Parthenon!

The yawning girl-school eddies on;
The lovers giggle gallantries.
How is your ancient glory gone!

Barbarians fell at Marathon;
Have you no bolts for such as these?
O Gods who crowned the Parthenon,
How is your ancient glory gone!