Laudator Temporis Acti

Ōtomo no Tabito (665-731), Thirteen Poems in Praise of Saké, no. 12 (tr. Jeremy Robinson):

If it is a fact
that all things that live
must someday die,
then while I am in this life
let me enjoy myself.

Homer, Iliad 9.312-313 (tr. Peter Green):

For hateful to me as the gates of Hādēs is that man
who hides one thought in his mind, but speaks another.

ἐχθρὸς γάρ μοι κεῖνος ὁμῶς Ἀΐδαο πύλῃσιν
ὅς χ᾽ ἕτερον μὲν κεύθῃ ἐνὶ φρεσίν, ἄλλο δὲ εἴπῃ.

Unfortunately nowadays this strategy is necessary for survival. Die Gedanken sind frei, but their public expression is not.

Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), pp. 131-132:

In Burckhardt's studio above the baker's shop, books occupied the floor space on every side of a dilapidated old sofa where Burckhardt sat. Unless the visitor wanted to stand throughout, he had no choice but to build a tottering pile and take a seat on it.

Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), Reflections on History, tr. M.D.H. (1943; rpt. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1950), p. 172:

Greatness is all that we are not.

Größe ist, was wir nicht sind.

Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 729, n. 29:

Jerome, In Jonam prophetam (CSEL 76: 390): "Non est enim nostrum mortem arripere, sed illatam libenter accipere. Unde et a persecutionibus non licet propria manu perire, absque ubi castitas periclitantur"; In Matthaeum, 27.5 (CSEL 77: 264): "ut non solum emendare nequiverit proditionis nefas, sed et prius scelus etiam proprii homicidii crimen addiderit."

Not CSEL (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum), but CCSL (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina). Not periclitantur, but periclitatur (I assume, although the CCSL edition is unavailable to me).

Labels: typographical and other errors

Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), From the Elephant's Back (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2015), pp. 39-40:

In this field of idle ratiocination one does, of course, come across bright solutions to the world problem. I can think of several—to abolish all news media, journals, films, books, for a period of ten years. Let no one have anything but word-of-mouth news from the village for a long time. I have tried this on myself and can testify to the extremely beneficial effect it has on one. To live in a Greek island with no radio, no newspaper, for a year at a time is a marvellous experience. Energy was saved which could be devoted to private inquiry and the practice of becoming more oneself; I even try the same thing today, for where I live there is no radio, no television, and the papers arrive ten days late. This is a great blessing. It makes it impossible to get worked up about the crises they record—for by the time I read about them they will already have been replaced by others. They come to me, these crises, with the time-lag of distant stars. In this way I strive to keep the milk of opinionation from boiling over. But I have noticed one thing about crises; they perpetually reproduce themselves, there is never any lack of them.

A.L. Rowse (1903-1997), A Cornish Childhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1942), p. 164:

Nothing can touch me like the phrases and liturgical scraps that bring back that vanished world of my childhood, a world of security and faith, now dissolved like a 'dream remembered on waking.'

Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter XXXIX (tr. Walter Starkie):

...it is God's will that there shall always be some scourge to chastise us.

...quiere y permite Dios que tengamos siempre verdugos que nos castiguen.

Ōtomo no Tabito (665-731), Thirteen Poems in Praise of Saké, no. 1 (tr. Jeremy Robinson):

To turn your thoughts
from matters of no importance,
it is best
to drink a single cup
of cloudy unfiltered saké.

Homer, Iliad 9.615 (Achilles to Phoenix; tr. Christopher H. Wilson):

It is a good thing for you that with me you should give pain to whoever gives pain to me.

καλόν τοι σὺν ἐμοὶ τὸν κήδειν ὅς κ᾽ ἐμὲ κήδῃ.

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), Germany: A Winter's Tale, Caput I, lines 41-48 (tr. Hal Draper):

The soil produces bread enough
For all mankind's nutrition,
Plus rose and myrtle, beauty and joy,
And sugar peas in addition.

Yes, sugar peas for everyone
Piled high upon the barrows!
The heavens we can safely leave
To the angels and the sparrows.

Es wächst hienieden Brot genug
Für alle Menschenkinder,
Auch Rosen und Myrten, Schönheit und Lust,
Und Zuckererbsen nicht minder.

Ja, Zuckererbsen für jedermann,
Sobald die Schoten platzen!
Den Himmel überlassen wir
Den Engeln und den Spatzen.

A.L. Rowse (1903-1997), A Cornish Childhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1942), p. 138:

I am very much struck at the altogether better times in these respects children have to-day than we had. They have much more to spend, they have many more amusements, pictures and wireless and bicycles; they appear to get around and be taken about the country far more than we ever were. Are they any better off for it? I doubt it. In some ways worse off: their attention and enjoyment more dispersed, they can have much less time for reading and dreaming than I had: nothing like such an intense concentration upon the inner life of one's own imagination. Far too great an importance can be attached to the improvement of external 'standards' of life: the Labour Party, all Labour Parties, have made this mistake. Better that they attached more importance to the real standards that signify; but of them they have no comprehension. Such standards are essentially aristocratic, aesthetic, qualitative not quantitative, private:

Of the unequal I assert the sense,
The valued quality, the difference.

The couplet is from one of Rowse's own poems (unavailable to me).

Job 11.3 (Geneva Bible):

Should men hold their peace at thy lies? and when thou mockest others, shall none make thee ashamed?

Poem attributed to Ikkyū Sōjun (1394-1481), tr. Adam L. Kern:

this life —
eating, shitting,
sleeping, rising
and after that
death

The same, tr. Evgeny Steiner, with his note:

In this world
We slop, we shit,
We sleep, we rise.
So we live.
What then? We die.<sup>57

57</sup> This is an accurate translation of the Japanese original, in which Ikkyū uses some rather crude expressions (kuu — to slop or gobble, etc.)

Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter XXVII (Cardenio speaking; tr. Edith Grossman):

In my imagination the power of my afflictions is so intense and contributes so much to my ruination that I am powerless to prevent it and I become like a stone, bereft of all sense and awareness.

La fuerza de la imaginación de mis desgracias es tan intensa y puede tanto en mi perdición, que, sin que yo pueda ser parte á estorbarlo, vengo á quedar como piedra, falto de todo buen sentido y conocimiento.

Horace, Ars Poetica 169-176 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

Many ills encompass an old man, whether because he seeks gain, and then miserably holds aloof from his store and fears to use it, or because, in all that he does, he lacks fire and courage, is dilatory and slow to form hopes, is sluggish and greedy of a longer life, peevish, surly, given to praising the days he spent as a boy, and to reproving and condemning the young. Many blessings do the advancing years bring with them; many, as they retire, they take away.

multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod
quaerit et inventis miser abstinet ac timet uti,        170
vel quod res omnis timide gelideque ministrat,
dilator spe longus, iners avidusque futuri,
difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti
se puero, castigator censorque minorum.
multa ferunt anni venientes commoda secum,        175
multa recedentes adimunt.

172 spe longus codd.: spe lentus Bentley, spe mancus Shackleton Bailey, splenosus Powell; avidusque codd.: pavidusque Bentley

Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), Reflections on History, tr. M.D.H. (1943; rpt. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1950), p. 76:

Here we should deal with the question of closed countries. Are countries closed for reasons of State, or rather for reasons of national pride, or of instinctive hate, fear and repulsion?¹ Culture would, left to itself, tend to expand and create a general level, but it costs so much to bring the State into tolerable order that people expect no good to come from the outside world, but only trouble.

¹ Note that hospes (stranger) and hostis (enemy) come from the same root.

Hierher gehört die Frage vom abgeschlossenen Verkehr. Ist derselbe mehr Staatsgebot oder hat er seinen Grund mehr in nationalem Hochmut oder mehr in instinktivem Haß, Furcht und Widerwillen?¹ Die Kultur an und für sich hätte die Neigung, sich mitzuteilen und auszugleichen; aber der Kulturstaat hat soviel gekostet, bis alles in leidlicher Ordnung war, daß man von draußen nur Störung und nichts Gutes erwartet.

¹ Wir erinnern daran, daß hospes und hostis vom gleichen Stamme kommt.

Or rather, according to Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 291, hospes is derived from hostis:

Compound of hostis and the root of potis.

I wonder if repulsion might be a mistake for revulsion, since Widerwillen can mean disgust, dislike. [Update: Thanks to Kevin Muse, who cites Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. repulsion, sense 4 (making my conjecture unnecessary): "A feeling of intense disgust; dislike, aversion, repugnance; (also occasionally) an instance of this."]

See also Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, tr. S.G.C. Middlemore (London: George Allen & Co., Ltd., 1914), pp. 449-450:

In certain districts of Italy, where civilization had made little progress, the country people were disposed to murder any stranger who fell into their hands. This was especially the case in the more remote parts of the Kingdom of Naples, where the barbarism dated probably from the days of the Roman 'latifundia,' and when the stranger and the enemy ('hospes' and 'hostis') were in all good faith held to be one and the same.

In gewissen Gegenden von Italien, wo die Kultur nicht hindrang, waren die Landleute permanent mörderisch gegen jeden von draussen, der ihnen in die Hände fiel. So namentlich in den entlegenem Teilen des Königreiches Neapel, wo eine uralte Verwilderung vielleicht seit der römischen Latifundienwirtschaft sich erhalten hatte, und wo man den Fremden und den Feind, hospes und hostis, noch in aller Unschuld für gleichbedeutend halten mochte.

Shakespeare, Cymbeline 4.2.259-282:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;        260
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o' the great;        265
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.        270

Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finish'd joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must        275
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!        280
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!

Samuel Johnson on lines 269-270:

The poet's sentiment seems to have been this. All human excellence is equally the subject to the stroke of death: neither the power of kings, nor the science of scholars, nor the art of those whose immediate study is the prolongation of life, can protect then from the final destiny of man.

Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I, Chapter XXXI (tr. Walter Starkie):

"When you approached her, did you not perceive a Sabaean odor, an aromatic fragrance, something sweet — I cannot find a name to describe it — a scent, an essence, as if you were in some dainty glover's shop."

"All I can vouch for," said Sancho, "is that I got a whiff of something a bit mannish; this must have been because she was sweating and a bit on the run."

"It could not have been that," answered Don Quixote, "but you must have had a cold in your head or else smelled yourself, for I know well the scent of that rose among thorns, that lily of the fields, that liquid amber."

"That may be so," answered Sancho, "for many a time I've noticed the same smell off myself as I perceived off her ladyship Dulcinea; but there's no wonder in that, for one devil is the dead spit of another."

Homer, Odyssey 17.217-218 (tr. A.T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock):

Here now in very truth comes the vile leading the vile.
As ever, the god is bringing like and like together.

νῦν μὲν δὴ μάλα πάγχυ κακὸς κακὸν ἡγηλάζει,
ὡς αἰεὶ τὸν ὁμοῖον ἄγει θεὸς ὡς τὸν ὁμοῖον.

Joseph Russo on line 218:

This verse seems to be a proverb, and is quoted as such by later authors. All recent editors accept the MSS' ώς τὸν ὁμοῖον, while acknowledging that there is no evidence for ὡς = εἰς before Attic Greek. Stanford notes that Plato (Lysis 214a) and Hippocrates (Kühn 1, 390 and 392) quote the line with ὡς, and he suggests that their influence, together with 'Aristotle's citation of the line with ὡς τὸν' (Rh. i 11.25. 1371b), has eliminated an original Homeric ἐς τόν. I believe this is so (with one correction: Aristotle quotes not the line but just the proverbial phrase ώς αἰεὶ τὸν ὁμοῖον, the first hemistich). That a blatant Atticism has crept into our text is further suggested by Callimachus fr. 178 Pfeiffer, 9-10 (cited by von der Mühll and Stanford as fr. 8): ἀλλ' αἶνος Ὁμηρικός, αἰὲν ὁμοῖον | ὡς θεός, οὐ ψευδής, ἐς τὸν ὁμοῖον ἄγει. This final piece of evidence is sufficient, in my judgement, to warrant the unusual step of restoring ἐς to the text against all the MS testimony.

M.L. West in his Teubner edition prints ἐς.