Laudator Temporis Acti

Pindar, Pythian Odes 1.46 (tr. Anthony Verity):

May his whole life continue to steer happiness and the gift of wealth
towards him, bringing him forgetfulness of past hardship.

εἰ γὰρ ὁ πᾶς χρόνος ὄλβον μὲν οὕτω
καὶ κτεάνων δόσιν εὐθύ-
νοι, καμάτων δ᾽ ἐπίλασιν παράσχοι.

Basil L. Gildersleeve ad loc.:

The Philological Crocodile, "The hideous weakness of the modern classicist" (March 8, 2021):

How many Classicists now possess any "exact knowledge" of their discipline? How many bachelors, masters, doctors are there who have never read through even Homer or Virgil but are full to the brim of whatever recently published nonsense is on their reading lists?

Proverbs 22.28 (KJV):

Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.

G. Zuntz (1902-1992), "Aeschyli Prometheus," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 95 (1993) 107-111 (at 111):

Every generation of scholars, so it seems, tends to indulge in some caprice of its own. I have seen the Yeargod come and go, and Myth and Ritual after him. Now it is the spurious Prometheus; but hardly much longer. And there is some comfort in the fact that each of these caprices has led to some improved understanding of its central subject. Thus the next generation may appreciate Prometheus better than we.

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 275-276 (tr. Alan H. Sommerstein):

Misery, you know, wanders everywhere,
and alights on different persons at different times.

                              πάντα τοι πλανωμένη
πρὸς ἄλλοτ᾽ ἄλλον πημονὴ προσιζάνει.

πάντα Herwerden: ταῦτα codd.

Goethe, Iphigenia in Tauris 2.2.803-807 (tr. David Luke):

Oh sweetest voice! Thrice welcome music of
My mother-tongue here in a foreign land!
Now the blue mountains of my native shore
Appear before my captive eyes again,
Bringing new gladness.

O süße Stimme! Vielwillkommner Ton
Der Muttersprach in einem fremden Lande!
Des väterlichen Hafens blaue Berge
Seh ich Gefangner neu willkommen wieder
Vor meinen Augen.

Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), "Der Scholar," lines 9-12 (tr. Eric Sams):

Free from Mammon I will traverse
the field of knowledge,
thinking deeply, and now and then taking
a mouthful of the juice of the grape.

Frei vom Mammon will ich schreiten
Auf dem Feld der Wissenschaft,
Sinne ernst und nehm' zu Zeiten
Einen Mund voll Rebensaft.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), Vanity Fair, Chapter IX:

Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read — who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state.

Pindar, Pythian Odes 1.39-40 (tr. Anthony Verity):

Phoebus, lord of Lycia and ruler of Delos,
lover of Castalia's spring at Parnassus,
be willing to store my wish in your heart
and make this a land of brave men.

Λύκιε καὶ Δάλοι᾿ ἀνάσσων
      Φοῖβε Παρνασσοῦ τε κράναν Κασταλίαν φιλέων,
ἐθελήσαις ταῦτα νόῳ τιθέμεν εὔανδρόν τε χώραν.

Basil L. Gildersleeve ad loc.: Protocorinthian aryballos from Lechaion, c. 690 BC:

Donald Kagan, The Archidamian War (1987; rpt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 18:

A successful strategy must rest on a clear understanding of the aims for which a war is undertaken and an accurate assessment of one's own resources and weaknesses and those of the enemy. It aims at employing one's own strength against the enemies' weakness. It makes use of, but is not bound by, the experience of the past. It adjusts to changes in conditions, both material and psychological. It considers in advance that its first expectations may be disappointed and has an alternate plan ready. Rarely, however, has a state or statesman embarking upon war been well enough prepared strategically.

Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), Tomb Sculpture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964), p. 56 (footnote omitted):

When — significantly, chiefly after the Black Death — Northern art attempted to represent the actual condition of "being dead," it solved the problem, not by replacing the effigy apparently endowed with everlasting life by that of a corpse, but by dramatically contrasting it with that of a corpse: the representacion au vif, viz., the image of the complete person (Erasmus' totus homo), arrayed as befits his state and dignity and unaffected by decay, was contrasted with the representacion de la mort (normally referred to as transi), viz., the image of the dead body covered — if at all — only with a shroud and either reduced to a skeleton or exhibiting the horrid traces of decomposition.

Id., p. 64 (footnotes omitted):

The moral significance of these grisly transis — often expressed by such inscriptions as "I was what you are; you will be what I am" or "Wretch, why are you proud? You are nothing but ashes and will, like me, be the food of worms" — is, of course, that of a memento mori (a notion eloquently expressed by the term "representation de la mort"), and some of them occur singly rather than in contrastive juxtaposition with a representation au vif. Apart from the tombstone of Jacques Germain just mentioned, this is also true of one of the earliest recorded instances, the monument of a nobleman named Francis de La Sarra (d. 1562) which can still be seen in the church of La Sarraz some ten miles north of Lausanne (figs. 257, 258). Watched over by members of his family in full dress, he is represented as he was supposed to look after several years in the grave: long worms slither in and out of the body, and the face is covered by toads in such a manner that two of their heads replace the eyes in a macabre anticipation of the effects achieved, more than two hundred years later, by Giuseppe Arcimboldo when he constructed human heads out of sea creatures or vegetables.

As a late-fifteenth-century instance of an isolated transi we may adduce another mayor of Straubing in Lower Bavaria, Johannes Gmainer (d. 1482; fig. 259), whose red marble tomb shows him as an almost skeletonized cadaver, as violently attacked by vermin as is the body of Francis of La Sarra and addressing the beholder as follows: "Sum speculum vitae, Johannes Gmainer, et rite / Tales vos eritis, fueram quandoque quod estis" ("In me behold the looking glass of life: / Such you will be, for I was what you are"). Yet — such is human nature — the mayor's armorial bearings are proudly displayed at the skeleton's feet; and a gentleman named Felix Ueblher, whose image en transi, dated 1509, can be admired in St. Nicholas at Merano (fig. 260), was even careful to inform posterity that he had been ennobled and allowed a coat of arms by Emperor Frederick III.

Id., figs. 257-260: Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Edward Short, "A Definitive Dig in the Graham Greene Quarry," City Journal (March 5, 2021), a review of Richard Greene, Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene (London: Little, Brown, 2020):

Similarly, the storyteller in Greene could be prescient when it came to exposing what his biographer calls "brittle orthodoxies." His characterization of America's involvement in Vietnam is a good example. Reasonable people can debate America's conduct of the war, but it is hard to argue with the narrator Thomas Fowler's assessment of the character of Alden Pyle in Greene’s novel The Quiet American (1955): "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused . . . impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance." Anyone inclined to doubt this should dip into Max Hasting's recent history of the Vietnam War, or read Plato on the tragic hero, who must be neither rogue nor paragon but a "character between these two extremes . . . a man . . . whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty."

Screen capture: For Plato read Aristotle.

Labels: typographical and other errors

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), Vanity Fair, Chapter VIII:

Fancy an old, stumpy, short, vulgar, and very dirty man, in old clothes and shabby old gaiters, who smokes a horrid pipe, and cooks his own horrid supper in a saucepan.

Cyril Mango (1928-2021), Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1981), p. 160, with note on p. 295:

The Lives of saints are full of references to demons that haunted the out-of-doors, as a few examples will show. In the sixth century St Nicholas of Sion, whom we have already mentioned, was called upon to deal with a huge cypress tree inhabited by a demon who terrified the surrounding region and killed anyone that drew near. The saint, before a large assembly, began chopping the tree down with an axe; it wavered and began falling into the crowd (naturally at the devil's instigation), but Nicholas caught it single-handed and made it fall in the opposite direction. Thereupon the demon admitted defeat and departed.²¹ Demons lurked in deserted places, kept watch at the crossing of rivers and torrents, and were particularly numerous underground. A man who walked abroad after dark ran the risk of becoming possessed. An injudicious excavation, especially of a spot marked by the remains of pagan antiquity, was apt to release a multitude of demons who would then take possession of human beings and farm animals.

21 Anrich, Hagios Nikolaos, i, 12ff.

Related post: St. Nick and Old Nick: A Case of Arboricide.

Goethe, Faust I.2565-2566 (tr. Walter Kaufmann):

Men usually believe, if only they hear words,
That there must also be some sort of meaning.

Gewöhnlich glaubt der Mensch, wenn er nur Worte hört,
es müsse sich dabei doch auch was denken lassen.

Goethe, "Beherzigung" (tr. Eric Sams):

Ah, what should a man desire?
Is it better to live quietly,
firmly clasping and holding on,
or should he be up and doing?
Should he build a house?
Should he live in tents?
Should he trust the rocks?
Even the solid rocks can shake.
There is no universal answer.
Let each man decide for himself how to act,
where to dwell;
and let him who stands take heed lest he fall.

Ach, was soll der Mensch verlangen?
Ist es besser, ruhig bleiben?
Klammernd fest sich anzuhangen?
Ist es besser, sich zu treiben?
Soll er sich ein Häuschen bauen?
Soll er unter Zelten leben?
Soll er auf die Felsen trauen?
Selbst die festen Felsen beben.
Eines schickt sich nicht für alle;
Sehe jeder, wie er's treibe,
Sehe jeder, wo er bleibe,
Und wer steht, daß er nicht falle!

Seneca, Agamemnon 56-64, in John G. Fitch, ed. and tr., Seneca, Oedipus, Agammemnon, Thyestes. [Seneca,] Hercules on Oeta, Octavia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004 = Loeb Classical Library, 78), pp. 130-131:

O regnorum
magnis fallax Fortuna bonis,
in praecipiti dubioque locas
excelsa nimis.
numquam placidam sceptra quietem        60
certumve sui tenuere diem;
alia ex aliis cura fatigat
vexatque animos nova tempestas.

O Fortune, beguiler
by means of the great blessings of thrones,
you set the exalted
in a sheer, unstable place.
Never do sceptres attain calm peace
or a day that is certain of itself.
They are wearied by care upon care,
their spirits tossed by some new storm.

I don't think bonis (line 57) is ablative of means, as Fitch's translation implies, or even ablative at all, but rather dative. See R.J. Tarrant, Seneca, Agamemnon. Edited with a Commentary (1976; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 184:

Fortuna is deceitful toward the riches that accompany rule; for the dative compare Pliny, N.H. 3.80 nauigiis fallax, Tac. Hist. 1.22 potentibus infidum, sperantibus fallax...

---

Thanks to Eric Thomson for drawing my attention to Fitch's Annaeana Tragica: Notes on the Text of Seneca's Tragedies (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 156 (on Agamemnon, line 57):

Is magnis bonis dative or instrumental ablative? I incline to the latter alternative for two reasons. First, Fortune does not deceive the wealth and power of kings, but rather deceives humans who are taken in by such things, regarding them as secure or as true bona. Second, magnis bonis must be ironic here, and the irony is more evident if the idea of 'blessings' is closely linked with that of deception. (There is then no need to consider Axelson's vanis for magnis.) For fallax with an ablative cf. Pliny NQ 25.8 pictura fallax est coloribus tam numerosis, Tac. Ann. 16.32 specie . . . amicitiae fallaces (the first causal rather than instrumental, but with much the same effect).

For "Pliny NQ" read "Pliny NH".

Vergil, Aeneid 11.892 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

True love of country points the way.

monstrat amor verus patriae.

The Rutilian women are defending the walls of their town.

See Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. monstro, sense 3.c:

C.H. Douglas (1879-1952), Economic Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), p. 96:

The exact figures are beside the point, but something over three hours' work per head per day is ample for the purpose of meeting consumption and depreciation of all the factors of modern life under normal conditions and proper direction.

Related post: Six Hours.

Aristophanes, fragment 468 (tr. Jeffrey Henderson):

For fear of death is the greatest senselessness:
we're all of us obliged to suffer it.

τὸ γὰρ φοβεῖσθαι τὸν θάνατον λῆρος πολύς·
πᾶσιν γὰρ ἡμῖν τοῦτ᾿ ὀφείλεται παθεῖν.

Related post: Sooner or Later.