Laudator Temporis Acti

Diodorus Siculus 11.33.2 (after the Battle of Plataea in 479 B.C.; tr. C.H. Oldfather, with his note):

The Greeks, taking a tenth part of the spoils, made a gold tripod and set it up in Delphi as a thank-offering to the God, inscribing on it the following couplet:

This is the gift the saviours of far-flung Hellas upraised here,
Having delivered their states from loathsome slavery's bonds.¹

¹ This inscription is found only in Diodorus, and is dubiously attributed to Simonides (frag. 102 Diehl; 168 Edmonds).

οἱ δ᾽ Ἕλληνες ἐκ τῶν λαφύρων δεκάτην ἐξελόμενοι κατεσκεύασαν χρυσοῦν τρίποδα, καὶ ἀνέθηκαν εἰς Δελφοὺς χαριστήριον τῷ θεῷ, ἐπιγράψαντες ἐλεγεῖον τόδε,

Ἑλλάδος εὐρυχόρου σωτῆρες τόνδ᾽ ἀνέθηκαν,
    δουλοσύνης στυγερᾶς ῥυσάμενοι πόλιας.

See Marcus N. Tod, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century B.C., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), pp. 22-24, and Peter Green, The Greco-Persian Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 273-274.

Joseph-Noël Sylvestre (1847–1926), Le sac de Rome en 410 par les barbares, in Sète, France, Musée Paul Valéry (inv. no. 891-3-1):

Edwin Muir (1887-1959), An Autobiography, rev. ed. (1954; rpt. London: Methuen, 1964), p. 17:

Whenever Sutherland got drunk he began to invent language. I can't remember now many of his feats in this way, but he liked words with a dashing Spanish sound, like 'yickahooka' and 'navahonta.' He was so pleased with the word 'tramcollicken,' which he invented himself, that he gave it a specific meaning which I had better not mention; but the word became so popular that it spread all over Wyre. From somewhere or other he had picked up 'graminivorous,' which struck him by its comic sound, and for a long time his usual greeting was, "Weel, boy, how's thee graminivorous tramcollicken?"

Related posts:

• Dhcmrlchtdj
• Dealing with Telemarketers
• Thrippsy Pillivinx
• Tafa-Lafa
• Radaratoo, Radarate
• Gibberish

Livy 45.39.16 (tr. Alfred C. Schlesinger):

I possess a body adorned with honourable scars, every one of them received in front.

insigne corpus honestis cicatricibus, omnibus adverso corpore exceptis, habeo.

See Matthew Leigh, "Wounding and Popular Rhetoric at Rome," Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 40 (1995) 195-215.

Related posts:

• Wound Placement
• Wounds in Front versus Wounds in Back
• Location of Wounds
• Cowardice and Bravery
• Wounds, Honorable and Dishonorable
• Preserving One's Honor in Retreat
• Wounds In Front and In Back
• Facing Death

Aristophanes, Clouds 1276 (Strepsiades to Second Creditor; tr. Stephen Halliwell):

I think your brain must have had a right old bashing.

τὸν ἐγκέφαλον ὥσπερ σεσεῖσθαί μοι δοκεῖς.

The same, tr. Benjamin Bickley Rogers:

I shrewdly guess your brain's received a shake.

A useful quotation. I can imagine using it half a dozen times a day.

K.J. Dover ad loc.:

ἐγκέφαλον: Although their terminology presupposes that thought and feeling are functions of organs located in the trunk, the Greeks could not fail to observe the effects of injury to the brain. Cf. Hp. Aph. vii.58, 'When the brain has been shaken, the patient necessarily loses the power of speech at once'. ὥσπερ: Not 'I think you have, as it were, had your brain shaken' but 'I think you are like a man who has ...'. Cf. Pax 234 f. ὥσπερ ᾐσθόμην ... θυείας φθέγμα 'I caught a sound like that of a mortar'.

Alan H. Sommerstein ad loc. quotes Hippocrates, Coan Prognoses 489 (vol. 5, p. 696 Littré):

Those whose brain is shaken and damaged by blows or otherwise fall down forthwith, lose the power of speech, can nei­ther see nor hear, and generally die.

Edwin Muir (1887-1959), "The Difficult Land," Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), pp. 237-238 (line numbers added):

This is a difficult land. Here things miscarry
Whether we care, or do not care enough.
The grain may pine, the harlot weed grow haughty,
Sun, rain, and frost alike conspire against us:
You'd think there was malice in the very air.        5
And the spring floods and summer droughts: our fields
Mile after mile of soft and useless dust.
On dull delusive days presaging rain
We yoke the oxen, go out harrowing,
Walk in the middle of an ochre cloud,         10
Dust rising before us and falling again behind us,
Slowly and gently settling where it lay.
These days the earth itself looks sad and senseless.
And when next day the sun mounts hot and lusty
We shake our fists and kick the ground in anger.         15
We have strange dreams: as that, in the early morning
We stand and watch the silver drift of stars
Turn suddenly to a flock of black-birds flying.
And once in a lifetime men from over the border,
In early summer, the season of fresh campaigns,         20
Come trampling down the corn, and kill our cattle.
These things we know and by good luck or guidance
Either frustrate or, if we must, endure.
We are a people; race and speech support us,
Ancestral rite and custom, roof and tree,         25
Our songs that tell of our triumphs and disasters
(Fleeting alike), continuance of fold and hearth,
Our names and callings, work and rest and sleep,
And something that, defeated, still endures—
These things sustain us. Yet there are times        30
When name, identity, and our very hands,
Senselessly labouring, grow most hateful to us,
And we would gladly rid us of these burdens
(Which yet are knit to us as flesh to bone),
Enter our darkness through the doors of wheat        35
And the light veil of grass (leaving behind
Name, body, country, speech, vocation, faith)
And gather into the secrecy of the earth
Furrowed by broken ploughs lost deep in time.

We have such hours, but are drawn back again        40
By faces of goodness, faithful masks of sorrow,
Honesty, kindness, courage, fidelity,
The love that lasts a life's time. And the fields,
Homestead and stall and barn, springtime and autumn.
(For we can love even the wandering seasons        45
In their inhuman circuit.) And the dead
Who lodge in us so strangely, unremembered,
Yet in their place. For how can we reject
The long last look on the ever-dying face
Turned backward from the other side of time?        50
And how offend the dead and shame the living
By these despairs? And how refrain from love?
This is a difficult country, and our home.

I added line 34 (missing in Collected Poems) from Muir's One Foot in Eden.

Ovid, Fasti 3.235-242 (tr. James George Frazer, rev. G.P. Goold):

Moreover, frosty winter then at last retires, and the snows perish, melted by the warm sun; the leaves, shorn by the cold, return to the trees, and moist within the tender shoot the bud doth swell; now too the rank grass, long hidden, discovers secret paths whereby to lift its head in air. Now is the field fruitful, now is the hour for breeding cattle, now doth the bird upon the bough construct a nest and home.

quid, quod hiems adoperta gelu tum denique cedit,        235
    et pereunt lapsae sole tepente nives;
arboribus redeunt detonsae frigore frondes,
    uvidaque in tenero palmite gemma tumet;
quaeque diu latuit, nunc se qua tollat in auras,
    fertilis occultas invenit herba vias?        240
nunc fecundus ager, pecoris nunc hora creandi,
    nunc avis in ramo tecta laremque parat.

Livy 45.35.5 (tr. Alfred C. Schlesinger):

Moderate circumstances are unassailed by envy; that passion always aims at the heights.

intacta invidia media sunt; ad summa ferme tendit.

Ovid, Fasti. With an English Translation by James George Frazer. Revised by G.P. Goold, 2nd edition reprinted with corrections (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996 = Loeb Classical Library, 253), pp. 382-383 (Fasti 6.810):

o decus, o sacra femina digna domo!

O florious dame! O lady worthy of that sacred house!

Read glorious instead of florious. The mistake persists in the Digital Loeb Classical Library. The original 1931 edition has the correct reading (glorious).

Labels: typographical and other errors

Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.12.20 (1372b; tr. J.H. Freese, with his note):

And those who have often been wronged but have not prosecuted, being, as the proverb says, "Mysian booty."<sup>b

b</sup> A proverb meaning "an easy prey." The Mysians were regarded as cowardly and unwarlike.

καὶ τοὺς ὑπὸ πολλῶν ἀδικηθέντας καὶ μὴ ἐπεξελθόντας, ὡς ὄντας κατὰ τὴν παροιμίαν τούτους Μυσῶν λείαν.

Edward Meredith Cope (rev. John Edwin Sandys) ad loc.:

'And those who have been wronged by many and yet never prosecuted, or taken vengeance on, the aggressors, these being what the proverb calls Mysians' spoil', that is, an easy prey. Μυσῶν λεία dicitur de possessione quae defensore caret et obnoxia est direptori cuivis, Dissen ad Dem. de Corona, § 72; of anything that may be plundered with impunity, Liddell and Scott, Lex.; von allem durchaus preisgegebenen, Rost u. Palm, L. Harpocration and Suidas, s. vv., both explain the origin of the proverb to be the defenceless state of Mysia during the absence of their king Telephus, the famous beggar-hero of Euripides, and Horace's type of a pauper. See also Stallbaum's note on Gorgias 521 B, who quotes Olympiodorus (on the passage of Plato), ἡ παροιμία αὕτη ἐκ τοῦ Τηλέφου ἐστὶν Εὐριπίδου, ἐκεῖ γάρ κ.τ.λ. Whatever may be the origin of this proverb, it certainly was not derived from Euripides' play: for Harpocration expressly says that it is to be found in Strattis (the Comic poet) and Simonides ἐν ἰάμβοις. This last is probably Simonides of Amorgos, a very early writer; but if it be the other Simonides, of Ceos, it is equally impossible that he could have derived it from Euripides, since he died when Euripides was a child.

The above explanations seem to be founded upon the helpless condition of the Mysian people under some special circumstances which deprived them of their ordinary means of self-defence. I should rather suppose that the proverb implies an imputation upon their national character, because another proverbial expression, at least as common as this, represents the Mysians, as sharing with the Carians, the reputation of being the vilest and most contemptible of mankind; the property of such mean and cowardly wretches would naturally be an easy prey to any one who chose to take it. This imputation of cowardice or weakness is directly conveyed by Aristotle in the passage before us. This brings the two proverbs together as the expression of the same features of national character. This will furnish a sufficient explanation of Gorg. 521 B, εἰ σοι Μυσόν γε ἥδιον καλεῖν, and we need not have recourse with Stallbaum and Heindorf (ad loc. § 162) to the Μυσῶν λείαν to interpret it. This proverbial contempt for the Mysian character appears in Rhes. 251, Pl. Theaet. 209 (Schol. in Heindorf and Stallbaum), Magnes, (Com.) Fr. Poastriae (in Meineke's Fragm. Comic. Gr. II 11), Philemon, Sicel. fr. 3 (Meineke u. s. IV 25), Menand. Androg. VII (Schol. Gorg. u. s., and Mein. IV 86), and Menand. Fr. Inc. 481 (Mein. IV 327), all in the words Μυσῶν ὁ ἔσχατος, 'the last and lowest—even of the Mysians', worthlessness can go no further. Cic. pro Flacco, 27. 65, quid in Graeco sermone tam tritum et celebratum est, quam si quis despicatui ducitur, ut 'Mysorum ultimus' esse dicatur. Ib. 2. 3; 40. 100; Orat. VIII 27, quonam igitur modo audiretur Mysus aut Phryx Athenis, quum etiam Demosthenes, &c. ad Quint. Fratr. I 1. 6 hominis ne Graeci quidem, at Mysii aut Phrygii potius. (Erasm. Adag. Mysorum postremus, p. 354.) The other form of the proverb occurs in Dem. de Cor. p. 248, § 72, τὴν Μυσῶν λείαν καλουμένην, in Strattis, Medea, (fr. Harpocr.) Mein. II 776. (Erasm. Adag. Mysorum praeda, p. 1774.)

I can think of some modern nations that refuse to defend their borders and hence could aptly be described by this proverb.

Livy 45.23.14 (speech of the Rhodian ambassadors; tr. Alfred C. Schlesinger):

The character of states is like that of individual men; some nations are hot-tempered, some bold, some diffident, some over-indulgent in wine, others in sex.

tam civitatium quam singulorum hominum mores sunt; gentes quoque aliae iracundae, aliae audaces, quaedam timidae, in vinum, in venerem proniores aliae sunt.

Cf. id., 45.30.7:

This part of the world is as a whole cold, difficult to cultivate, and harsh; it has inhabitants of temperament like their land.

frigida haec omnis duraque cultu et aspera plaga est; cultorum quoque ingenia terrae similia habet.

Aristophanes, Acharnians 500 (tr. Jeffery Henderson):

For even comedy knows about what's right.

τὸ γὰρ δίκαιον οἶδε καὶ τρυγῳδία.

This reminds me of Horace, Satires 1.1.24-25 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

What is to prevent one from telling truth as he laughs?

ridentem dicere verum / quid vetat?

Related post: A Wise Man Is Known by Much Laughing.

Edwin Muir (1887-1959), "The Island," Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), pp. 248-249 (line numbers added):

Your arms will clasp the gathered grain
For your good time, and wield the flail
In merry fire and summer hail.
There stand the golden hills of corn
Which all the heroic clans have borne,        5
And bear the herdsmen of the plain,
The horseman in the mountain pass,
The archaic goat with silver horn,
Man, dog and flock and fruitful hearth.
Harvests of men to men give birth.        10
These the ancestral faces bred
And show as through a golden glass
Dances and temples of the dead.
Here speak through the transmuted tongue
The full grape bursting in the press,        15
The barley seething in the vat,
Which earth and man as one confess,
Babbling of what both would be at
In garrulous story and drunken song.
Though come a different destiny,        20
Though fall a universal wrong
More stern than simple savagery,
Men are made of what is made,
The meat, the drink, the life, the corn
Laid up by them, in them reborn.        25
And self-begotten cycles close
About our way; indigenous art
And simple spells make unafraid
The haunted labyrinths of the heart,
And with our wild succession braid        30
The resurrection of the rose.

Sicily

Plato, Laws 6.777e-778a (tr. R.G. Bury):

We ought to punish slaves justly, and not to make them conceited by merely admonishing them as we would free men. An address to a servant should be mostly a simple command: there should be no jesting with servants, either male or female, for by a course of excessively foolish indulgence in their treatment of their slaves, masters often make life harder both for themselves, as rulers, and for their slaves, as subject to rule.

κολάζειν γε μὴν ἐν δίκῃ δούλους δεῖ, καὶ μὴ νουθετοῦντας ὡς ἐλευθέρους θρύπτεσθαι ποιεῖν· τὴν δὲ οἰκέτου πρόσρησιν χρὴ σχεδὸν ἐπίταξιν πᾶσαν γίγνεσθαι, μὴ προσπαίζοντας μηδαμῇ μηδαμῶς οἰκέταις, μήτ᾽ οὖν θηλείαις μήτε ἄρρεσιν, ἃ δὴ πρὸς δούλους φιλοῦσι πολλοὶ σφόδρα ἀνοήτως θρύπτοντες χαλεπώτερον ἀπεργάζεσθαι τὸν βίον ἐκείνοις τε ἄρχεσθαι καὶ ἑαυτοῖς ἄρχειν.

---

From Joel Eidsath:

I thought that Bury's translation missed some of the main contrast in this passage. He has to add color like that "merely" because of it. And I don't think "conceited" is quite right. In translation, it comes across as ever so slightly a shade more patronizing than Plato is actually being towards slaves.

"Slaves really have to be *corrected* with punishments and not be made to lose discipline in verbally criticizing them like with freemen. The address to a household servant should be nearly entirely command, not ever bantering with any servant in any way, neither indeed with the females, nor with the males; really, many love this banter with slaves and are very short-sightedly breaking discipline to work out a more difficult life both for those who take orders and also for themselves who give them."

You can see that I took ἐν δίκῃ as "with punishments", because I don't see any sense that masters are being called on to act especially justly. Instead, I try to show κολάζειν ἐν δίκῃ as directly contrasting νουθετεῖν ὡς ἐλευθέρους.

Livy 44.39.2-5 (speech of L. Aemilius Paullus; tr. Alfred C. Schlesinger):

Your ancestors regarded a fortified camp as a haven against all the mischances of an army, whence they might go out to fight, and whither they might find shelter from the storm of battle. Therefore when they had walled in their camp with fortifications, they used also to strengthen it with a powerful garrison, because one who had been stripped of his camp, even though he had won the battle, would be considered the loser. Camp is the shelter of the conqueror, the refuge of the conquered. How many armies meeting with none too favourable fortune in battle, after being driven within their rampart, have in their own good time, sometimes after only a moment, sallied forth and routed the victorious enemy? This abode is a second home for the soldier, its rampart takes the place of city walls and his own tent is the soldier's dwelling and hearthside.

maiores vestri castra munita portum ad omnis casus exercitus ducebant esse, unde ad pugnam exirent, quo iactati tempestate pugnae receptum haberent. ideo, cum munimentis ea saepsissent, praesidio quoque valido firmabant, quod, qui castris exutus erat, etiamsi pugnando acie vicisset, pro victo haberetur. castra sunt victori receptaculum, victo perfugium. quam multi exercitus, quibus minus prospera pugnae fortuna fuit, intra vallum compulsi tempore suo, interdum momento post, eruptione facta victorem hostem pepulerunt? patria altera est militaris haec sedes, vallumque pro moenibus et tentorium suum cuique militi domus ac penates sunt.

Most dictionaries of ancient Greek (at least all that I've consulted, including the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon, p. 1272) define σκιμαλίζω as give someone the finger, i.e. raise the middle finger with palm facing inward as an obscene sign of contempt.

But Max Nelson, "Insulting Middle-Finger Gestures among Ancient Greeks and Romans," Phoenix 71.1/2 (Spring/Summer, 2017) 66-88 (at 67-77), argues convincingly that the primary meaning of σκιμαλίζω is goose, i.e. insert a finger into someone else's anus.

Red-figure vase by the Berlin Painter, at Geneva, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, inv. no. I 529: Note the two figures at the upper right.

Livy 44.34.2-5 (reported speech of L. Aemilius Paullus; tr. Alfred C. Schlesinger):

There should be a single general in an army who foresees and plans what should be done, sometimes by himself, sometimes with the advisers he calls into council. Those who are not called into council should not air their own views publicly or privately. A soldier should concern himself with the following: his body, to keep it as strong and as nimble as possible; the good condition of his weapons; and the readiness of his food-supply for unexpected orders. For the rest, he should realize that the immortal gods and his general are taking care of him. In an army in which the soldiers deliberate and the general is led about by the gossip of the rank and file, conditions are utterly unsound. For my part, I shall do the duty of a general — that is, see to it that you have an opportunity for successful action. You ought not to ask what is going to happen, but when the signal is given, then do your duty as soldiers.

unum imperatorem in exercitu providere et consulere quid agendum sit debere, nunc per se, nunc cum iis, quos advocarit in consilium; qui non sint advocati, eos nec palam nec secreto iactare consilia sua. militem haec tria curare debere, corpus ut quam validissimum et pernicissimum habeat, arma apta, cibum paratum ad subita imperia; cetera scire de se dis immortalibus et imperatori suo curae esse. in quo exercitu milites consultent, imperator rumoribus vulgi circumagatur, ibi nihil salutare esse. se quod sit officium imperatoris provisurum ut bene gerendae rei occasionem iis praebeat: illos nihil quid futurum sit quaerere, ubi datum signum sit, tum militarem navare <operam debere>.

operam debere add. Madvig

Ammianus Marcellinus 22.5.4 (him = the Emperor Julian; tr. Walter Hamilton):

Experience had taught him that no wild beasts are such dangerous enemies to man as Christians are to one another.

Latin text and apparatus from Jacques Fontaine's Budé edition:

nullas infestas hominibus bestias <ut> sunt sibi ferales plerique Christianorum expertus

ut sunt Gel. Rol.: sunt V, Cl. Sey. || ferales W², Lin. Rol.: -libus V, Cl. Sey. || plerique V, Rol.: -isque Gel. Mom. Cl. Sey.

Christopher Lasch (1932-1994), The Culture of Narcissism (1979; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), p. xviii:

Far from regarding it as a useless encumbrance, I see the past as a political and psychological treasury from which we draw the reserves (not necessarily in the form of "lessons") that we need to cope with the future. Our culture's indifference to the past—which easily shades over into active hostility and rejection—furnishes the most telling proof of that culture's bankruptcy. The prevailing attitude, so cheerful and forward-looking on the surface, derives from a narcissistic impoverishment of the psyche and also from an inability to ground our needs in the experience of satisfaction and contentment. Instead of drawing on our own experience, we allow experts to define our needs for us and then wonder why those needs never seem to be satisfied.

Id., p. 5:

To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.

Cf. Plato, Laws 4.721c (tr. Trevor J. Saunders):

Thus mankind is by nature a companion of eternity, and is linked to it, and will be linked to it, for ever. Mankind is immortal because it always leaves later generations behind to preserve its unity and identity for all time: it gets its share of immortality by means of procreation.

γένος οὖν ἀνθρώπων ἐστίν τι συμφυὲς τοῦ παντὸς χρόνου, ὃ διὰ τέλους αὐτῷ συνέπεται καὶ συνέψεται, τούτῳ τῷ τρόπῳ ἀθάνατον ὄν, τῷ παῖδας παίδων καταλειπόμενον, ταὐτὸν καὶ ἓν ὂν ἀεί, γενέσει τῆς ἀθανασίας μετειληφέναι.

Anacreontea 56 (tr. David A. Campbell):

The god who gives the troubled man endurance, the young man courage in love, the dancer beauty in drunkenness, has come down to earth, bringing wine to mortals, a gentle love-charm, a potion to banish grief, the child of the vine. He keeps it shackled in the fruit of the vine-branches so that when men cut the grape-bunches they may all stay healthy — healthy in handsome body, healthy in pleasant mind — till the next year appears.

ὁ τὸν ἐν πόνοις ἀτειρῆ,
νέον ἐν πόθοις ἀταρβῆ,
καλὸν ἐν πότοις χορευτήν
τελέων θεὸς κατῆλθε,
ἁπαλὸν βροτοῖσι φίλτρον,        5
πόθον ἄστονον κομίζων,
γόνον ἀμπέλου, τὸν οἶνον,
πεπεδημένον ὀπώραις
ἐπὶ κλημάτων φυλάττων,
ἵν᾽ ὅταν τέμωσι βότρυν        10
ἄνοσοι μένωσι πάντες,
ἄνοσοι δέμας θεητόν,
ἄνοσοι γλυκύν τε θυμόν
ἐς ἔτους φανέντος ἄλλου.

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, "Die griechische Literatur des Altertums," Die Griechische und Lateinische Literatur und Sprache (Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1905), pp. 1-236 (at 25):

Heutzutage können die Anakreonteen als Schibboleth dienen: wem diese matte Limonade nicht unausstehlich ist, der soll nicht nach dem hellenischen Weine greifen.

I like a glass of lemonade now and then, even weak lemonade.