Laudator Temporis Acti

From BigHominid:

Some of my coworkers ate the taco salad I'd made (originally for my students, as it's the end of the semester and I'd promised to cook for them). Later on, two coworkers complained of nausea, and I freaked. I had also eaten the taco salad, but had suffered no ill effects. I'm hoping I didn't accidentally kill my colleagues, who are all fairly young and deserve the chance to live out their natural lives without fear of suffering a vomitous, diarrhetic demise.

By constant exposure to his own food, BigHominid could be immune from any of its ill effects. Mithridates the Great (120-63 B.C.), king of Pontus, also known as Mithridates VI Eupator Dionysus, gave himself poison in small doses, which supposedly immunized him against larger amounts.

Justin, Epitome 37.2.4-6 (tr. John Selby Watson):

During his boyhood his life was attempted by plots on the part of his guardians, who, mounting him on a restive horse, forced him to ride and hurl the javelin; but when these attempts failed, as his management of the horse was superior to his years, they tried to cut him off by poison. He, however, being on his guard against such treachery, frequently took antidotes, and so fortified himself, by exquisite preventives, against their malice, that when he was an old man, and wished to die by poison, he was unable.

puer tutorum insidias passus est, qui eum fero equo inpositum equitare iacularique cogebant; qui conatus cum eos fefellissent supra aetatem regente equum Mithridate, veneno eum appetivere. quod metuens antidota saepius bibit et ita se adversus insidias, exquisitis tutioribus remediis, stagnavit ut ne volens quidem senex veneno mori potuerit.

Pliny, Natural History 25.3.5-6 (tr. John Bostock and H.T. Riley):

Mithridates, the most powerful monarch of that period, and who was finally conquered by Pompeius, is generally thought to have been a more zealous promoter of discoveries for the benefit of mankind, than any of his predecessors -- a fact evinced not only by many positive proofs, but by universal report as well. It was he who first thought, the proper precautions being duly taken, of drinking poison every day; it being his object, by becoming habituated to it, to neutralize its dangerous effects. This prince was the first discoverer too of the various kinds of antidotes, one of which, indeed, still retains his name; and it is generally supposed that he was the first to employ the blood of the ducks of Pontus as an ingredient in antidotes, from the circumstance that they derive their nutriment from poisons.

namque Mithridates, maximus sua aetate regum, quem debellavit Pompeius, omnium ante se genitorum diligentissimus vita fuisse argumentis, praeterquam fama, intellegitur. uni ei excogitatum cotidie venenum bibere praesumptis remediis, ut consuetudine ipsa innoxium fieret; primo inventa genera antidoti, ex quibus unum etiam nomen eius retinet; illius inventum, sanguinem anatum Ponticarum miscere antidotis, quoniam veneno viverent.

In reality, I'm sure BigHominid's taco salad was healthy as well as delicious. I've seen photos of his culinary accomplishments on his blog, and my mouth watered at the sight. On the other hand, I'd stay away from his corn and peanuts (see the left sidebar of his blog post).

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (Saturday, August 3, 1751):

The Roarer is an enemy rather terrible than dangerous. He has no other qualification for a champion of controversy than a hardened front and strong voice. Having seldom so much desire to confute as to silence, he depends rather upon vociferation than argument, and has very little care to adjust one part of his accusation to another, to preserve decency in his language, or probability in his narratives.

He has always a store of reproachful epithets and contemptuous appellations, ready to be produced as occasion may require, which by constant use he pours out with resistless volubility. If the wealth of a trader is mentioned, he without hesitation devotes him to bankruptcy; if the beauty and elegance of a lady be commended, he wonders how the town can fall in love with rustick deformity; if a new performance of genius happens to be celebrated, he pronounces the writer a hopeless idiot, without knowledge of books or life, and without the understanding by which it must be acquired. His exaggerations are generally without effect upon those whom he compels to hear them; and though it will sometimes happen that the timorous are awed by his violence, and the credulous mistake his confidence for knowledge, yet the opinions which he endeavours to suppress soon recover their former strength, as the trees that bend to the tempest erect themselves again when its force is past.

Gilbert Abbott à Becket, A Holiday Task:

Air--Jullien's Polka

Qui nunc dancere vult modo
Wants to dance in the fashion, oh!
Discere debet -- ought to know,
Kickere floor cum heel et toe
        One, two three,
        Hop with me,
Whirligig, twirligig, rapidè.

Polkam jungere, Virgo, vis,
Will you join the Polka, Miss?
Liberius -- most willingly.
Sic agimus -- then let us try:
        Nunc vide
        Skip with me,
Whirlabout, roundabout, celerè.

Tum laevâ citò, tum dextrâ
First to the left, and then t' other way;
Aspice retrò in vultu,
You look at her, and she looks at you.
        Das palmam,
        Change hands ma'am
Celerè -- run away, just in sham.

Plutarch, Life of Crassus 18.2 (tr. Rex Warner):

Crassus boastfully replied that he would give them his answer in Seleucia, and the eldest of the ambassadors, Vagises, burst out laughing and, pointing to the palm of his upturned hand, said: 'Hair will grow here, Crassus, before you set eyes on Seleucia.'

This is an example of the rhetorical trope known as adynaton (impossibility). Another example is Herodotus 5.92.a.1 (tr. George Rawlinson):

Surely the heaven will soon be below, and the earth above, and men will henceforth live in the sea, and fish take their place upon the dry land, since you, Lacedaemonians, propose to put down free governments in the cities of Greece, and to set up tyrannies in their room.

In English, we say, "When pigs fly..."

E.B. White, Reading Room:

Sadness and languor along the oak tables
Steady the minds of the sitters and readers;
Sleep and despair, and the stealth of hunters,
And (in the man at the end of the row) anger.

Books are the door of escape from the forest,
Books are the wilderness, too, for the scholar;
Walled in the past, drowning in fables,
Out of the weather we sit, steady in languor.

Which are the ones that belong, properly?
Which are the hunters, which the harried?
Break not the hush that surrounds this miracle --
Mind against mind, coupling in splendor --
Step on no twig, disturbing the forest.
Enter the aisles of despair. Sit down and be quiet.

Robert Frost said, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in." I'd say that the reading room of the public library is that place. The reading room was my refuge, the center of my universe, when I was a teenager. When I got kicked out of high school, it's where I spent every day, reading Musical Quarterly and the novels of Knut Hamsun.

Especially in cold weather, it was also the refuge of those you wouldn't ordinarily find in a library. I remember one fellow, dressed in a lumberjack shirt, dirty pants stuffed into his packs. When I walked by him, the smell reminded me of a story my father used to tell, about the time he spent working for an undertaker in a small Missouri town. Once my father was assigned the job of cutting a dead farmer out of his long underwear, into which he had been sewn for the winter. The lumberjack smelled as if he had not changed his underwear all winter, either. He usually had an entire oak table all to himself.

It's been many years since I've been back to that reading room. Probably now it's filled with row upon row of computers. The abomination of desolation in the holy place. Probably the novels of Knut Hamsun and the back issues of the Musical Quarterly have been discarded, too.

I often wish I'd never left the small town where I grew up. It might not be a bad life -- haunting the reading room at the public library, dressed in a red flannel shirt, having an entire oak table all to myself.

E.B. White, Youth and Age:

This is what youth must figure out:
    Girls, love, and living.
    The having, the not having,
    The spending and giving,
And the melancholy time of not knowing.

This is what age must learn about:
    The ABC of dying.
    The going, yet not going,  
    The loving and leaving,
And the unbearable knowing and knowing.

W.B. Yeats, The Leaders of the Crowd:

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

W.B. Yeats wrote a poem entitled A Woman Young and Old, in eleven parts. The last part, subtitled From the 'Antigone', reads as follows:

Overcome - O bitter sweetness,
Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl -
The rich man and his affairs,
The fat flocks and the fields' fatness,
Mariners, rough harvesters;
Overcome Gods upon Parnassus;

Overcome the Empyrean; hurl
Heaven and Earth out of their places,
That in the same calamity
Brother and brother, friend and friend,
Family and family,
City and city may contend,
By that great glory driven wild.

Pray I will and sing I must,
And yet I weep -- Oedipus' child
Descends into the loveless dust.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the closest thing I could find in Sophocles' Antigone was this chorus (781-800, tr. R.C. Jebb):

Love, unconquered in the fight, Love, who makest havoc of wealth, who keepest thy vigil on the soft cheek of a maiden; thou roamest over the sea, and among the homes of dwellers in the wilds; no immortal can escape thee, nor any among men whose life is for a day; and he to whom thou hast come is mad.

The just themselves have their minds warped by thee to wrong, for their ruin: 'tis thou that hast stirred up this present strife of kinsmen; victorious is the love-kindling light from the eyes of the fair bride; it is a power enthroned in sway beside the eternal laws; for there the goddess Aphrodite is working her unconquerable will.

A pendant to A Woman Young and Old is Yeat's A Man Young and Old, also in eleven parts, with the last part also a translation or paraphrase of Sophocles, this time from Oedipus at Colonus 1211-1227:

Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
Even from that delight memory treasures so,
Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,
As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.
In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
The bride is carried to the bridegroom's chamber through torchlight and tumultuous song;
I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

Here is Jebb's translation:

Whoso craves the ampler length of life, not content to desire modest span, him will I judge with no uncertain voice; he cleaves to folly.

For the long days lay up full many things nearer unto grief than joy; but as for thy delights, their place shall know them no more when a man's life hath lapsed beyond the fitting term; and the Deliverer comes at the last to all alike, - when the doom of Hades is suddenly revealed, without marriage-song, or lyre, or dance, - even Death at the last.

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

Yeats also paraphrased another chorus from Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus (668-719):

Come praise Colonus' horses, and come praise
The wine-dark of the wood's intricacies,
The nightingale that deafens daylight there,
If daylight ever visit where,
Unvisited by tempest or by sun,
Immortal ladies tread the ground
Dizzy with harmonious sound,
Semele's lad a gay companion.

And yonder in the gymnasts' garden thrives
The self-sown, self-begotten shape that gives
Athenian intellect its mastery,
Even the grey-leaved olive-tree
Miracle-bred out of the living stone;
Nor accident of peace nor war
Shall wither that old marvel, for
The great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.

Who comes into this country, and has come
Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom,
Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter
And beauty-drunken by the water
Glittering among grey-leaved olive-trees,
Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;
Who finds abounding Cephisus
Has found the loveliest spectacle there is.
Because this country has a pious mind
And so remembers that when all mankind
But trod the road, or splashed about the shore,
Poseidon gave it bit and oar,
Every Colonus lad or lass discourses
Of that oar and of that bit;
Summer and winter, day and night,
Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.

Here, for the sake of comparison, is Jebb's version:

Stranger, in this land of goodly steeds thou hast come to earth's fairest home, even to our white Colonus; where the nightingale, constant guest, trills her clear note in the covert of green glades, dwelling amid the wine-dark ivy and the god's inviolate bowers, rich in berries and fruit, unvisited by sun, unvexed by wind of any storm; where the reveller Dionysus ever walks the ground, companion of the nymphs that nursed him.

And, fed of heavenly dew, the narcissus blooms morn by morn with fair clusters, crown of the Great Goddesses from of yore; and the crocus blooms with golden beam. Nor fail the sleepless founts whence the waters of Cephisus wander, but each day with stainless tide he moveth over the plains of the land's swelling bosom, for the giving of quick increase; nor hath the Muses' quire abhorred this place, nor Aphrodite of the golden rein.

And a thing there is such as I know not by fame on Asian ground, or as ever born in the great Dorian isle of Pelops, - a growth unconquered, self-renewing, a terror to the spears of the foemen, a growth which mightily flourishes in this land, - the grey-leafed olive, nurturer of children. Youth shall not mar it by the ravage of his hand, nor any who dwells with old age; for the sleepless eye of the Morian Zeus beholds it, and the grey-eyed Athena.

And another praise have I to tell for this the city our mother, the gift of a great god, a glory of the land most high; the might of horses, the might of young horses, the might of the sea. For thou, son of Cronus, our lord Poseidon, hast throned her in this pride, since in these roads first thou didst show forth the curb that cures the rage of steeds. And the shapely oar, apt to men's hands, hath a wondrous speed on the brine, following the hundred-footed Nereids.

Sophocles, Antigone 446-457 (tr. R.C. Jebb):

CREON: Now, tell me thou - not in many words, but briefly - knewest thou that an edict had forbidden this?

ANTIGONE: I knew it: could I help it? It was public.

CREON: And thou didst indeed dare to transgress that law?

ANTIGONE: Yes; for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the justice who dwells with the gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of to-day or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth.

A.N. Wilson, Jesus: A Life (1992), chapter V (The Fore-Runner):

He refused to be called 'master'.

Wilson was probably thinking of Matthew 23.5-10:

But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments, And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi. But be not ye called Rabbi [῾Ραββί]: for one is your Master [διδάσκαλος, literally teacher], even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father [πατήρ], which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master [καθηγητής], even Christ.

But while Jesus himself is never addressed in the Gospels as καθηγητής (a word which occurs in the New Testament only in the passage just quoted from Matthew), he is addressed by another word for master (ἐπιστάτης, vocative ἐπιστάτα) six times in Luke (5.5, 8.24, 8.45, 9.33, 9.49, 17.13) without objection.

The normal ways to address Jesus in the Gospels are as lord, Rabbi, teacher, and master. What is rare is to find Jesus addressed by his name alone. Televangelists and other preachers who bawl "Jesus, do this!" and "Jesus, do that!" should realize that this is not an evangelical form of address. For more on this subject, see here.

I had no thoughts on Thanksgiving worth communicating, but others did. I recommend:

1. Clayton Cramer on the history of Thanksgiving.
   
2. Jeff at Quid Nomen Illius? on magazine cover art commemorating the holiday.
   
3. Bill Keezer on reasons to be thankful.
   
4. Dennis Mangan on the gratitude he feels for friendships with fellow bloggers.

Dennis with characteristic modesty says, "I hasten to add that they are all far more educated than me, so it is something of a conceit on my part to think of myself as their peer." To which I reply, "Bosh!" Any regular reader of Mangan's Miscellany can testify to the author's fine writing, sharp intelligence, and stout courage in maintaining and defending controversial opinions which many share but fear to utter.

Besides, education and advanced degrees are no guarantee of intelligence, as this farrago of nonsense by a tenured professor on the subject of Thanksgiving amply demonstrates.

I feel lucky whenever I happen upon a new essay by Theodore Dalrymple, as if I just found a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk. Here are links and samples from recent essays.

Drug Quandaries:

No doubt laws have always been on the books whose purpose is more to promote discretion among those who break their precepts than to enforce strict adherence; but widespread, open, and profitable lawbreaking will before long exert a corrupting effect upon the whole of society.

The Suicide Bombers Among Us:

It need hardly be pointed out that rap music—full of inchoate rage, hatred, and intemperance—does not instill a balanced or subtle understanding of the world in its listeners. It fills and empties the mind at the same time: fills it with debased notions and empties it of critical faculties.

Truth vs. Theory:

One of the merits of this passage—and it is characteristic of Shakespeare that the merits of his writing should be so multiform, combining in equal measure truth, humanity, tolerance, wisdom, understanding, love, irony, and poetry—is its beautiful and accurate description of delirium.

Law Isn't Enough:

I tried to point out some of the cultural meanings of the vogue for tattooing. First, it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.

Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.

And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.

Truth vs. Theory has a misprint: infra dignitatum, which should be infra dignitatem.

Psalms 55.6-8:

Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest. Lo, then would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness. Selah. I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest.

Mendelssohn's setting of this passage ("Oh for the wings of a dove") in his oratorio Elijah is exquisite.

Parallels from Euripides can be found in W.S. Barrett's commentary on Hippolytus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964).

Hippolytus 732-741 (tr. E.P. Coleridge):

O to be nestling 'neath some pathless cavern, there by god's creating hand to grow into a bird amid the wingèd tribes! Away would I soar to Adria's wave-beat shore and to the waters of Eridanus; where a father's hapless daughters in their grief for Phaethon distil into the glooming flood the amber brilliance of their tears.

And to the apple-bearing strand of those minstrels in the west I then would come, where ocean's lord no more to sailors grants a passage o'er the deep dark main, finding there the heaven's holy bound, upheld by Atlas, where water from ambrosial founts wells up beside the couch of Zeus within his halls, and holy earth, the bounteous mother, causes joy to spring in heavenly breasts.

Andromache 861-862 (tr. E.P. Coleridge):

Would I could speed away from Phthia's land on bird's dark pinion!

Ion 796-797 (tr. Robert Potter):

O, through the liquid air that I could fly, far from the land of Greece, ev'n to the stars fix'd in the western sky!

Helen 1478-1494 (tr. E.P. Coleridge), superficially similar, expresses a desire not to escape, but to bring the news of Menelaus' good fortune to Sparta:

Oh! for wings to cleave the air in the track of Libyan cranes, whose serried ranks leave far behind the wintry storm at the shrill summons of some veteran leader, who raises his exultant cry as he wings his way o'er plains that know no rain and yet bear fruitful increase. Ye feathered birds with necks outstretched, comrades of the racing clouds, on! on! till ye reach the Pleiads in their central station and Orion, lord of the night; and as ye settle on Eurotas' banks proclaim the glad tidings that Menelaus has sacked the city of Dardanus, and will soon be home.

Sometimes a choice is presented, either flight into the sky or escape beneath the ground.

Hippolytus 1290-1293 (tr. E.P. Coleridge):

Why dost thou not for very shame hide beneath the dark places of the earth, or change thy human life and soar on wings to escape this tribulation?

Ion 1238-1243 (tr. Robert Potter):

What flight shall save me from this death, borne on swift pinions through the air, sunk to the darksome cave beneath, or mounted on the rapid car?

Medea 1296-1298 (tr. E.P. Coleridge):

For she must hide beneath the earth or soar on wings towards heaven's vault, if she would avoid the vengeance of the royal house.

Heracles 1157-1158 (tr. E.P. Coleridge):

Where can I find release from my sorrow? Shall I take wings or plunge beneath the earth?

Hecuba 1099-1105 (tr. E.P. Coleridge):

Whither can I turn or go? Shall I take wings and soar aloft to the mansions of the sky, where Orion and Sirius dart from their eyes a flash as of fire, or shall I, in my misery, plunge to Hades' murky flood?

Men cannot fly, but they can hide in the depths of the earth. The ancient life of Euripides says that he used to seek solitude in a cave facing the sea on Salamis.

Martial 10.47 (tr. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey):

Martial, the things that do attain
  The happy life be these, I find:
The richesse left, not got with pain;
  The fruitful ground, the quiet mind;
The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;
  No charge of rule, nor governance;
Without disease, the healthful life;
  The household of continuance;
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
  True wisdom join'd with simpleness;
The night dischargèd of all care,
  Where wine the wit may not oppress.
The faithful wife, without debate;
  Such sleeps as may beguile the night:
Contented with thine own estate
  Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.

Vitam quae faciant beatiorem,
iucundissime Martialis, haec sunt:
res non parta labore sed relicta;
non ingratus ager, focus perennis;
lis numquam, toga rara, mens quieta;
vires ingenuae, salubre corpus;
prudens simplicitas, pares amici;
convictus facilis, sine arte mensa;
nox non ebria sed soluta curis;
non tristis torus et tamen pudicus;
somnus qui faciat breves tenebras:
quod sis esse velis nihilque malis;
summum nec metuas diem nec optes.

"The richesse left" (res ... relicta) means an inheritance.

Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (1970; rpt. New York: Dover, 1982), p. 137:

Shortly after the newlyweds' arrival, Emerson and Thoreau together paid a formal call of welcome. It was not a success. Each sat in his chair bolt upright and completely ill at ease. Much of the time they sat in embarrassed silence. Hawthorne occasionally propounded a question which Thoreau would answer in a monosyllable. Emerson tried to start a conversation only to have each sentence sound like a royal pronouncement. Finally, in desperation the guests departed.

Harding, p. 174:

Emerson, delighted to have so many stimulating young men gathered around him, decided in the fall of 1844 to organize a weekly discussion group, which was to meet Monday evenings in his library. Alcott, Hawthorne, Thoreau, George Bradford, the Curtis brothers, and Channing were all invited to attend. The first Monday evening there was an uneasy silence as though, as George Curtis recalls, each were asking, "Who will now proceed to say the finest thing that has ever been said?" Finally Alcott made one of his most orphic sayings. Silence. Thoreau made a brief observation. More silence. Emerson beamed and said nothing. Hawthorne shrunk further into the shadowed corner of the room. Finally a bowl of apples was brought in and each munched in silence. When the end of the long evening came, each disappeared his own way into the darkness. Two more Monday evenings they assembled but with no more success.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implicito (1977), I, 275:

Human nature surrenders more easily to the avoidable than to the unavoidable.

La humanidad se resigna más fácilmente a lo evitable que a lo inevitable.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implicito (1977), I, 275:

Modern political ideologies are false in what they affirm and true in what they deny.

Las ideologias políticas contemporáneas son falsas en lo que afirman y ciertas en lo que niegan.

Song of Roland, 1082-1092, translated by John O'Hagan:

"I deem of neither reproach nor stain.
I have seen the Saracen host of Spain,
Over plain and valley and mountain spread,
And the regions hidden beneath their tread.
Countless the swarm of the foe, and we
A marvellous little company."
Roland answered him, "All the more
My spirit within me burns therefore.
God and his angels of heaven defend
That France through me from her glory bend.
Death were better than fame laid low.
Our Emperor loveth a downright blow."

Translated by Charles Scott Moncrief:

Says Oliver: "In this I see no blame;
I have beheld the Sarrazins of Spain;
Covered with them, the mountains and the vales,
The wastes I saw, and all the farthest plains.
A muster great they've made, this people strange;
We have of men a very little tale."
Answers Rollanz: "My anger is inflamed.
Never, please God His Angels and His Saints,
Never by me shall Frankish valour fail!
Rather I'll die than shame shall me attain.
Therefore strike on, the Emperour's love to gain."

Old French original:

Dist Oliver: "D'iço ne sai jo blasme?
Jo ai veüt les Sarrazins d'Espaigne,
Cuverz en sunt li val e les muntaignes
E li lariz e trestutes les plaignes.
Granz sunt les oz de cele gent estrange;
Nus i avum mult petite cumpaigne."
Respunt Rollant: "Mis talenz en est graigne.
Ne placet Damnedeu ne ses angles
Que ja pur mei perdet sa valur France!
Melz voeill murir que huntage me venget.
Pur ben ferir l'emperere plus nos aimet."

Herodotus 1.5.3-4 (tr. Aubrey de Sélincourt):

I will proceed with my history, telling the story as I go along of small cities no less than of great. Most of those which were great once are small today; and those which in my lifetime have grown to greatness, were small enough in the old days. It makes no odds whether the cities I write of are big or little -- for in this world nobody remains prosperous for long.

Greek Anthology 10.108 (tr. W.R. Paton):

Zeus the king, give us good things whether we pray for them or not, and keep evil things away from us even if we pray for them.

Ζεῦ βασιλεῦ, τὰ μὲν ἐσθλὰ καὶ εὐχομένοις καὶ ἀνεύκτοις
ἄμμι δίδου· τὰ δὲ λυγρὰ καὶ εὐχομένων ἀπερύκοις.