Laudator Temporis Acti

Horace, Satires 1.3.73-75 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

One who expects his friend not to be offended by his own warts will pardon the other's pimples. It is but fair that one who craves indulgence for failings should grant it in return.

qui ne tuberibus propriis offendat amicum
postulat, ignoscet verrucis illius: aequum est
peccatis veniam poscentem reddere rursus.

Good advice, which Erasmus (Adagia I vi 91, tr. R.A.B. Mynors) says "has all the look of a proverb." Cf. Seneca, On the Happy Life 27 (tr. John W. Basore): "You look at the pimples of others when you yourselves are covered with a mass of sores" (papulas observatis alienas obsiti plurimis ulceribus).

Horace also mentions a wen (polypus) afflicting someone named Hagna in line 40 of the same satire. As an aside, I sometimes wonder if people know the meaning of wen ("sebaceous cystic tumour under the skin, occurring chiefly on the head," Oxford English Dictionary). How else to explain that there is a hair care product called WEN®? The words wen and hair, in combination, suggest to me a bristle growing out of a warty facial excrescence. Not a pretty picture.

The mysterious Campanian disease mentioned by Horace in the fifth satire of his first book may have been a skin ailment. Here is the passage in context (Satires 1.5.56-64, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

And first Sarmentus: "You, I say, are like a wild horse." We laugh, and Messius himself, " I grant you," and tosses his head. "Oh!" says Sarmentus, "if only the horn had not been cut out of your forehead, what would you do, when you can threaten, thus dehorned?" Now an unsightly scar had disfigured the left side of his bristly brow. With many a joke on his Campanian disease and on his face, he begged him to dance the Cyclops shepherd-dance: he would need neither mask nor tragic buskin.

                       prior Sarmentus: "equi te
esse feri similem dico." ridemus, et ipse
Messius "accipio," caput et movet. "o tua cornu
ni foret exsecto frons," inquit, "quid faceres, cum
sic mutilus minitaris?" at illi foeda cicatrix
saetosam laevi frontem turpaverat oris.
Campanum in morbum, in faciem permulta iocatus,
pastorem saltaret uti Cyclopa rogabat:
nil illi larva aut tragicis opus esse cothurnis.

What the Commentator Cruquianus says ad loc. (my translation) is probably no more than a guess:

For this, as though by nature, is characteristic of almost all inhabitants of Campania, that on the temples of the head big warts grow, like horns. When they have the warts cut off, scars remain on the face, like marks of horns cut out.

hoc enim quasi a natura Campanis fere omnibus inest, ut capitis temporibus magnae verrucae innascantur in modum cornuum, quas cum incidi faciunt, cicatrices in fronte manent, quasi notae exsectorum cornuum.

T.S. Eliot, "Goethe as the Sage," On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1957), pp. 207-227 (at 210):

And antipathy overcome, when it is antipathy to any figure so great as Goethe, is an important liberation from a limitation of one's own mind.

George Santayana, Persons and Places, I.x (The Latin School):

What idle thoughts had been wandering for years through all those empty heads in all those tedious school hours! In the best schools, almost all school-time is wasted. Now and then something is learned that sticks fast; for the rest the boys are given time to grow and are kept from too much mischief.

Erasmus, A Fish Diet, in The Colloquies of Erasmus, tr. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 312-357 (at 329):

FISH-MONGER. On the other hand, you should have confidence in anyone with a doctor's degree.

BUTCHER. But among these I find some more ignorant and more absurd than those who are completely uneducated.

SALSAMENTARIUS. Caeterum quibus contigit titulus doctoris, his oportet fidere.

LANIO. Verum in his quoque comperio nonnullos multo rudiores ac stultiores illis, qui prorsus sunt illiterati.

T.S. Eliot, "Virgil and the Christian World," On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1957), pp. 121-131 (at 125-126):

The fact that every major poetic form employed by Virgil has some precedent in Greek verse, must not be allowed to obscure the originality with which he recreated every form he used. There is I think no precedent for the spirit of the Georgics, and the attitude towards the soil, and the labour of the soil, which is there expressed, is something that we ought to find particularly intelligible now, when urban agglomeration, the flight from the land, the pillage of the earth and the squandering of natural resources are beginning to attract attention. It was the Greeks who taught us the dignity of leisure; it is from them that we inherit the perception that the highest life is the life of contemplation. But this respect for leisure, with the Greeks, was accompanied by a contempt for the banausic occupations. Virgil perceived that agriculture is fundamental to civilization, and he affirmed the dignity of manual labour.

Isaak Levitan, Evening in the Field

Erasmus, The Apotheosis of That Incomparable Worthy, John Reuchlin, in The Colloquies of Erasmus, tr. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 79-86 (at 85):

O sacred spirit, bless languages and those who study them; prosper godly speech; bring to nought evil speech, infected by the poison of hell.

O sancta anima, sis felix linguis, sis felix linguarum cultoribus, faveto linguis sanctis, perdito malas linguas, infectas veneno gehennae.

Lucian, Slander 24 (tr. H.W. Fowler and F.G. Fowler):

I know nothing so characteristic of a warped slavish nature as to bite the lip while you nurse your spite and cultivate your secret hatred, one thing on your heart and another on your tongue, playing with the gay looks of comedy a lamentable sinister tragedy.

οὗ δὴ ἐγὼ οὐδὲν οἶμαι ἀδικώτερον οὐδὲ δουλοπρεπέστερον, ἐνδακόντα τὸ χεῖλος ὑποτρέφειν τὴν χολὴν καὶ τὸ μῖσος ἐν αὑτῷ κατάκλειστον αὔξειν ἕτερα μὲν κεύθοντα ἐνὶ φρεσίν, ἄλλα δὲ λέγοντα καὶ ὑποκρινόμενον ἱλαρῷ καὶ κωμικῷ τῷ προσώπῳ μάλα περιπαθῆ τινα καὶ ἰοῦ γέμουσαν τραγῳδίαν.

Schiller, Our Common Fate (Das gemeinsame Schicksal, tr. Paul Carus):

O, how we struggle and hate! Inclinations, opinions divide us.
  Yet in the meantime thy locks turn into silver like mine.

Siehe, wir hassen, wir streiten, es trennet uns Neigung und Meinung;
  Aber es bleichet indess dir sich die Locke wie mir.

Goethe, Torquato Tasso, II.4 (lines 830-832), tr. Maurice Baring in Have You Anything to Declare? A Note Book with Commentaries (London: William Heinemann Ltd., n.d), p. 180:

We mortals are most wonderfully tried,
Nor could we bear it, were we not vouchsafed
By Nature a divine frivolity.

Wir Menschen werden wunderbar geprüft,
Wir könnten's es nicht ertragen, hätt' uns nicht
Den holden Leichtsinn die Natur verliehn.

George Santayana, Persons and Places, II.xxiv (Official Career at Harvard):

The Faculty meetings were an object-lesson to me in the futility of parliamentary institutions. Those who spoke spoke badly, with imperfect knowledge of the matter in hand, and simply to air their prejudices. The rest hardly listened. If there was a vote, it revealed not the results of the debate, but the previous and settled sentiments of the voters. The uselessness and the poor quality of the whole performance were so evident that it surprised me to see that so many intelligent men—for they were intelligent when doing their special work—should tamely waste so much time in keeping up the farce. But parliamentary institutions have a secret function in the Anglosaxon world, like those important glands that seem useless to a superficial anatomy. There is an illusion of self-government, especially for members of the majority; there is a gregarious sense of safety and reassurance in being backed, or led, or even opposed by crowds of your equals under conventional safeguards and guarantees; and there is solace to the vague mind in letting an anonymous and irresponsible majority be responsible for everything. You grumble but you consent to put up with the course that things happen to take.

George Santayana, Persons and Places, I.ii (My Father):

Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.

M.A. Screech, Erasmus: Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly (London: Penguin Books, © 1980), p. 63 (discussing Erasmus, Praise of Folly 180-181 Kan):

There are several nuances here which are difficult to render in English. There is, for example, the use of the word religio in apparently two different senses, with religiosae res in another. I have done my best to translate what seems to be the appropriate shade of meaning, but I could well be wrong.

This expression (itself Erasmian in tone) of scholarly diffidence struck me when I read it —"I could well be wrong."

I wish I heard it more often, especially in public discourse these days, when I listen to politicians pontificating about subjects far outside their expertise, e.g. theology and science. What a heavy burden, to be so certain about everything!

E.R. Dodds, Euripides. Bacchae. Edited with Introduction and Commentary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. x-xi:

To the Greeks of the classical age Dionysus was not solely, or even mainly, the god of wine. Plutarch tells us as much, confirming it with a quotation from Pindar,¹ and the god's cult titles confirm it also: he is Δενδρίτης or Ἔνδενδρος, the Power in the tree; he is Ἄνθιος the blossom-bringer, Κάρπιος the fruit-bringer, Φλεύς or Φλέως, the abundance of life. His domain is, in Plutarch's words, the whole of the ὑγρὰ φύσις—not only the liquid fire in the grape, but the sap thrusting in a young tree, the blood pounding in the veins of a young animal, all the mysterious tides that ebb and flow in the life of nature. Our oldest witness, Homer, nowhere explicitly refers to him as a wine god;² and it may be that his association with certain wild plants, such as the fir and the ivy, and with certain wild animals, is in fact older than his association with the vine. It was the Alexandrines, and above all the Romans—with their tidy functionalism and their cheerful obtuseness in all matters of the spirit—who compartmentalized Dionysus as 'jolly Bacchus' the wine-god with his riotous crew of nymphs and satyrs.³ As such he was taken over by Renaissance painters and poets; and it was they in turn who shaped the image in which the modern world pictures him.

¹ Is. et os. 35, 365 A, quoting Pindar, fr. 140 Bowra.

² This may of course be accidental; but it odd, as Farnell says, that Maron, though a Thracian and a vine-rgower [sic, read vine-grower], is represented as a priest not of Dionysus but of Apollo.

³ Horace is an exception: Odes, 2.19 and 3.25 show a deeper understanding of the god's true nature.

Id., pp. 80-81 (on lines 109-110 καὶ καταβακχιοῦσθε δρυὸς / ἢ ἐλάτας κλάδοισι, i.e. 'and consecrate yourselves with twigs of oak or fir'):

For Dion. as Lord of Trees cf. his cult titles Ἔνδενδρος (in Boeotia, Hesych. s.v.), Δενδρεύς (Studemund, Anecd. Varia, i.268), Δενδρίτης (Plut. Q. Conv. 5.3.1, 675 F), and Jeanmaire, Dionysos, 12 ff. There were in Hellenistic times δενδροφορίαι in his honour (Strabo 10.3.10, Artemidorus, p. 141.13 Hercher), though these may be due in part to the influence of the Attis-cult. Oak and fir are the typical trees of Cithaeron (Sandys), as of many Greek forests; but there may be ritual reasons for their frequent appearance in the Bacchae (oak 685, 703, 1103; fir 684, 1061, 1098). A θίασος of Dionysus Δρυοφόρος existed at Philippi close to Mt. Pangaeum, one of the original homes of the cult (Bull. Corr. Hell. 1900, pp. 322 f.); on a fifth-century coin of Abdera we see the god carrying a fir-tree in his hand (Münzer-Strack, Münzen von Thrakien, I.i, pl. 2, No. 4); and the fir-tree on which Pentheus sat was a holy tree (1058 n.).

Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 35 = Moralia 365 A-B (tr. Frank Cole Babbitt):

To show that the Greeks regard Dionysus as the lord and master not only of wine, but of the nature of every sort of moisture, it is enough that Pindar be our witness, when he says

May gladsome Dionysus swell the fruit upon the trees,
The hallowed splendour of harvest time.

For this reason all who reverence Osiris are prohibited from destroying a cultivated tree or blocking up a spring of water.

ὅτι δ' οὐ μόνον τοῦ οἴνου Διόνυσον, ἀλλὰ καὶ πάσης ὑγρᾶς φύσεως Ἕλληνες ἡγοῦνται κύριον καὶ ἀρχηγόν, ἀρκεῖ Πίνδαρος μάρτυς εἶναι λέγων

δενδρέων δὲ νομὸν Διόνυσος πολυγαθὴς
αὐξάνοι, ἁγνὸν φέγγος ὀπώρας.

διὸ καὶ τοῖς τὸν Ὄσιριν σεβομένοις ἀπαγορεύεται δένδρον ἥμερον ἀπολλύναι καὶ πηγὴν ὕδατος ἐμφράττειν.

Plutarch, Convivial Questions 5.3.1 = Moralia 675 F (tr. Paul A. Clement and Herbert B. Hoffleit):

Practically all Greeks sacrifice to Poseidon the Life-Giver and to Dionysus the Tree-god.

καὶ Ποσειδῶνί γε Φυταλμίῳ Διονύσῳ δὲ Δενδρίτῃ πάντες ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν Ἕλληνες.

See also Valdis Leinieks, The City of Dionysos: A Study of Euripides Bakchai (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1996), pp. 179-180.

Related post: Arboreal Epithets of Greek Gods.

James Willis, Latin Textual Criticism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 3-4:

Mr. Rackham's Pliny is vitiated in both text and translation by ignorance of (inter alia) ancient astronomy: 2,91 in austrino polo means 'in the southern sky,' not 'at the south pole,' which none of the ancients ever saw; 2,92 occasura caeli parte is not 'the western sky,' but 'that part of the celestial sphere in which are the stars that set,' being contrasted with those which are sub ipso septentrione (91) and never set; 2,97 defectus means 'eclipses,' 'occultations,' not 'settings'; 2,178 idem a Rhodo absconditur refers to Septentrio, not Canopus.

H. Rackham's edition and translation of Pliny's Natural History, Preface and Books 1-2, first appeared in 1938 as a volume in the Loeb Classical Library. For a 1991 reprinting, the series editor, G.P. Goold, added a "Bibliographical Note," but apparently no other changes were made. The errors mentioned by Willis can still be found in the translation.

Willis and Goold were classmates and friends. On p. x of Latin Textual Criticism, Willis wrote:

Acknowledgments are always tedious and seldom sincere. I should do very wrongly, however, if I did not say, and with emphasis, that nothing has helped me more towards an understanding of textual criticism than my many evenings of discussion with Professor G.P. Goold, who so often led my halting footsteps, after long and patient exposition, to some emendation made by Housman while shaving or by Bentley in his sleep.

Goold also remembered those evenings with Willis, in his "Noctes Propertianae," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 71 (1967) 59-106 (at 80, 105-106), but a bit differently, with Willis as the leader, Goold as the follower. Recalling one occasion on which Willis corrected his interpretation of a passage from Ovid, Goold wrote:

With the emotions of one who has expected a call girl and opened the door to a nun, I weakly heard him describe my rendering as inaccurate, my perception as clouded, and my palaeographical explanation as pure babble from the padded cell.

Thanks to the benefactor who recently gave me all ten volumes of Pliny's Natural History in the Loeb Classical Library series. With these books I will spend many pleasant "noctes Plinianae."

George Santayana, Persons and Places, I.xi (The Church of the Immaculate Conception):

If later I was taken to some Unitarian church, it didn't matter. It seemed a little ridiculous, all those good people in their Sunday clothes, so demure, so conscious of one another, not needing in the least to pray or to be prayed for, nor inclined to sing, but liking to flock together once a week, as people in Spain flock to the paseo, and glad to hear a sermon like the leading article in some superior newspaper, calculated to confirm the conviction already in them that their bourgeois virtues were quite sufficient and that perhaps in time poor backward races and nations might be led to acquire them.

....

It is not difficult for a man with a ready tongue and a good memory to pluck moral and theological arguments from the patristic garden. St. Augustine alone will furnish flowers for a thousand good sermons. And this practice of repeating ancient authorities cannot be taxed with laziness. More diligence and more conscience are shown in ransacking the Fathers than in ventilating one's casual notions; and Catholic preachers at least are expected to preach the Gospel, and not some message new to the age.

Thanks to Eric Thomson for what follows.

---

Composer of the Week on BBC Radio 3 last week was Sir Hubert Parry, never a great favourite of mine but there are few in Britain who don't know or haven't sung his setting of Blake's Jerusalem. I doubt whether either Blake or Parry was thinking of 'dark Satanic' saw-mills, but the idea might have occurred to Parry in December 1917 when the Government laid claim to almost the last of the timber on his Gloucestershire family estate. A letter to his friend Harry Plunket Greene is quoted in Charles Larcom Graves, Hubert Parry: His Life and Works, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1926) p. 86:

I have just arrived here after a harrowing three days at Highnam ... the situation is heart-rending. Government instructions to cut down a large number of the finest elms in the place! I had to go round this week to look at them all. Glorious, old, noble trees that have taken centuries to grow—and doomed irrevocably. They are going to clear the whole of the chestnut wood in the next fortnight—shave it off clean. The larch wood by the brickfields is to be cleared—and they threaten to take all the ash in the woods, as they say they are too good and straight. The place looks bald already. What it will be when they have accomplished all their fell designs is too tragic to think of.

By chance I recently came across the same adjective 'heart-rending' used in an almost identical context, but this time it is December 1940 and the estate, near Dunbar, belongs to The Earl of Haddington:

Binning Wood was taken over under emergency powers and the loggers moved in. Down crashed, day after day, week after week, 4500 oak trees, 2300 beech trees, 690 sycamores, the same number of ash trees, 640 birches, alder, gean and other hardwoods, almost a hundred lime and horse chestnut trees, 82 hornbeams, 39 sweet chestnuts, and around a thousand conifers, including the esteemed Scots pines. In the end nothing was left of the Earl of Haddington's fine wood but ten thousand stumps. It was heartrending — though he may have taken consolation on hearing that some of the best beech went to make Mosquito fighter-bombers in the war against Hitler.

Binning wood was not an isolated case. Once again Armageddon decimated some of the best woodlands on the home front, and this time the casualties were even heavier than in World War One. On the densely wooded Seafield Estates in the northeast three times as much timber was cut in the second war as in the first, when the toll had been bad enough. On Deeside the Great Tanar estate suffered serious loss. Rothiemurchus on Speyside, savaged before, was hit again. The Black Wood of Rannoch, spared at the eleventh hour in 1918, fell victim in the 1940s when most of the best trees were taken out. Shortly after the war, the naturalist Frank Fraser Darling was moved to declare 'our land is so devastated that we might as well have been the battlefield.'

John Fowler, Landscapes and Lives. The Scottish Forest Through the Ages (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002) pp. 183-4.

Labels: arboricide

George Santayana, Persons and Places, I.xiii (The Harvard Yard):

Electricity, vacuum cleaning, and ladies' kitchens render life simpler and more decent; but central heating, in banishing fireplaces, except as an occasional luxury or affectation, has helped to destroy the charm of home. I don't mean merely the ancient and rustic sanctity of the hearth; I mean also the home-comforts of the modern bachelor. An obligatory fire was a useful and blessed thing. In northern climates it made the poetry of indoor life. Round it you sat, into it you looked, by it you read, in it you made a holocaust of impertinent letters and rejected poems. On the hob your kettle simmered, and the little leaping flames cheered your heart and ventilated your den. Your fire absolved you from half your dependence on restaurants, cafés, and servants; it also had the moralising function of giving you a duty in life from which any distraction brought instant punishment, and taught you the feminine virtues of nurse, cook, and Vestal virgin. Sometimes, I confess, these cares became annoying; the fire kept you company, but like all company it sometimes interrupted better things. At its best, a wood fire is the most glorious; but unless the logs are of baronial dimensions, it dies down too quickly, the reader or the writer is never at peace; while a hard-coal fire (which also sometimes goes out) sleeps like a prisoner behind its iron bars, without the liveliness of varied flames. The ideal fire is soft coal, such as I had in England and also in America when I chose; like true beauty in woman, it combines brilliancy with lastingness. I congratulate myself that in the Harvard Yard I was never heated invisibly and willy-nilly by public prescription, but always by my own cheerful fire, that made solitude genial and brought many a genial friend who loved cheerfulness to sit by it with me, not rejecting in addition a drink and a little poetry, no tedious epic, but perhaps one of Shakespeare's sonnets or an ode of Keats, something fit to inspire conversation and not to replace it.

Anacreon 101 Diehl = Greek Anthology 7.160, tr. Guy Davenport, Thasos and Ohio: Poems and Translations 1950-1980 (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), p. 69:

He was a soldier in the wars.
Timokritos. This is his grave.
Sometimes blood-drinking Ares kills
Not the cowards but the brave.

Greek has words for blood-drinking and blood-thirsty, e.g. αἱματοπώτης (alt. αἱμηπότης, αἱμοπότης, αἱμοπώτης, αἱμωπός), αἱματορρόφος, αἱμόδιψος, but after a quick search I don't see any of these as epithets for Ares in C.F.H. Bruchmann, Epitheta Deorum Quae Apud Poetas Graecos Leguntur (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1893), pp. 36-43. Ares of course does love blood—he is φιλαίματος in another epitaph attributed to Anacreon (100 Diehl = Greek Anthology 7.226, line 3). But Davenport's "blood-drinking" doesn't appear in the Greek of Timocritus' epitaph:

Καρτερὸς ἐν πολέμοις Τιμόκριτος, οὗ τόδε σᾶμα·
  Ἄρης δ᾽ οὐκ ἀγαθῶν φείδεται, ἀλλὰ κακῶν.

C.M. Bowra, Early Greek Elegists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), p. 181, translates the epitaph as follows:

Of brave Timocritus this is the grave:
The War-God spares the coward, not the brave.

Another translation, by Andrew Robert Burn, The Lyric Age of Greece (1960; rpt. Minerva Press, 1968), p. 316:

Good soldier was Timokritos, whose grave
This is. War spares the coward, not the brave.

See D.L. Page, Further Greek Epigrams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 135, who says:

Weber and Friedländer ask why the epigram should be taken away from Anacreon; the proper question was, why should it be given to him? The only witness, the Anthology, is notoriously unreliable in such a case. If the epigram was inscriptional, it was unsigned; and the ascription to Anacreon is presumably the product of guesswork; if it is a pseudo-epitaph, merely a literary exercise (for the sake of the neat pentameter), it is certainly much later than the age of Anacreon.

It is commonly assumed (e.g. by Bergk PLG 3.281, Peek 888, Wilamowitz TG 36 n. 4, Beckby 2.578) that the epigram is an inscriptional epitaph; if it is, it is probably much later than the age of Anacreon, for, as Friedländer observes (Epigrammata p. 69), 'the sententious pentameter has no counterpart on the tombstones, at least in the archaic period'; there is indeed nothing like it in the fifth century.

On the sentiment expressed in the pentameter, cf. Aeschylus fragment 100 (tr. Herbert Weir Smyth):

But Ares ever loves to pluck all the fairest flowers of an armed host.

                                                ἀλλ᾽ Ἄρης φιλεῖ
ἀεὶ τὰ λῷστα πάντ᾽ ἀπανθίζειν στρατοῦ.

Sophocles, Philoctetes 436-437 (tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones):

War never willingly destroys a villain, but always noble men.

                           πόλεμος οὐδέν᾽ ἄνδρ᾽ ἑκὼν
αἱρεῖ πονηρόν, ἀλλὰ τοὺς χρηστοὺς ἀεί

Sophocles, fragment 724 (tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones):

My son, Ares loves to kill the noble and valiant; and they who are brave with their tongues escape destructive forces and keep out of trouble; for Ares cuts down nothing that belongs to evil.

τοὺς εὐγενεῖς γὰρ κἀγαθούς, ὦ παῖ, φιλεῖ
Ἄρης ἐναίρειν· οἱ δὲ τῇ γλώσσῃ θρασεῖς
φεύγοντες ἄτας ἐκτός εἰσι τῶν κακῶν·
Ἄρης γὰρ οὐδὲν τῶν κακῶν λωτίζεται.

Euripides, fragment 728 (tr. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp):

War does not usually achieve all its aims, but rejoices in the deaths of brave young men and spurns cowardly ones. This is an affliction for the city, but glorious for those that have died.

φιλεῖ τοι πόλεμος οὐ πάντ' εὐτυχεῖν,
ἐσθλῶν δὲ χαίρει πτώμασιν νεανιῶν,
κακοὺς δὲ μισεῖ. τῇ πόλει μὲν οὖν νόσος
τόδ᾽ ἐστί, τοῖς δὲ κατθανοῦσιν εὐκλεές.

Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters, lines 153-173:

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurled
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.
But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish and they suffer—some, 'tis whisper’d—down in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, tr. Walter Kaufmann), Vorspiel, § 3:

Undaunted

Where you stand, dig deep and pry!
Down there is the well.
Let the obscurantists cry:
"Down there's only—hell!"

In German:

Unverzagt

Wo du stehst, grab tief hinein!
Drunten ist die Quelle!
Lass die dunklen Männer schrein:
"Stets ist drunten—Hölle!"