Laudator Temporis Acti

Terence, Adelphoe 855-861 (Demea speaking; tr. John Sargeaunt):

However well a man may have calculated his scheme of life, still circumstances, years, experience, always introduce a new element and teach new lessons. You find that you don't know what you thought you did know, and what you thought of primary importance that in practice you reject. That's what has happened to me. The hard life, which up to now I have lived, now that my race is almost run I renounce. And why? Hard facts have taught me that a man can have no better qualities than mildness and complaisance.

numquam ita quisquam bene subducta ratione ad vitam fuit
quin res, aetas, usus semper aliquid apportet novi,
aliquid moneat, ut illa quae te scisse credas nescias,
et quae tibi putaris prima, in experiundo ut repudies.
quod nunc mi evenit. nam ego vitam duram quam vixi usque adhuc
prope iam excurso spatio omitto. id quam ob rem? re ipsa repperi
facilitate nil esse homini melius neque clementia.

Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 1.21 (on Scopelian; tr. Wilmer Cave Wright, with her note):

During the daytime he did not work much, but he was the most sleepless of men, and hence he used to say: "O Night, thy share of wisdom is greater than that of the other gods!"² and he made her the collaborator in his studies. Indeed it is said that he used to work continuously from evening until dawn.

² Menander, frag. 199 Meineke; Scopelian adapted the line by substituting wisdom for love.

τὸν μεθ᾽ ἡμέραν καιρὸν ἧττον ἐσπούδαζεν, ἀυπνότατος δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων γενόμενος "ὦ νύξ," ἔλεγε "σὺ γὰρ δὴ πλεῖστον σοφίας μετέχεις μέρος θεῶν," ξυνεργὸν δὲ αὐτὴν ἐποιεῖτο τῶν ἑαυτοῦ φροντισμάτων. λέγεται γοῦν καὶ ἐς ὄρθρον ἀποτεῖναι σπουδάζων ἀπὸ ἑσπέρας.

Stendhal (1783-1842), The Life of Henry Brulard, tr. John Sturrock (New York: New York Review Books, 2002), p. 92:

We were toiling away translating Virgil then when I discovered in my father's library a translation of Virgil in four handsomely bound octavo volumes by that scoundrel the abbé Desfontaines, I think it was. I found the volume corresponding to the Georgics and to Book Two which we were massacring (in reality we knew no Latin at all). I hid this blessed volume in the privy, in a cupboard where we used to store the feathers from the capons eaten in the house, and there we would go two or three times during our painful version, to consult that of Desfontaines.

Nous traduisions donc Virgile à grand-peine lorsque je découvris dans la bibliothèque de mon père une traduction de Virgile en quatre volumes in 8° fort bien reliés par ce coquin d'abbé Desfontaines, je crois. Je trouvai le volume correspondant aux Géorgiques et au second livre que nous écorchions (réellement nous ne savions pas du tout le latin). Je cachai ce bienheureux volume aux lieux d'aisance dans une armoire où l'on déposait les plumes des chapons consommés à la maison, et là, deux ou trois fois pendant notre pénible version, nous allions consulter celle de Desfontaines.

Wilmer Cave Wright (1868-1951) translated late Greek texts (Julian, Philostratus, Eunapius) for the Loeb Classical Library. She did not translate Seneca the Elder. Michael Winterbottom (1934-) did. My copy (a gift from a friend) was "First published 1974 / Reprinted 2003".

Homer, Odyssey 10.572-573 (tr. Richmond Lattimore):

                              Whose eyes can follow the movement
of a god passing from place to place, unless the god wishes?

                         τίς ἂν θεὸν οὐκ ἐθέλοντα
ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ἴδοιτ᾽ ἢ ἔνθ᾽ ἢ ἔνθα κιόντα;

Related posts:

• To Believe as They Believed
• How Would You Recognize a God?
• A Private Epiphany
• Epiphanies
  
• More on Epiphanies

Pseudo-Vergil, Culex 79-97 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

Who in a happier age could be more blest [80] than he who, dwelling afar, with pure soul and feelings well tested knows not the greed of wealth, and fears not grim wars or the fatal conflicts of a mighty fleet, nor yet, if so he may but adorn the gods' holy temples with gleaming spoils, or high uplifted may surpass the limits of wealth, [85] wilfully risks his life, confronting savage foes? He reverences a god shaped by pruning-knife, not by artist's skill; he reverences the groves; for him the grasses of the field, mottled with flowers, yield Panchaean incense; his are sweet repose and unsullied pleasure, [90] free, with simple cares. This is his goal, toward this he directs every sense; this is the thought lurking within his heart, that, content with any fare, he may be rich in repose, and in pleasant sleep may enchain his weary frame. O flocks, O Pans, O vales of [95] Hamadryads, delightful in your springs, in whose humble worship the shepherds, vying each for himself with the bard of Ascra, spend with tranquil hearts a care-free life.

The Latin, with my selective apparatus:

quis magis optato queat esse beatior aevo,
quam qui mente procul pura sensuque probando        80
non avidas agnovit opes nec tristia bella
nec funesta timet validae certamina classis
nec, spoliis dum sancta deum fulgentibus ornet
templa vel evectus finem transcendat habendi,
adversum saevis ultro caput hostibus offert?        85
illi falce deus colitur, non arte politus,
ille colit lucos, illi Panchaia tura
floribus agrestes herbae variantibus addunt;
illi dulcis adest requies et pura voluptas,
libera, simplicibus curis; huc imminet, omnis        90
derigit huc sensus, haec cura est subdita cordi,
quolibet ut requie victu contentus abundet,
iucundoque liget languentia corpora somno.
o pecudes, o Panes et o gratissima Tempe
fontis Hamadryadum, quarum non divite cultu        95
aemulus Ascraeo pastor sibi quisque poetae
securam placido traducit pectore vitam!

80 procul codd.: potens Heinsius
84 vel Bembo: nec codd.
95 fontis codd.: frondis Heinsius, hortus Leo, frigus Housman, saltus Allen

I haven't seen Anthony A. Barrett, "The Praise of Country Life in the Culex," La Parola del Passato 25 (1970) 323-327.

Related posts:

• Merry It Is and Quiet
• The Shepherd
• This Lowly Quiet Life

James Thomson (1700-1748), "Winter," lines 322-338, from The Seasons:

Ah! little think the gay licentious proud,
Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround;
They who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth,
And wanton, often cruel, riot waste;
Ah! little think they, while they dance along,
How many feel, this very moment, death,
And all the sad variety of pain.
How many sink in the devouring flood,
Or more devouring flame. How many bleed,
By shameful variance betwixt man and man.
How many pine in want, and dungeon glooms;
Shut from the common air, and common use
Of their own limbs. How many drink the cup
Of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread
Of misery. Sore pierced by wintry winds,
How many shrink into the sordid hut
Of cheerless poverty.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), The Gay Science, Book IV, § 321 (tr. Walter Kaufmann):

Let us stop thinking so much about punishing, reproaching, and improving others!

Lasst uns nicht mehr so viel an Strafen, Tadeln und Bessern denken!

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Daybreak, Book III, § 195 (tr. R.J. Hollingdale):

And the classics! Did we learn anything of that which these same ancients taught their young people? Did we learn to speak or write as they did? Did we practise unceasingly the fencing-art of conversation, dialectics? Did we learn to move as beautifully and proudly as they did, to wrestle, to throw, to box as they did? Did we learn anything of the asceticism practised by all Greek philosophers? Were we trained in a single one of the antique virtues and in the manner in which the ancients practised it?

Und Classicität! Lernten wir Etwas von dem, worin gerade die Alten ihre Jugend erzogen? Lernten wir sprechen wie sie, schreiben wie sie? übten wir uns unablässig in der Fechtkunst des Gesprächs, in der Dialektik? Lernten wir uns schön und stolz bewegen wie sie, ringen, werfen, faustkämpfen wie sie? Lernten wir Etwas von der praktischen Asketik aller griechischen Philosophen? Wurden wir in einer einzigen antiken Tugend geübt und in der Weise, wie die Alten sie übten?

Id.:

Nothing grows clearer to me year by year than that the nature of the Greeks and of antiquity, however simple and universally familiar it may seem to lie before us, is very hard to understand, indeed is hardly accessible at all, and that the facility with which the ancients are usually spoken of is either a piece of frivolity or an inherited arrogance born of thoughtlessness. We are deceived by a similarity of words and concepts: but behind them there always lies concealed a sensation which has to be foreign, incomprehensible or painful to modern sensibility.

Nichts wird mir von Jahr zu Jahr deutlicher, als dass alles griechische und antike Wesen, so schlicht und weltbekannt es vor uns zu liegen scheint, sehr schwer verständlich, ja, kaum zugänglich ist, und dass die übliche Leichtigkeit, mit der von den Alten geredet wird, entweder eine Leichtfertigkeit oder ein alter erblicher Dünkel der Gedankenlosigkeit ist. Die ähnlichen Worte und Begriffe täuschen uns: aber hinter ihnen liegt immer eine Empfindung versteckt, welche dem modernen Empfinden fremd, unverständlich oder peinlich sein müsste.

Ovid, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters. Translated with an Introduction, Notes and Glossary by Peter Green, with a New Foreword (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. x (from the translator's Foreword):

The notion that Ovid was never relegated to Tomis at all, but—in a very real sense an exul ludens—spent his latter years in Rome toying with ever more elaborate exilic topoi (presumably as an excuse for not finishing the Fasti and not revising the Metamorphoses, unless we take Ovid's cessation of work on these cherished projects as part of the fantasy), remains fundamentally bizarre. Just how bizarre can be appreciated when we try to envisage the Realien of such a project and the reaction to it of friends and critics. Ovid's real exile may not have provoked (surviving) contemporary comment, but so ludicrous a piece of monotonous and obsessional playacting (not to mention the abandonment of the two great works on which the poet had set his heart) most certainly would have done so. In the Black Sea Letters (4.3.51-54) Ovid wrote:

If anyone had told me, 'You'll end up by the Euxine
scared of being hit with a shaft from some native's bow,'
my reply would have been,'Take a purge, your brain needs clearing:
try hellebore, you're in a really bad way.'

Just so. I suspect that, confronted by the exile-in-Rome theory, his rejoinder would have been even more scathing, not least to Bingham's recent suggestion that because Ovid's place of relegation was significantly harsher than any other such location known from the first century CE, therefore it must have been fictional. This flight from reality may be, in essence, a recourse for those scholars of this age who, having systematically removed literature further and further from contact with the real world, found the poet's Black Sea banishment, with his agonized reaction to it, an intrusive and ongoing embarrassment, best relegated to the safe toyshop of fantasy.

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), The Faerie Queene, Book VI, Canto IX, Stanzas 24-25:

The time was once, in my first prime of yeares,
  When pride of youth forth pricked my desire,
  That I disdain'd amongst mine equall peares
  To follow sheepe, and shepheards base attire:
  For further fortune then I would inquire.
  And leauing home, to roiall court I sought;
  Where I did sell my selfe for yearely hire,
  And in the Princes gardin daily wrought:
There I beheld such vainenesse, as I neuer thought.

With sight whereof soone cloyd, and long deluded
  With idle hopes, which them doe entertaine,
  After I had ten yeares my selfe excluded
  From natiue home, and spent my youth in vaine,
  I gan my follies to my selfe to plaine,
  And this sweet peace, whose lacke did then appeare.
  Tho backe returning to my sheepe againe,
  I from thenceforth haue learn'd to loue more deare
This lowly quiet life, which I inherite here.

Jonathan Richardson, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton's Paradise Lost (London: James, John, and Paul Knapton, 1734), pp. cxliv-cxlv:

[A] Reader of Milton must be Always upon Duty; he is Surrounded with Sense, it rises in every Line, every Word is to the Purpose; There are no Lazy Intervals, All has been Consider'd, and Demands, and Merits Observation. Even in the Best Writers you Sometimes find Words and Sentences which hang on so Loosely you may Blow 'em off; Milton's are all Substance and Weight; Fewer would not have Serv'd the Turn, and more would have been Superfluous.

His Silence has the Same Effect, not only that he leaves Work for the Imagination when he has Entertain'd it, and Furnish'd it with Noble Materials; but he Expresses himself So Concisely, Employs Words so Sparingly, that whoever will Possess His Ideas must Dig for them, and Oftentimes pretty far below the Surface. If This is call’d Obscurity let it be remembered 'tis Such a One as is Complaisant to the Reader, not Mistrusting his Ability, Care, Diligence, or the Candidness of his Temper; not That Vicious Obscurity which proceeds from a Muddled Inaccurate Head, not Accustomed to Clear, Well Separated and Regularly Order'd Ideas, or from want of Words and Method and Skill to Convey them to Another, from whence Always Arises Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and a Sort of a MoonLight Prospect over a Landscape at Best not Beautiful; whereas if a Good Writer is not Understood 'tis because his Reader is Unacquainted with, or Incapable of the Subject, or will not Submit to do the Duty of a Reader, which is to Attend Carefully to what he Reads.

I owe the reference to Stanley Eugene Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 54.


Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723), Old Scholar

August von Platen (1796-1835), "Ghazal XXV" (tr. Leonard Forster):

One man's pain, one man's wounds are of no importance,
the healthy pays no heed to what torments the sick,
and if this life, that man keeps on inheriting from man, were not short,
there would be nothing more lamentable in the whole wide world.
Nature reproduces herself uniformly, but her death may take a thousand shapes,
the world does not inquire about my goal or your last hour;
and the man who does not willingly submit to this iron fate, which threatens him,
only worries himself into his grave in helpless anger, and in fate's maw he feels nothing;
everyone knows this, but each man likes to forget it every day,
so let me say nothing more of it.
Forget that the world deceives you and that the desire for it only engenders more desire,
let nothing elude your love or escape your knowledge.
Let each man hope that time will give him what it has never given anyone,
for each man tries to be a universal whole, and every man is at bottom nothing at all.

The German:

Es liegt an eines Menschen Schmerz, an eines Menschen Wunde nichts,
Es kehrt an das, was Kranke quält, sich ewig der Gesunde nichts!
Und wäre nicht das Leben kurz, das stets der Mensch vom Menschen erbt,
So gäb's Beklagenswerteres auf diesem weiten Runde nichts!
Einförmig stellt Natur sich her, doch tausendförmig ist ihr Tod,
Es fragt die Welt nach meinem Ziel, nach deiner letzten Stunde nichts;
Und wer sich willig nicht ergiebt dem ehrnen Lose, das ihm dräut,
Der zürnt ins Grab sich rettungslos und fühlt in dessen Schlunde nichts;
Dies wissen Alle, doch vergißt es Jeder gerne jeden Tag,
So komme denn, in diesem Sinn, hinfort aus meinem Munde nichts!
Vergeßt, daß euch die Welt betrügt, und daß ihr Wunsch nur Wünsche zeugt,
Laßt eurer Liebe nichts entgehn, entschlüpfen eurer Kunde nichts!
Es hoffe Jeder, daß die Zeit ihm gebe, was sie Keinem gab,
Denn Jeder sucht ein All zu sein und Jeder ist im Grunde nichts.

More than half of the lines end with the same word—nichts.

I understand the fifth line to mean that we all come into the world the same way, but that there are a thousand different ways to leave it. For another expression of this idea, see Seneca the Elder, Controversiae 7.1.9 (quoting Cestius Pius, tr. Michael Winterbottom):

This is mankind's wretched lot, that we have one way to be born—but many to die: the noose, the sword, a precipice, poison, ship-wreck and a thousand other deaths lie in wait for this wretched life.

haec est condicio miserrima humani generis, quod nascimur uno modo, multis morimur: laqueus, gladius, praeceps locus, venenum, naufragium, mille aliae mortes insidiantur huic miserrimae vitae.

C.E.M. Joad (1891-1953), The Untutored Townsman's Invasion of the Country (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1946), pp. 49-50:

And to my mind, the best time for walking is the winter. Many townsmen know little of the joys of winter walking, and only venture into the country in weather that is fine and warm. Winter, they think, is cold and wet. Cold it may be, and why not, pray? For my part, I like the cold, which brisks me up so that I can keep up with anybody on a cold day. But wet it most certainly is not, at least, not especially wet. It rains far more, I am convinced, in July and August than ever it does in December and January.

In the winter I can go across country. There is no undergrowth in the woods; there are no crops in the fields and no bracken on the slopes. One walks free and unencumbered and, broadly speaking, one walks where one likes.

And how much more one sees! In August the country is muffled under a blanket of dull green. The blanket spoils its shape and blurs its contours. (It is sad to think that August, which is the dullest month of the year, is the only month in which most people see the country.) The winds of winter have stripped the blanket away and laid bare the bones and naked structure of the countryside. And how lovely that structure is! I would give all the tender greens of young spring, all the gorgeous colours of the autumn woods' decay, for the bare boughs of an oak with its tracery of little twigs silhouetted against the dark red of an afternoon sky in December. The sun has just set and over against it, glimpsed through the infinitely lovely pattern work of the twigs, there is an evening star. There is a tang in the air; the earth rings hard under the feet; there will be a frost to-night. So home to a coal fire, with lamplight and curtains drawn; the kettle boiling on the hob, and crumpets for tea. What has summer to offer comparable to these winter delights?

Crates, quoted by Diogenes Laertius 6.86 = Greek Anthology 7.326 (tr. Robin Hard):

This I own, what I have learned and thought, and the Muses'
Solemn precepts, but all my riches are gone like empty smoke.

ταῦτ' ἔχω ὅσσ' ἔμαθον καὶ ἐφρόντισα καὶ μετὰ Μουσῶν
σέμν' ἐδάην· τὰ δὲ πολλὰ καὶ ὄλβια τῦφος ἔμαρψεν.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, letter to Thomas Love Peacock (July 17, 1816):

You must shelter my roofless Penates, dedicate some new temple to them, and perform the functions of a priest in my absence. They are innocent deities, and their worship neither sanguinary nor absurd.

Leave Mammon and Jehovah to those who delight in wickedness and slavery—their altars are stained with blood or polluted with gold, the price of blood. But the shrines of the Penates are good wood fires, or window frames intertwined with creeping plants; their hymns are the purring of kittens, the hissing of kettles; the long talks over the past and dead, the laugh of children, the warm wind of summer filling the quiet house, and the pelting storm of winter struggling in vain for entrance.

Charles C. Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), p. 140:

He got the idea from a scrap of a New York newspaper that bore the state seal, a rising sun with the motto "Excelsior," a word of dubious Latinity as used in his poem, translated as "higher."

Mortimer Collins, Thoughts in My Garden, Vol. I (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1880), pp. 132-133 (August 24, 1871):

The other day I had the pleasure of discussing with an American gentleman the quality of Longfellow's poem 'Excelsior.' I maintained that, beyond the inherent absurdity of any young person's trying to climb the Matterhorn late at night, without guides, and with a banner in his hand instead of an alpenstock, the Latin refrain of the poem could only mean that the youth in question grew taller as he went farther up. Longfellow ought to have written 'Excelsius,' if he meant higher up—as there seems reason to suppose. My American was quite aggrieved, and remarked that the word had been accepted in the United States—that ships were christened 'Excelsior'—that ladies' schools were called 'Excelsior Seminary,' and the like—that there was at least one 'Excelsior Terrace' in every town in the great Republic. 'That,' he said, 'is sound fame'—and I have no doubt Mr. Hepworth Dixon would agree with him. 'But,' I retorted, 'it is unsound grammar.' 'What do we Americans want of Latin grammar?' he asked, indignantly. 'Nothing at all,' was my reply; 'nobody asked you to use Latin, but if you will do it, you might use it accurately.'

D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (1930; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, 2003), p. 189:

A bitter controversy has raged round the young man's cry of "Excelsior!" One school of philologists holds that he meant to cry "Excelsius!" the comparative of the adverb excelsè, but that what with the late hour and the severe Alpine cold and (as Miss Beatrice Lillie would say) what with this and what with that, he confused it with the comparative of the adjective or past participle excelsus. Arrayed in opposition is a school which insists that the banner with a strange device and the young man's odd behaviour altogether were deliberately designed by Longfellow, the seer, to foreshadow the more striking developments of American Publicity, and that "Excelsior!" therefore is to be regarded as perfectly good Big Business Latin.

Longfellow, letter to Vincenzo Cesati (February 5, 1874):

I have had the pleasure of receiving your card with your friendly criticism on the word "Excelsior."

In reply I would say by way of explanation that the device on the banner is not to be interpreted "ascende superius" but "scopus meus excelsior est."

This will make evident why I say "Excelsior" and not "Excelsius."

Longfellow, letter to Allen Page Moor (April 14, 1876):

What you say of the word "Excelsior" is doubtless right from your point of view, but not from mine. You take it for granted that I meant St. Luke's "Amice, ascende superius." No, that is not my meaning, but rather "Scopus meus excelsior est"; and with this interpretation of the broken phrase, the adjective is right, and not the adverb. And I prefer this interpretation to the other, because Excelsior is a much more sonorous ending to the stanza than Excelsius would be.

Longfellow, letter to Curtis Guild (April 18, 1876):

I know that critics say the word should be excelsius, and they are right if they understand the broken phrase in the scriptural sense of Amice, ascende superius. I do not so fill up the sentence but with some such words as Scopus meus excelsior est. Then the adjective is right and not the adverb.

And this interpretation I prefer, because excelsior is a better word for my purpose than excelsius, having a more sonorous termination.

The Latin word for goal used by Longfellow in his explanation, scopus, is rare (borrowed from Greek σκοπός). More usual words are meta, finis, or terminus.

Michael Jacobs (1952-2014), The Factory of Light: Tales from My Andalucian Village (London: John Murray, 2003), p. 126:

Two knells for a woman, three for a man, five for a nun, and six for a priest — that was the code from earlier centuries.

Richard Fortey, Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 150-151:

A new species has to have a new second name—the specific name. Long years of tradition (shortly to be brought to an end) have set up rules about the classical form of species name. It has to be derived from the Greek or Latin root of the appropriate word, so, for example, a beautiful species could be christened pulcher, or even pulcherrima if it was very beautiful indeed (from the Latin). It could not be verypretti, or jolliattractivi (from the vernacular). Rosa pulcherrima would be quite in order. Rosa pulcherrimus would not, because the endings of the genus and species are supposed to agree in gender—it is a matter of euphonious sound, if nothing else. I have always rather liked this adherence to classical roots, if only because it serves to link me with the pioneer taxonomists of the eighteenth century, who wrote in Latin and probably thought in it. This much I share with the great John Ray and the incomparable Carolus Linnaeus (or Karl von Linné, to delatinize him). We are all linked through the great endeavour of classifying the natural world; across more than two hundred years we share the same passion for ordering our knowledge. I actually rather relish trawling through heavy old dictionaries compiled by learned classicists (I have Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary in front of me as I write) to look up the word for, say, “blushing,” or “warty,” to attach it to a species, and I love to read the quotes from Ovid that justify the usage. This adherence to a past classical culture is a bond, not a bondage.

Arsenius, Violetum, ed. Christian Walz (Stuttgart: Loeflund, 1832), p. 209 (ascribed to Diogenes; my translation):

He said that wealth was Fortune's vomit.

Ὁ αὐτὸς εἶπε τὸν πλοῦτον τύχης ἔμετον εἶναι.

Stobaeus 4.31.89, in Ioannis Stobaei Anthologium, Vol. V: Anthologii Libri Quarti Partem Alteram...Continens, ed. Otto Hense (Berlin: Weidmann, 1912), p. 766 (ascribed to Monimus; my translation):

He said that wealth was Fortune's vomit.

Τὸν πλοῦτον εἶπε Τύχης ἔμετον εἶναι.

Gnomologium Vaticanum e Codice Vaticano Graeco 743, ed. Leo Sternbach (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1963), p. 86, no. 216 (ascribed to Demosthenes; my translation):

He said that the wealthy and uneducated man was Fortune's vomit.

Ὁ αὐτὸς τὸν πλούσιον καὶ ἀπαίδευτον ἔφη Τύχης ἔμετον εἶναι.

I owe the references to Diogenes the Cynic, Sayings and Anecdotes with Other Popular Moralists. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Thanks to Ian Jackson for checking the quotation from the Gnomologium Vaticanum.