Laudator Temporis Acti

Aristophanes, Frogs 323-336, 340-353 (tr. Jeffrey Henderson):

Iacchus, dwelling exalted here in your abode,
Iacchus, Iacchus,
come to this meadow to dance
with your reverent followers,
brandishing about your brow
a fruitful, a burgeoning
garland of myrtle, and stamping
with bold foot in our licentious,
fun-loving worship,
that is richly endowed by the Graces, a dance
pure and holy to pious initiates.

[....]

Awaken blazing torches, tossing them in your hands,
Iacchus, Iacchus,
brilliant star of our nighttime rite!
Lo, the meadow's ablaze with flame,
and old men's knees are aleap
as they shed their cares
and the longdrawn seasons of ancient years,
owing to your worship.
Now illuminate with torchlight
and lead forth to blooming meadowland
our dancing youth, o blest one!

Ἴακχ᾿, ὦ πολυτίμητ᾿ ἐν ἕδραις ἐνθάδε ναίων,
Ἴακχ᾿, ὦ Ἴακχε,        325
ἐλθὲ τόνδ᾿ ἀνὰ λειμῶνα χορεύσων
ὁσίους εἰς θιασώτας,
πολύκαρπον μὲν τινάσσων
περὶ κρατὶ σῷ βρύοντα
στέφανον μύρτων, θρασεῖ δ᾿ ἐγκατακρούων      330/1
ποδὶ τὴν ἀκόλαστον
φιλοπαίγμονα τιμήν,
Χαρίτων πλεῖστον ἔχουσαν μέρος, ἁγνήν, ἱερὰν      334/5
ὁσίοις μύσταις χορείαν.

[....]

ἔγειρ᾿ <ὦ> φλογέας λάμπαδας ἐν χερσὶ τινάσσων,      340/1
Ἴακχ᾿, ὦ Ἴακχε,
νυκτέρου τελετῆς φωσφόρος ἀστήρ.
φλέγεται δὴ φλογὶ λειμών·
γόνυ πάλλεται γερόντων·      345
ἀποσείονται δὲ λύπας
χρονίους τ᾿ ἐτῶν παλαιῶν ἐνιαυτοὺς
ἱερᾶς ὑπὸ τιμῆς.
σὺ δὲ λαμπάδι φέγγων      350
προβάδην ἔξαγ᾿ ἐπ᾿ ἀνθηρὸν ἕλειον δάπεδον
χορποιόν, μάκαρ, ἥβαν.

Both Tucker and Dover in their commentaries on 345 cite Euripides, Bacchae 188-189 (the elderly Cadmus to his age-mate Teiresias, as they try out their dance-steps in honor of Dionysus; tr. David Kovacs):

How delightful it is that we forget our age!

ἐπιλελήσμεθ᾽ ἡδέως
γέροντες ὄντες.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, 18 (tr. Walter Kaufmann):

"The earth," he said, "has a skin, and this skin has diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called 'man'."

Die Erde, sagte er, hat eine Haut; und diese Haut hat Krankheiten. Eine dieser Krankheiten heißt zum Beispiel: »Mensch«.

Related posts:

• Beware
• Toadstools by the Wayside
• Homo sapiens

Will Smale, "'It's a hacker's paradise out there'," BBC News (April 30, 2018):

Ask most companies who their founders and key staff are and they happily real off a list. But Darktrace, which was set up in Cambridge, England, in 2013, has to be a bit more discrete.

Screen capture:


Two howlers in two sentences. Correction:

Ask most companies who their founders and key staff are and they happily reel off a list. But Darktrace, which was set up in Cambridge, England, in 2013, has to be a bit more discreet.

Labels: typographical and other errors

Excerpt from a sermon by Martin Luther, tr. Roland H. Bainton in The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West, from the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. S.L. Greenslade (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1963), p. 32:

'When I hear the Word of God speak from above, I believe, though I cannot understand, and do not see how I can get it through my head. I can understand that two and five make seven and no one can prove the contrary. But if God from above says that they make eight, then I must believe against my reason and feeling.'<sup>1

1</sup> W, 37, 402.

The reference is to the Weimarer Ausgabe of Luther's Werke, but Bainton has the wrong page number. It should be 40, not 402. Here is the quotation in German:

Wenn ich das wort höre lauten als von oben herab, so gleube ichs, ob ichs wol nicht kan fassen und nicht verstehen noch inn meinen kopff wil, wie ich das kan fassen, das zwey und funffe sind sieben, mit der vernunfft, und las mich niemand anders weisen. Noch wenn Er oben erab sagte: Nein, sondern es sind achte, so solte ichs gleuben widder meine vernunfft und fülen.

Thanks very much to Joel Eidsath for tracking down the German.

Related post: Two and Two.

Labels: typographical and other errors

George Orwell, "Autobiographical Note," The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters, II: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943 (1968; rpt. Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), pp. 23-24 (at 24):

I like English cookery and English beer, French red wines, Spanish white wines, Indian tea, strong tobacco, coal fires, candlelight and comfortable chairs. I dislike big towns, noise, motor cars, the radio, tinned food, central heating and "modern" furniture.

Aristophanes, Frogs. Edited with an Introduction and Commentary by Kenneth Dover (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 22 (from the Introduction):

Talk is dangerous, because it takes young males away from physical exercise, encourages them to question their fathers' values, and undermines the discipline which a city with its back to the wall needs.<sup>35

35</sup> Each generation tends to believe that its children are the first rebels. Xen. M. i.2.46 is a useful corrective: Perikles, trapped in an argument by the young Alkibiades, says, 'We were clever at that kind of argument when I was young!' Robert Louis Stevenson, as an Edinburgh student in the 1870s, was a founder-member of a society whose declared purpose was to reject all the values of the older generation.

Euripides, Orestes 902-908 (tr. David Kovacs):

                                                           Then there stood up
a man with no check on his tongue, strong in his brashness;
he was an Argive but no Argive, suborned,
relying on noise from the crowd and the obtuse license of his tongue,
persuasive enough to involve them in the future in some misfortune.
When someone of pleasing speech but without sense
persuades the people, it is a great misfortune for the city.

                                   κἀπὶ τῷδ᾿ ἀνίσταται
ἀνήρ τις ἀθυρόγλωσσος, ἰσχύων θράσει·
Ἀργεῖος οὐκ Ἀργεῖος, ἠναγκασμένος,
θορύβῳ τε πίσυνος κἀμαθεῖ παρρησίᾳ,        905
πιθανὸς ἔτ᾿ αὐτοὺς περιβαλεῖν κακῷ τινι.
ὅταν γὰρ ἡδύς τις λόγοις φρονῶν κακῶς
πείθῃ τὸ πλῆθος, τῇ πόλει κακὸν μέγα.

904-913 del. Hartung, seq. Kovacs
906 αὐτοὺς C: ἀστοὺς Valckenaer
907 τις Musgrave: τοῖς C

I especially like ἀθυρόγλωσσος (hapax legomenon, from alpha privative plus θύρα = door plus γλῶσσα = tongue) and ἀμαθεῖ παρρησίᾳ.

---

From Joel Eidsath:

Aristophanes may have been thinking of the first when he has Euripides say (in Frogs) that Aeschylus has an ἀπύλωτον στόμα.

George Orwell, "Notes on the Way," The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters, II: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943 (1968; rpt. Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), pp. 15-18 (at 15):

Human types supposedly extinct for centuries, the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world.

Christopher Allen, "Masterpieces from the shelf," The Australian (April 21, 2018):

I have, for example, a copy of Enoch Powell's edition of Herodotus Book VIII, with a Latin dedication to his colleague Guy Manton written on September 4, 1939, three days after the invasion of Poland and one day after the declaration of war, implying that they might both expect to die in the imminent conflict: moriturus morituro.

Powell, a prodigiously brilliant stud­ent at Cambridge who had become at 25 the youngest professor of Greek to be appointed to the University of Sydney, had immediately ­resigned when war broke out to join the army. In the event, both survived, Powell to pursue a polit­ical career and Manton to become professor of Greek at the University of Otago and later dean of arts at Monash University.

Don Marquis (1878-1937), "Preface to the Plays of Euripides," Prefaces (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1919), pp. 47-53:

We approach a preface to the plays of Euripides with more confidence than we could summon to the critical consideration of any other Greek dramatist. We know more about Euripides. We have read more of him. We once read five lines of him in the original Greek. It is true that we did not know what they were about when we read them, and should not know now; but we read them thirty or forty times and something about the manner in which we read them saved a man's life.

We were fussing around the office of the Atlanta (Ga.) Journal one morning about three o'clock, having just finished writing an editorial which we thought would likely elect Hoke Smith governor, if he were able to live up to it, when we ran across a copy of "Iphigenia in Tauris." It was a new edition, and some trusting publisher had sent it along in the vain hope that it would be noticed. We happened to know the alphabet and could mispronounce a few words, and we turned over the pages wishing that we were able to read the thing—it might give us a chance to elevate our mind, which was suffering from the frightful strain of writing about Hoke Smith in such a way that even Hoke would believe himself a statesman. And thinking how great a man Euripides probably was, for all we knew, and how superior to Hoke Smith he must have been in many ways, we got very hungry.

We went across the street to a little basement lunchroom kept by a fellow named George Stefanopoulous, who always put so much onion in his Hamburger steaks one could not taste the beef. If one poured enough Worcestershire sauce over them so that one could not taste the onions they could be eaten. We carried Euripides with us, and George told us proudly that there is no more difference between the Greek of Euripides and the Greek written and spoken in Athens to-day than between the English of Shakespeare's time and the English of to-day. Inquiry revealed that George's knowledge of Shakespeare was about as extensive as our knowledge of Euripides, and so we cannot vouch for his statement.

Interrupting our course in Euripides—some one or some thing has been interrupting us all our life every time we seemed to be on the point of really getting into the classics—in came a young man named Henry.

Henry roomed with us, and roamed with us at that time, and he was a chronic sufferer from false angina pectoris. This is a disease (unknown to Euripides, but Alcibiades undoubtedly developed it) which has all the effects upon patient and observer of real organic affection of the heart; no one takes it lightly but the doctors. In Henry's case it was aggravated by a fondness for Georgia corn whisky and stuff he ate out of tin cans. This diet did things to his stomach; his stomach kicked to his pneumogastric nerve, and his pneumogastric nerve gripped his heart as with iron claws, squeezed it to the size of a peanut, twisted it like a fountain pen that won't unscrew and convinced it that it would never beat again. The chief difference between real angina and pseudo angina (as far as we can gather from Euripides) is that while both can kill you, the real sort kills you more quickly and kindly.

Henry pulled a spasm of it while George was telling us about Euripides; writhed about, and fell to the floor semi-conscious.

Heat, applied to the heart, and strychnine or aromatic ammonia, if you can get hold of them, are (as Aesculapius would say) "indicated."

So we sent George's assistant to telephone for a doctor and applied a hot Hamburger steak, just out of George's frying pan, to Henry's bosom.

We had frequently helped Henry die with his heart, but this time we were alarmed.

"George," said we, "throw another Hamburger steak into the skillet at once. His pulse has stopped entirely. And this steak is cooling."

Just then Henry's eyes fluttered and he strove to speak. We bent over the sufferer.

"I'm dying," murmured Henry. "Pray! Pray for me!"

The request caught us unaware; we could not remember any formal petition. In desperation we took up Euripides, and, as the second Hamburger steak went hot and sizzling and dripping with grease from George's frying-pan to Henry's heart, we began to chant one of the choruses.

There was something about a Basileon in it, whatever a Basileon may be ...

"Thank you!" muttered Henry ...

The third steak was getting cool, and still George's assistant did not return with a doctor. Henry's chest was cooling, too. His feet and hands were cold. He had no more pulse than a wooden Indian or one of the iron dogs in Hoke Smith's front yard. If we had known a real prayer we would have switched to it from Basileon ...

And just as we were putting Basileon over the jumps for the eighteenth time George Stefanopoulous announced:

"Sir, I have no more Hamburger steak to fry!"

"My God!" said we, "Basileon—Basileon—dig up something else—Basileon—Basileon—fry an egg, George—Basileon—Basileon—and be quick about it! Fry two eggs!"

It was at the sixteenth egg that the physician arrived and complimented us on our treatment.

"Heat," he said, "is the great thing in these cases, and it Is well to remove all apprehension from the patient's mind if possible." "The prayer," said Henry, who had been hypodermicked into something like an appetite for corn whisky and tin cans again, "the prayer is what saved me!"

Euripides did not live as long as Sophocles, but was, on the whole, more widely popular. And one has only to compare the "Iphigenia" of Euripides with the "Agamemnon" of Aeschylus to see their entire dissimilarity. They are products of practically the same period of Hellenic culture ... and yet, what a difference!

Henry married, Hoke Smith in the Senate, Euripides dead—how time flies!

Hoke Smith first ran for governor of Georgia in 1906. If the tale has any truth, perhaps the book was Isaac Flagg's school edition of the play (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1889; rpt. 1891)—cf. line 190.

---

Kevin Muse (per litteras) suggests that a more likely candidate for the book is the edition by William Nickerson Bates (New York: American Book Company, 1904), and I think he's right.

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965), p. 96:

The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love—he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn't help himself. To him it wasn't a means to a lecture or article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself.

---

Thanks very much to Taylor Posey for the following image of a bookseller's illiterate description of Kipling's Kim (click to enlarge):

Pindar, Pythian Odes 9.44–49 (Chiron to Phoebus; tr. Richmond Lattimore):

                                    You know the appointed end
of each thing and the ways they are brought to pass;
and the number of the spring leaves earth blossoms, the number
of the sands in the seas and the rivers,
shaken by the waves and the streaming winds; and things to be
and whence they shall come to pass. All this you know.

                 κύριον ὃς πάντων τέλος
οἶσθα καὶ πάσας κελεύθους·        45
ὅσσα τε χθὼν ἠρινὰ φύλλ᾿ ἀναπέμπει, χὠπόσαι
ἐν θαλάσσᾳ καὶ ποταμοῖς ψάμαθοι
κύμασιν ῥιπαῖς τ᾿ ἀνέμων κλονέονται,
    χὤ τι μέλλει, χὠπόθεν
ἔσσεται, εὖ καθορᾷς.

Homer, Iliad 21.385-390 (tr. A.T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt):

But on the other gods fell strife momentous
and dire, and in different directions the heart in their breasts was blown.
Together then they clashed with a mighty din and the wide earth rang,
and round about great heaven pealed as with a trumpet. And Zeus heard it
where he sat on Olympus, and the heart within him laughed
with joy as he saw the gods joining in strife.

ἐν δ᾿ ἄλλοισι θεοῖσιν ἔρις πέσε βεβριθυῖα        385
ἀργαλέη, δίχα δέ σφιν ἐνὶ φρεσὶ θυμὸς ἄητο.
σὺν δ᾿ ἔπεσον μεγάλῳ πατάγῳ, βράχε δ᾿ εὐρεῖα χθών,
ἀμφὶ δὲ σάλπιγξεν μέγας οὐρανός. ἄιε δὲ Ζεὺς
ἥμενος Οὐλύμπῳ· ἐγέλασσε δέ οἱ φίλον ἦτορ
γηθοσύνῃ, ὅθ᾿ ὁρᾶτο θεοὺς ἔριδι ξυνιόντας.        390

Nicholas Richardson ad loc.:

Zeus's delight in the gods' quarrels shocked later critics. Aristotle (quoted by schol. Ge on 21.390) discussed the apparent contradiction between this and 5.890-1, where Zeus hates Ares because of his perpetual love of strife. Chamaeleon (fr. 18 Wehrli) found Zeus's apparent malevolence inexplicable. Other commentators compared Od. 8.78, where Agamemnon rejoices at the quarrel of Odysseus and Akhilleus, and Menander (fr. 784 K.), where someone says that conflict between members of his household helps to keep the family together! Cf. also Phld. Hom. col. 10.13, p. 39 ed. Olivieri.

One defence offered was that Zeus was pleased because the gods were contending περὶ ἀρετῆς and yet without risk (T 21.389, schol. Ge 21.390). But there is not much sign of ἀρετή in what follows (cf. Griffin, HLD 183). It is the lack of risk which is perhaps the point: 'Zeus appears to have a just appreciation of the whole combat as a parody of serious fighting. It is only here and in 508 that Homer's Zeus ever goes beyond a smile, like the Zeus of the hymn to Hermes (389), who "laughs aloud" at the tricks of his naughty son' (Leaf on 390).

Roger Scruton, News from Somewhere: On Settling (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 61-62:

Like the landscape, the cow is a man-made object. This helpless box-shaped imbecile on tottering legs, with toothless mouth, was bred for human uses, and steadily deprived of the ability to survive on her own. Yet the cow is also an animal, as remote from us in her feelings as any creature of the wild. Living and working with cows you are immersed in the natural order, responding not to reason or emotion but to instinct and need. The cow is the channel through which nature feeds us — literally, by giving us milk, and also morally, by putting us side by side with silent herds in a living landscape.

When people describe what they love in the English countryside, they mention the many small green fields with their meticulous boundaries; the streams that run through pasture, and the copses that crown the hills; sometimes too they remember the shady trees in the parklands, their branches cropped level six feet above the ground. These features of the landscape were made either by cows or for them. Every children's animal book dwells on the cow as the moral centre of the farmyard. Not for nothing does the Koran open with the great Surah of the Cow, describing the reluctant sacrifice of a perfect animal at the command of Moses. Not for nothing do the Hindus venerate this creature, who so perfectly illustrates the interdependence of nature and man.

English Longhorn

George Orwell, "Charles Dickens," The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, I: An Age Like This, 1920-1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), pp. 413-460 (at 448):

The ideal to be striven after, then, appears to be something like this: a hundred thousand pounds, a quaint old house with plenty of ivy on it, a sweetly womanly wife, a horde of children, and no work. Everything is safe, soft, peaceful and, above all, domestic. In the moss-grown churchyard down the road are the graves of the loved ones who passed away before the happy ending happened. The servants are comic and feudal, the children prattle round your feet, the old friends sit at your fireside, talking of past days, there is the endless succession of enormous meals, the cold punch and sherry negus, the feather beds and warming-pans, the Christmas parties with charades and blind man's buff; but nothing ever happens, except the yearly childbirth. The curious thing is that it is a genuinely happy picture, or so Dickens is able to make it appear. The thought of that kind of existence is satisfying to him.

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From Eric Thomson:

By coincidence, just this afternoon I've been reading some similar sentiments on Dickens from Carlyle.

David Alec Wilson, Carlyle at his Zenith (1848-53) (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1927), p. 126:

"Dickens" said Carlyle [to Gavan Duffy], "is a good little fellow, one of the most cheery, innocent natures I have ever encountered, and maintains something of the reporter's independence." But "his theory of life is entirely wrong. He thinks men ought to be buttered up, and the world made soft and accommodating for them, and all sorts of fellows have turkey for Christmas dinner. Commanding and controlling and punishing them he would give up without any misgivings, in order to coax and soothe and delude them into doing right. But it is not in this manner the eternal laws operate but quite otherwise. Dickens has not written anything which will be found of much use in solving the problems of life. But he is worth something; worth a penny to read of an evening before going to bed."

Homer, Iliad 17.567-568 (tr. A.T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt):

So he spoke, and the goddess, flashing-eyed Athene, rejoiced,
since to her first of all the gods he made his prayer.

ὣς φάτο, γήθησεν δὲ θεὰ γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη,
ὅττί ῥά οἱ πάμπρωτα θεῶν ἠρήσατο πάντων.

W.E. Gladstone, Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. II: Olympus: or, The Religion of the Homeric Age (Oxford: At the University Press, 1858), p. 177:

This sentiment may be accounted for in two ways. It may be due to the vulgar vanity of a merely mythological divinity scuffling for precedence. It may be a remnant of the tradition of a wisdom that knew no superior. The former cause would be scarcely suitable even to the deities of invention in Homer. The latter seems wholly in keeping with the character and position of his Minerva.

To my mind, the plain meaning (the former cause) is preferable to Gladstone's allegorizing (the latter cause). See Mark W. Edwards ad loc.:

The comparison editors make to the sentiment of Od. 3.52-3 means little, since there Athene is warmed by Peisistratos' courtesy to the old man she is pretending to be, a different thing from her appreciation here of Menelaos' choice of her godhead to turn to for help in his trouble. The scholia (bT) with more relevance quote Euripides: ἔνεστι γὰρ δὴ κἀν θεῶν γένει τόδε· | τιμώμενοι χαίρουσιν ἀνθρώπων ὕπο (Hipp. 7-8).

W.S. Barrett on Euripides, Hippolytus 7-8:

'The gods too [as well as men] have this trait: they take delight in honour from men.' Similarly Ba. 321 κἀκεῖνοϲ (sc. Dionysos), οἶμαι, τέρπεται τιμώμενοϲ, Al. 53 (Death speaking) τιμαῖϲ κἀμὲ τέρπεϲθαι δόκει.

Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (1983; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 19:

'We ourselves fix boundaries to the sanctuaries and precincts of the gods, so that nobody may cross them unless he be pure; and when we enter we sprinkle ourselves, not as defiling ourselves thereby, but to wash away any pollution we may already have contracted .'³ There is abundant evidence from literature, vase paintings, and excavation for these stoups of lustral water sited at the entrance to sanctuaries, for the purification of those who entered. In inventories, they appear as part of a temple's normal furnishing; Hero, in his Pneumatica, tells of a mechanical device that gave forth lustral water at the drop of a coin.⁴ It is very revealing for Greek conceptions of the sacred that in Athens the agora, civic and political centre of the city, was marked off by similar lustral stoups.

³ Hippoc. Morb. Sacr. 148.55 ff. J., 1.46 G.

⁴ Cf. SIG³ index s.v. περιρραντήριον; Hero, Spir. 21. Full treatment by Ginouvès, 229-310 (my debt to this learned and comprehensive work is very large). For the earliest perirrhanteria see J. Ducat, BCH 88 (1964), 577-606. On their function cf. Lucian, Sacr. 13, Pollux 1.8.

Fuller references:

• René Ginouvès, Balaneutikè. Recherches sur le bain dans l'antiquité grecque (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1962 = Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d'Athènes et de Rome, fasc. 200)
• Jean Ducat, "Périrrhantèria," Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 88.2 (1964) 577-606

Perirrhanterion from Temple of Poseidon (Isthmia Museum)
Greek original of Parker's quotation (Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease 4):

αὐτοί τε ὅρους τοῖσι θεοῖσι τῶν ἱερῶν καὶ τῶν τεμενέων ἀποδείκνυμεν, ὡς ἂν μηδεὶς ὑπερβαίνῃ ἢν μὴ ἁγνεύῃ, ἐσιόντες τε ἡμεῖς περιρραινόμεθα οὐχ ὡς μιαινόμενοι, ἀλλ᾿ εἴ τι καὶ πρότερον ἔχομεν μύσος, τοῦτο ἀφαγνιούμενοι.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, 17 (tr. Walter Kaufmann):

Much about your good people nauseates me; and verily, it is not their evil.

Vieles an euren Guten macht mir Ekel, und wahrlich nicht ihr Böses.

George Orwell, "Marrakech," The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, I: An Age Like This, 1920-1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), pp. 387-393 (at 390):

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), The Decline of the West, Vol. I: Form and Actuality, tr. Charles Frances Atkinson (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1926), pp. pp. 43-44:

To me, the depths and refinement of mathematical and physical theories are a joy; by comparison, the aesthete and the physiologist are fumblers. I would sooner have the fine mind-begotten forms of a fast steamer, a steel structure, a precision-lathe, the subtlety and elegance of many chemical and optical processes, than all the pickings and stealings of present-day "arts and crafts," architecture and painting included. I prefer one Roman aqueduct to all Roman temples and statues. I love the Colosseum and the giant vault of the Palatine, for they display for me to-day in the brown massiveness of their brick construction the real Rome and the grand practical sense of her engineers, but it is a matter of indifference to me whether the empty and pretentious marblery of the Caesars — their rows of statuary, their friezes, their overloaded architraves — is preserved or not. Glance at some reconstruction of the Imperial Fora — do we not find them the true counterpart of a modern International Exhibition, obtrusive, bulky, empty, a boasting in materials and dimensions wholly alien to Periclean Greece and the Rococo alike, but exactly paralleled in the Egyptian modernism that is displayed in the ruins of Rameses II (1300 B.C.) at Luxor and Karnak? It was not for nothing that the genuine Roman despised the Graeculus histrio, the kind of "artist" and the kind of "philosopher" to be found on the soil of Roman Civilization. The time for art and philosophy had passed; they were exhausted, used up, superfluous, and his instinct for the realities of life told him so. One Roman law weighed more than all the lyrics and school-metaphysics of the time together.