Laudator Temporis Acti

Yes, better to die doing than not doing.

δρῶντας γὰρ ἢ μὴ δρῶντας ἥδιον θανεῖν.

How then shall we die so as to win glory?

πῶς οὖν θανούμεθ᾿ ὥστε καὶ δόξαν λαβεῖν;

Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

Plutôt mourir debout que de vivre à genoux.

The Araceli, we may note, housed until the Counter Reformation another conspicuous example of this kind of cult—a statue base on which the marks of the feet of the statue were taken to be the footprints of the Archangel Michael and much venerated. The statue base in question was in fact dedicated to the goddess Isis.

Let us throw off this clothing, my beauty, and join naked limbs with naked limbs entwined. Let nothing be between us; even that thin tissue you wear seems like the wall of Semiramis to me. Let our breasts and our lips be linked—the rest must be veiled in silence: I hate a babbling tongue.

Ῥίψωμεν, χαρίεσσα, τὰ φάρεα, γυμνὰ δὲ γυμνοῖς
    ἐμπελάσῃ γυίοις γυῖα περιπλοκάδην·
μηδὲν ἔοι τὸ μεταξύ· Σεμιράμιδος γὰρ ἐκεῖνο
    τεῖχος ἐμοὶ δοκέει λεπτὸν ὕφασμα σέθεν.
στήθεα δ᾽ ἐζεύχθω τά τε χείλεα· τἄλλα δὲ σιγῇ
    κρυπτέον· ἐχθαίρω τὴν ἀθυροστομίην.

[2] The Plataeans undertook to make funeral offerings annually for the Hellenes who had fallen in battle and lay buried there. And this they do yet unto this day, after the following manner. On the sixteenth of the month Maimacterion (which is the Boeotian Alalcomenius), they celebrate a procession. [3] This is led forth at break of day by a trumpeter sounding the signal for battle; waggons follow filled with myrtle-wreaths, then comes a black bull, then free-born youths carrying libations of wine and milk in jars, and pitchers of oil and myrrh (no slave may put hand to any part of that ministration, because the men thus honoured died for freedom); [4] and following all, the chief magistrate of Plataea, who may not at other times touch iron or put on any other raiment than white, at this time is robed in a purple tunic, carries on high a water-jar from the city's archive chamber, and proceeds, sword in hand, through the midst of the city to the graves; [5] there he takes water from the sacred spring, washes off with his own hands the gravestones, and anoints them with myrrh; then he slaughters the bull at the funeral pyre, and, with prayers to Zeus and Hermes Terrestrial, summons the brave men who died for Hellas to come to the banquet and its copious draughts of blood; next he mixes a mixer of wine, drinks, and then pours a libation from it, saying these words: "I drink to the men who died for the freedom of the Hellenes." These rites, I say, are observed by the Plataeans down to this very day.

[2] οἱ Πλαταιεῖς ὑπεδέξαντο τοῖς πεσοῦσι καὶ κειμένοις αὐτόθι τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἐναγίζειν καθ᾿ ἕκαστον ἐνιαυτόν. καὶ τοῦτο μέχρι νῦν δρῶσι τόνδε τὸν τρόπον· τοῦ Μαιμακτηριῶνος μηνός, ὅς ἐστι παρὰ Βοιωτοῖς Ἀλαλκομένιος, τῇ ἕκτῃ ἐπὶ δέκα πέμπουσι πομπήν, [3] ἧς προηγεῖται μὲν ἅμ᾿ ἡμέρᾳ σαλπιγκτὴς ἐγκελευόμενος τὸ πολεμικόν, ἕπονται δ᾿ ἅμαξαι μυρρίνης μεσταὶ καὶ στεφανωμάτων καὶ μέλας ταῦρος καὶ χοὰς οἴνου καὶ γάλακτος ἐν ἀμφορεῦσιν ἐλαίου τε καὶ μύρου κρωσσοὺς νεανίσκοι κομίζοντες ἐλεύθεροι· δούλῳ γὰρ οὐδενὸς ἔξεστι τῶν περὶ τὴν διακονίαν ἐκείνην προσάψασθαι διὰ τὸ τοὺς ἄνδρας ἀποθανεῖν ὑπὲρ ἐλευθερίας· [4] ἐπὶ πᾶσι δὲ τῶν Πλαταιέων ὁ ἄρχων, ᾧ τὸν ἄλλον χρόνον οὔτε σιδήρου θιγεῖν ἔξεστιν οὔθ᾿ ἑτέραν ἐσθῆτα πλὴν λευκῆς ἀναλαβεῖν, τότε χιτῶνα φοινικοῦν ἐνδεδυκὼς ἀράμενός τε ὑδρίαν ἀπὸ τοῦ γραμματοφυλακίου ξιφήρης ἐπὶ τοὺς τάφους προάγει διὰ μέσης τῆς πόλεως. [5] εἶτα λαβὼν ὕδωρ ἀπὸ τῆς κρήνης αὐτὸς ἀπολούει τε τὰς στήλας καὶ μύρῳ χρίει, καὶ τὸν ταῦρον εἰς τὴν πυρὰν σφάξας καὶ κατευξάμενος Διΐ καὶ Ἑρμῇ χθονίῳ παρακαλεῖ τοὺς ἀγαθοὺς ἄνδρας τοὺς ὑπὲρ τῆς Ἑλλάδος ἀποθανόντας ἐπὶ τὸ δεῖπνον καὶ τὴν αἱμοκουρίαν. ἔπειτα κρατῆρα κεράσας οἴνου καὶ χεάμενος ἐπιλέγει· "Προπίνω τοῖς ἀνδράσι τοῖς ὑπὲρ τῆς ἐλευθερίας τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἀποθανοῦσι." ταῦτα μὲν οὖν ἔτι καὶ νῦν διαφυλάττουσιν οἱ Πλαταεῖς.

Sitting in one's study, it was easy enough to wax eloquent, or at any rate to wax emphatic, on the spirit of the old contests, the spirit that had flown never to return, and it was not surprising that a student should see naught in the projected games but the every-day desire for the mastery that stirs every man child born into the world, —a desire which is by no means a religious feeling. Yet the consecration was there. Even in the old times when Zeus was the patron deity, the contestant strove for his people, his canton, his city; and while the poet of the games gives due honor to the god of the games, he does not forget the claims of the land of the victor. This is the consecration that has remained after the other has passed away, and the cry "Zíto i Ellás!" (Long live Greece!) hallowed the new Olympic games, and gave them the sacredness that they would otherwise have lacked.

As I heard that cry on every hand caught up and thundered forth in the great torchlight procession even by those who knew no other Greek, I could not keep from reflecting on the disadvantage under which we Americans labor in the matter of a cry. "Hurrah for America" is too wide a call. "Hurrah for the United States" is too formal. Do people hurrah for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland? In fact, apart from campaign cries, in which the candidates figure, the real enthusiasm of American devotion is perhaps to be heard only in the college yell. The college yell is really a remarkable return to an early form of worship, and deserves closer study than it has received at the hands of anthropologists; but I must confess that the articulate Greek cry appealed to me more forcibly, though the Greeks themselves, recognizing the Olympic spirit of the American yell, did their best to imitate it as a return for the ""Zíto i Ellás," which the foreigners were so quick to catch.

This fly is pestering me, and I kill it. That branch is scratching me, I break it. Crimes, in their spontaneous conception, are like these gestures and that is why men's minds are often stocked with images of crimes about most of which they don't even stop to think, though they get a furtive pleasure out of them.

Every ideal, every desire always involves, just below the surface, a number of exterminations and violences done to others—so much so that if a man wanted to rid himself of them entirely, he would have to kill himself.

Religions, nations, sects, political parties—all are like this. Every political program visualizes, first and foremost, mass shootings; then universal happiness.

Here we have a normal activity of the mind, which translates every desire and need (whether personal or relating to the world at large) into an image in which it sees them gratified; and, among the mental pictures of acts or events that would give satisfaction, includes the executions they inevitably call for.

---

Cette mouche m'irrite, je la supprime. Cette branche me pique, je la brise. Les crimes ne sont pas autre chose, dans leur conception spontanée : Les hommes sont facilement plein d'images de crimes, dont la plupart même ne les font pas réflechir, quoique distraitement ils s'y plaisent.

Tout idéal, tout désir implique toujours, à une faible profondeur, nombre de suppressions et de violations d'autre êtres, tellement que celui qui voudrait s'en épurer tout à fait, se supprimerait soi-même.

Religions, nations, sectes, partis, tous sont ainsi. Toute politique voit avant tout des fusillades massives, puis, le bonheur universel...

—C'est là une activité ordinaire de l'esprit, qui traduit chaque besoin ou désir dans une image où il les satisfait suivant le monde et le corps, et parmi toutes ces représentations des actes ou des événements qui procureraient la satisfactions, les éxecutions nécéssaires.

I should heartily approve universal knowledge, if man were capable of it; but I respect more highly a joiner who knows his job than a babbler who thinks he knows everything, and understands nothing.

J'approuverais fort la science universelle, si les hommes en étaient capables; mais j'estime plus un menuisier, qui sait son métier, qu'un bavard, qui pense tout savoir, et qui ne possède rien.

It is the writings of Epiphanius, the bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, in the 370s that especially mark the new phase of energetic concern with heresy that configured much ecclesiastical and theological writing in the later fourth and early fifth centuries. His ideas were to have considerable repercussions in the Latin West. This second anti-heretical movement was characterized by a determined drive to identify heretics: to develop systematic identikits to identify the hated enemies of right thinking. This late fourth-century interest in heresies had its own style. It was different both in kind and extent from the earlier anti-heretical movement. The big concern of the later age was not so much one of internal ideological defense and cleansing of a single threatening idea as it was with the identification of a wide range of various types of external pseudo-Christian enemies. Rather than the extensive and detailed theological treatise, it is the heresy list that is the characteristic document of the second movement devoted to hunting down the enemies of the true church.

This later tradition produced extensive hit lists of heresies, lists that were meant to provide quick identity profiles by which concerned believers could recognize any one of the variegated host of enemies that the orthodox faced....[T]he bishop Epiphanius, a converted Jew, seated at Salamis on the island of Cyprus, found himself located at the epicenter of a vast circuit of lands and heresies that surrounded him. The striking panorama of heretical species that he could spy from this vantage point set his Linnaean instincts alight. With a fervour that helped fire the age, he began categorizing, labeling, and describing them in his Panarion — a Medicine Box because it was intended to be a doctor's medical bag filled with the medicaments necessary to cure the poisonous infections of wrong belief.

Forbidden generosity. — There is not enough love and goodness in the world for us to be permitted to give any of it away to imaginary things.

Verbotene Freigebigkeit. — Es ist nicht genug Liebe und Güte in der Welt, um noch davon an eingebildete Wesen wegschenken zu dürfen.

One should sacrifice to the gods and ask for blessings but leave prophecy alone. That invention is one of life's foolish traps. No idle man ever got rich by looking at burnt offerings. The best way to tell the future is to be intelligent and plan ahead.

                                            τοῖς θεοῖσι χρὴ
θύοντας αἰτεῖν ἀγαθά, μαντείας δ᾿ ἐᾶν·
βίου γὰρ ἄλλως δέλεαρ ηὑρέθη τόδε,        755
κοὐδεὶς ἐπλούτησ᾿ ἐμπύροισιν ἀργὸς ὤν·
γνώμη δ᾿ ἀρίστη μάντις ἥ τ᾿ εὐβουλία.

Our peasants love their villages. The Romans were ardent patriots, when Rome was a mere township. When it became more powerful, their patriotism was not so keen. A city that was mistress of the world was too vast for the hearts of its citizens. Men are not made to love immensity.

Nos paysans aiment leurs hameaux; les Romains étaient passionnés pour leur patrie, pendant que ce n'était qu'une bourgade; lorsqu'elle devint plus puissante, l'amour de la patrie ne fut plus si vif; une ville, maîtresse de l'univers, était trop vaste pour le coeur de ses habitants. Les hommes ne sont pas nés pour aimer les grandes choses.

• A Blade of Grass
• This Is My Home
• Near and Dear
• Parochialism
• One World
• Local Attachment
• Patriotism
• Insularity
• Le Patriotisme de Clocher
• Home Sweet Home

Septimius, you would go with me to Cadiz, and to the Cantabrian who has not yet learned to bear our yoke, and to the wild Syrtes where the Moorish surf boils for ever.

Let me have Tibur, founded by an Argive settler, as the home of my old age; let that mark the end for one who is weary of the sea and of marching and fighting.

If the Fates are unkind enough to deny me that spot, I shall make for the river Galaesus (so sweet to the sheep in their leather jackets), and for the countryside once ruled by the Spartan Phalanthus.

For me that corner of the world smiles more invitingly than all others. There the honey is not inferior to Hymettus, and the olive rivals green Venafrum;

there Jove sends a long spring and mild winters, and Aulon, a valley beloved of prolific Bacchus, has no cause whatever to envy the grapes of Falernum.

That place with its happy stronghold beckons to you and me; there you will duly drop a tear on the warm ashes of your poetic friend.

Septimi, Gadis aditure mecum et
Cantabrum indoctum iuga ferre nostra et
barbaras Syrtis, ubi Maura semper
    aestuat unda,

Tibur Argeo positum colono        5
sit meae sedes utinam senectae,
sit modus lasso maris et viarum
militiaeque!

unde si Parcae prohibent iniquae,
dulce pellitis ovibus Galaesi        10
flumen et regnata petam Laconi
    rura Phalantho.

ille terrarum mihi praeter omnis
angulus ridet, ubi non Hymetto
mella decedunt viridique certat        15
    baca Venafro,

ver ubi longum tepidasque praebet
Iuppiter brumas, et amicus Aulon
fertili Baccho minimum Falernis
    invidet uvis.

ille te mecum locus et beatae        20
postulant arces; ibi tu calentem
debita sparges lacrima favillam
    vatis amici.

Gades (Cadiz) is at the ends of the earth in the south-west corner of Spain beyond the pillars of Hercules. The Cantabrians in north Spain had always resisted the Romans. Augustus himself fought bitter campaigns against them in 26-25 BC, but they were not finally subdued until 20 BC by Agrippa. The Syrtes are the sandbanks on the Libyan coast, scene of the fearful storm of sand and sea at the beginning of Virgil's Aeneid, which was being written when his friend Horace produced these odes in 23 BC. Septimius would think nothing of going with his friend to any or all of those remote places, but this is a feint. Horace has something less arduous in mind.

Tibur is the wealthy and spectacularly beautiful resort up in the hills 15 miles east of Rome, not violent like Spain or barbarous like North Africa, but founded by Tiburnus from Argos, a farmer-settler, colonus, suggesting Greek civilization and rural peace. Horace sums up in lines 7-8. He is tired of travel by sea and land and wants no more to do with war. Those who know him will think of his voyages to Athens to complete his education; the voyage back on which he suggests in Odes 3.4.28 that he was nearly drowned off Cape Palinurus; the rigours of the journey to Brundisium of Satires 1.5 (but he must have taken many like it); and his traumatic involvement in the battle of Philippi, about which we shall hear in the next ode.

Failing Tibur, his second choice would be Tarentum, a colony of Sparta founded according to tradition by the Laconian Phalanthus in 708 BC (Laconia is the south-east area of the Peloponnese, governed by Sparta). Instead of the ever-seething ocean, he would have the Galaesus, a river sheep can drink from and find sweet (gala is the Greek for milk), and these are no ordinary sheep. Their wool was so precious that they wore leather coats to protect it. Herodotus gives an example of similar care in wool production in antiquity at 3.113.1-2, where he tells us that some Arabian sheep had such long tails that they were supported on wheeled trolleys. If any scepticism remains, it may be countered by the note in How and Wells's commentary, referring to the ovis stealopyga of Pallas in Asiatic Russia: 'Its tail is said in some cases to weigh over 70 lbs.; it is still at times protected by wheeled boards. (Woods, Natural History)'. Again, instead of violence Horace looks for a settled countryside; instead of barbarism, one of the ancient Greek foundations in south Italy, which was known as Magna Graecia, and one with honey as good as the fabled honey of Hymettus, the hill of Athens, olives as good as those from Venafrum in central Italy, and wine from the sheltered vineyards of Aulon (aulon is the Greek for a glen) as good as Falernian, one of the best of the Italian wines.

The photograph attached will show you what I was looking for and found this afternoon: after 2000 years, a locus not quite now so amoenus, with a busy autostrada passing almost overhead, a vast petrochemical complex not far behind, eucalyptus trees (which would have bemused Horace and Vergil) elbowing out the pines, and instead of jacketed sheep, a pair of vicious dogs belonging to the fishermen nearby, but for all that, the Galaesus hasn't entirely lost its charm.

Man excels all the animals even in his ability to be trained. Moslems are trained to turn their faces towards Mecca five times a day and pray: they do so steadfastly. Christians are trained to cross themselves on certain occasions, to genuflect, etc.; while religion in general constitutes the real masterpiece in the art of training, namely the training of the mental capacities — which, as is well known, cannot be started too early. There is no absurdity so palpable that one could not fix it firmly in the head of every man on earth provided one began to imprint it before his sixth year by ceaselessly rehearsing it before him with solemn earnestness. For the training of men, as of animals, can be completely successful only in early youth.

Sogar an Abrichtungsfähigkeit übertrifft der Mensch alle Thiere. Die Moslem sind abgerichtet, 5 Mal des Tages, das Gesicht gegen Mecka gerichtet, zu beten: thun es unverbrüchlich. Christen sind abgerichtet, bei gewissen Gelegenheiten ein Kreuz zu schlagen, sich zu verneigen u. dgl.; wie denn überhaupt die Religion das rechte Meisterstück der Abrichtung ist, nämlich die Abrichtung der Denkfähigkeit; daher man bekanntlich nicht früh genug damit anfangen kann. Es giebt keine Absurdität, die so handgreiflich wäre, daß man sie nicht allen Menschen fest in den Kopf setzen könnte, wenn man nur schon vor ihrem sechsten Jahre anfienge, sie ihnen einzuprägen, indem man unablässig und mit feierlichstem Ernst sie ihnen vorsagte. Denn, wie die Abrichtung der Thiere, so gelingt auch die des Menschen nur in früher Jugend vollkommen.

The usual excuse of those who cause others trouble is that they wish them well.

Le prétexte ordinaire de ceux qui font le malheur des autres, est qu'ils veulent leur bien.

O my own little Lares, whom I am wont to supplicate with a pinch of frankincense or grain, or with a tiny garland, when can I assure myself of what will keep my old age from the beggar's staff and mat? Twenty thousand sesterces, well secured; some vessels of plain silver—yet such as Censor Fabricius would have condemned—and a couple of stout Moesian porters on whose hired necks I may be taken comfortably to my place in the bawling circus. Let me have besides a stooping engraver, and a painter who will quickly dash off any number of likenesses. That is enough.

o parvi nostrique Lares, quos ture minuto
aut farre et tenui soleo exorare corona,
quando ego figam aliquid, quo sit mihi tuta senectus
a tegete et baculo? viginti milia faenus        140
pigneribus positis, argenti vascula puri,
sed quae Fabricius censor notet, et duo fortes
de grege Moesorum, qui me cervice locata
securum iubeant clamoso insistere Circo;
sit mihi praeterea curvus caelator, et alter        145
qui multas facies pingit cito; sufficiunt haec.

143 locatum Heinrich

If you cared to give scope to your imagination you could even adduce that the twofold-long night in which Zeus begot Heracles on Alcmene came about because further east Joshua at Jericho told the sun to stand still. Zeus and Jehovah were thus assisting one another: for the gods of Heaven are, like those of earth, always secretly in alliance. But how innocent was the pastime of Father Zeus compared with the bloodthirsty activities of Jehovah and his chosen brigands.

Man könnte sogar, wenn man dem Witz Spielraum gestatten wollte, anführen, daß die verdoppelt lange Nacht, in welcher Zeus mit der Alkmene den Herakles zeugte, dadurch entstand, daß weiter östlich Iosua vor Iericho die Sonne still stehen hieß. Zeus und Iehovah spielten so einander in die Hände: denn die Götter des Himmels sind, wie die irdischen, allezeit im Stillen befreundet. Aber wie unschuldig war die Kurzweil des Vaters Zeus im Vergleich mit dem blutdürstigen Treiben des Iehovah und seines auserwählten Räubervolks.

The counsels of old age give light without warmth, like the winter sun.

Les conseils de la vieillesse éclairent sans échauffer, comme le soleil de l'hiver.

Your lot is painful, I admit. But it is best, you know,
to bear life's harsh necessities as lightly as you can.

ἔχεις μὲν ἀλγείν᾿, οἶδα· σύμφορον δέ τοι
ὡς ῥᾷστα τἀναγκαῖα τοῦ βίου φέρειν.

We mortals must bear misfortune with resignation.

κούφως φέρειν χρὴ θνητὸν ὄντα συμφοράς.

It's for this very reason that you're going to be great,
because you're knavish and vulgar and arrogant.

δι᾿ αὐτὸ γάρ τοι τοῦτο καὶ γίγνει μέγας,
ὁτιὴ πονηρὸς κἀξ ἀγορᾶς εἶ καὶ θρασύς.

It may seem as though there were hardly room in the modern world for the few simple savages that still exist. They are survivals from an age not far remote in time, but irretrievable as the dinornis. Amid the drab security of civilisation they wander like captive Indians on parole. Present creeds and ideals do not greatly concern them. They have never been wholly dipt in urbanity, but are like the Celts of early days when British Christianity was at odds with heathendom, and high-hearted mothers left the right arms of their babies unchristened, so that they might strike the stronger blow. They long for the sun, the moon, the stars, and the desert air. In the midst of daily life, in sober streets where policemen rot at ease, in committee-rooms and on boards of education, in quiet rectories and legislative assemblies, a breath of the wilderness comes suddenly, and whispers in their ears. At once the dull horror of all this sedentary world is borne in upon them. The old spirit wakes and cries for the wings of the morning that it may fly away and bid sewage and civilisation go hang.

In the Border counties of Scotland, it was formerly customary, when any rancorous enmity subsisted between two clans, to leave the right hand of male children unchristened, that it might deal the more deadly, or, according to the popular phrase, "unhallowed" blows, to their enemies. By this superstitious rite, they were devoted to bear the family feud, or enmity. The same practice subsisted in Ireland, as appears from the following passage in CHAMPION's History of Ireland, published in 1633. "In some corners of the land they used a damnable superstition, leaving the right armes of their infants, males, unchristened, (as they termed it,) to the end it might give a more ungracious and deadly blow."