Laudator Temporis Acti

Edward Kennard Rand (1871-1945), Founders of the Middle Ages (1928; rpt. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1957), pp. 230-231 (note omitted):

I would here call the reader's attention to a page of the Harvard Catalogue for 1830-1831. My copy is unbound, but even when bound, this volume of thirty-one small pages would still be portable. It sets forth the course of instruction for Freshmen, Sophomores, Junior Sophisters, and Senior Sophisters. The programme is founded on the literatures of Greece and Rome, and many of the authors are listed. But there are also mathematics through calculus, general history and ancient history, with "Greek antiquities," Grotius, De Veritate Religionis Christianae, English grammar, rhetoric and composition, with themes, forensics, and oratory, modern languages, logic, philosophy and theology, natural philosophy, including mechanics, chemistry, electricity and magnetism, with "experimental lectures" — all this by the end of the Junior year. The great feature of the Senior year is that no Classical literature is prescribed; the ancient authors have been transcended for the higher learning — natural philosophy, including astronomy, optics, mineralogy, and the philosophy of natural history, also intellectual and moral philosophy, and theology both natural and revealed. Modern languages are still pursued, themes and forensics are still required. Finally, we note political economy, anatomy, and Rawle "On the Constitution of the United States."

This is a humanistic programme, reaching to the upper heights of thought and concentrated on the present time. It were ridiculous to suppose that all of these subjects were pursued as thoroughly as they are in colleges to-day. It were also ridiculous to suppose that we could probably reintroduce such a programme in all its parts. Yet I venture to think that the lads of 1830 had their minds touched at more points, and with more points, than our undergraduates to-day.

I can't find a copy of the 1830-1831 Harvard course catalogue, but cf. Report of the President of Harvard University, Submitting for Consideration a General Plan of Studies, Conformably to a Vote of the Board of Overseers of That Seminary, Passed February 4, 1830 (Cambridge: E.W. Metcalf and Company, 1830).

Edward Kennard Rand is my Doktorgrossvater.

Hat tip: Marc Addington.

William M. Calder III, "Unfair to Wilamowitz?" Classical Review 54.2 (October, 2004) 552-554 (at 553):

Scholars should seek to understand the thinkers they study in the context of their times. Plato bought and sold human beings. Should he be blacklisted? Classical scholars today lack the breadth and linguistic competence of their predecessors. Instead of gratitude for what they have been bequeathed, too many seek to prove themselves superior by citing ideas incompatible with contemporary dogma.

William M. Calder III, "Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff to William Abbott Oldfather: Three Unpublished Letters," Classical Journal 72.2 (December, 1976 - January, 1977) 115-127 (at 118):

Third there was his overwhelming devotion to scholarship. While Oldfather drove, his wife read aloud scholarly articles to him.

Hat tip: Alan Crease.

Vincenzo Di Benedetto, "Ricordi di Eduard Fraenkel," Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, Serie IV, 5.1 (2000) 1-20 (at 14):

Una volta ad Oxford di sua iniziativa mi disse con quali parole si poteva riassumere il suo metodo; e le parole erano: «leggere, leggere, leggere».

I.e.:

Once upon a time at Oxford, on his own initiative, he told me with what words one could sum up his method; and the words were: "Read, read, read."

The title of this post is a variation on Sebastiano Timpanaro, Genesi del metodo di Lachmann, translated by Glenn W. Most as The Genesis of Lachmann's Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Francis Kilvert, Diary (March 4, 1872):

What a superb day it has been, almost cloudless, brilliant hot as late May and the warm south wind blowing from the Black Mountains. Cwmgwanon Wood is being murdered. As I walked along the edge of the beautiful dingle and looked sadly down into the hollow, numbers of my old friends of seven years standing lay below on both banks of the brook prostrate and mutilated, a mournful scene of havoc, the road almost impassable for the limbs of the fallen giants.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Labels: arboricide

Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 121:

To be a scholar is the greatest of vocations: to compose a devout commentary, a Talmud, on the created world.

Hat tip: Emily Esfahani Smith.

Martin Luther (1483-1546), To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools, tr. Albert T.W. Steinhauser, in Luther's Works, Vol. IV (Philadelphia: A.J. Holman Company, 1931), pp. 103-130 (at 113-115):

Truly, if there were no other use for the languages, this alone ought to rejoice and move us, that they are so fine and noble a gift of God, with which He is now richly visiting and endowing us Germans, more richly indeed than any other land. There is little evidence that the devil suffered them to be revived through the universities and monasteries; these have, on the contrary, always raged against them and are still raging. For the devil smelt a rat and perceived that if the languages were revived, there would be a hole knocked in his kingdom which he might have difficulty stopping. Since he was unable, however, to prevent their being revived, his aim is now to keep them on such slender rations that they will of themselves decline and pass away. They are like an unwelcome guest who has come to his house; so he determines to show him such entertainment that he will not tarry long. Very few of us, my dear sirs, see through this wicked plot of the devil.

Therefore, my beloved Germans, let us open our eyes, thank God for this precious treasure, and guard it well, lest it be again taken from us and the devil have his will. For though the Gospel has come and daily comes through the Holy Spirit alone, we cannot deny that it has come by means of the languages, by which it was also spread abroad, and by which it must be preserved. For when God desired through the apostles to spread abroad the Gospel in all the world, He provided tongues for that purpose. And before that He had spread the Greek and Latin languages, by means of the Roman empire, throughout all lands, in order that His Gospel might the more speedily bear fruit far and wide. He has done the same now. No one knew for what purpose God suffered the languages to be revived, until we now begin to see that it was for the sake of the Gospel, which He intended afterwards to reveal, in order to expose and destroy thereby the kingdom of antichrist. To this end He also gave over Greece to the Turk, in order that the Greeks, driven out and scattered, might spread their language and give an incentive to the study of other languages as well.

In proportion, then, as we prize the Gospel, let us guard the languages. For not in vain did God have His Scriptures set down in these two languages alone—the Old Testament in Hebrew, the New in Greek. The languages, therefore, that God did not despise but chose above all others for His Word, we too ought to honor above all others. For St. Paul declared it to be a peculiar glory and distinction of Hebrew that God gave His Word in that language, when he said in Romans iii, "What profit is there of circumcision? Much every way: chiefly, because unto them were committed the oracles of God." King David also boasts in Psalm cxlvii, "He sheweth his word unto Jacob, his statutes and his judgments unto Israel. He hath not dealt so with any nation nor made known to them his judgments." Hence Hebrew is called a sacred language, and St. Paul terms it in Romans i "the holy scriptures," doubtless because of the holy Word of God contained therein. Similarly, the Greek language may be called sacred, because it was chosen above all others as the language in which the New Testament was to be written and from which, as from a fountain, it flowed by translation into other languages and made them also sacred.

And let us be sure of this: we shall not long preserve the Gospel without the languages. The languages are the sheath in which this sword of the Spirit is contained; they are the casket in which we carry this jewel; they are the vessel in which we hold this wine; they are the larder in which this food is stored; and as the Gospel itself says, they are the baskets in which we bear these loaves and fishes and fragments. If through our neglect we let the languages go (which may God forbid!), we shall not only lose the Gospel, but come at last to the point where we shall be unable either to speak or write a correct Latin or German. As proof and warning of this, let us take the wretched and woeful example of the universities and monasteries, in which men not only unlearned the Gospel, but corrupted the languages so that the miserable folk were fairly turned into beasts, unable to read or write a correct German or Latin and wellnigh losing their natural reason to boot.

Hence the apostles themselves considered it necessary to put the New Testament into Greek and to bind it fast to that language, doubtless in order to preserve it for us safe and sound as in a sacred ark. For they foresaw all that was to come and now has come to pass, and knew that if it were contained only in men's heads, wild and fearful disorder and confusion, and many various interpretations, fancies and doctrines would arise in the Church, which could be prevented and from which the plain man could be protected only by committing the New Testament to writing and language. Hence it is certain that unless the languages remain the Gospel must finally perish.

John Donne (1572-1631), Satires 3.75-82:

He's not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best.
T'adore or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely. In strange way,
To stand enquiring right is not to stray.
To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill,
Craggèd and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must, and about must go,
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.

The notes in Robin Robbins, ed., The Complete Poems of John Donne (Harlow: Pearson, 2010), pp. 393-395, are excellent (In strange way = On an unfamiliar road, suddenness = steepness, etc.).

I wonder if "of none" (line 75) could be influenced by the Latin genitive of worth—J.B. Hofmann and Anton Szantyr, Lateinische Syntax und Stilistik (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1965), pp. 72-73 (§ 57).

Dear Mike,

An exhaustively annotated edition of Swinburne’s letter might include some of the following information on the allusion made to Octavia and Queen Caroline.

Sir Joseph Arnould, Life of Thomas, First Lord Denman, Formerly Lord Chief Justice of England (Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1874), vol. 1, pp. 133-134:

"While we were calling our witnesses, and I was at Holland House on Sundays and at home in the evenings, anxiously sifting the minutes of evidence, Dr. Parr was my frequent correspondent, pointing out illustrations of many parts of our case from history and classical literature. He earnestly besought me to look into Bayle, and weave into my summing-up allusions to Judith, Julia, and Octavia. The two first seemed to me inapplicable; the third flashed upon me like lightning. In a moment I resolved to make the unhappy wife of Nero my heroine, and indeed, the parallel was perfect. I was deeply smitten, too, with the honest chambermaid's Greek, but, trembling as to the effect it might produce, I wrote back to ask Parr whether I could venture to bring it forward. He, in reply, at first suggested a method of periphrasis, but, at length, recurring to it in the postscript to a long letter, he burst out, ‘Oh dear, Mr. Denman, I am for the word itself — don't be squeamish.’

My speech was as successful with a view to my own reputation as my friends could desire. I hope, too, that it was of some use to the Queen, though the unfortunate turn that was, not quite unjustly, given to the parable of the woman taken in adultery has given me some of the bitterest moments of my life. Not that the subject was unfit to be touched, for it could not fail to have some effect on persons possessing religious feelings; but it ought not to have formed the concluding sentence, and might have been more guardedly introduced, and more dexterously softened off."

Arnould’s footnote 1 (p. 135):

Bayle, article ‘Octavia,’ cites the parallel passages from Tacitus and Xiphilin; Tacitus Ann. xiv., c. 60, Xiphilin p. 176; and see also Dion lii. 13. Neither the Latin nor the Greek can be quoted with decency. Tigellinus was presiding at the examination in which the female attendants of Octavia were being tortured to prove their mistress guilty of adultery with a slave. The imputation cast upon Tigellinus by the ‘honest chambermaid’ was of a nameless impurity, which made him peculiar for infamy even in the infamous court of Nero.

The word itself in the honest chambermaid’s Greek that could not be quoted with decency was ‘αἰδοῖον’; in the honest chambermaid’s Latin, ‘muliebria’, squeamishly rendered, – or ‘dextrously softened off’ – by translators Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (1876) as ‘person’.

Dio Cassius, Roman History 62b.13.4 (tr. Earnest Cary):

ἐπεὶ γὰρ τῶν περὶ τὴν Ὀκταουίαν ὄντων οἱ ἄλλοι πάντες πλὴν Πυθιάδος συνεπέθεντο μετὰ τῆς Σαβίνης αὐτῇ, τῆς μέν, ὅτι ἐδυστύχει, καταφρονήσαντες, τὴν δέ, ὅτι ἴσχυε, κολακεύοντες, μόνη ἡ Πυθιὰς οὔτε τι κατεψεύσατο αὐτῆς, καίπερ πικρότατα βασανισθεῖσα, καὶ τέλος ὡς ὁ Τιγελλῖνος ἐνέκειτο αὐτῇ, προσέπτυσέ τε αὐτῷ καὶ εἶπε: ‘καθαρώτερον, ὦ Τιγελλῖνε, τὸ αἰδοῖον ἡ δέσποινά μου τοῦ σοῦ στόματος ἔχει.’

When all the other attendants of Octavia, with the exception of Pythias, had taken sides with Sabina in her attack upon the empress, despising Octavia because she was in misfortune and toadying to Sabina because she had great influence, Pythias alone had refused, though cruelly tortured, to utter lies against her mistress, and finally, as Tigellinus continued to urge her, she spat in his face, saying: "My mistress's privy parts are cleaner, Tigellinus, than your mouth."

Tacitus, Annals 14.60 (tr. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb):

Actae ob id de ancillis quaestiones et vi tormentorum victis quibusdam ut falsa adnuerent, plures perstitere sanctitatem dominae tueri; ex quibus una instanti Tigellino castiora esse muliebria Octaviae respondit quam os eius.

As a consequence, her slave-girls were examined under torture, and though some were forced by the intensity of agony into admitting falsehoods, most of them persisted in upholding the virtue of their mistress. One of them said, in answer to the furious menaces of Tigellinus, that Octavia's person was purer than his mouth.

Best wishes,
Eric [Thomson]

Martin Luther (1483-1546), To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools, tr. Albert T.W. Steinhauser, in Luther's Works, Vol. IV (Philadelphia: A.J. Holman Company, 1931), pp. 103-130 (at 112):

Shall we then permit none but clods and boors to rule, when we can get better men? That would indeed be a barbarous and foolish policy.

The German, from D. Martin Luthers Werke, Bd. 15 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1899), p. 35:

Soll man denn zu lassen, daß eyttel rülltzen und knebel regiren, so man's wohl bessern kan, ist yhe ein wild unvernünftiges furnehmen.

On rülltzen see Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch, Bd. 8: R-Schiefe (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1893), cols. 1478-1479, s.v. Rülz = ructus, sense 2: ungebildeter mensch.

William M. Calder III, "The Refugee Classical Scholars in the USA: An Evaluation of their Contribution," Illinois Classical Studies 17.1 (Spring, 1992) 153-173 (at 163):

Sir Kenneth Dover has remarked that what was most memorable for him about Eduard Fraenkel was the great seriousness with which Fraenkel took the calling of scholar. This was precisely my experience with Werner Jaeger at Harvard (1952-56). He remarked to me when I was 19 years old: "The trouble with American classical scholars is that they are only classicists from 9:00 am until 5:00 pm five days a week. One must always be a scholar, every moment of one's life."

Hat tip: Alan Crease.

Oil painting of the Betrayal (c. 1382-1390), formerly at St. Michael-at-Plea Church, Norwich, now at Norwich Cathedral:


Closeup of Malchus' ear:


Hat tip: A friend.

Herodotus 9.27.4 (tr. A.D. Godley):

But since it is idle to recall these matters — for they that were erstwhile valiant may now be of lesser mettle, and they that lacked mettle then may be better men now — enough of these doings of old time.

ἀλλ' οὐ γάρ τι προέχει τούτων ἐπιμεμνῆσθαι· καὶ γὰρ ἂν χρηστοὶ τότε ἐόντες ὡυτοὶ νῦν ἂν εἶεν φλαυρότεροι, καὶ τότε ἐόντες φλαῦροι νῦν ἂν εἶεν ἀμείνονες. παλαιῶν μέν νυν ἔργων ἅλις ἔστω.

Algernon Swinburne, letter to the New York Daily Tribune (written January 30, 1874, published February 25, 1874), from The Swinburne Letters. Edited by Cecil Y. Lang, Vol. 2: 1869-1875 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 274-275:

I am informed that certain American journalists, not content with providing filth of their own for the consumption of their kind, sometimes offer to their readers a dish of beastliness which they profess to have gathered from under the chairs of more distinguished men. While the abuse lavished on my name and writings could claim no higher than a nameless source, I have always been able to say with Shelley²—'I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name.' If I am to believe that that name has been made the mark for such vile language as is now publicly attributed to men of note in the world of letters, I, who am not sufficiently an expert in the dialect of the cesspool and the dung-cart to retort in their own kind on these venerable gentlemen—I, whose ears and lips alike are unused to the amenities of a conversation embroidered with such fragments of flowery rhetoric as may be fished up by congenial fingers or lapped up by congenial tongues out of the sewerage of Sodom—can return no better or more apt reply than was addressed by the servant of Octavia to the satellites of Nero and applied by Lord Denman when counsel for Queen Caroline to the sycophants of George IV. A foul mouth is so ill matched with a white beard that I would gladly believe the newspaper scribes alone responsible for the bestial utterances which they declare to have dropped from a teacher whom such disciples as these exhibit to our disgust and compassion as performing on their obscene platform the last tricks of tongue now possible to a gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried first into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle, and who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his own finding and fouling; Coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian tribe of autocoprophagous baboons who make the filth they feed on.

Averting with a peculiar emotion which I need not specify my eyes and nostrils from the sight and savour of such things, I need not stoop as though to blow off any speck of leaving from a name which I trust and think, though it may well be that it has gained nothing, has at least lost nothing in my hands of its hereditary honour. Those to whom it is known only as an object of reviling from writers with or without a name of their own, may yet do well to ask themselves how far such follies and such villainies may be likely to affect the repute or disturb the consciousness of one to whom it is given to remember that wellnigh at the very outset of his course he had earned the praise and won the friendship of Landor, of Hugo, and of Mazzini; and who, though he may see no need and feel no inclination to seek shelter behind the name or beneath the countenance of any man, has yet in the sense of this not unmerited honour an enduring source of such pleasures and such pride as the 'most sweet voices'³ of his revilers are about equally competent to give and to take away.

2. Letter to Leigh Hunt, Jan. 25, 1822, published in Richard Garnett's Relics of Shelly (1862).

3. Coriolanus, II.iii.180.

The "gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape" was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in an interview had called Swinburne "a perfect leper and a mere sodomite." See Clyde K. Hyder, "Emerson on Swinburne: A Sensational Interview," Modern Language Notes 48.3 (March, 1933) 180-182.

Thanks very much to Eric Thomson for his help. His notes on Octavia, Nero, Lord Denman, and Queen Caroline will be featured on this blog tomorrow.

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 11.1305 (tr. Celia E. Schultz):

Tullia Superiana fulfilled her vow to Minerva Memor willingly and with just cause, on account of the restoration of her hair.

Minervae Memori Tullia Superiana restitutione facta sibi capillorum v(otum) s(olvit) l(ibens) m(erito)

W.G. Sebald (1944-2001), The Rings of Saturn, tr. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998), pp. 8-9 (on Janine Dakyns):

Many a time, at the end of a working day. Janine would talk to me about Flaubert's view of the world, in her office where there were such quantities of lecture notes, letters and other documents lying around that it was like standing amidst a flood of paper. On the desk, which was both the origin and the focal point of this amazing profusion of paper, a virtual paper landscape had come into being in the course of time, with mountains and valleys. Like a glacier when it reaches the sea, it had broken off at the edges and established new deposits all around on the floor, which in turn were advancing imperceptibly towards the centre of the room. Years ago, Janine had been obliged by the ever-increasing masses of paper on her desk to bring further tables into use, and these tables, where similar processes of accretion had subsequently taken place, represented later epochs, so to speak, in the evolution of Janine's paper universe. The carpet, too, had long since vanished beneath several inches of paper; indeed, the paper had begun climbing from the floor, on which, year after year, it had settled, and was now up the walls as high as the top of the door frame, page upon page of memoranda and notes pinned up in multiple layers, all of them by just one corner. Wherever it was possible there were piles of papers on the books on her shelves as well. It once occurred to me that at dusk, when all this paper seemed to gather into itself the pallor of the fading light, it was like the snow in the fields, long ago, beneath the ink-black sky. In the end Janine was reduced to working from an easy chair drawn more or less into the middle of her room where, if one passed her door, which was always ajar, she could be seen bent almost double scribbling on a pad on her knees or sometimes just lost in thought. Once when I remarked that sitting there amidst her papers she resembled the angel in Dürer's Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction, her response was that the apparent chaos surrounding her represented in reality a perfect kind of order, or an order which at least tended towards perfection. And the fact was that whatever she might be looking for amongst her papers or her books, or in her head, she was generally able to find right away.

Evan T. Sage, "Cicero and the Agrarian Proposals of 63 B.C.," Classical Journal 16 (1921) 230-236 (at 230):

In some ways the hardest and most important task of the Latin teacher is to make his students realize that Latin is something more than a series of disconnected units of twenty or thirty lines each, and that in the works of Caesar and Cicero we have historical documents that tell an important, and even an interesting, story.

Cicero, On the Agrarian Law I.1.1 (tr. John Henry Freese):

By the immortal gods! do such ideas appear to you to be sober men's plans or the dreams of men drunk with wine? do they look like the deliberate opinions of wise men or the raving wishes of madmen?

haec, per deos immortales! utrum esse vobis consilia siccorum an vinulentorum somnia et utrum cogitata sapientium an optata furiosorum videntur?

Id. II.33.89:

See what a world of difference there is between the counsels of our ancestors and the madness of these men!

videte, quantum intervallum sit interiectum inter maiorum nostrorum consilia et inter istorum hominum dementiam.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Ecce Homo ("Why I Am So Clever," § 8; tr. Walter Kaufmann):

Scholars who at bottom do little nowadays but thumb books — philologists, at a moderate estimate, about 200 a day — ultimately lose entirely their capacity to think for themselves. When they don't thumb, they don't think. They respond to a stimulus (a thought they have read) whenever they think — in the end, they do nothing but react. Scholars spend all of their energies on saying Yes and No, on criticism of what others have thought — they themselves no longer think.

The instinct of self-defense has become worn-out in them; otherwise they would resist books. The scholar — a decadent.

I have seen this with my own eyes: gifted natures with a generous and free disposition, "read to ruin" in their thirties — merely matches that one has to strike to make them emit sparks — "thoughts."

Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one's strength — to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!

---

Der Gelehrte, der im Grunde nur noch Bücher »wälzt« — der Philologe mit mässigem Ansatz des Tags ungefähr 200 — verliert zuletzt ganz und gar das Vermögen, von sich aus zu denken. Wälzt er nicht, so denkt er nicht. Er antwortet auf einen Reiz (— einen gelesenen Gedanken), wenn er denkt, — er reagirt zuletzt bloss noch. Der Gelehrte giebt seine ganze Kraft im Ja und Neinsagen, in der Kritik von bereits Gedachtem ab, — er selber denkt nicht mehr ...

Der Instinkt der Selbstvertheidigung ist bei ihm mürbe geworden; im andren Falle würde er sich gegen Bücher wehren. Der Gelehrte — ein décadent.

— Das habe ich mit Augen gesehn: begabte, reich und frei angelegte Naturen schon in den dreissiger Jahren »zu Schanden gelesen«, bloss noch Streichhölzer, die man reiben muss, damit sie Funken — »Gedanken« geben.

— Frühmorgens beim Anbruch des Tags, in aller Frische, in der Morgenröthe seiner Kraft, ein Buch lesen — das nenne ich lasterhaft!

Found (and purchased) by a friend, for 50p each: