Laudator Temporis Acti

Order your troops by their clans and by brotherhoods, Agamemnōn:
Thus brotherhood will bring aid to brotherhood, clan to clan.

κρῖν' ἄνδρας κατὰ φῦλα κατὰ φρήτρας Ἀγάμεμνον,
ὡς φρήτρη φρήτρηφιν ἀρήγῃ, φῦλα δὲ φύλοις.

The epic saga is concerned primarily with the members of the princely class. They were individualistic in outlook, and stood above many of the restraints which were normal in contemporary society. In the struggle for power they committed murder even within their own families, and many of them paid little heed to the claims of 'phratry' or 'tribe'. But the society in which they lived was certainly organized on a more conservative system. Nestor, the representative of an older generation, told Agamemnon to muster the host before Troy by phratry and tribe, 'that phratry may aid phratry and tribes tribes'. The commoners, rather than the princes, were loyal members of these 'brotherhoods' (phratries), which were based on kinship and formed together into tribes. Anyone who was not a member of a brotherhood (aphretor) was an outcast from society. He could not become a member of a tribe or attend an Assembly.

Homer's own experience gave him no help in imagining the military structure of a centralised kingdom such as Agamemnon's, and the stock of formulae which he inherited contained no hint of what a Mycenean army had been like. In the poet's own world organisation by phratries was a commonplace, but in the poems it is a disturbing intrusion. Through the bulk of the Iliad the army is essentially formless: if Homer had had in his mind a distinct idea how it was organised, he could never have treated it in the manner he does, inventing schemes of organisation for a momentary effect and forgetting them as soon as made. But there is of course one principle of cohesion, the loyalty of ἑταῖροι to their leader, and this principle is ubiquitous.

Our ancestors, Fathers of the Senate, were never lacking either in wisdom or courage, and yet pride did not keep them from adopting foreign institutions, provided they were honourable. They took their offensive and defensive weapons from the Samnites, the badges of their magistrates for the most part from the Etruscans. In fine, whatever they found suitable among allies or foes, they put in practice at home with the greatest enthusiasm, preferring to imitate rather than envy the successful.

maiores nostri, patres conscripti, neque consili neque audaciae umquam eguere; neque illis superbia obstat, quo minus aliena instituta, si modo proba erant, imitarentur. arma atque tela militaria ab Samnitibus, insignia magistratuum ab Tuscis pleraque sumpserunt. postremo, quod ubique apud socios aut hostis idoneum videbatur, cum summo studio domi exsequebantur: imitari quam invidere bonis malebant.

In unsure fortune a sure friend is seen.

amicus certus in re incerta cernitur.

For it is in trouble's hour that the good most clearly
show their friendship; though prosperity by itself in every case finds friends.

ἐν τοῖς κακοῖς γὰρ ἁγαθοὶ σαφέστατοι
φίλοι· τὰ χρηστὰ δ' αὔθ' ἕκαστ' ἔχει φίλους.

Exactly one of my 16 non-retired former colleagues in the Department of Classics at Princeton University has been in touch since I was fired last May, and almost none of them have spoken or written so much as a single word to me in two and a half years. When a friend made the mistake of simply mentioning my name to a Princeton classicist over a year ago, the reaction was shock: "We don't talk about him."

As for Lamartine, for him Rabelais was "a poisonous, fetid mushroom born in the dunghill of the medieval cloister, the defrocked monks' pig who regaled himself in his dirty sty and loved to spatter his dregs on the face, manners, and language of his age."¹¹⁶

116. Alphonse de Lamartine, Cours familier de littérature, 28 vols. (Paris, 1856-1869), III, 424.

More than two thousand years have done their best to mutilate extant herms and to obliterate what would still today be scandalous in public; but anybody familiar with vase-paintings knows what a classical herm looks like: a rather dignified, usually bearded, head on a four-cornered pillar and, in due place, an unmistakable, realistically molded, erect phallus.

Go away! You are disturbing sleep, the healer of sickness.

ἄπελθε· κινεῖς ὕπνον ἰατρὸν νόσου.

ἄπελθε· κινεῖς Nauck: ἄπελθ' ἐκείνης codd. Clem. Alex. Strom. 6.2.10.3 (2, 429, 12 Stählin)
ὕπνον ἰητρὸν codd.: ὕπνος ἰατρὸς Valckenaer

Go away! Sleep is healer of that sickness.

The final examination, if there is one, might consist of this: the student must recite to me a long poem chosen by him which he has learnt by heart, and he must then answer (orally, in English) various questions on it; and I would mark him according to the skill and truth of his recitation. and the worth of his answers.

The self-made Inferno of the academic junk-bond era is the conferences, where the din of ambition is as deafening as on the floor of the stock exchange. The huge post-Sixties proliferation of conferences, used as an administrative marketing tool by colleges and universities, produced a diversion of professional energy away from study and toward performance, networking, advertisement, cruising, hustling, glad-handing, back scratching, chitchat, groupthink. Interdisciplinary innovation? Hardly. Real interdisciplinary work is done reading and writing at home and in the library. The conferences teach corporate raiding: academics become lone wolves without loyalty to their own disciplines or institutions; they're always on the trail and on the lookout, ears up for the better job and bigger salary, the next golden fleece or golden parachute. The conferences are all about insider trading and racketeering, jockeying for power by fast-track traveling salesmen pushing their shrink-wrapped product and tooting fancy new commercial slogans. The conferences induce a delusional removal from reality. They mislead fad-followers like Halperin and Winkler into beginning ridiculous statements with "We"—we think, we say, we do this or that. No, we don't; that's you, the teeming conference-hoppers, the plague of locusts and froglets croaking in their tiny pond. In the conferences, a host of Bartleby the Scriveners tippy-toe through showy verbal pirouettes and imagine they're running with the bulls at Pamplona. But the menu, as the chorus chants in Monty Python, is nothing but "Spam, Spam, Spam!" The conferences are lightweight shuttlecock scholarship, where the divorced can trawl for new spouses and where people meet in an airless bubble to confirm each other's false assumptions and certitudes. A new Dunciad is needed to chart the reefs and shoals of this polluted boat-choked race course, where no one ever gets anywhere.

Whole careers have gone down the tubes at the conferences. Dozens of prominent academics are approaching the moment of reckoning, when they and everyone else will realize they have wasted the best years of their professional lives on cutesy mini-papers and globe-trotting. By their books ye shall know them. A scholar's real audience is not yet born. A scholar must build for the future, not the present. The profession is addicted to the present, to contemporary figures, contemporary terminology, contemporary concerns. Authentic theory would mean mastery of the complete history of philosophy and aesthetics. What is absurdly called theory today is just a mask for fashion and greed. The conferences are the Alphabet City of addiction to junk, the self-numbing anodyne of rootless, soulless people who have lost contact with their own ethnic traditions. Their work will die with them, for it is based on neither learning nor inspired interpretation. The conferences are oppressive bourgeois forms that enforce a style of affected patter and smarmy whimsy in the speaker and polite chuckles and iron-butt torpor in the audience. Success at the conferences requires a certain kind of physically inert personality, superficially cordial but emotionally dissociated. It's the genteel high Protestant style of the country clubs and corporate board rooms, with their financial reports and marketing presentations. The transient intimacies of the conferences are themselves junk bonds. Dante would classify the conference-hoppers as perverters of intellect, bad guides, sowers of schism.

The conferences have left a paper trail of folly and trivial pursuit. True scholars are time-travelers, not space-travelers.

Attendance at conferences must cease to be defined as professional activity. It should be seen for what it is: prestige-hunting and long-range job-seeking junkets, meat-rack mini-vacations. The phrase "He or she is just a conference-hopper" (cf. "just a gigolo") must enter the academic vocabulary. I look for the day when conference-hopping leads to denial of employment or promotion on the grounds that it is a neglect of professional duties to scholarship and one's institution. Energies have to be reinvested at home. The reform of education will be achieved when we all stay put and cultivate our own garden, instead of gallivanting around the globe like migrating grackles. Furthermore, excessive contact with other academics is toxic to scholarship. Reading and writing academic books and seeing academics every day at work are more than enough exposure to academe. The best thing for scholars is contact with nonacademics, with other ways of thinking and seeing the world.

A crowd gathered as his body was being taken to the place of burial and the following decree was read out by the herald, Demetrius, who had the most powerful voice of any herald at the time:

It has been decreed by the people of Syracuse that Timoleon the son of Timaenetus is to be buried at a cost of two hundred mnas and is to be honoured in perpetuity with musical, equestrian, and athletic contests, because he defeated the barbarians and repopulated the greatest of the Greek cities, and thereby made himself the architect of freedom for the Siceliots.

κατὰ τὴν ἐκφορὰν ἀθροισθέντος τοῦ πλήθους τόδε τὸ ψήφισμα ἀνηγόρευσεν ὁ Δημήτριος ὃς ἦν μεγαλοφωνότατος τῶν τότε κηρύκων·

ἐψήφισται ὁ δᾶμος τῶν Συρακοσίων Τιμολέοντα Τιμαινέτου Κορίνθιον τόνδε θάπτειν μὲν ἀπὸ διακοσιᾶν μνᾶν, τιμᾶσθαι δὲ εἰς τὸν ἅπαντα χρόνον ἀγώνεσσι μουσικοῖς καὶ ἱππικοῖς καὶ γυμνικοῖς, ὅτι τοὺς τυράννους καταλύσας καὶ τοὺς βαρβάρους καταπολεμήσας καὶ τὰς μεγίστας τῶν Ἑλληνίδων πόλεων ἀνοικίσας αἴτιος ἐγενήθη τᾶς ἐλευθερίας τοῖς Σικελιώταις.

Labels: typographical and other errors

And on the other hand much of what seems rubbish at first sight is not quite so bad if we take the trouble to study it more closely.

He asked Hans Castorp why, if he really wanted to read such books, he had not borrowed them from the director, who surely had a fine selection of that sort of literature. But Hans Castorp replied that he wanted to own them himself—it was different reading a book that you owned. And besides, he loved to take his pencil and underline at will. Joachim listened for hours to the sound coming from his cousin's balcony: a paper knife slipping through uncut pages.

Er fragte, warum Hans Castorp sie sich nicht, wenn er dergleichen schon lesen wolle, vom Hofrat geliehen habe, der diese Literatur doch sicher in guter Auswahl besitze. Aber Hans Castorp erwiderte, er wolle sie selber besitzen, es sei ein ganz an­deres Lesen, wenn das Buch einem gehöre; auch liebe er es, mit dem Bleistift dareinzufahren und anzustreichen. Stundenlang hörte Joachim in seines Vetters Loge das Geräusch, mit dem das Papiermesser die Blätter broschierter Bogen trennt.

Visagier describes Rabella as a curious man whose curiosity makes him utterly unbearable. He might be called the king of snoopers and meddlers. "You want to know everything," Visagier reproves him, "who I am, how I live, who my father is, where I was born and where my house is. You want to know my name and my sweetheart's name, my style of life, what I eat and who works for me, whether I am lucky in love or ever have been. You want to know—" In the next line Visagier's muse gets a little too outspoken for us to quote in translation. But immediately after this digression comes the expected conclusion: "There is nothing that you do not want to know. But in your rage to know all, Rabella, what you want to know is not enough and it is too much (non satis et nimium scire, Rabella, cupis)."

Scire cupis qui sim, qui vivam, quoque parente
    Sim natus, quae sit patria, quique lares.
Scire cupis nomenque meum, nomenque puellae.
    Scire cupis vitae quod genus ipse sequar.
Scire cupis mensas, famulus mihi quotque ministret.        5
    Scire cupis campi jugera quotque habeam.
Scire cupis quam sim, fuerimque in amore beatus.
    Scire cupis quam sit mentula longa mihi.
Nil non scire cupis; sed dum cupis omnia scire,
    Non satis et nimium scire, Rabella, cupis.        10

A few years before, he used to be savage, and inveigh against all parsons, scholars, and the like declaring that they were a pack of humbugs, and quacks that weren't fit to get their living but by grinding Latin and Greek, and a set of supercilious dogs that pretended to look down upon British merchants and gentlemen, who could buy up half a hundred of 'em. He would mourn now, in a very solemn manner, that his own education had been neglected, and repeatedly point out, in pompous orations to Georgy, the necessity and excellence of classical acquirements.

In fact the only reason why Virgil is thought 'dull' by some of his modern readers is that these readers are too 'dull' in Latin to perceive his subtlety, variety and novelty of expression. We know the conceptual and factual meanings of most Latin words, we even know, with the help of statistics, which words are 'poetic' and which 'unpoetic'; but who among us can claim to feel all the shades of meaning of a Latin word, who can see its whole 'colour', who can taste its full 'flavour'?

Senators, everything that is now believed to be really ancient was once new.

omnia, patres conscripti, quae nunc vetustissima creduntur, nova fuere.

When he saw some man of the people who was shouting,
he would strike at him with his staff, and reprove him also:
"Excellency! Sit still and listen to what others tell you,
to those who are better men than you, you skulker and coward
and thing of no account whatever in battle or council.
Surely not all of us Achaians can be as kings here.
Lordship for many is no good thing. Let there be one ruler,
one king, to whom the son of devious-devising Kronos
gives the sceptre and right of judgment, to watch over his people."

ὃν δ' αὖ δήμου τ᾽ ἄνδρα ἴδοι βοόωντά τ' ἐφεύροι,
τὸν σκήπτρῳ ἐλάσασκεν ὁμοκλήσασκέ τε μύθῳ·
δαιμόνι' ἀτρέμας ἧσο καὶ ἄλλων μῦθον ἄκουε,        200
οἳ σέο φέρτεροί εἰσι, σὺ δ' ἀπτόλεμος καὶ ἄναλκις
οὔτέ ποτ' ἐν πολέμῳ ἐναρίθμιος οὔτ' ἐνὶ βουλῇ·
οὐ μέν πως πάντες βασιλεύσομεν ἐνθάδ' Ἀχαιοί·
οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίη· εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω,
εἷς βασιλεύς, ᾧ δῶκε Κρόνου πάϊς ἀγκυλομήτεω        205
σκῆπτρόν τ' ἠδὲ θέμιστας, ἵνά σφισι βουλεύῃσι.

Therefore, the best reading is the one adopted by Ernout in the Budé edition⁵ (Paris, 1962): 'pygesiaca sacra' = a sacred ceremony dedicated to πυγή.

I've seen some buttocks that I'd like to honor.

"I would never read a book....I'm very skeptical of books. I don't want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that."

"Don't you read, or get read to?"

The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness. Folly. No, no!"

For the many, who are not as individuals excellent men, nevertheless can, when they have come together, be better than the few best people, not individually but collectively, just as feasts to which many contribute are better than feasts provided at one person's expense. For being many, each of them can have some part of virtue and practical wisdom, and when they come together, the multitude is just like a single human being, with many feet, hands, and senses, and so too for their character traits and wisdom. That is why the many are better judges of works of music and of the poets. For one of them judges one part, another another, and all of them the whole thing.

τοὺς γὰρ πολλούς, ὧν ἕκαστός ἐστιν οὐ σπουδαῖος ἀνήρ, ὅμως ἐνδέχεται συνελθόντας εἶναι βελτίους ἐκείνων, οὐχ ὡς ἕκαστον ἀλλ' ὡς σύμπαντας, οἷον τὰ συμφορητὰ δεῖπνα τῶν ἐκ μιᾶς δαπάνης χορηγηθέντων· πολλῶν γὰρ ὄντων ἕκαστον μόριον ἔχειν ἀρετῆς καὶ φρονήσεως, καὶ γίνεσθαι συνελθόντων, ὥσπερ ἕνα ἄνθρωπον τὸ πλῆθος, πολύποδα καὶ πολύχειρα καὶ πολλὰς ἔχοντ' αἰσθήσεις, οὕτω καὶ περὶ τὰ ἤθη καὶ τὴν διάνοιαν. διὸ καὶ κρίνουσιν ἄμεινον οἱ πολλοὶ καὶ τὰ τῆς μουσικῆς ἔργα καὶ τὰ τῶν ποιητῶν· ἄλλοι γὰρ ἄλλο τι μόριον, πάντα δὲ πάντες.

His son Peregrine's eulogy for the funeral Mass ended: "He died fortified by the rites of the Holy Church, and a partridge and a bottle of champagne."