Laudator Temporis Acti

Modern society surpasses past societies in only two respects: vulgarity and technology.

La sociedad moderna no aventaja las sociedades pretéritas sino en dos cosas: la vulgaridad y la técnica.

Not only did our elders complain about their days, their grandparents too complained about their days. People have never been pleased with the days they lived in. But the days of the ancestors please their descendants, and they too were pleased with days they hadn't experienced—and that's precisely why they thought them pleasant. It's what's present that is sharply felt. I don't mean it comes nearer, but it touches the heart every day. Practically every year when we feel the cold we say "It's never been so cold." "It's never been so hot."

Et maiores nostri planxerunt dies suos, et avi eorum planxerunt dies suos. Nullis hominibus dies placuerunt quos vivendo egerunt. Sed posteris placent dies maiorum: et illis iterum illi dies placebant, quos ipsi non sentiebant, et ideo placebant. Quod enim praesens est, acrem habet sensum. Non dico, propius admovetur, sed cor tangit quotidie. Omni anno plerumque dicimus quando frigus sentimus: Numquam fecit tale frigus. Numquam fecit tales aestus.

The complaint our ancestors made, the complaint we make, the complaint our posterity will make, is that morality is overturned, that wickedness holds sway, and that human affairs and every sin are tending toward the worse. Yet these things remain and will continue to remain in the same position, with only a slight movement now in this direction, now in that, like that of the waves, which a rising tide carries far inland, and a receding tide restrains within the limits of the shoreline.

hoc maiores nostri questi sunt, hoc nos querimur, hoc posteri nostri querentur: eversos mores, regnare nequitiam, in deterius res humanas et omne nefas labi. at ista eodem stant loco stabuntque, paulum dumtaxat ultra aut citra mota, ut fluctus, quos aestus accedens longius extulit, recedens interiore litorum vestigio tenuit.

Volterra ordered all men living in certain hilly areas to plant at least four fruit trees each year, whereas Pisa required all contadini to plant six a year, as well as insisting on cabbage patches and beans. Parma decreed that all sharecroppers plough at least four times before sowing and specifically forbade the export of almost all foodstuffs, including cheese, poultry, eggs and vegetables.

Thought, dogblast you, thought is made up of particulars, and when those particulars cease to be vividly present to the consciousness in the general statement, thought ceases and blah begins.

At a single stroke all your plenteous prosperity has been shattered...

ὡς ἐν μιᾷ πληγῇ κατέφθαρται πολὺς
ὄλβος...

Your strength is not what it was, a harsh old age attends you.

σὴ δὲ βίη λέλυται, χαλεπὸν δέ σε γῆρας ὀπάζει.

El enemigo de una civilización es menos el adversario externo que el interno desgaste.

The enemy of a civilization isn't so much the external adversary as the internal corrosion.

An empty bag cannot stand upright.

Free men have free tongues!

ἐλευθέρα γὰρ γλῶσσα τῶν ἐλευθέρων.

Now learn a lesson from your son. Your little son is crying before you to lift him onto a horse. Do you listen, do you let him have his way? Are you being cruel, or in fact kind? Tell me, what is it, what's your reason for refusing? Can anyone doubt that the reason of course is love? You are saving up your whole estate for him when he is big, and while he is a little boy crying you won't lift him up on a single horse. Everything you have, house and whatever's in it, piece of land and whatever's in it, you are saving for him. And yet this little boy's crying and you won't lift him up on a horse. Let him cry all he wants, let him cry all day, and you don't listen to him, and it's out of kindness you don't listen to him, and you would be cruel if you did.

Nunc similitudinem accipe de filio tuo. Plorat ante te filius tuus parvus, ut eum leves in equum tuum: numquid audis? numquid exaudis? Durus es, an potius misericors? Quid est, dic mihi, quo consilio facis? Certe hoc consilium est charitatis, quis dubitet? Cui grandi servas totam domum, parvulum plorantem non levas in equum. Omnia quae habes, et domum et quidquid in domo, et agrum et quidquid in agro, illi servas; et tamen in equum non levas parvulum plorantem. Ploret quantum vult, tota die ploret; non exaudis, et misericordia non exaudis, et si exaudires, crudelis esses.

The sentiment within the city-state of sharing a common citizenship was not solely the result of having a common place of residence. When, in his fiction of a journey through the afterlife, the poet Dante meets the soul of the unhappy Pia dei Tolomei (Purgatorio V, 134), and she says that 'Siena made me' (Siena mi fe), she is doing more than announcing her place of birth. She is saying that the city-state of Siena provided the physical, social and political environment in which she grew up, that it moulded her outlook and personality. The modern citizen is shaped by varied forces, among which the monstrously powerful energy of the nation-state competes with international mass communications and with the generally diluted and disappearing strength of regional and local patriotism (resurgent though it is in some areas). The local newspaper demonstrates the survival of older loyalties, and in Italy itself the spirit of campanilismo, of the cherished and longed-for city tower, is not yet dead. But the citizen who fought alongside his neighbours against the citizens of the neighbouring cities knew through his way of life a now-vanished patriotism and campanilismo.

And one must add the attachment that almost all people, and especially those of conventional and conservative temperaments, feel to what is familiar, the spectacle of the same daily surroundings and accustomed ways of speech. Only thus can one understand something of the intensity of that emotion which Dante conveys in a passage of the Purgatorio (VI, 70 ff) when Virgil utters the single word 'Mantua' and a figure replies:

'O Mantoano, io son Sordello
De la tua terra;' e l'un l'altro abbracciava.
('O Mantuan, I am Sordello from your town.' And they embraced.)

• Think Locally
• Regional Solidarity and Hostility
• Native Soil
• Patria Chica
• Provincialism
• A Blade of Grass
• This Is My Home
• Near and Dear
• Parochialism
• One World
• Local Attachment
• Patriotism
• Insularity
• Xenophobia
• Le Patriotisme de Clocher
• Home Sweet Home

So I like, respect, and, in a sense, reverence Ezra Pound; I have found him a true, disinterested and unspoilt individual. He has not effected this intimate entrance into everything that is noble and enchanting for nothing. He has really walked with Sophocles beside the Aegean; he has seen the Florence of Cavalcanti; there is almost nowhere in the Past that he has not visited; he has been a great time-trotter, as we could describe this new kind of tourist. And he is not unworthy, in himself, of these many privileges.

But where the Present is concerned it is a different matter. He is extremely untrustworthy where that is concerned. That is the penalty of his function, like that of the eunuch instanced above. When he tries to be up-to-date it is a very uncomfortable business. And because he is conventional, and so accepts counterfeit readily where no standard has been established, he is a danger as far as he exerts any contemporary influence. He should not be taken seriously as a living being at all. Life is not his true concern, his gifts are all turned in the other direction. 'In his chosen or fated field he bows to no one,' to use his words. But his field is purely that of the dead. As the nature mortist, or painter essentially of still-life, deals for preference with life-that-is-still, that has not much life, so Ezra for preference consorts with the dead, whose life is preserved for us in books and pictures. He has never loved anything living as he has loved the dead.

The mixture of peoples was ever
the beginning of the city's ills,
as food in excess is of the body's.

Sempre la confusion delle persone
principio fu del mal de la cittade,
come del vostro il cibo che s'appone.

[L]a contusione di stirpi diverse, l'immigrazione di gente nuova, fu sempre cagione di sovvertimento e rovina dello stato (cittade); come il cibo che si sovrappone, mescolandosi nello stomaco, ad altro non ancora digerito, è causa di malattia nell'uomo. Principio di dottrina comune nei giuristi e filosofi medievali, e derivato da Aristotele (Politica, III, 3; VI, 10, ecc).

These men for their virtue were honored with crowns by the ancient
people of Athens, because once when men with unjust
ordinances ruled the city, they were first to check them
and lead the way, accepting mortal danger.

·τούσδ᾽ ἀρετῆς ἕνεκα στεφάνοις ἐγέραιρε παλαίχθων
    δῆμος Ἀθηναίων, οἵ ποτε τοὺς ἀδίκοις
θεσμοῖς ἄρξαντας πόλιος πρῶτοι καταπαύειν
    ἦρξαν, κίνδυνον σώμασιν ἀράμενοι.

Great cities, greater in decay and death,
    Dream-like with immemorial repose,
Whose ruins like a shrine for ever sheathe
    The mighty names and memories of those
    Who lived and died to die no more, shall close
Your happy pilgrimage; and you shall learn,
Breathing their ancient air, the thoughts that burn

For ever in the hearts of after men:—
    Yea, from the very soil of silent Rome
You shall grow wise; and, walking, live again
    The lives of buried peoples, and become
    A child by right of that eternal home,
Cradle and grave of empires, on whose walls
The sun himself subdued to reverence falls.

O solemn aisles! O vast and sacred shade!
    Ruins on ruins heaped! Imperial state
With rubbish of wrecked centuries o'erlaid!
    There Christ in Phoebus' shrine is consecrate;
    Titles of pope and priest surmount the gate
Where Cæsar's legions trampled: yet in vain
Age strives with age; for still the old gods reign:

Pale gods in cere-cloths, ghosts of bye-gone Greece,
    Rule in their marble sepulchres: the halls,
Through which we pass, with dead divinities
    Are gleaming; and the voice of Hellas calls
    Clear from her grave: nought but the pedestals
Belong to Christ: the carven shapes above
Still breathe and smile with life of ancient Love.

• The Old Goat-Legged Gentleman from Greece
• They Told Me Pan Was Dead
• You Shall Hear the Note of His Pipe
• Pan Is Not Yet Dead
• A Worshipper at Pan's Shrine
• This Modern World Is Grey and Old
• Poems of a Stockbroker
• The Survival of Pan

Discord mid citizens is the foeman's chance.

Seditio civium hostium est occasio.

Occupied with internecine feuds, the capital has been almost destroyed by the Ethiopian and the Dacian.

paene occupatam seditionibus
delevit urbem Dacus et Aethiops.

The end of death overtook you, you couldn't escape it!

φθῆ σε τέλος θανάτοιο κιχήμενον, οὐδ᾽ ὑπάλυξας.

Which John? The one, brothers, whom the Lord loved more than the rest, who reclined on his breast,¹⁶ who drank from his breast what he himself belched forth¹⁷ in the gospel. It's the very John who said, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing (Jn 1:1-3). A great belching—but first there had been a great drinking! Do you enjoy what he belches out? See where he drank from. He was reclining on the Lord's breast. At that banquet he had drunk everything that he was to belch forth so felicitously in the gospel.

16. See Jn 13:23.
17. In English "belching" is not a nice word, and metaphorically only used of such things as chimneys belching forth smoke. But in the Latin of Augustine's time it was a nice word, possibly because belching after a meal was correct etiquette, as still today in certain Oriental cultures. I have to keep it here (though otherwise I would have translated it by something like "gushed forth"), because of his comment immediately after the quotation, where he quite obviously is presenting us with the image of a doughty pot-man belching.

Qui Ioannes? Ille, fratres, quem dominus prae ceteris diligebat, qui super pectus domini recumbebat, qui de pectore eius bibit quod in euangelio ructavit. Ipse est Ioannes qui dixit: In principio erat uerbum, et uerbum erat apud deum, et deus erat uerbum. Hoc erat in principio apud deum. Omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil. Magna ructatio, sed prior erat magna potatio. Delectat quod ructat? Vide unde bibit. Super pectus domini discumbebat, in conuiuio illo haec omnia biberat quae in euangelio magna felicitate ructabat.

Natural wealth is complete when you have bread and water and simple covering for the body. Superfluous wealth, however, contains a boundless agony of desire in its heart.

Ὁ κατὰ φύσιν πλοῦτος ἄρτῳ καὶ ὕδατι καὶ τῇ τυχούσῃ τοῦ σώµατος σκέπῃ συµπεπλήρωται· ὁ δὲ περιττὸς κατὰ ψυχὴν ἀπέραντον ἔχει καὶ τὴν τῆς ἐπιθυµίας βάσανον.

AST comprime sis eiram.
TRVC    eam quidem hercle tu, quae solita es, comprime,
impudens, quae per ridiculum rustico suades stuprum.
AST “eiram” dixi: ut decepisti! dempsisti unam litteram.

262 eam P, meam A, eram Spengel

AST Do keep your distress in check.
TRVC No, you, who are used to doing it, keep your mistress in check,¹⁰ you shameless creature! You jokingly advise a country lad to have sex.
AST I said “distress”: how you’ve tricked me! You’ve changed one letter.

¹⁰ The word ira, “anger, distress,” originally contained the diphthong ei in its first syllable; in Plautus’ day the diphthong was still written and possibly still pronounced, though it is more likely that in pronunciation it had already developed into a closed ē. Truculentus (probably deliberately) misunderstands the word as ĕra, “mistress,” which leads to a different interpretation of comprimere: Astaphium had intended the meaning “keep in check, control,” whereas Truculentus interprets it as “keep in check, rape.” In the Latin, Astaphium goes on to say that Truculentus removed one letter (eira → era); in the translation this is rendered as “changing one letter” (distress → mistress).

Labels: typographical and other errors