Laudator Temporis Acti

I serve my master: you, and countless others,
Are governed by convention. Some, again,
Obey a tyrant, ruled himself by fear.
Kings have their servants, but submit to gods:
God, to Necessity. Considered well,
All things in their degree give place, the small
By nature's law made subject to the greater.

ἐμοῦ γάρ ἐστι κύριος <μὲν> εἷς ἀνήρ,
τούτου δὲ καὶ σοῦ μυρίων τ᾽ ἄλλων νόμος,
ἑτέρων τύραννος, τῶν τυραννούντων φόβος·
δοῦλοι βασιλέων εἰσίν, ὁ βασιλεὺς θεῶν,
ὁ θεὸς ἀνάγκης. πάντα δ᾽, ἂν σκοπῇς, ὅλως        5
ἑτέρων πέφυκεν ἥττον᾽· ὧν δὲ μείζονα,
τούτοις ἀνάγκη ταῦτα δουλεύειν ἀεί.

My master calls me his; but him, and all,—
Myself and thousands more,— the laws enthral.
By tyrants some are held; themselves by fear;
Kings rule on earth, but from the heavenly sphere
Gods direct kingly actions day by day;
But gods themselves Necessity obey.
Look round; in everything the law's the same;
The stronger o'er the weaker mastery claim.

χοὶ μὲν ξεναγοὶ τῶν σατραπῶν, οἱ δὲ σατράπαι

The first and most rudimentary test of the historian’s competence is that he should be able to read his sources. This is not always easy, as for example when the language is classical Arabic or the writing is a crabbed Ottoman bureaucratic script.

[....]

I was told that I should study the original documents, which meant British documents, French documents, German documents, Austrian documents and Russian documents. And in my youth and innocence I asked, What about the Turkish documents? I was told that they were not important, and anyway there weren’t any. I found this an unsatisfactory answer. There had to be some Turkish documents. In the books that I read on the Eastern Question, Turkey was a stage and a backdrop and all the actors were Europeans. I felt this needed further investigation. So I learned Turkish, or at least enough to read some documents.

The principal things for the whole use of man's life are water, fire, iron, and salt, flour of wheat, honey, milk, and the blood of the grape, and oil, and clothing.

In 39:26 are listed ten indispensable items for human life in ancient Palestine; the list in 29:21 includes only water, bread, clothing, and a house. Several of the items in the longer list are traditional: for grain ("the heart of the wheat," 39:26c; cf. NOTE), wine ("the blood of the grape," 39:26d; cf. Gen 49:11), and oil, cf. Hos 2:10; Jer 31:12; Neh 10:38; 2 Chr 32:28; for "milk and honey," the formulaic pair of words used to describe the Promised Land, cf, for example, Exod 3:8; 13:5; 33:3; Lev 20:24; Num 13:27; 14:8; 16:13-14; Deut 6:3; 11:9; 26:9; Jer 11:5; 32:22; for water and cloth, cf. Hos 2:7. The pairing of iron with salt (39:26b) in this list is noteworthy: manufactured iron goods were apparently considered essential for daily life in Ben Sira's day.

There is one other thing that I recall about Yiddish. Many languages have some sort of suffix, added at the end of a word, for a variety of purposes—smallness, affection, intimacy, etc. In English we use only two: -let and -kin (e.g., booklet, lambkin) and both sparingly. German makes much more extensive use of -lein and -chen (e.g., fraülein, mädchen). Italian has a wide range, notably -ino, -etto, -ello and, to magnify rather than reduce, -one. A similar effect is achieved in Arabic not by adding a suffix, but by a change of vowels—from Hassan to Husayn, from ‘Abd to ‘Ubayd, as in the names ‘Abdallah and ‘Ubaydallah. Yiddish has a wide range of such suffixes, but one in particular, -inyu, caught my attention. It is attached to three words and to no others. The three words are father (tatinyu), mother (maminyu) and God (Gottinyu). Clearly, these are not diminutives—the message is not diminution but intimacy. I thought this remarkable. The same theological attitude of intimacy is expressed in a familiar Jewish joke about the hard-up businessman who prays, “Oh God, you help complete strangers! Why can’t you help me?”

Then was I sore afraid, and fell into such a pickle that I savoured ill in the nostrils of those who stood by.

Tunc fui ita perterritus quod perminxi et permerdavi me, quod omnes nasum praetenebant.

Then I was so very afraid that I thoroughly pissed and shat myself, so that all were holding their noses.

• The Smell of Fear
• An Effect of Fear
• Thin Soup
• An Effect of Fear in Cellini's Autobiography

Labels: noctes scatologicae

The people's lack of judgment has often put the worst man in office.

πολλάκις γὰρ ἀκρισία δήµου τὸν χείριστον εἰς ἀρχὴν προεστήσατο.

This is wine—if the merest driblet falls in the Nile,
its scent makes the sober crocodile drunk without end.
If the deer on the plain drinks but a single drop,
he becomes a roaring lion, fearing no tiger.

• Some Effects of Wine
• Praise of Dionysus
• Wine
• The Power of Wine
• Effects of Wine
• Effects of Drinking Wine

You save yourself, and I'll save myself.

σῶζε σαυτόν, ἐγὼ δ' ἐμέ.

As vultures are attracted to foul-smelling things, flying over many meadows and many fair and sweet-smelling places, and as flies, passing over what is healthy, are drawn to a sore, so too malicious characters do not even glance at splendid achievements or great accomplishments in life but dedicate themselves to the rot and the decay.

Ὥσπερ δὲ οἱ γῦπες πρὸς τὰ δυσώδη φέρονται, πολλοὺς µὲν λειµῶνας, πολλοὺς δὲ ἡδεῖς καὶ εὐώδεις τόπους ὑπεριπτάµενoι, καὶ αἱ µυῖαι τὸ µὲν ὑγιαῖνον παρατρέχουσιν, πρὸς δὲ τὸ ἕλκος ἐπείγονται, οὕτως οἱ βάσκανοι τὰς µὲν τοῦ βίου λαµπρότητας καὶ τὰ µεγέθη τῶν κατορθουµένων οὐδὲ προσβλέπουσι, τοῖς δὲ σαθροῖς ἐπιτίθενται.

Get lost! You can do nothing—you can only talk.

φθείρου· τὸ γὰρ δρᾶν οὐκ ἔχων λόγους ἔχεις.

Tastier than old wine,
sweeter than the passing of winecups
is the play of swords and lances,
the clash of armies at my command.
To face death in battle is my life,
for life is what fulfils the soul.

Despite the warnings of those around her, Dorothea married him, thus embarking on a short-lived, unhappy wedded life in a gloomy parsonage filled with books and silence.

Before he left the next day it had been decided that the marriage should take place within six weeks. Why not? Mr. Casaubon's house was ready. It was not a parsonage, but a considerable mansion, with much land attached to it. The parsonage was inhabited by the curate, who did all the duty except preaching the morning sermon.

Mr. Casaubon's home was the manor-house. Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church, with the old parsonage opposite.

Labels: typographical and other errors

Your life is a sum of counted breaths.
With each breath that passes
a part of life is lost.
That which gives life brings death every moment nearer,
and your caravan is led by one
who will not jest with you.

Labels: typographical and other errors

For every one should cleave to his own business, and none should put his sickle into another man's corn. Because a cobbler is a cobbler, and a tailor is a tailor, and a smith is a smith; and it would go ill with a tailor who tried to make shoes and slippers.

Quia unusquisque debet manere in facultate sua, et non debet mittere falcem in messem alterius. Quia sutor est sutor et sartor est sartor, et faber est faber. Et non staret bene si unus sartor vellet facere calceos vel stamulta.

• Outside My Area of Expertise
• Let the Cobbler Stick to His Last
• Sutor Ne Ultra Crepidam

Though our modern dictators entertain us by their bombast and vulgarity, and maintain the high traditions of their class in other less engaging vices, they fall short, alas!, of the exorbitant pleasures, the outrageous, shameless orgies of debauchery, which are so endearing a feature of the more ancient and authentic tyrants. Hitler and Mussolini neither smoke nor drink, and although Musso sometimes allows himself a mild infusion of lime-flowers, for his stomach’s sake, tea and coffee (those poisonous drugs!) he rigorously eschews. As for Hitler, cream-éclairs are said to be the limit of his indulgence; but of these, it is whispered, he has sometimes, when in convivial mood, been known to take one over the eight. When these two miserable creatures met in Venice, that city of ancient and exotic debauchery, did they feast with Lucullus and romp with Cleopatra? No: two plates of scrambled eggs, and early and alone to bed. O tempora, o mores! Shades of Sardanapalus and Semiramis! Where’s Caligula, where’s Nero, where’s Elagabalus? Has the long catalogue of luxurious Popes and Caesars tapered down to this, and the Seven glorious Deadly Sins shrunk to an inhibition?

More problematic is the Aeneid, which reverses the proportions: the Dido episode, and the journey into the underworld that succeeds it, add up to an oasis in a carefully landscaped desert, and it takes a lot of thirstily summoned dedication to convince yourself that those parched miles of dunes, elegantly arranged though they might be, are worth crossing just for the prospect of getting to Troy and watching it burn. The Orpheus and Eurydice episode in Georgics IV shows the intensity of dramatic talent that lay within Virgil's reach, but that only makes things worse when we find out how little drama the Aeneid has, compared with the long swathes of beautiful language with nothing in particular to be beautiful about. As it has come down to us, epic poetry in Latin is a misfire. The great classical historian Ronald Syme spoke the truth in passing, when he said that Tacitus wrote the Roman epics that the poets didn't.

Poor old Rowse says somewhere in his autobiography that he regards the old ideal of Mens sana in corpore sano as arrant nonsense and a contradiction in terms, or words to that effect; for when he rides his hobby-horses he does ride them with whips and spur. He prefers to believe that bodily health and intellectual force are incompatible things, and that art springs from the limitation of experience. Well, I suppose it's a tenable view for such as want to hold it, and for sure, since Flaubert and Leopardi were invalids, there's something to give a smack of taste to the weak, insipid soup of Wackenroder and Proust. But I'm on the side of the Elizabethans, and Goethe, and St Aristophanes, my patron saint, and all whose philosophy is founded on experience, or, at least, on a bottom of common sense which presupposes experience. I'm for Gibbon and Surtees, not these etiolated continentals. Why even style depends on experience and observation, since style needs imagery, and imagery must be drawn from life, from wild beasts in the forest, and storms at sea, and low life in taprooms and circuses and at earthstoppers' dinners, and a relish and recollection of these things, and a sympathy with them. But who can draw a good image from private wards and clinking bedpans and cut flowers and demure white sheets and undertones, an unillumined world, without seasons, without laughter, where even a fart is an austere medical symptom only?

Lord, of your grace all that I hope is this—
keep the realm of my pleasure prosperous
avert from me the calamity of chastity
and keep far from me the doom of repentance.

                                        I am so tired,
And sick, and sicker even than that; for ah,
The worst of sicknesses is life itself;
And only death can cure it. This is sure
The medicine that is bitterest, but the last,
And everywhere available, and cheap.

                                        Ich bin recht müd'
Und krank, und kranker noch als krank, denn ach!
Die allerschlimmste Krankheit ist das Leben;
Und heilen kann sie nur der Tod. Das ist
Die bitterste Arznei, doch auch die letzte,
Und ist zu haben überall, und wohlfeil.