Laudator Temporis Acti

Homer, Odyssey 11.36-41 (tr. A.T. Murray):

                                              Then there gathered
from out of Erebus the spirits of those that are dead,
brides, and unwedded youths, and toil-worn old men,
and tender maidens with hearts yet new to sorrow,
and many, too, that had been wounded with bronze-tipped spears,
men slain in fight, wearing their blood-stained armour.

                                                  αἱ δ᾽ ἀγέροντο
ψυχαὶ ὑπὲξ Ἐρέβευς νεκύων κατατεθνηώτων.
νύμφαι τ᾽ ἠίθεοί τε πολύτλητοί τε γέροντες
παρθενικαί τ᾽ ἀταλαὶ νεοπενθέα θυμὸν ἔχουσαι,
πολλοὶ δ᾽ οὐτάμενοι χαλκήρεσιν ἐγχείῃσιν,        40
ἄνδρες ἀρηίφατοι βεβροτωμένα τεύχε᾽ ἔχοντες.

Alfred Heubeck ad loc.: W.B. Stanford ad loc.:

This noble passage was condemned as spurious by Zenodotus, Aristophanes, and Aristarchus, on grounds of inconsistency with the later description of the ghosts approaching one by one. Luckily, whether an interpolation or not, it survived their censure, to be imitated by Virgil twice (Georgics 4, 475 ff., Aen. 6, 306 ff.) and to find echoes in Dante and Milton.

Giorgio Pintzas Monzani, "Pasteli, the Sweet Snack of Greece, Dates Back to Homer," Greek Reporter (May 24, 2026):

The first thing we know about this iconic Greek sweet is that it dates back to the Homeric era. In the Odyssey and in the Iliad, a sweet called ιτριον (itrion) is mentioned. A dish made of honey and sesame, it was used to give energy to Greek warriors who were battling in the Trojan War.

The word ἴτριον doesn't occur in Homer.

Labels: typographical and other errors

Peter Green (1924-2024), Armada from Athens (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970), p. 151:

Nothing is harder for a modern individual to understand than ancient concepts of loyalty and treachery. Those who have read so far will be uncomfortably aware that patriotism, in our sense, is a quality more or less irrelevant to Greek civic morality during the fifth century B.C. On very exceptional occasions — the Persian Wars are a good example — patriotism could burst its normal partisan bounds, and become something we all can recognise; but in the ordinary way loyalty was to one's family clan, one's religious or political group, rather than to that comparatively recent institution the polis. What one scholar describes as our passion for "the transcendental power of Greek city-state patriotism" is largely the pursuit of a modern myth. There was seldom a time when an oligarchic group was not ready to betray a democratically controlled city — or vice versa — to the foreign enemy at the gates. As for distinguished individual traitors, there was no shortage of them either in Athens or in Sparta: Hippias and Pausanias are only the first two names that come to mind. The number of Spartan rulers who defected, collaborated, or plotted against the state would make a very impressive roll-call on its own.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother Warren (February 18, 1940):

[T]he world, as it is now becoming and has partly become, is simply too much for people of the old square-rigged type like you and me. I don't understand its economics, or its politics, or any dam' thing about it.

Walter Scott (1771-1832), The Antiquary, chap. XIV (Jonathan Oldbuck speaking):

I love the reversion of a feast better than the feast itself. I delight in the analecta, the collectanea, as I may call them, of the preceding day's dinner...

Juvenal, Satires 10.232-236 (tr. Susanna Morton Braun):

But worse than any physical decline is the dementia. It doesn't remember the names of slaves or recognise the face of a friend who dined with him the previous evening or the children he fathered and raised himself.

                                                       sed omni
membrorum damno maior dementia, quae nec
nomina servorum nec voltum agnoscit amici
cum quo praeterita cenavit nocte, nec illos        235
quos genuit, quos eduxit.

Walter Scott (1771-1832), The Antiquary, chap. XXVIII (Jonathan Oldbuck and Edie Ochiltree speaking):

'I do bethink me you were the first person we met when Sir Arthur made his successful attack upon Misticot's grave, and also that when the labourers began to flag, you, Edie, were again the first to leap into the trench, and to make the discovery of the treasure. Now you must explain all this to me, unless you would have me use you as ill as Euclio does Staphyla in the Aulularia.'

'Lordsake, sir,' replied the mendicant, 'what do I ken about your Howlowlaria?—it's mair like a dog's language than a man's.'

Homer, Odyssey 22.226-230 (Athena speaking; tr. A.T. Murray):

Odysseus, no longer hast thou steadfast might nor any valor,
such as was thine when for high-born Helen of the white arms
thou didst for nine years battle with the Trojans unceasingly,
and many men thou slewest in dread conflict,
and by thy counsel was the broad-wayed city of Priam taken.

οὐκέτι σοί γ᾽, Ὀδυσεῦ, μένος ἔμπεδον οὐδέ τις ἀλκή
οἵη ὅτ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ Ἑλένῃ λευκωλένῳ εὐπατερείῃ,
εἰνάετες Τρώεσσιν ἐμάρναο νωλεμὲς αἰεί,
πολλοὺς δ᾽ ἄνδρας ἔπεφνες ἐν αἰνῇ δηϊοτῆτι
σῇ δ᾽ ἥλω βουλῇ Πριάμου πόλις εὐρυάγυια.

On the epithet λευκώλενος (white-armed) applied to Helen, see Lowell Edmunds, Toward the Characterization of Helen in Homer: Appellatives, Periphrastic Denominations, and Noun-Epithet Formulas (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 92-102. See also Th. Vlachodimitris, entry for λευκώλενος, in Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos, Bd. 2, Fasc. 14 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), cols. 1672-1673.

Detail of Jacques-Louis David, Les Amours de Pâris et d'Hélène (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. 3696): Lupita Nyong'o, cast as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie The Odyssey: Related posts:

• The Dead, Then and Now
• Pale Women and Dark Men
• Perusta Solibus
• Pale Skin
• Pallor
• Umbrellas
• White Lead

Xenophon, Apology of Socrates 6 (tr. O.J. Todd):

But now, if my years are prolonged, I know that the frailties of old age will inevitably be realized, that my vision must be less perfect and my hearing less keen, that I shall be slower to learn and more forgetful of what I have learned.

νῦν δὲ εἰ ἔτι προβήσεται ἡ ἡλικία, οἶδ ̓ ὅτι ἀνάγκη ἔσται τὰ τοῦ γήρως ἀποτελεῖσθαι καὶ ὁρᾶν τε χεῖρον καὶ ἀκούειν ἧττον καὶ δυσμαθέστερον εἶναι καὶ ὧν ἔμαθον ἐπιλησμονέστερον.