Laudator Temporis Acti

Euripides, Suppliant Women 949-954 (tr. Edward P. Coleridge):

O wretched sons of men! Why do you get weapons and bring slaughter on one another? Cease from that, give over your toiling, and in mutual peace keep safe your cities. Short is the span of life, so it would be best to run its course as lightly as we may, free from trouble.

                                       ὦ ταλαίπωροι βροτῶν,
τί κτᾶσθε λόγχας καὶ κατ᾽ ἀλλήλων φόνους
τίθεσθε; παύσασθ᾽, ἀλλὰ λήξαντες πόνων        950
ἄστη φυλάσσεθ᾽ ἥσυχοι μεθ᾽ ἡσύχων.
σμικρὸν τὸ χρῆμα τοῦ βίου· τοῦτον δὲ χρὴ
ὡς ῥᾷστα καὶ μὴ σὺν πόνοις διεκπερᾶν.

C.S. Lewis, letter to Owen Barfield (February 8, 1939):

[M]y distrust of all lexicons and translations is increasing.

[J.] Enoch Powell (1912-1998), No Easy Answers (London: Sheldon Press, 1973), p. 8:

It is not unusual to discover that when we suppose ourselves to have risen superior to what generations of our predecessors found overwhelmingly significant and self-evident, we are in reality describing our own impoverishment of imagination or of vision.

Plutarch, Life of Philopoemen 4.3 (tr. Bernadotte Perrin):

As for what he got from his campaigning, he used to spend it on horses, or armour, or the ransoming of captives; but his own property he sought to increase by agriculture, which is the justest way to make money. Nor did he practise agriculture merely as a side issue, but he held that the man who purposed to keep his hands from the property of others ought by all means to have property of his own.

τὰ μὲν οὖν ἐκ τῶν στρατειῶν προσιόντα κατάνλισκεν εἰς ἵππους καὶ ὅπλα καὶ λύσεις αἰχμαλώτων, τὸν δὲ οἶκον ἀπὸ τῆς γεωργίας αὔξειν ἐπειρᾶτο δικαιοτάτῳ τῶν χρηματισμῶν, οὐδὲ τοῦτο ποιούμενος πάρεργον, ἀλλὰ καὶ πάνυ προσήκειν οἰόμενος οἰκεῖα κεκτῆσθαι τὸν ἀλλοτρίων ἀφεξόμενον.

Related post: The Foundation.

Plato, Laws 9.862e (tr. Trevor J. Saunders):

But suppose the lawgiver finds a man who's beyond cure — what legal penalty will he provide for this case? He will recognize that the best thing for all such people is to cease to live — best even for themselves. By passing on they will help others, too: first, they will constitute a warning against injustice, and secondly they will leave the state free of scoundrels.

ὃν δ᾽ ἂν ἀνιάτως εἰς ταῦτα ἔχοντα αἴσθηται νομοθέτης, δίκην τούτοισι καὶ νόμον θήσει τίνα; γιγνώσκων που τοῖς τοιούτοις πᾶσιν ὡς οὔτε αὐτοῖς ἔτι ζῆν ἄμεινον, τούς τε ἄλλους ἂν διπλῇ ὠφελοῖεν ἀπαλλαττόμενοι τοῦ βίου, παράδειγμα μὲν τοῦ μὴ ἀδικεῖν τοῖς ἄλλοις γενόμενοι, ποιοῦντες δὲ ἀνδρῶν κακῶν ἔρημον τὴν πόλιν.

Otto Kern, Die Inschriften von Magnesia am Maeander (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1900), Nr. 98, pp. 82-84, lines 21-31 on p. 83, tr. Frank R. Trombley after Royden Keith Yerkes:

At the exhibition of the bull the sacred herald is to pray, with the priest and priestess, the stephanophorus, the boys and girls, the military officers, the cavalry officers, the stewards, the secretary of the council, the auditor and the general, for the safety of the city and the land, the women and children and all the inhabitants of the city and the land, for peace and wealth and bearing of grain and all other fruits and possessions.

καὶ ἐν τῶι ἀναδείκνυσθαι τὸν ταῦρον κατευ-
χέσθω ὁ ἱεροκῆρυξ μετὰ τοῦ ἱέρεω καὶ τῆς ἱερείας καὶ
τοῦ στεφανηφόρου καὶ τῶμ παίδων καὶ τῶν παρθένων
καὶ τῶμ πολεμάρχων καὶ τῶν ἱππάρχων καὶ τῶν οἰ-
κονόμων καὶ τοῦ γραμματέως τῆς βουλῆς καὶ τοῦ    25
ἀντιγραφέως καὶ τοῦ στρατηγοῦ ὑπέρ τε σωτηρί-
ας τῆς τε πόλεως καὶ τῆς χώρας καὶ τῶμ πολιτῶν
καὶ γυναικῶν καὶ τέκνων καὶ τῶν ἄλλων τῶν κατοικούν-
των ἔν τε τῆι πόλει καὶ τῆι χώραι ὑπέρ τε εἰρήνης καὶ
πλούτου καὶ σίτου φορᾶς καὶ τῶν ἄλλων καρπῶν πάν-    30
τῶν καὶ τῶν κτηνῶν.

The translation is faulty in the last word — it seems to confuse κτηνῶν (herds) with κτημάτων (possessions).

On the inscription as a whole see Stéphanie Paul, "Sharing the Civic Sacrifice: Civic Feast, Procession, and Sacrificial Division in the Hellenistic Period," in Floris van den Eijnde et al., edd., Feasting and Polis Institutions (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 315-339 (at 316-321).

---

From Gonzalo Jerez Sánchez:

Maybe he had too much Aeschylus in his mind and had κτήνη τὰ δημιοπληθῆ (Ag. 129, vid. Fraenkel ad loc.) in mind.

Fraenkel translated κτήνη τὰ δημιοπληθῆ as "the herds ... the plentiful possessions of the people". Here is his note: From Eric Thomson:

It behooves me to mention Old English feoh (cognate with Latin pecus) which often has a sense indeterminate between livestock in the flesh and (metonymically derived) wealth and possessions.

Related posts:

• Goods and Chattels
• Wealth in Cattle

Labels: typographical and other errors

The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper, Vol. II (San Francisco: Harper, 2009), p. 20, n. 66:

Since they were boys Jack and Warnie had been amused by their father's 'low' Irish pronunciation of 'potatoes' as 'p'daytas'. As a result, Mr Lewis was nicknamed 'The P'dayta' or 'The P'daytabird'. The term came to be applied to anyone displaying the characteristics of their father, in particular an ignorant dogmatism. Jack eventually discovered this characteristic in himself: 'I'm afraid I must be a P'dayta,' he wrote to Warnie on 2 August 1928, 'for I made a P'daytism the other day: I began talking about the world and how it was well explored by now and, said I "We know there are no undiscovered islands." It was left for Maureen to point out the absurdity' (CL I, p. 777).

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, Chapter 12, § 156 (tr. Adrian Del Caro and Christopher Janaway):

In order to have a sure compass always in hand for finding our bearings in life, and in order to view life always in the proper light without ever going astray, nothing is more useful than to accustom oneself to regarding this world as a place of penance, hence as a prison, a penal colony as it were, a labour camp as it was already called by the oldest philosophers (according to Clement of Alexandria, Stromata III, c. 3, p. 399). Among the Christian fathers Origen formulated it with commendable boldness (see Augustine, The City of God, XI, ch. 23).

Um allezeit einen sichern Kompass, zur Orientierung im Leben, bei der Hand zu haben, und um dasselbe, ohne je irre zu werden, stets im richtigen Lichte zu erblicken, ist nichts tauglicher, als dafs man sich angewöhne, diese Welt zu betrachten als einen Ort der Busse, also gleichsam als eine Strafanstalt, a penal colony, ein ἐργαστήριον), wie schon die ältesten Philosophen sie nannten (Clem. Alex. Strom. L. III, c. 3, p. 399) und unter den christlichen Vätern Origenes es mit lobenswerter Kühnheit aussprach (Augustin. de civit. Dei, L. XI, c. 23).

John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), Memories and Milestones (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1915), pp. 120-122:

There should be a great Reader in large print, made up of bits and fragments — anecdotes, verses, scenes from the dramatists, fragments of Plutarch, Homer and Herodotus. And the boys should be encouraged to read in this book small bits at a time, and easy bits first. And the teacher should be satisfied when the sense is understood and should push the boys on to read and to read, and not to bother about the grammar. Enough grammar will filter into them by degrees to make them understand the constructions — and what else is grammar for? Let the tutor have no ambition to make the boys write Greek. The desire to write Greek is an exotic thing. If a boy has it, let him be encouraged, of course; but let it not be forced upon the next boy. As a matter of fact, the best way to learn to write any language is to read plenty of it; to learn fragments by heart, and fill the mind with the sound of it; then to write it by ear; and thereafter to work up the grammar in correcting what has been written. This is the way to learn French or German; why not Greek? Language is a thing of the ear, and is most easily learned by the ear, and in quantities. Let the children have more Greek, and ever more Greek, and let grammar and critical analysis be kept for dessert. When one thinks of the thousands of teachers who are obliged to plod year after year through the same portions of Xenophon and Virgil and through the same scenes of Homer, just because of the fear of the Learned World lest the boys should learn the wrong kind of Greek — when one sees the stunting of intelligence, the deadening of interest that must come from such a process — one does not wonder at the decay of Greek in our universities. We have been doing what is hard; we ought to do what is easy.

I corrected dotes to anecdotes.

Labels: typographical and other errors