Laudator Temporis Acti

Every man shall find his own desire; there is no one thing which pleases all: one man gathers thorns and another roses.

inveniet quod quisque velit: non omnibus unum est
    quod placet: hic spinas colligit, ille rosas.

I prattled on as if I were expert...

garriebam plane quasi peritus...

Yes, I'll step out, I'll step along as ... fast as my age permits and the occasion demands. (halting) But I know well enough how ... easy it is for me. For I've lost my nimbleness ... the years have taken hold of me ... it's a heavy body I carry ... my strength has left me. Ah, old age is a bad thing—a bad piece of freight! Yes, yes, it brings along untold tribulations when it comes; if I were to specify them all, it would be a long, long story.

ut aetas mea est atque ut hoc usus facto est
gradum proferam, progrediri properabo.
sed id quam mihi facile sit hau sum falsus.        755
nam pernicitas deserit: consitus sum
senectute, onustum gero corpus, vires
reliquere: ut aetas mala est! mers mala ergo est.
nam res plurumas pessumas, quom advenit, fert,
quas si autumem omnis, nimis longus sermo est.        760

758 ergo codd.: aegro Gratwick

Montaigne devotes a brief essay to a pair of pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, "Of Democritus and Heraclitus." The former is reputed to have been a misanthrope, perhaps a melancholic. The latter was known as "the laughing philosopher."

Labels: typographical and other errors

De Ste Croix was driven by a hatred of Christianity. He used to talk about his list of the most evil influences in world history, with Plato, St Paul and Augustine topping the list.

From trivial causes the tongue brings about great quarrels for men.

σμικρᾶς ἀπ' ἀρχῆς νεῖκος ἀνθρώποις μέγα
γλῶσσ' ἐκπορίζει.

LYS                         perii hercle ego miser!
PAR                                                              dig<nus es>.

LYS Poor me, I'm dead!
PAR (aside) Serves you right.

He loved to sprinkle howlers into his tutorial teaching (for instance the false claim that Julius Caesar had gone to Ireland) and unsuspecting pupils would repeat them in examination papers unaware that the examiners already knew them well. He also kept a barrel of beer in his rooms at Magdalen. After Schools (the final examination in Greats) he would entertain his finalists and throw half crowns to whoever had included one of his howlers in their Roman history paper.

Where, after all, does the earth get its richness from, if not from the rotting of earthy things? Those who cultivate the countryside are well aware of this; and those who don't, because they always live in town, should certainly know, from the gardens near the town, with what diligent care the worthless off-scourings of the city are kept, by whom they are even bought for a price, where they are carried to. Certainly all this could be thought by people with no experience to be worthless rubbish, void of any further use. And is anyone ready to spare a glance for a lump of dung? What people shrink from glancing at, they take great care to save.

So what seemed to have been already used up and thrown away goes back into the richness of the earth, the richness into sap, the sap into the root. And what passes from the earth into the root wanders up by invisible channels into the trunk, is distributed through the branches, passes from the branches into the seeds, from seed into fruit and leaves. There you are—what you shuddered at in the putrefaction of dung, you admire in the fruit and the greenery of the tree.

Unde enim terra pinguificatur, nisi de putredine terrenorum? Attendunt haec qui agrum colunt; et qui non colunt, quia in urbe semper vivunt, de hortis certe vicinis urbi cognoscant contemptibilia quaeque purgamenta civitatis quibus studiis serventur, a quibus etiam pretio comparentur, quo portentur. Certe iam contemptibilia, exinanita omni utilitate, ab inexpertis possent putari. Et quis dignatur stercus intueri? Quod intueri homo horret, servare curat.

Illud ergo quod consumptum iam et abiectum videbatur, redit in pinguedinem terrae, pinguedo in succum, succus in radicem; et quod de terra in radicem transit, invisibilibus accessibus migrat in robur, distribuitur per ramos, a ramis in germina, a germine in fructus et folia. Ecce quod horrebas in putredine stercoris, in arboris fecunditate et viriditate miraris.

Does any coin ever seem so carefully hidden that the authors of this law have not smelt it out?

numquisnam tam abstrusus usquam nummus videtur, quem non architecti huiusce legis olfecerint?

For myself, though I cannot recall the former age of liberty because I was born after that era, yet, as I insatiably steep myself in our present liberty, I count those enviable who were born and brought up in it; and I hold worthy of honour not less than the gods these men here who at this late date and at this stage of our lives, have treated us to one sip of liberty that we may know its taste.

ἐμοὶ δὲ τῆς μὲν πρότερον ἐλευθερίας ἀμνημονεῖν ἔστι διὰ τὸ κατόπιν αὐτῆς γεγονέναι, τῆς δὲ νῦν ἀπλήστως πιμπλαμένῳ μακαριστούς τε ἡγεῖσθαι τοὺς ἐγγενηθέντας καὶ ἐντραφέντας αὐτῇ καὶ τῶν θεῶν οὐδὲν μειόνως ἀξίους τιμῆς τούσδε τοὺς ἄνδρας, οἳ ὀψὲ γοῦν κἀν τούτῳ τῆς ἡλικίας ἡμᾶς γεύσαντας αὐτῆς.

Past history I know from tradition, but from the evidence of my own eyes I have learned with what evils tyranny infects a state. For it frustrates all the virtues, robs freedom of its lofty mood, and opens a school of fawning and terror, inasmuch as it leaves matters not to the wisdom of the laws, but to the angry whim of those who are in authority.

ἐγὼ γὰρ τὰ παλαιὰ οἶδα ἀκοῇ παραλαβών, οἷς δὲ ὄψει ὁμιλήσας ᾐσθόμην, οἵων κακῶν τὰς πολιτείας ἀναπιμπλᾶσιν αἱ τυραννίδες, κωλύουσαι μὲν πᾶσαν ἀρετὴν καὶ τοῦ μεγαλόφρονος ἀφαιρούμεναι τὸ ἐλεύθερον, κολακείας δὲ καὶ φόβου διδάσκαλοι καθιστάμεναι διὰ τὸ μὴ ἐπὶ σοφίᾳ τῶν νόμων, ἀλλ᾿ ἐπὶ τῇ ὀργῇ τῶν ἐφεστηκότων καταλιπεῖν τὰ πράγματα.

This tyranny was fostered by nothing but indolence and our failure to speak in opposition to any of its wishes.

καὶ τέτροφε τὴν τυραννίδα οὐδὲν ἕτερον πλὴν ἥ τε ἀργία καὶ τὸ πρὸς οὐδὲν τῶν ἐκείνῃ θελομένων ἀντιλογίᾳ χρώμενον

Taxation had doubled, even trebled, within living memory. The poor were victimized by an insane inflation. The rich defended themselves by unparalleled accumulations of property.

But when the dead are carried out to burial, people's thoughts do turn to death, and you hear them saying, "Poor soul! That's how it was; he was walking about only yesterday," or, "I saw him only a week ago, we had a conversation about this and that; yes, man is nothing at all."

Yes, they mutter things like that. But perhaps while the dead person is being mourned, while the funeral is being arranged, and preparations being made for it, when the cortège sets off, while the coffin is being laid in the grave, this kind of talk is to be heard. But once the dead have been buried, even this kind of thought is buried too. All those death-dealing preoccupations return, people forget whom they have buried, those who are going to follow them to the grave start thinking about the succession. Back they go to their frauds, their extortions, their perjuries, their drunkenness, to the endless pleasures of the body which are, I don't say going to vanish when they've been exhausted, but already vanishing while they are being sampled. And what is much more pernicious, from the burying of the dead an argument is drawn for the burial of the heart, and they say, Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.

Sed cum efferuntur mortui, cogitatur mors, et dicitur: Vae misero! talis fuit, heri ambulabat; aut: ante septem dies illum vidi, illud atque illud mecum locutus est; nihil est homo.

Murmurant ista. Sed forte cum mortuus plangitur, cum funus curatur, cum exsequiae praeparantur, cum effertur, cum itur, cum sepelitur, viget iste sermo: sepulto autem mortuo, etiam talis cogitatio sepelitur. Redeunt illae curae mortiferae, obliviscitur quem deduxerit, de successione cogitat decessurus; reditur ad fraudes, ad rapinas, ad periuria, ad vinolentiam, ad infinitas corporis voluptates, non dico, cum exhaustae fuerint, perituras, sed cum hauriuntur pereuntes; et, quod est perniciosius, de sepulto mortuo argumentum sepeliendi cordis assumitur, et dicitur: Manducemus et bibamus; cras enim morimur.

The hyphen in "Greco-Roman" civilization stands by abbreviation for many significant differences, within which still others set at odds "the dull Boeotians," "deceitful Carthaginians," "volatile Alexandrians," and so forth, each caricatured by jealous neighbors.³

3 Differences in manners and values between the Latin- and the Greek-speaking parts of our area of study appear above, chapter 3 note 69, and 4 notes 61, 68, 91, and 99. The prevalence of caricatures of nations and city-state populations can best be illustrated by passages dealing with Alexandrians and (usually meaning the same thing) Egyptians: Tac., Hist. 1.11; Plin., Paneg. 31.2; Dio Chrysos., Or. 32.1, 68, 77 and 86; Herodian 4.9.2; Dio 51.17.1; Expositio tot. mundi 37; etc.; and more generally E. Wölfflin in Archiv für Lat. Lexicographie 7 (1892) 135-146, 333-342.