Laudator Temporis Acti

Gilbert Murray, Euripides and His Age (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1913), pp. 99-102:

It is strange to reflect on the gulf that lies between the life of an ancient poet and his modern descendants. Our poets and men of letters mostly live either by writing or by investments eked out by writing. They are professional writers and readers and, as a rule, nothing else. It is comparatively rare for any one of them to face daily dangers, to stand against men who mean to kill him and beside men for whom he is ready to die, to be kept a couple of days fasting, or even to work in the sweat of his body for the food he eats. If such things happen by accident to one of us we cherish them as priceless "copy," or we even go out of our way to compass the experience artificially.

But an ancient poet was living hard, working, thinking, fighting, suffering, through most of the years that we are writing about life. He took part in the political assembly, in the Council, in the jury-courts; he worked at his own farm or business; and every year he was liable to be sent on long military expeditions abroad or to be summoned at a day's notice to defend the frontier at home. It is out of a life like this, a life of crowded reality and work, that Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides found leisure to write their tragedies; one writing 90, one 127, and the third 92! Euripides was considered in antiquity a bookish poet. He had a library—in numbers probably not one book for every hundred that Tennyson or George Meredith had: he was a philosopher, he read to himself. But on what a background of personal experience his philosophy was builded! It is probably this immersion in the hard realities of life that gives ancient Greek literature some of its special characteristics. Its firm hold on sanity and common sense, for instance; its avoidance of sentimentality and paradox and various seductive kinds of folly; perhaps also its steady devotion to ideal forms and high conventions, and its aversion from anything that we should call "realism." A man everlastingly wrapped round in good books and safe living cries out for something harsh and real—for blood and swear-words and crude jagged sentences. A man who escapes with eagerness from a life of war and dirt and brutality and hardship to dwell just a short time among the Muses, naturally likes the Muses to be their very selves and not remind him of the mud he has just washed off. Euripides has two long descriptions of a battle, one in the Children of Heracles and one in the Suppliant Women; both are rhetorical Messenger's Speeches, conventionally well-written and without one touch that suggests personal experience. It is curious to compare these, the writings of the poet who had fought in scores of hand-to-hand battles, with the far more vivid rhapsodies of modern writers who have never so much as seen a man pointing a gun at them.

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 36.2 (1915) 230-242 (at 230):

No one can understand Aristophanes without studying Euripides. A man's enmities are as important for the appreciation of his work in life as his friendships, if not more important. 'Dearest foe', we say, and 'pet aversion'.

Theocritus 16.20 (tr. A.S.F. Gow):

And who would listen to another? Homer is enough for all.

τίς δέ κεν ἄλλου ἀκούσαι; ἅλις πάντεσσιν Ὅμηρος.

Demosthenes 4.44 (1st Philippic; tr. J.H. Vince):

If we sit here at home listening to the abuse and mutual recriminations of the orators, there is not the slightest chance of our getting anything done that ought to be done.

ἂν μέντοι καθώμεθ᾽ οἴκοι, λοιδορουμένων ἀκούοντες καὶ αἰτιωμένων ἀλλήλους τῶν λεγόντων, οὐδέποτ᾽ οὐδὲν ἡμῖν μὴ γένηται τῶν δεόντων.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), "The Old Issue," lines 17-18:

All we have of freedom, all we use or know—
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), "La Vita Solitaria," lines 23-38 (tr. Jonathan Galassi):

Sometimes I sit alone, apart,
on a hillside, by a lake
ringed by silent reeds and bushes.
There, when high noon fills the sky,
the Sun paints his undisturbed reflection,
and no blade of grass or leaf
stirs in the wind, you neither see nor hear
wave break nor cicada shriek; no bird
moves a feather on a branch, no butterfly
flitters—there's no sound or movement, far or near.
Deepest quiet fills those shores,
and, sitting still, I seem to forget
myself and the world; my limbs relax,
no longer ruled by mind or spirit,
their immemorial calm
dissolving in the silence of the place.

Talor m'assido in solitaria parte,
Sovra un rialto, al margine d'un lago
Di taciturne piante incoronato.        25
Ivi, quando il meriggio in ciel si volve,
La sua tranquilla imago il Sol dipinge,
Ed erba o foglia non si crolla al vento,
E non onda incresparsi, e non cicala
Strider, nè batter penna augello in ramo,        30
Nè farfalla ronzar, nè voce o moto
Da presso nè da lunge odi nè vedi.
Tien quelle rive altissima quiete;
Ond'io quasi me stesso e il mondo obblio
Sedendo immoto; e già mi par che sciolte        35
Giaccian le membra mie, nè spirto o senso
Più le commova, e lor quiete antica
Co' silenzi del loco si confonda.

Iris Origo, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (Chappaqua: Helen Marx Books, 1999), pp. 129-130 (after quoting lines 26, 28-32):

In this deliberate return to country myths and scenes, Leopardi—like his great contemporary Manzoni—was following the current of his time; he was sharing in the revolution which was bringing back literature from the palace to the farm, from the heroic to the quotidian. His lady is not a goddess, but a country girl on a summer's evening, bringing home an armful of fresh grass; his subjects, not kings or heroes, but an old woman gossiping on the church steps, and children shouting, and a tired labourer, bearing home his hoe. His scene is the village square, the hedgerow beneath the hill. But the square holds the whole pageant of human life, and beyond the hedgerow lies infinity.

The same lines in Geoffrey L. Bickersteth's translation:

At times I seat me in a lonely spot,
Upon a gentle knoll, beside a lake
Ringed with a silent coronal of trees.
There, in the full noon of a summer's day,
The Sun his tranquil image loves to paint,
Nor grass, nor leaf stirs in the windless air,
No ripple of water, no cicala's shrill
Chirping, no flutter of wings upon the bough,
No buzz of insect, voice or movement none,
Far off or near, can ear or eye perceive.
Those shores a deep, unbroken stillness holds;
Whence, sitting motionless, I half forget
Myself, forget the world, my limbs appear
Already loosened, neither soul nor sense
Informs them more, and their age-old repose
Is mingled with the silences around.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 8.48.4 (Corolianus' mother speaking; tr. Earnest Cary):

Any peace is preferable to any war.

πᾶσα μὲν εἰρήνη παντός ἐστι πολέμου κρείττων.

This reminds me of the fatuous bumper sticker "War is never the answer."

Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1998), p. xlii (notes omitted):

Most (though not all) of the war memorials which stand in squares, schools and churchyards all over Europe, whether they portray idealized warriors, mourning women or (as at Thiepval) merely list names on stone or bronze, insist that those who died in the war did not die in vain. 'Morts pour la Patrie' is the most frequently encountered inscription on French monuments aux morts, whether heroic, civic or funerary. 'Deutschland muss leben, auch wenn wir sterben mussen [sic, read müssen],' reads the legend of the Dammtor memorial I used to pass every day as a student in Hamburg: 'Germany must live, even if we must die.' Only a few memorials venture to suggest that the 'sacrifice' of those they bring to mind was in vain.

Thiepval, Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, designed by Edwin Lutyens (erected in 1928-1932; photograph by Chris Hartford): Hamburg, Dammtor-Bahnhof, Kriegerdenkmal für die im Ersten Weltkrieg gefallenen Soldaten des Hamburgischen Infanterie-Regiments Nr. 76, aka 76er Denkmal, designed by Richard Kuöhl (erected in 1936): James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 337-338:

This seemingly indestructible military monument by Richard Kuohl [sic] was erected by the Nazis in 1936 near the entrance to Hamburg's wondrous Botanical Garden at the Dammtor. A massive cube of granite blocks, it is encircled by a frieze of marching German soldiers, four abreast in profile relief. In Gothic script typical of the Third Reich, the monument is dedicated to the memory of soldiers from Hamburg's Second Hanseatic Infantry Regiment number 76 who fell in the 1870-71 war and in the First World War.

Despite its militaristic tenor and Nazi origin, the monument might have remained undisturbed had it not been for a line of poetry by Heinrich Lersch inscribed on one side: "Deutschland muss leben, auch wenn wir sterben mussen [sic, read müssen]" (Germany must live, even if we have to die). In the midst of the surrounding devastation after the war (this monument was practically the only edifice left standing in the Dammtor after the bombing), this verse had taken on a mock hollow ring in 1945, a perceived affront to the dead of all wars.

As antiwar sentiment rose over the years, Kuohl's monument came under siege by demonstrators, who smeared it with paint and took hammer and chisel to its stone reliefs. It has incited full-fledged rock-and-bottle riots between skinheads and police, as other police and antiwar marchers battled in the streets nearby. At the same time, veterans of the Second Hanseatic Infantry Regiment number 76 continued to honor their fallen comrades at the monument's base, and the city continued to clean the monument and repair its vandalized facade. At one point, Radio Bremen invited listeners to turn out en masse and swaddle the monument in rags, blankets, and linen—à la Christo. All the networks covered this live "TV happening," to the great concern of local Christian Democratic Union politicians and veterans groups still attempting to protect the monument from its pubic. Eventually, the city gave up cleaning the monument, caught between its popular rejection as a glorification of war and the veterans' need for a place to honor their comrades. Having withstood the Allies' bombs, the monument also defeated the townspeople's own attempts to demolish it.

This memorial stone had become, in the punning vernacular, a "Stein des Anstosses"—an annoyance, a stone of contention—that just wouldn't go away.

The line from Heinrich Lersch (1889-1936) comes from his poem "Soldatenabschied," Herz! Aufglühe dein Blut: Gedichte im Kriege (Jena: Eugen Diederich, 1916), pp. 14-15. It was parodied by the Hamburg punk rock group Slime in their song "Deutschland muss sterben, damit wir leben können."

When my son was a small boy, he thought Gutzon Borglum's statue The Aviator (1918) at the University of Virginia was a statue of Spiderman: From Kevin Muse:

Curiously, in both quotations (Ferguson and Young) of the Dammtor monument, the umlaut is missing from müssen, though visible on the monument.

Simonides, fragment 37, lines 37-38, quoted by Plato, Protagoras 346c (tr. David A. Campbell):

For the generation of fools is numberless.

τῶν γὰρ ἠλιθίων / ἀπείρων γενέθλα.

Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), Zibaldone, tr. Kathleen Baldwin et al. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), pp. 1730-1731 (Z 4058-4059):

If we take a good look at life, at the actions and decisions of men, we will see that for ten things done well, which are advantageous and useful to those who do them, there are thousands of things done badly, which are disadvantageous, completely useless, self-damaging, more or less, contrary to wisdom, to what a wise and perfectly prudent man would have decided or done, finding himself in that situation. We will see that most of the time men do not deliberate as mature adults when there is need of maturity, they do not recognize the importance of the things that they have to decide or do, do not have the least suspicion that it is useful or necessary that they consult other people on the matter, and do not enter into any consultation at all. I speak of great men and ordinary ones alike, [4059] of public and private matters, of things of relatively little or great importance. It is certain that the affairs of any men, which go badly, do not go that way (except rarely) without some fault or insufficiency on their own part. Now how then can looking for what is useful or advantageous to them be the rule for guessing at their actions and decisions? The number of absolutely stupid people, or of those inept for tasks or for matters that they have to manage, although they might be determined in other ways, or of those who are well suited to the task in hand, but not perfect, or of decisions and actions badly taken and badly done, useless and damaging to those who have done them or taken them, inappropriate to the matter in hand, or that in the end prove in the given circumstances not to have been the best; the number, I repeat, of such actions, decisions, and such men surpasses and has always surpassed by a long way that of the actions, decisions, and men who are their opposites, as appears from all ancient and modern stories of civil and military and private life, and from the observation of life as well as private and public events daily.

Thanks to Kevin Muse for drawing my attention to an Italian proverb:

La mamma dei cretini è sempre incinta.

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 36.1 (1915) 102-114 (at 112):

Apropos of grammars and syntaxes Krueger's Greek Grammar is a mirror of his life. The quarrel with his wife, his wrangle with the world, made themselves felt in the examples which he gathered from his Greek authors, and when the examples did not fit, he altered them to suit his mood—and fooled the men who copied him blindly. This was made known to me when I was a student in Berlin sixty odd years ago and it lent a new interest to a book, which gave me my first interest in syntax, and I sometimes wonder how many suspect that there is a human document in a schoolbook that came into the world shortly after the great conflict of the Civil War, out of which the author, who was not a mere compiler, emerged, crippled in body, shattered in fortune, with teeth set hard to meet the stress of fate, his eyes wet with tears for his fallen comrades; and yet with the gleam of a new love reflected in their depths. In the examples of my Latin Grammar of 1867 lies perdu the history of that period of my life. The first page of the Syntax shows my attitude towards the Civil War by a quotation from Ovid, <Non> tam | turpe fuit vinci quam contendisse decorum est (A.J.P. XXXV 234), and the poet of love is accountable for many examples of a different kind. The book is a breviary of love. My friend, Professor March, used to say that Hamlet belonged to Shakespeare's earlier period by reason of the large part that love plays in the drama, and anyone interested in the story of my life might recognize my state of mind in the many quotations from Ovid and Propertius. If the period of disillusionment should ever come, I said to myself, Krueger is at hand.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 8.45 (Marcius = Corolianus; tr. Earnest Cary):

[1] When they came near to one another, his mother was the first to advance toward him to greet him, clad in rent garments of mourning and with her eyes melting with tears, an object of great compassion. Upon seeing her, Marcius, who till then had been hard-hearted and stern enough to cope with any distressing situation, could no longer keep any of his resolutions, but was carried away by his emotions into human kindness, and embracing her and kissing her, he called her by the most endearing terms, and supported her for a long time, weeping and caressing her as her strength failed and she sank to the ground. After he had had enough of caressing his mother, he greeted his wife when with their children she approached him, and said: [2] "You have acted the part of a good wife, Volumnia, in living with my mother and not abandoning her in her solitude, and to me you have done the dearest of all favours." After this, drawing each of his children to him, he gave them a father's caresses, and then, turning again to his mother, begged her to state what she had come to ask of him. She answered that she would speak out in the presence of all, since she had no impious request to make of him, and bade him be seated where he was wont to sit when administering justice to his troops. [3] Marcius willingly agreed to her proposal, thinking, naturally, that he should have a great abundance of just arguments to use in combating his mother's intercession and that he should be giving his answer where it was convenient for the troops to hear. When he came to the general's tribunal, he first ordered the lictors to remove the seat that stood there and to place it on the ground, since he thought he ought not to occupy a higher position than his mother or use against her any official authority. Then, causing the most prominent of the commanders and captains to sit by him and permitting any others to be present who wished, he bade his mother speak.

Giacomo Leopardi, "All'Italia," lines 25-35 (tr. Jonathan Galassi):

Whoever speaks or writes about you,
who, remembering you in your pride,
wouldn't say: She was great once; but no longer?
Why? What happened to our ancient strength,
the arms, the courage, the resolve?
Who stripped you of your sword?
Who betrayed you?
What treachery, what sabotage, what power
could take away your cloak and golden crown?
When did you fall, and how,
so low from such great heights?

Chi di te parla o scrive,        25
Che, rimembrando il tuo passato vanto,
Non dica: già fu grande, or non è quella?
Perchè, perchè? dov'è la forza antica,
Dove l'armi e il valore e la constanza?
Chi ti discinse il brando?        30
Chi ti tradì? qual arte o qual fatica
O qual tanta possanza
Valse a spogliarti il manto e l'auree bende?
Come cadesti o quando
Da tanta altezza in così basso loco?        35

Did Galassi mean "What happened to your ancient strength," etc.?

Demosthenes 5.15 (On the Peace; tr. Jeremy Trevett):

And let no one interrupt me before he hears what I have to say.

καί μοι μὴ θορυβήσῃ μηδεὶς πρὶν ἀκοῦσαι.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. II, Chapter 8 (On Ethics), §114 (tr. E.F.J. Payne):

O for an Asmodeus of morality who for his minion rendered transparent not merely roofs and walls, but also the veil of dissimulation, falseness, hypocrisy, grimace, lying, and deception that is spread over everything, and who enabled him to see how little genuine honesty is to be found in the world and how often injustice and dishonesty sit at the helm, secretly and in the innermost recess, behind all the virtuous outworks, even where we least suspect them. Hence we see the four-footed friendships of so many men of a better nature; for how could we recover from the endless dissimulation, duplicity, perfidy, and treachery of men if it were not for the dogs into whose open and honest eyes we can look without distrust? Our civilized world, then, is only a great masquerade; here we meet knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, barristers, priests, philosophers, and the rest. But they are not what they represent themselves to be; they are mere masks beneath which as a rule moneymakers are hidden. One man dons the mask of the law which he has borrowed for the purpose from his barrister, merely in order to be able to come to blows with another. Again, for the same purpose, a second chooses the mask of public welfare and patriotism; a third that of religion or religious reform. Many have already donned for all kinds of purposes the mask of philosophy, philanthropy, and so on.

The German, from his Sämtliche Werke, Fünfter Band, ed. Paul Deussen (Munich: R. Piper & Co., Verlag, 1913), pp. 230-231:

O, um einen Asmodäus der Moralität, welcher seinem Günstlinge nicht bloß Dächer und Mauern, sondern den über Alles ausgebreiteten Schleier der Verstellung, Falschheit, Heuchelei, Grimace, Lüge und Trug durchsichtig machte, und ihn sehn ließe, wie wenig wahre Redlichkeit in der Welt zu finden ist, und wie so oft, auch wo man es am wenigsten vermuthet, hinter allen den tugendsamen Außenwerken, heimlich und im innersten Receß, die Unrechtlichkeit am Ruder sißt. — Daher eben kommen die vierbeinigen Freundschaften so vieler Menschen besserer Art: denn freilich, woran sollte man sich von der endlosen Verstellung, Falschheit und Heimtücke der Menschen erholen, wenn die Hunde nicht wären, in deren ehrliches Gesicht man ohne Mißtrauen schauen kann? — Ist doch unsere civilisirte Welt nur eine große Maskerade. Man trifft daselbst Ritter, Pfaffen, Soldaten, Doktoren, Advokaten, Priester, Philosophen, und was nicht alles an! Aber sie sind nicht was sie vorstellen: sie sind bloße Masken, unter welchen, in der Regel, Geldspekulanten (moneymakers) stecken. Doch nimmt auch wohl Einer die Maske des Rechts, die er sich dazu beim Advokaten geborgt hat, vor, bloß um auf einen Andern tüchtig losschlagen zu können: wieder Einer hat, zum selben Zwecke, die des öffentlichen Wohls und des Patriotismus gewählt; ein Dritter die der Religion, der Glaubensreinigkeit. Zu allerlei Zwecken hat schon Mancher die Maske der Philosophie, wohl auch der Philanthropie u. dgl. m. vorgesteckt.

Xenophon, Anabasis 1.7.3 (tr. Carleton L. Brownson):

Be sure, therefore, to be men worthy of the freedom you possess.

ὅπως οὖν ἔσεσθε ἄνδρες ἄξιοι τῆς ἐλευθερίας ἧς κέκτησθε.

Iris Origo, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (Chappaqua: Helen Marx Books, 1999), pp. 121-122, with notes on p. 352:

A great critic of our own time, Professor Momigliano, has referred to the 'sublime poverty' of his style.¹⁷ He was referring, I think, not only to the poet's deliberate restraint and economy of expression, but also to the actual size of his vocabulary—which is surprisingly small. But this 'poverty' was rather like a millionaire's whim to lead the simple life: it was founded upon riches. The years that he had spent in his philological studies, noting down innumerable words and phrases, tracing their origin and their development, had provided him with an unequalled storehouse to draw upon; and it is fascinating to observe the process of rejection and exclusion by which his personal lexicon was formed. He had always maintained that the exclusion of archaisms, as practised by some of his contemporaries and especially by the French, was an unnecessary and mistaken act of self-impoverishment, and there are a number of words which he always preferred to use in their old form. Indeed it was this deliberate use of archaisms, as well as the close web of classical reminiscence, which formed the very texture of his thought, that caused Tommaseo to observe maliciously that Leopardi's work was like a badly scraped palimpsest, in which, beneath the new writing, one can always perceive the old. But beside these archaisms there are a number of familiar, very simple words so frequently used by him, and so often linked to the same adjectives or verbs, that they have almost come to form a personal language. The night is almost always placida or quieta, the moon candida or tacita, solinga or pellegrina; the woods, too (selve, not boschi), are tacite; beauty is fugace or fuggitiva, and so is life (though sometimes, instead, sudata); fate is acerbo or duro; youth l'età verde or il fior degli anni miei, and life 'il viver mio'.¹⁸ Among the most frequent archaisms are speme or spene for speranza (generally linked to tanta or cotanta), desìo for desiderio, dì for giorno, alma for anima, donzella for giovanetta, beltà for bellezza, il sembiante for faccia; illusions are called inganni, errori, larve, fole; a bird is an augello, and a beast a fera; every sword becomes a ferro or a brando, and most houses an ostello. It is the conventional language of Petrarca and Tasso and subsequently of Metastasio, and yet, used by Leopardi's pen, the well-worn phrases undergo a strange alchemy: they are renewed, they become his own.

17. A. Momigliano, La poesia di Leopardi, in a series of lectures at the Lyceum of Florence.

18. Cf. Flora's Preface to his school edition of I Canti e le Prose scelte, pp. 9–14.

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 35.3 (1914) 361-369 (at 363-364):

The Anabasis is not often quoted. Like the commentaries of Julius Caesar, the associations are too painful. Outside of 'Gallia omnis' and Κῦρος ἐξελαύνει, which serve the purpose of 'Arma virumque', there is seldom an allusion to either of these classic engines of torture. The boasted ἀφέλεια of Xenophon does not commend itself to the average schoolboy; the humour is very thin, and it is only the advanced student that tastes out the foreign tang in the honey of the Attic bee, or takes to heart the encomium of Aristeides. When it was my fortune to teach the Anabasis and correct Greek exercises based on the Anabasis, a favorite pedagogic device, I prepared, as much I must confess for my own sake as for the alleviation of my pupils, a special series of my own in which I narrated the adventures of a camp-follower of the Ten Thousand, whose report, couched in the language of Xenophon and treating of the same events, was not over-favorable to Themistogenes. My restlessness under the task made me anticipate Dürrbach. There is one passage, however, that everybody knows and everybody cites, the θάλαττα θάλαττα passage (4, 7, 24). One would think that celebrity and brevity would secure the famous cry from misquotation, but I was shocked the other day to find it cited as θάλασσα θάλασσα. At first the change seems to be a brutal change, but such are the refinements of modern scholarship that I asked myself whether it had not been made wittingly, and σσ substituted for ττ because of the Arcadians and other rough fellows who composed the Ten Thousand and who were not up to the refinements of the new Attic dialect.

Dürrbach = Félix Dürrbach, L'apologie de Xénophon dans l'Anabase (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1893).

Philemon, fragment 178, in R. Kassel and C. Austin, edd., Poetae Comici Graeci, Vol. VII: Menecrates - Xenophon (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), pp. 311-312 (click once or twice to enlarge): Transcription of the Greek (omitting lunate sigmas and including iota subscripts):

ὦ Κλέων, παῦσαι φλυαρῶν· ἂν ὀκνῇς τὸ μανθάνειν,
ἀνεπικούρητον σεαυτοῦ τὸν βίον λήσεις ποῶν.
οὔτε γὰρ ναυαγός, ἂν μὴ γῆς λάβηται φερόμενος,
οὔποτ ̓ ἂν σώσειεν αὑτόν, οὔτ ̓ ἀνὴρ πένης γεγώς
μὴ οὐ τέχνην μαθὼν δύναιτ' ἂν ἀσφαλῶς ζῆν τὸν βίον.        5
κἂν μὲν ὁρμισθῇ τις ἡμῶν εἰς λιμένα τὸν <τῆς> τέχνης,
ἐβάλετ ̓ ἄγκυραν καθάψας ἀσφαλείας εἵνεκα·
ἂν δ' ἀπαιδεύτου μετάσχῃ πνεύματος φορούμενος,
τῆς ἀπορίας εἰς τὸ γῆρας οὐκ ἔχει σωτηρίαν.
ἀλλὰ χρήματ ̓ ἔστιν ἡμῖν. ἅ γε τάχιστ ̓ ἀπόλλυται.        10
κτήματ', οἰκίαι. τύχης δὲ μεταβολὰς οὐκ ἀγνοεῖς,
ὅτι τὸν εὔπορον τίθησι πτωχὸν εἰς τὴν αὔριον·
ἀλλ' ἑταῖροι καὶ φίλοι σοι καὶ συνήθεις, νὴ Δία,
ἔρανον εἰσοίσουσιν. εὔχου μὴ λαβεῖν πεῖραν φίλων.
εἰ δὲ μή, γνώσῃ σεαυτὸν ἄλλο μηδὲν πλὴν σκιάν.        15

Kassel and Austin in their apparatus don't mention Friedrich Franz Rothe (1808-1888), Zur Methodik des griechischen Unterrichts (Eisleben: Heinr. Reichardt'schen Buchdruckerei, 1869), p. 39 (on line 15):

γνώσει σεαυτόν ἄ. μ. πλ. σκ. übersetzt Grotius: comperies umbras esse, sc. amicos. Er muss also für σεαυτὸν etwas anderes gelesen haben, etwa γ' εκείνους. Wenn σεαυτὸν richtig ist, dann ist der letzte Satz unvollständig überliefert und hat der folgende Vers mit einem Participium, wie etwa ἐκτεθηρευκότα begonnen. Denn aus λαβεῖν vielleicht λαβόντα zu σεαυτὸν extrahiren zu wollen dürfte kaum als zulässig erscheinen.

John Maxwell Edmonds, ed., The Fragments of Attic Comedy, Vol. III A (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1961), pp. 88-89: Transcription of Edmonds' translation (spoiled as usual by his insistence on rhyme):

OLD MAN Stop talking nonsense, Cleon; if you just won't try to learn,
You'll find your life's got no support to which a man can turn.
A poor man who's not learnt a trade can no more live secure
Than a sailorman can save his skin if he doesn't make the shore.
If one of us makes harbour in the trade he wants to ply,
He drops his anchor and ties up and lets the storms go by;
If one who's never learnt his job gets a bit tossed about,
He's in for trouble every time and won't see his way out.
CLEON Oh yes, we've got some money though—
                                               O.M. But that won't last you long.
C. And real property as well.
                                       O.M. But luck, you know, goes wrong,
And then your rich man of to-day's your poor man of to-morrow.
C. But all my kind acquaintances will join to let me borrow.
O.M. If you put friends to such a test you'll suffer for your faith;
You'll find as far as they're concerned you're nothing but a wraith.

Hugo Grotius' Latin translation in James Bailey, ed., Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, Pars Prior (Cambridge: Pitt Press, 1840), pp. 226-227:

O Cleon desine nugarum: nisi quid addiscas boni,
Non vides, ut omni auxilio vitam destituas tuam?
Namque ut naufragus natator terram nisi prehenderit
Non quit adipisci salutem: sic qui pauper factus est,
Artem nisi didicerit, vitam nequit in tuto ponere.        5
Sunt pecuniae mihi, inquis; nempe quae pereunt cito.
At domus sunt, sunt et agri: nescis fortunae vices,
Quæ perfacile divitem hodie cras mendicum fecerit?
Nostrum quisquam, si fortunae portum appulerit, anchoram
Dejicit, et sic extra pelagi se locat violentiam.        10
Hoc si eveniat imperito, raptus qua venti ferunt,
Nullum reperit, quod senecta pauper praesidium occupet.
Sed tribules et sodales et cognati conferent.
Imo opta illorum periclum ne sit faciendum tibi:
Sin eo venies, comperies umbras esse, aliud nihil.        15

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 8.26.6 (tr. Earnest Cary):

Courage in the face of danger is not apt to be felt in equal measure by those who fight for their own blessings and by those who set out after what belongs to others. For the latter, if they do not succeed, suffer no loss, whereas the others, if they are defeated, have nothing left. And this is the chief reason why large armies have often been beaten by smaller ones and superior forces by inferior ones. For necessity is formidable, and a struggle in which life itself is at stake is capable of inspiring boldness in a man which was not already his by nature.

τὸ παρὰ τὰ δεινὰ εὔτολμον οὐκ ἐξ ἴσου παραγίνεσθαι φιλεῖ τοῖς θ' ὑπὲρ οἰκείων ἀγαθῶν ἀγωνιζομένοις καὶ τοῖς ἐπὶ τἀλλότρια πορευομένοις· οἱ μέν γ' οὐδέν, ἐὰν μὴ κατορθώσωσι, βλάπτονται, τοῖς δ' οὐδέν, ἐὰν πταίσωσι, καταλείπεται· καὶ τοῦ σφάλλεσθαι τὰς μεγάλας δυνάμεις ὑπὸ τῶν ἐλαττόνων καὶ τὰς κρείττους ὑπὸ τῶν φαυλοτέρων τοῦτ' ἐν τοῖς μάλιστ' αἴτιον ἦν. δεινὴ γὰρ ἡ ἀνάγκη, καὶ ὁ περὶ τῶν ἐσχάτων κίνδυνος ἱκανὸς θάρσος ἐνθεῖναί τινι καὶ μὴ προϋπάρχον φύσει.

The languagehat blog has a post about the etymology of April. Here is the entry for aprilis in Robert Maltby, A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1991), p. 44:

Ronald Syme, "Tigranocerta. A Problem Misconceived," in his Roman Papers, IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 245-251 (at 245):

Erudite controversies can go on for a long time. Repetition or fatigue is no bar. Of some, notably in sacred history, there never was a solution.

Id. (at 246):

Hence the prolonged controversy, the echo and the annoyance of which is not yet mute. It serves no profit to retail opinions and arguments, to catalogue verdicts or even recantations.

Id. (at 247):

Manifold harm accrues when passages are culled from a large work without estimating the sources, structure, and habits of the author—often a compiler.

Iris Origo, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (Chappaqua: Helen Marx Books, 1999), pp. 120-121, with note on p. 351:

His interest in his own language, which had begun during his philological studies in his boyhood, was perhaps the only passion of his youth that never failed him.

… Il cor di tutte
Cose alfin sente sazietà, del sonno,
Della danza, del canto e dell' amore,
Piacer più cari che il parlar di lingua;
Ma sazietà di lingua il cor non sente.*

Certainly the pages of the Zibaldone bear eloquent witness to the fact that, for Leopardi himself this statement was true! Some men have an addiction to drink, some to drugs, some to one particular human being: Leopardi had an addiction to words.¹²

* 'The heart at last tires of all things: of sleep, dance, song, and even love—pleasures sweeter than the gift of words—but of words themselves, the heart is never tired.' From Leopardi's notes to the Canzoni, Poesie e Prose, vol. I, p. 152.

12. 'The measure of a nation's genius', he affirmed, 'is the richness of its language, and when a language is insufficient to render in translation the subtleties of another, it is a sure sign that it belongs to a less cultivated people.' Zibaldone, I, pp. 730–1, 25 May 1821.

From David Driscoll:

I thought you might be interested to know that today's quotation from Leopardi appears to be a reworking of Iliad 13.636-9, in the 19th century translation by Vincenzo Monti:

… Il cor di tutte
Cose alfin sente sazietà, del sonno,
Della danza, del canto e dell’amore,
Piacer più cari che la guerra; e mai
di guerra non saranno i Teucri?

πάντων μὲν κόρος ἐστὶ καὶ ὕπνου καὶ φιλότητος
μολπῆς τε γλυκερῆς καὶ ἀμύμονος ὀρχηθμοῖο,
τῶν πέρ τις καὶ μᾶλλον ἐέλδεται ἐξ ἔρον εἷναι
ἢ πολέμου· Τρῶες δὲ μάχης ἀκόρητοι ἔασιν.