Statesmen were mortal, the state eternal.Or, as Ronald Syme rendered it in Tacitus, Vol. I (1958; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 319:
principes mortales, rem publicam aeternam esse.
Princes come and go, but the Commonwealth is perpetual.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, October 05, 2018
Impermanent and Permanent
Tacitus, Annals 3.6.3 (tr. John Jackson):