Make glad your own heart. Of your pitiless townsmen
One will speak with ill words, one with good.
σὴν αὐτοῦ φρένα τέρπε· δυσηλεγέων δὲ πολιτέων
ἄλλος τίς σε κακῶς, ἄλλος ἄμεινον ἐρεῖ.
We may contrast this independence with Pindar's horror of slander or with Solon's prayer to have a good report.
"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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Saturday, December 23, 2023
Indifference to Public Opinion
Mimnermus, fragment 7, tr. C.M. Bowra, with his note, in Early Greek Elegists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), p. 33: