Fellow-citizens, we must now show what we can do and so be able to look people in the face. Let us leave to those who come after us the Sparta which we received from our fathers. Let there now be an end to our feeling ashamed of ourselves before our wives and our children and the older men and the foreigners — we who were once the admiration of the whole of Greece!See Elisabeth Vorrenhagen, De orationibus quae sunt in Xenophontis Hellenicis (Elberfeld: Karl Rheinen, 1926), pp. 120-121.
Ἄνδρες πολῖται, νῦν ἀγαθοὶ γενόμενοι ἀναβλέψωμεν ὀρθοῖς ὄμμασιν· ἀποδῶμεν τοῖς ἐπιγιγνομένοις τὴν πατρίδα οἵανπερ παρὰ τῶν πατέρων παρελάβομεν· παυσώμεθα αἰσχυνόμενοι καὶ παῖδας καὶ γυναῖκας καὶ πρεσβυτέρους καὶ ξένους, ἐν οἷς πρόσθεν γε πάντων τῶν Ἑλλήνων περιβλεπτότατοι ἦμεν.
"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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Monday, February 10, 2025
End This Shame
Xenophon, Hellenica 7.1.30 (speech of Archidamus; tr. Rex Warner):