Laudator Temporis Acti

These essays by Theodore Dalrymple are all on the Social Affairs Unit web log. They don't have titles, so I made these up from the brief descriptions:

• The Problem with Expert Testimony
  
• Swift, Severe, and Exemplary Punishment
  
• A Nation of Intolerant Monomaniacs
  
• The Growing Informality of Modern Funerals
  
• Ken Saro-Wiwa

C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 113:

What is vital and healthy does not necessarily survive. Higher organisms are often conquered by lower ones. Arts as well as men are subject to accident and violent death. The philosophy of history outlined by Keats' Oceanus is not true. We ask too often why cultures perish and too seldom why they survive; as though their conservation were the normal and obvious fact and their death the abnormality for which special causes must be found. It is not so. An art, a whole civilization, may at any time slip through men's fingers in a very few years and be gone beyond recovery.

See the speech by Oceanus in John Keats, Hyperion, Book II, lines 173-243, especially 228-229:

'Tis the eternal law / That first in beauty should be first in might.

Jerome, Life of Paul the Hermit 10 (tr.W.H. Freemantle):

Tell me therefore, I pray you, how fares the human race? Are new homes springing up in the ancient cities? What government directs the world? Are there still some remaining for the demons to carry away by their delusions?

Narra mihi, quaeso, ut se habeat humanum genus. An in antiquis urbibus nova tecta consurgant; quo mundus regatur imperio; an supersint aliqui, qui daemonum errore rapiantur.

Paul the Hermit is questioning Anthony the Abbot. This painting by Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) depicts the scene.


You can see a raven bringing the two old men a little snack. That detail appears later in the same chapter of Jerome's Life of Paul the Hermit.

Euripides, Orestes 792 (tr. E.P. Coleridge):

A wretched task, to come in contact with a sick man.

δυσχερὲς ψαύειν νοσοῦντος ἀνδρός.

M.L. West, commentary ad loc. (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1987), p. 237:

There is no more touching depiction of affection in Greek art than the cup by the Brygos Painter which shows a girl tenderly holding a young man's head while he vomits over her feet.

This is apparently Würzburg L 479, shown below. How touching it is, you judge.


There is a more detailed image here.

The young man is sick because he drank too much. The girl is a courtesan. This post might have been more appropriate yesterday, for Mardi Gras, which probably saw many similar acts of affection.

My friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, objects to some remarks I made about the genitive case. I concede his first point, but not his second. For there to be a genuine instance of the subjective genitive or objective genitive, you must be able to identify the verb inherent in the noun governing the genitive. Here are two explanations.

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Guy L. Cooper III, Attic Greek Prose Syntax (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), following K.W. Krüger, § 47.7.1:

There is often a distinctly verbal relation between the adnominal genitive and its substantive .... For the analysis of all such passages where substantive and adnominal genitive stand in a semi-verbal relation to one another it is useful to think of the syntactic complex they form as a condensed or abbreviated sentence, and then to expand the statement into a fuller form. If the adnominal genitive in the abbreviated statement corresponds to the subject in the full sentence, the adnominal genitive is referred to as a subjective genitive. If the adnominal genitive in the abbreviated sentence corresponds to the object in the full sentence, it is referred to as an objective genitive.

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James Mountford, 'Bradley's Arnold' Latin Prose Composition (1938; rpt. New York: David McKay, 1967), § 299:

The genitive case always implies a close relation between the noun in that case and another noun.

(i) Sometimes that relation is such that, if the other noun were converted into a verb, the word now in the genitive would become the subject of that verb.

Thus: post fugam Pompeii = postquam fugit Pompeius.

Such a genitive is called subjective.

(ii) Sometimes the relation of a genitive to its governing noun resembles that of an object to its verb.

Thus: propter mortis timorem = quod mortem timuit.

Such a genitive is called objective.

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These principles apply to any language with subjective and objective genitives, not just Greek and Latin.

I used to think that the authors, as well as the titles, of the books in the catalogue of the Library of Saint Victor (Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, book II, chapter VII) were fictitious. But now I learn from M.A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 44, that I was wrong. The titles are made up, but at least some of the authors were real people, which adds to the humor. For example, the Ars honeste petandi in societate (The Art of Farting Politely in Public) is attributed "per M. Ortuinum." According to Screech, this is "an allusion to a theologian in Cologne widely mocked for his hostility to Reuchlin and Jewish studies generally," viz. Ortuinus Gratius (1491-1542), aka Ortwin or Ortuin or Hardouin, from Graes or Graetz. The mocking occurred in the satirical Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, ostensibly addressed to Ortwin. Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522) taught Hebrew at the universities of Ingolstadt and Tübingen.

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Those opposed to the Hebraica veritas also objected to Erasmus' edition of the Greek New Testament (1516). An excellent treatment of this subject is the first chapter (Learning Greek is heresy! Resisting Erasmus) of Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), who quotes a letter of Thomas More concerning a gang (named the Trojans) opposed to the study of Greek at Oxford (p. 39):

Their senior sage christened himself Priam; others called themselves Hector, Paris and so forth. The idea, whether as a joke or a piece of anti-academic politics, is to pour ridicule on those devoted to the study of Greek.

There were obscurantists at Cambridge as well, who wanted to ban Erasmus' edition of the Greek New Testment, as Erasmus himself reports in a letter to Henry Bullock (August, 1516, quoted in Goldhill, p. 29):

I have heard from trustworthy witnesses that you have one college, steeped in theology, whose members are regular Areopagites and who are said to have provided by solemn resolution that no man bring the said volume by horse, boat, wagon, or porter within the curteledge of said college. I ask you, my learned friend, should one laugh or cry? How their zeal has led them astray!

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Early American poet John Trumbull (1750-1831), in his The Progress of Dulness, part I (The Adventures of Tom Brainless), criticized the study of Greek and Latin:

Say ye, who bear the name of wise,
Wherein substantial learning lies.
Is it, superb in classic lore,
To speak what Homer spoke before,
To write the language Tully wrote,
The style, the cadence and the note?
Is there a charm in sounds of Greek,
No language else can learn to speak;
That cures distemper'd brains at once,
Like Pliny's rhymes for broken bones?
Is there a spirit found in Latin,
That must evap'rate in translating?
And say are sense and genius bound
To any vehicles of sound?
Can knowledge never reach the brains,
Unless conveyed in ancient strains?
While Homer sets before your eyes
Achilles' rage, Ulysses' lies,
Th' amours of Jove in masquerade,
And Mars entrapp'd by Phoebus' aid;
While Virgil sings, in verses grave,
His lovers meeting in a cave,
His ships turn'd nymphs, in pagan fables,
And how the Trojans eat their tables;
While half this learning but displays
The follies of the former days;
And for the linguists, fairly try them,
A tutor'd parrot might defy them.

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The original of the following true story by a Catholic choir director has disappeared from the World Wide Web, but survives in a copy:

There in the sacristy was my "boss" the Liturgy Co-Ordinator/Pastoral Minister and her buddy the Senior Citizen Ministry Director. There's nothing odd about seeing them in the sacristy, what was odd was that they were RIPPING PAGES OUT OF A HYMNAL AND THROWING THEM INTO A LARGE GARBAGE CAN! The looks on their faces were priceless. They were terrified (I'm 6'6 and have been told I'm scary looking). They explained that they thought I had left and that they were just ripping out the songs they didn't want me to use anymore.

Now for those of you not familiar with the Pius X Hymnal, it has a good selection of English hymns as well as the normal Latin. As I reached into the garbage can and picked out the pages (luckily they'd only ripped pages out of 4 hymnals by the time I got there), I found that they were leaving all the English hymns (unless they had Latin on the back side of them) and were ripping out all the Latin.

When I asked them why they were doing this, they explained that they "didn't want me doing the Latin anymore" and that we had to "get the kids into the pews!"

Sartre's "L'enfer, c'est les autres" (Hell is other people) is often quoted, with good reason. I feel that way most of the time. But a good case can be made for considering hell to be not other people, but one's self. Satan, in Milton's Paradise Lost, recognized this:

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
(1.254-255)

And like a devilish engine back recoils
Upon himself; horrour and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir
The Hell within him; for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step, no more than from himself, can fly
By change of place.
(4.17-23)

Milton understood Satan so well because in Milton's personality, as in Satan's, rebelliousness was one of the chief ingredients. Johnson in his Life of Milton writes with great psychological penetration:

Milton's Republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful of superiority. He hated monarchs in the State, and prelates in the Church; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy rather than establish, and that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to authority.

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Stephen Crane's little poem is a frightening vision of hell:

I stood upon a high place,
And saw, below, many devils
Running, leaping,
and carousing in sin.
One looked up, grinning,
And said, "Comrade! Brother!"

I picked up Clyde M. Christensen's Common Fleshy Fungi (Minneapolis: Burgess, 1965) for a dollar at a used book shop. Some of these fungi have naughty names, such as Verpa bohemica, Verpa conica, Ithyphallus impudicus, and Ithyphallus ravenelli. You'll have to look up verpa and ithyphallus in your own Latin dictionary. This blog is rated G, after all.

The prudish Thoreau (Journals, October 16, 1856) was shocked and fascinated to find one of these fungi on his rambles through the woods:

One of those fungi named impudicus, I think. In all respects a most disgusting object, yet very suggestive. . . . It was as offensive to the eye as to the scent, the cap rapidly melting and defiling what it touched with a fetid, olivaceous, semiliquid matter. In an hour or two the plant scented the whole house wherever placed, so that it could not be endured. I was afraid to sleep in my chamber where it had lain until the room had been well ventilated. It smelled like a dead rat in the ceiling, in all the ceilings of the house. Pray, what was Nature thinking of when she made this? She almost puts herself on a level with those who draw in privies.

King Alfred at The Bitter Scroll has an interesting post on Egil the Melancholy Viking (Egil Skallagrimsson) and his big head. Egil's Saga 91 (tr. W.C. Green) relates:

Grim of Moss-fell was baptized when Christianity was established by law in Iceland. He had a church built there, and 'tis common report that Thordis had Egil moved to the church. And this proof there is thereof, that later on, when a church was built at Moss-fell, and that church which Grim had built at Bush-bridge taken down, the churchyard was dug over, and under the altar-place were found human bones. They were much larger than the bones of other men. From the tales of old people it is thought pretty sure that these were Egil's bones. Skapti the priest, Thorarin's son, a wise man, was there at the time. He took then the skull of Egil, and set it on the churchyard fence. The skull was wondrous large, but still more out of the common way was its heaviness. It was all wave-marked on the surface like a shell. Skapti then wished to try the thickness of the skull. He took a good-sized hand-axe, and brandishing it aloft in one hand, brought down the back of it with force on the skull to break it. But where the blow fell the bone whitened, but neither was dinted nor cracked. Whence it might be gathered that this skull could not easily be harmed by the blows of weak men while skin and flesh were on it. The bones of Egil were laid in the outer part of the churchyard at Moss-fell.

Jesse L. Byock, Egil's Bones, Scientific American 272.1 (January 1995) 82-87, speculated that Egil suffered from Paget's disease of bone, one symptom of which is increasing skull size.

This reminded me of an ancient Greek with a big head, Pericles. Plutarch, Life of Pericles 3.2-4 (tr. Bernadotte Perrin), says:

His personal appearance was unimpeachable, except that his head was rather long and out of due proportion. For this reason the images of him, almost all of them, wear helmets, because the artists, as it would seem, were not willing to reproach him with deformity. The comic poets of Attica used to call him "Schinocephalus," or Squill-head (the squill is sometimes called "schinus"). So the comic poet Cratinus, in his "Cheirons," says: "Faction and Saturn, that ancient of days, were united in wedlock; their offspring was of all tyrants the greatest, and lo! he is called by the gods the head-compeller." And again in his "Nemesis": "Come, Zeus! of guests and heads the Lord!" And Telecleides speaks of him as sitting on the acropolis in the greatest perplexity, "now heavy of head, and now alone, from the eleven-couched chamber of his head, causing vast uproar to arise." And Eupolis, in his "Demes," having inquiries made about each one of the demagogues as they come up from Hades, says, when Pericles is called out last:--

    The very head of those below hast thou now brought.

Head-compeller (κεφαληγερέτα) is a humorous modification of the Homeric cloud-compeller (νεφεληγερέτα, an epithet of the sky god Zeus), and squill-head (σχινοκέφαλος) recalls the squill's bulbous root, which can weigh several pounds.

In his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Thoreau translated several poems by or attributed to Anacreon. Here is one of them, rather bold in its sexual imagery for the chaste Transcendentalist:

Thracian colt, why at me
Looking aslant with thy eyes,
Dost thou cruelly flee,
And think that I know nothing wise?
Know I could well
Put the bridle on thee,
And holding the reins, turn
Round the bounds of the course.
But now thou browsest the meads,
And gambolling lightly dost play,
For thou hast no skilful horseman
Mounted upon thy back.

Πῶλε Θρηικίη, τί δή με
  λοξὸν ὄμμασι βλέπουσα
νηλέως φεύγεις, δοκεῖς δέ
  μ' οὐδὲν εἰδέναι σοφόν;
ἴσθι τοι, καλῶς μὲν ἄν τοι
  τὸν χαλινὸν ἐμβάλοιμι,
ἡνίας δ' ἔχων στρέφοιμί
  σ' ἀμφὶ τέρματα δρόμου·
νῦν δὲ λειμῶνάς τε βόσκεαι
  κοῦφά τε σκιρτῶσα παίζεις,
δεξιὸν γὰρ ἱπποπείρην
  οὐκ ἔχεις ἐπεμβάτην.

The Dunkin Rebellion occurred at Harvard when Thoreau was a freshman. Dunkin was Thoreau's Greek teacher. Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (New York: Dover, 1982), pp. 41-42, quotes from the official report on the incident -- Harvard University, Proceedings of the Overseers Relative to the Late Disturbance in That Seminary (Boston, 1834):

On the 19th of May last [1834], the Instructor of the Freshman Class in Greek [Christopher Dunkin], reported to the President that one of that Class, when reciting to him, stopped and refused to recite farther; on being told by his Instructor that when "he directed any thing to be translated, he expected it would be done," the student replied, "I do not recognize your authority," shut his book and paid no attention to his recitation afterward....

On that night, (Wednesday) between the hours of ten and one, the room occupied by the Greek Instructor, above-mentioned, as a recitation room, was torn in pieces by some students, all its furniture broken, and every window dashed out....

The morning and evening prayers were, on the next day, (Thursday) interrupted by scraping, whistling, groaning and other disgraceful noises....

On this night a watch was set for the protection of the College property. It was attacked with stones by several students. An affray ensued....

On [the next] evening, about midnight, the Chapel bell was rung, (a cord having been attached to it,) accompanied by great noises in the yard.

Thoreau apparently took no part in the Dunkin Rebellion. He did not follow in the footsteps of his maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, who fomented a Harvard rebellion in 1767 over bad food in the dining hall.

Maverick Philosopher discusses:

1. Is Compassion a Mistake?
2. Spinoza on Commiseratio. Pity as a Wastebasket Emotion

Here's what Nietzsche said about compassion, in Human, All Too Human § 499 (tr. R.J. Hollingdale):

Friend.— Fellow rejoicing [Mitfreude], not fellow suffering [Mitleiden], makes the friend.

Freund.— Mitfreude, nicht Mitleiden, macht den Freund.

One bitter fruit of Bush's wiretapping policy is the verb surveil (from surveillance), repeated ad nauseam by pundits and politicians. It would be hard to find another verb so ugly and misshapen, unless perhaps it's liaise (from liaison).

I sometimes quote statements in this web log that I disagree with, in whole or in part. I wouldn't want anyone to get the impression from the B.L. Ullman quotation in my post on Richard Bentley that I'm a foe of conjectural emendation. Bentley, Housman, and Shackleton Bailey are my heroes. A hundred years from now, if by that time anyone still reads Latin, the only thing I'll be remembered for is an emendation in the text of Plautus, Stichus 617, published in the American Journal of Philology 98 (1977) 355. Here it is.

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Epignomus and his brother Pamphilippus are teasing the parasite Gelasimus by raising his hopes of a dinner and then dashing them:

EP. posse edepol tibi opinor etiam uni locum condi p......um
ubi accubes. PAM. sane faciundum censeo. GE. o lux oppidi!
EP. si arte poeris accubare. GE. uel inter cuneos ferreos;
tantillum loculi ubi catellus cubet, id mi sat e rest loci.
EP. exorabo aliquo modo. ueni. GE. hucine? EP. immo in carcerem (617-621)

617 condi p......um A, conspicor P
          .      .

Goetz's proposal to fill the gap in the Ambrosian palimpsest with bonum has met with two criticisms, one just, the other not. First, Schoell noted that a longer word is needed to fill the space; p<ropemod>um, he thought, would fit nicely. Leo in his critical apparatus remarked that two other possibilities, probum and breuem, were unsatisfactory for the same reason. The latest editor of the Stichus, H. Petersmann, conjectured p<aruol>um, which is of sufficient length.

The second criticism of Goetz's proposal was made by Ussing, who in his commentary objected that bonitas loci non requiritur. On the contrary, an ironic reference to the bonitas loci is precisely what is needed to preserve the humor of the passage: the fault with Petersmann's p<aruol>um is that it takes the sting from Epignomus' si arte poteris accubare (619). I would suggest p<erbon>um, which meets the requirements of both length and context. Cf. Plaut. Most. 673 non in loco emit perbono and Cic. Att. 6.1.3 perbono loco res erat.

Of the six other passages where Plautus uses the adjective perbonus (Merc. 526, Most. 692 and 764) or the adjective perbene (Aul. 186, Men. 1141, and Rud. 164), two involve dining: prandi perbene (Men. 1141) and prandium uxor mihi perbonum dedit (Most. 692).

Stichus 617 is a trochaic septenarius. It should be noted that, if the conjecture p<erbon>um is adopted, the -cum of locum before condi must be shortened in accordance with the law of breuis breuians.

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It's infra dig to translate in a scholarly article, but not in a web log. Here's a translation of the Plautine passage with my emendation, adapted from Henry Thomas Riley:

EP. By my faith, I think a very good spot can be found just for you alone, where you may recline.
PAM. Really, I do think it may be managed.
GE. O light of the city!
EP. If you can manage to recline in a small compass.
GE. Aye, even between two wedges of iron. As little space as a puppy can lie in, the same will be enough for me.
EP. I'll beg for it some way or other; come along. (Pulls him along.)
GE. What? This way?
EP. Yes, to prison.

Dave Haxton at MacRaven, commenting on yet another inflated resume in the news, reveals the extent of his own formal education. In doing so, he proves a point I've often tried to make -- that formal education, advanced degrees, and scholarly credentials by themselves are no guarantee of intelligence and competence. Dave has intelligence and competence in spades, as any reader of his web log will soon discover.

For the record, my grades put me in the bottom third of my high school class. I flunked high school Latin, along with several other subjects. I don't mention either of these facts on my resume. On the other hand, I don't pretend to have degrees I never earned.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims, from Parerga and Paralipomena:

No man can be in perfect accord with any one but himself — not even with a friend or the partner of his life; differences of individuality and temperament are always bringing in some degree of discord, though it may be a very slight one. That genuine, profound peace of mind, that perfect tranquillity of soul, which, next to health, is the highest blessing the earth can give, is to be attained only in solitude, and, as a permanent mood, only in complete retirement; and then, if there is anything great and rich in the man’s own self, his way of life is the happiest that may be found in this wretched world .... The less necessity there is for you to come into contact with mankind in general, in the relations whether of business or of personal intimacy, the better off you are. Loneliness and solitude have their evils, it is true; but if you cannot feel them all at once, you can at least see where they lie; on the other hand, society is insidious in this respect; as in offering you what appears to be the pastime of pleasing social intercourse, it works great and often irreparable mischief. The young should early be trained to bear being left alone; for it is a source of happiness and peace of mind.

If you remember a little high school or college Latin, it's fun to try to figure out the meaning of this passage from Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book II, chapter VI (tr. J.M. Cohen). Apparently college students have changed little over the years.

'So you come from Paris,' said Pantagruel. 'And how do you spend your time, you gentlemen students at this same Paris?'

'We transfretate the Sequana at the dilucule and crepuscule; we deambulate through the compites and quadrives of the urb; we despumate the Latin verbocination and, as verisimile amorabunds, we captate the benevolence of the omnijugal, omniform, and omnigenous feminine sex. At certain intervals we invisitate the lupanars, and in venerean ecstasy we inculcate our veretres into the penitissim recesses of the pudenda of these amicabilissime meretricules. Then do we cauponizate, in the meritory taverns of the Pineapple, the Castle, the Magdalen, and the Slipper, goodly vervecine spatules, perforaminated with petrosil. And if by fort fortune there is rarity or penury of pecune in our marsupies, and they are exhausted of ferruginous metal, for the scot we dimit our codices and vestments oppignerated, prestolating the tabellaries to come from the penates and patriotic lares.'

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Tu viens duncques de Paris, dist il. Et à quoy passez vous le temps, vous aultres, messieurs estudians audict Paris?

Respondit l'eschollier: Nous transfrétons la Séquane au dilucule et crépuscule; nous déambulons par les compites et quadriviez de l'urbe; nous despumons la verbocinatiun latiale , et, comme verisimiles amorabundes, captons la bénévolence de l'omnijuge, omniforme, et omnigène sexe féminin. Certaines diécules, nous invisons les lupanares de Champgaillard, de Matcon, de Cul-de-Sac, de Bourbon, de Huslieu, (...) puis, cauponizons ès tabernes méritoires de la Pomme de Pin, de la Magdaleine, et de la Mulle, belles spatules vervecines, perforaminées de pétrosil. Et si, par forte fortune, y a rarité ou pénurie de pécune en nos marsupiez, et soyent exhaustez de métal ferruginé, pour l'escot nous dimittons nos codices et vestez oppignerées, prestulans les tabellaires à venir des Pénates et Larez patrioticques.

Here is a caricature of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) by Danish cartoonist Peter Klaestrup, published in the satirical paper The Corsair:


It reminds me a bit of a pencil sketch of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) by his friend Daniel Ricketson:


The existentialist and the transcendentalist are both standing, both facing left, both wearing hats, and both holding umbrellas.

Another similarity between Thoreau and Kierkegaard? Their views on the importance of the individual and the insignificance of the crowd. Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), p. 183, quotes from a letter of Thoreau to Emerson:

When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?

Compare these passages from Kierkegaard, The Last Years: Journals 1853-1855, tr. R.G. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1968):

XI¹ A 384 (p. 141):

These millions, the law of whose existence is 'first be like the rest', this mass of aping -- materially they look as if they were something, something great, something immensely powerful. And materially they are indeed something; but ideally this mass, these millions are zero, they are less than zero, they are wasted and forfeited existences.

XI² A 90 (pp. 230-231):

One hundred thousand million men, of which each is like the rest = one. Only when one turns up who is different from these millions or this one, do we have two.

Something to keep in mind, when we see newsreels of thousands of savages rioting, gesticulating, and screeching over a few harmless cartoons in a Danish newspaper -- "Materially they look as if they were something, something great, something immensely powerful. And materially they are indeed something; but ideally this mass, these millions are zero, they are less than zero, they are wasted and forfeited existences."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Books:

Plutarch cannot be spared from the smallest library; first because he is so readable, which is much; then that he is medicinal and invigorating. The lives of Cimon, Lycurgus, Alexander, Demosthenes, Phocion, Marcellus and the rest, are what history has of best. But this book has taken care of itself, and the opinion of the world is expressed in the innumerable cheap editions, which make it as accessible as a newspaper. But Plutarch's Morals is less known, and seldom reprinted. Yet such a reader as I am writing to can as ill spare it as the Lives. He will read in it the essays On the Daemon of Socrates, On Isis and Osiris, On Progress in Virtue, On Garrulity, On Love; and thank anew the art of printing and the cheerful domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch charms by the facility of his associations; so that it signifies little where you open his book, you find yourself at the Olympian tables. His memory is like the Isthmian Games, where all that was excellent in Greece was assembled; and you are stimulated and recruited by lyric verses, by philosophic sentiments, by the forms and behavior of heroes, by the worship of the gods, and by the passing of fillets, parsley and laurel wreaths, chariots, armor, sacred cups and utensils of sacrifice.

I was amused to find the following stanza by Mary Baker Eddy in Garry Wills, Certain Trumpets (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 178:

Joy in every belfry bell --
Joy for the captive! sound it long!
Ye who have wept four-score can tell
The holy meaning of their dong.

For other unintended double entendres, see here.