Laudator Temporis Acti

Homeric Hymn to Apollo 143-155 (tr. Martin L. West):

Many are your temples and wooded groves, and all the peaks find favor with you, and the upper ridges of the high mountains, and the rivers flowing on to the sea. But it is in Delos, Phoibos, that your heart most delights, where the Ionians with trailing robes assemble with their children and wives on your avenue, and when they have seated the gathering they think of you and entertain you with boxing, dancing, and singing. A man might think they were the unaging immortals if he came along then when the Ionians are all together: he would take in the beauty of the whole scene, and be delighted at the spectacle of the men and the fair-girt women, the swift ships and the people's piles of belongings.

πολλοί τοι νηοί τε καὶ ἄλσεα δενδρήεντα,
πᾶσαι δὲ σκοπιαί τε φίλαι καὶ πρώονες ἄκροι
ὑψηλῶν ὀρέων ποταμοί θ᾿ ἅλαδε προρέοντες·        145
ἀλλὰ σὺ Δήλωι, Φοῖβε, μάλιστ᾿ ἐπιτέρπεαι ἦτορ,
ἔνθά τοι ἑλκεχίτωνες Ἰάονες ἠγερέθονται
αὐτοῖς σὺν παίδεσσι γυναιξί τε σὴν ἐς ἄγυιαν·
οἳ δέ σε πυγμαχίηι τε καὶ ὀρχηστυῖ καὶ ἀοιδῆι
μνησάμενοι τέρπουσιν, ὅταν καθέσωσιν ἀγῶνα.        150
φαίη κ᾿ ἀθανάτους καὶ ἀγήρως ἔμμεναι ἀνήρ,
ὃς τότ᾿ ἐπαντιάσει᾿, ὅτ᾿ Ἰάονες ἁθρόοι εἶεν·
πάντων γάρ κεν ἴδοιτο χάριν, τέρψαιτο δὲ θυμόν
ἄνδράς τ᾿ εἰσορόων καλλιζώνους τε γυναῖκας
νῆάς τ᾿ ὠκείας ἠδ᾿ αὐτῶν κτήματα πολλά.        155

Plato, Laws 4.708 C (tr. R.G. Bury):

In the case where the race is one, with the same language and laws, this unity makes for friendliness, since it shares also in sacred rites and all matters of religion...

τὸ μὲν γὰρ ἕν τι εἶναι γένος ὁμόφωνον καὶ ὁμόνομον ἔχει τινὰ φιλίαν, κοινωνὸν ἱερῶν ὂν καὶ τῶν τοιούτων πάντων...

Related post: One United People.

J.J. Thomson (1856-1940), Recollections and Reflections (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1936), p. 49:

Though [George] Stokes was such an accomplished lecturer, his power of keeping silent was equally remarkable. He, like Newton, represented Cambridge University in Parliament: he was member for four years and attended the House with great regularity, but never spoke. It is reported of Newton, who was member for two years, that the only time he addressed the House was to move that a window be opened, and Sir Joseph Larmor, another Lucasian Professor, was member for about eleven years and only spoke once, so that the Lucasian Professors cannot be accused of having wasted the time of the House. Stokes certainly had not much small-talk. A story is current in Cambridge that a visitor, who did not know that it was Lady Stokes she was speaking to, said, "There are two men in Cambridge whom it is positively painful to sit next at dinner: they never say a word". Lady Stokes said, "Yes, George is one, but who is the other?" He was, however, quite ready to talk on subjects on which he felt he had something to say. I once saw an amusing instance of this. He was sitting at lunch next a very charming American lady who started one subject after another without getting any reply but yes or no. At last in desperation, she asked him which did he like best, arithmetic or algebra? The change was marvellous; he became quite fluent and talked freely for the rest of the lunch.

Related posts:

• Acanthian Cicada
• Taciturn in Seven Ancient Languages
• Character of a Taciturn Person
• Silent in Seven Languages
• Unfit for the Society of the Living
• Burton's Characters
• Unit of Taciturnity: The Dirac
• Ich bin ein Boeotier
• The Merest Statue of a Man
• One of the Most Ungregarious of Beings
• Small Talk
• Penury of Words
• Portrait of a Shy Man

"Letter from Niebuhr to a Young Man Who Wished to Devote Himself to Philology," tr. J[ulius] C[harles] H[are], Educational Magazine 1 (1840) 12-22 (at 15-16):

I must frankly beg you to examine your Latin, and to convince yourself that in this respect much is wanting. I will not lay a stress on certain grammatical blunders: on this point I agree entirely with my dear friend Spalding, whom such blunders in his scholars did not provoke, provided his pointing them out availed by degrees to get rid of them. A worse fault is, that you have more than once broken down in a sentence; that you employ words in an incorrect sense; that your style is turgid and without uniformity; that you use your metaphors illogically. You do not write simply enough to express a thought unpretendingly, when it stands clearly before your mind. That your style is not rich and polished is no ground for blame: for although there have been some, especially in former times, who by a peculiarly happy management of a peculiar talent have gained such a style at your age, yet in ordinary cases such perfection is quite unattainable. Copiousness and nicety of expression imply a maturity of intellect, which can only be the result of a progressive development. But what everyone can and ought to do, is, not to aim at an appearance of more than he really understands; but to think and express himself simply and correctly. Here, therefore, take a useful rule. When you are writing a Latin essay, think what you mean to say with the utmost distinctness you are capable of, and put it into the plainest words. Study the structure of the sentences in great writers; and exercise yourself frequently in imitating some of them: translate passages so as to break up the sentences; and when you translate them back again, try to restore the sentences. In this exercise you will not need the superintendence of your teacher; do it, however, as a preparation for the practice of riper years. When you are writing, examine carefully whether your language be of one colour. It matters not to my mind, whether you attach yourself to that of Cicero and Livy, or to that of Tacitus and Quintilian: but one period you must choose: else the result is a motley style, which is as offensive to a sound philologer, as if one were to mix up German of 1650 and of 1800. Try to acquire the art of connecting sentences, without which all attempts at writing Latin are downright torture to the reader; and most especially look carefully to your metaphors: whatever is not quite faultless in them, is intolerable. Hence writing Latin is such an excellent discipline for a good style; and next to Latin, French, which also will not tolerate any absurdities; whereas we Germans in our own language are lamentably indifferent about such matters.

Id. (at 16-17):

You must know enough of antiquity to be aware that the philosophy of young men, down to a much riper age than yours, consisted in silent listening, in endeavouring to understand and to learn. You cannot even have an acquaintance with the facts, much less carry on general reflections,—to let pass the word philosophical,—on questions of minute detail, mostly problematical. To learn, my dear friend, to learn conscientiously,—to go on sifting and increasing our knowledge,—this is our speculative calling through life: and it is so most especially in youth, which has the happiness that it may give itself up without hinderance to the charms of the new intellectual world opened to it by books. He who writes a dissertation,—let him say what he will,—pretends to teach: and one cannot teach without some degree of wisdom; which is the amends that, if we strive after it, God will give us for the departing bliss of youth. A wise young man is a monster.

Id. (at 17):

Antiquity may be compared to an immense city in ruins, of which we have not even a ground-plan; which everyone must make out for himself, and learn to understand, the whole from the parts, the parts from a careful comparison and study of each, and from their relation to the whole. If a person who had only a smattering of architectural knowledge, were totally ignorant of hydrostatics, had scarcely seen the chief ruins of Rome, and never anything beyond it, were to write about the remains of the aqueducts, he would be in much the same case as a student who should write a treatise on some branch of philology.

Id. (at 19-20):

In this matter I am so strict, that I utterly disapprove of the common practice of adopting references, after verifying them, without naming the source whence they are taken; and tedious as the double reference is, I never allow myself to dispense with it. When I cite a passage simply, I have found it out myself. He who does otherwise, assumes the appearance of more extensive reading than belongs to him.

Others may be less strict; nor should I blame them for it, if I can imagine that it is really altogether indifferent to them, whether they are believed to have engaged in more profound researches than they have done; or if, like some persons, they suppose it taken for granted that references are mostly borrowed. But from a young man, were it merely as an exercise of honesty, I demand the most scrupulous truth in literature, as in all other things, absolutely and without exception; so that it may become an integral part of his nature; or rather, that the truth, which God planted in his nature, may abide there. By it alone can we fight our way through the world.

Id. (at 20-21):

I wish you were not so fond of satires, even of Horace's. Turn to those works which elevate the heart, in which you see great men and great events, and live in a higher world: turn away from those which represent the mean and contemptible side of ordinary relations and degenerate ages. They are not fitted for the young; and the ancients would not have let them fall into your hands. Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, Pindar,—these are the poets for youth, the poets with whom the great men of antiquity nourished themselves; and as long as literature shall give light to the world, they will ennoble the youthful souls, that are filled with them, for life. Horace's Odes, as copies of Greek models, are also good reading for the young; and I regret that it is become the practice to depreciate them, which only a few masters are entitled to do, or can do without arrogance. In his Epistles, Horace is original, and more genial; but he who reads them intelligently, reads them with sorrow; they cannot do good to anyone. We see a man of noble disposition, but who, from inclination and reflection, tries to adapt himself to an evil age, and who has given himself up to a vile philosophy, which does not prevent his continuing noble, but lowers all his views. His morality rests on the principle of suitableness, decorum, reasonableness: he declares expediency (to take the most favourable expression) to be the source of the idea of right (Sat. I.iii.98). Baseness discomposes him, and excites him, not to anger, but to a slight chastisement. That admiration for virtue, which constrains us to scourge vice, and which we see not only in Tacitus, but also in Juvenal,—in the latter disgustingly,—is not found in Horace. Juvenal however you must not read yet, with the exception of a few pieces: nor is this any loss; for even if you might be allowed to read him, it would not be wholesome at your age, to dwell on the contemplation of vice, instead of enriching your mind with great thoughts.

To these poets, and among prose writers to Herodotus, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Cicero, Livy, Caesar, Sallust, Tacitus, I earnestly entreat you to turn, and to keep exclusively to them. Do not read them to make esthetical remarks on them, but to read yourself into them, and to fill your soul with their thoughts, that you may gain by their reading, as you would gain by listening reverently to the discourses of great men. This is the philology which does one's soul good: learned investigations, when one has attained to the capacity of carrying them on, still are only of secondary value. We must be accurately acquainted with grammar, according to the ancient, wide acceptation of that term: we must acquire all branches of archaeology, so far as lies in our power. But even though we were to make the most brilliant emendations, and could explain the most difficult passages offhand, this is nothing but mere trickery, unless we imbibe the wisdom and the magnanimity of the great ancients, feel like them, and think like them.

Id. (at 21):

Leave the commentators and emenders for the present unread. The time will come, when you may study them to advantage.

Paul Johnson, "Dirty rotten scholars," The Spectator (February 26, 2011), on physicist Joseph Thomson (1856-1940):

Even Thomson's entry in the old Dictionary of National Biography, which is solemn and strait-laced to a fault, hints there was something amiss. Alongside his awards and honours, it found space to notice his 'peculiar grin' and the fact that he was 'most careless in his attire and appearance, and behaved as though it were a matter of no interest either to himself or others'. The obituary in Country Life said he had 'the appearance of a grocer’s errand boy'. However it was left to one of his Trinity colleagues, A.S.F. Gow, to administer the sharpest rebuke, though he couched it 'in the decent obscurity of a learned language':

In memoriam Josephi Thomson, qui, propter minimarum particularum scientiam maximo utriusque universitatio collegio praepositus, alteram officii partem omnino neglexit, altera ita functus est ut neglectam maluisses. Raucus, edentulous, ipexus, urorem duxit non amabileum, cuius ope et auxilio suffultus, heredibus LXXX milia librarum sterling-arum, collegio domicilium hara immundius, posteri exemplum memorabile avaritiae reliquit.

George Lyttelton, who had been a master at Eton alongside Gow, before he moved to Trinity, copied this into his commonplace book, providing a translation:

In memory of Joseph Thomson who, by virtue of his knowledge of the smallest particles, attained the mastership of the greatest college in either university. He totally neglected the one part of his duties and discharged the other in such a way that it would have been better if he had neglected that also. Loud-mouthed, toothless and unkempt, he married an unpleasant wife, thanks to whose money he was able to leave £80,000 sterling to his heirs, a house filthier than a pigsty to the college, and to posterity a model of avarice never to be forgotten.

The Latin as quoted here is full of mistakes:

For universitatio read universitatis.
For edentulous read edentulus.
For ipexus read impexus.
For urorem read uxorem.
For amabileum read amabilem.
For sterling-arum read sterlingarum.
For posteri read posteris.

Here is a screen capture of the Latin, taken this morning, in case you think I'm making this up:


For a mostly correct Latin version see George Lyttelton's Commonplace Book, 2nd ed. (Settrington: Stone Trough Books, 2003), p. 102, although even there you'll find an additional misprint (memorablile, should be memorabile). Here is the Latin purged of mistakes:

In memoriam Josephi Thomson, qui, propter minimarum particularum scientiam maximo utriusque universitatis collegio praepositus, alteram officii partem omnino neglexit, altera ita functus est ut neglectam maluisses. Raucus, edentulus, impexus, uxorem duxit non amabilem, cuius ope et auxilio suffultus, heredibus LXXX milia librarum sterlingarum, collegio domicilium hara immundius, posteris exemplum memorabile avaritiae reliquit.

Labels: typographical and other errors

Theocritus, Idylls 16.88-97 (tr. Neil Hopkinson):

May all those towns utterly ravaged by the hands of the enemy be settled once more by their former citizens. May they cultivate fields that flourish; may countless thousands of sheep, fattened on their pastures, bleat over the plain; may oxen heading for their byres hasten on his way the man traveling at dusk; may the fallow land be made ready for sowing, while high in the trees the cicada, keeping watch over the shepherds in the heat of the day, chirps up in the branches; may spiders stretch their fine-spun webs over armor; and may the battle cry no longer exist even in name.

ἄστεα δὲ προτέροισι πάλιν ναίοιτο πολίταις,
δυσμενέων ὅσα χεῖρες ἐλωβήσαντο κατ' ἄκρας·
ἀγροὺς δ' ἐργάζοιντο τεθαλότας· αἱ δ' ἀνάριθμοι        90
μήλων χιλιάδες βοτάνᾳ διαπιανθεῖσαι
ἂμ πεδίον βληχῷντο, βόες δ' ἀγεληδὸν ἐς αὖλιν
ἐρχόμεναι σκνιφαῖον ἐπισπεύδοιεν ὁδίταν·
νειοὶ δ' ἐκπονέοιντο ποτὶ σπόρον, ἁνίκα τέττιξ
ποιμένας ἐνδίους πεφυλαγμένος ὑψόθι δένδρων        95
ἀχεῖ ἐν ἀκρεμόνεσσιν· ἀράχνια δ' εἰς ὅπλ' ἀράχναι
λεπτὰ διαστήσαιντο, βοᾶς δ' ἔτι μηδ' ὄνομ' εἴη.

A.S.F. Gow's commentary on these lines (with Google Chrome, click and then click again to enlarge):

John Hill Burton (1809-1881), The Book-Hunter etc. (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1862), pp. 103-104:

There are those terrible folios of the scholastic divines, the civilians, and the canonists, their majestic stream of central print overflowing into rivulets of marginal notes sedgy with citations. Compared with these, all the intellectual efforts of our recent degenerate days seem the work of pigmies; and for any of us even to profess to read all that some of those indomitable giants wrote, would seem an audacious undertaking. But, in fact, they were to a great extent solemn shams, since the bulk of their work was merely that of the clerk who copies page after page from other people's writings.

Surely these laborious old writers exhibited in this matter the perfection of literary modesty. Far from secretly pilfering, like the modern plagiarist, it was their great boast that they themselves had not suggested the great thought or struck out the brilliant metaphor, but that it had been done by some one of old, and was found in its legitimate place — a book. I believe that if one of these laborious persons hatched a good idea of his own, he could experience no peace of mind until he found it legitimated by having passed through an earlier brain, and that the author who failed thus to establish a paternity for his thought would sometimes audaciously set down some great name in his crowded margin, in the hope that the imposition might pass undiscovered. Authorities, of course, enjoy priority according to their rank in literature. First come Aristotle and Plato, with the other great classical ancients; next the primitive fathers; then Abailard, Erigena, Peter Lombard, Ramus, Major, and the like. If the matter be jurisprudence, we shall have Marcianus, Papinianus, Ulpianus, Hermogenianus, and Tryphonius to begin with; and shall then pass through the straits of Bartolus and Baldus, on to Zuichemus, Sanchez, Brissonius, Ritterhusius, and Gothofridus. If all these say the same thing, each of the others copying it from the first who uttered it, so much the more valuable to the literary world is deemed the idea that has been so amply backed — it is like a vote by a great majority, or a strongly-signed petition.

Note the halo:


From https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_960w/2010-2019/Wires/Images/2017-02-01/Getty/118313234.jpg (where the halo is even more prominent).

I don't believe in the Gospel according to St. Mark.

D.S. Carne-Ross (1921-2010), "A Modest Proposal: To Whom It May Concern," Arion 4.3 (Autumn, 1965) 358-360 (at 358):

The Greekless public asks for bread and it is given—what? Not even dry Bohns (which at least never claimed to be anything else), but harlot shapes pretending to a virtue they do not own, their rumps stamped with the impudent claim that they "give you the spirit" of the original.

Related posts:

• The Valley of Dry Bohns
• The Bohnyard

Serlo of Wilton (1105-1181), poem 28 in Serlon de Wilton, Poèmes latins. Texte critique avec une introduction et des tables, ed. Jan Öberg (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1965 = Studia Latina Stockholmiensia, 14), p. 105 (tr. Peter Dronke):

As I go alone, full of thoughts, I behold three girls.
I marvel, and receive new matter for my thoughts.

Dum studeo, dum solus eo, tres cerno puellas:
Opstupeo studioque meo res addo novellas.

Related post: Pretty Little Girl With a Red Dress On.

Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964; rpt. 1972), p. 185:

I have often irritated people by saying that an intelligent person can become what is called an 'authority' on most 'questions', 'problems', or 'subjects' by intensive study for two or three months. They thought me arrogant for saying so, or, if not arrogant, not serious. But it is true. The number and volume of relevant facts on any subject are not many or great and the number of good books on it are few. If you have a nose for relevant facts and the trails which lead to them—this is essential and half the battle—and if you know how to work with the laborious pertinacity of the mole and beaver, you can acquire in a few months all the knowledge necessary for a thorough understanding of the subject.

D.S. Carne-Ross (1921-2010), "T.S. Eliot: Tropheia," Arion 4.1 (Spring, 1965) 5-20 (at 17):

If the study of literature is a moral activity (and if it isn't, we are all spending far too much time on it), a means of getting at those regions of consciousness out of which we live but which mostly remain half hidden from us, the regions where motives take shape and character and ideas are formed, then this study should mean a naked confrontation of the text, undertaken with all the sincerity that we possess. There is no room here for posturing in borrowed clothes, in borrowed beliefs. With a modern writer, inhabiting the same moral universe as ourselves, we need only be equipped with intelligence and sincerity. But if our curiosity takes us to the literatures of the past, we must bring more to the texts, we must acquire the historical sense. We need simply to know certain things about Dante's or Shakespeare's universe before we can, in any real sense, read their poetry.

Julia Budenz (1934-2010), "Learning Latin," Vergilius 37 (1991) 20-21 (lines 31-56):

                                                The glow
Of Rome will fade if teachers do not stress
(I turn prosaic and pedestrian)
Latin's immutable eternal law:
To read one must be a grammarian.
Rome will have fallen if one fatal flaw
Enters and penetrates and undermines
Its adamantine everlastingness,
The Latin language. When no one declines
And conjugates the rubble is a mess.
Build up the stones again as they must be
Constructed and construed eternally.

But read. Read as the Romans read, aloud,
Word after word. This is not really rubble.
The Roman stones already are inscribed
In order. This is not a game of scrabble.
The Latin that one loves was once hard work.
The Latin that one loves is subtlest play.
Happy are they who somehow did not shirk
The one. They see the other's blessed day.
Like Daphnis they will marvel as they stand
Upon the threshold of Olympus, where
They look down on the clouds and planets and
The traffic of the stars and, breathing air
Azure, celestial, pass through the facades
And learn they are conversant with the gods.

The final sentence refers to Vergil, Eclogues 5.56-57 (quoted at the beginning of the poem):

candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi
sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera Daphnis.

Lucian, Anacharsis 34 (tr. A.M. Harmon):

But to bear arms always and carry a dirk at one's belt is, we think, superfluous in time of peace; in fact, there is a penalty prescribed for anyone who carries weapons unnecessarily within the city limits or brings armour out into a public place.

τὸ μέντοι ὁπλοφορεῖν ἀεὶ καὶ ἀκινάκην παρεζῶσθαι περιττὸν ἐν εἰρήνῃ οἰόμεθα εἶναι, καὶ πρόστιμόν γ᾿ ἔστιν, ὅστις ἐν ἄστει σιδηροφοροίη μηδὲν δέον ἢ ὅπλα ἐξενέγκοι εἰς τὸ δημόσιον.

Related post: Gun Control.

Lucian, On Funerals 16 (prematurely dead young man, speaking to his grieving father; tr. A.M. Harmon):

What dreadful misfortune do you think I am undergoing? Is it that I did not get to be an old man like you, with your head bald, your face wrinkled, your back bent, and your knees trembling,—like you, who in short are rotten with age after filling out so many months and so many Olympiads, and who now, at the last, go out of your mind in the presence of so many witnesses?

ἢ τί σοι δεινὸν πάσχειν δοκῶ; ἢ διότι μὴ τοιουτοσὶ γέρων ἐγενόμην οἷος εἶ σύ, φαλακρὸς μὲν τὴν κεφαλήν, τὴν δὲ ὄψιν ἐρρυτιδωμένος, κυφὸς καὶ τὰ γόνατα νωθής, καὶ ὅλως ὑπὸ τοῦ χρόνου σαθρὸς πολλὰς τριακάδας καὶ ὀλυμπιάδας ἀναπλήσας, καὶ τὰ τελευταῖα δὴ ταῦτα παραπαίων ἐπὶ τοσούτων μαρτύρων;

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), "Roosevelt: An Autopsy," Prejudices: Second Series:

In part it [the Progressive Party] was made up of mere disordered enthusiasts—believers in anything and everything, pathetic victims of the credulity complex, habitual followers of jitney messiahs, incurable hopers and snufflers.

From the same essay:

No one who has given any study to the development and propagation of political doctrine in the United States can have failed to notice how the belief in issues among politicians tends to run in exact ratio to the popularity of those issues. Let the populace begin suddenly to swallow a new panacea or to take fright at a new bugaboo, and almost instantly nine-tenths of the master-minds of politics begin to believe that the panacea is a sure cure for all the malaises of the republic, and the bugaboo an immediate and unbearable menace to all law, order and domestic tranquillity. At the bottom of this singular intellectual resilience, of course, there is a good deal of hard calculation; a man must keep up with the procession of crazes, or his day is swiftly done. But in it there are also considerations a good deal more subtle, and maybe less discreditable. For one thing, a man devoted professionally to patriotism and the wisdom of the fathers is very apt to come to a resigned sort of acquiescence in all the doctrinaire rubbish that lies beneath the national scheme of things—to believe, let us say, if not that the plain people are gifted with an infallible sagacity, then at least that they have an inalienable right to see their follies executed. Poll-parroting nonsense as a matter of daily routine, the politician ends by assuming that it is sense, even though he doesn't believe it.

William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well 2.2.13-19:

CLOWN. But for me, I have an answer will serve all men.

COUNTESS. Marry, that's a bountiful answer that fits all questions.

CLOWN. It is like a barber's chair that fits all buttocks, the pin-buttock, the quatch-buttock, the brawn buttock, or any buttock.

Sebastiano Timpanaro (1923-2000), The Genesis of Lachmann's Method, tr. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 119:

There is an undeniable affinity between the method with which the Classical philologist classifies manuscripts genealogically and reconstructs the reading of the archetype, and the method with which the linguist classifies languages and as far as possible reconstructs a lost mother language, for example, Indo-European. In both cases inherited elements must be distinguished from innovations, and the unitary anterior phase from which these have branched out must be hypothesized on the basis of the various innovations. The fact that innovations are shared by certain manuscripts of the same text, or by certain languages of the same family, demonstrates that these are connected by a particularly close kinship, that they belong to a subgroup: a textual corruption too is an innovation compared to the previously transmitted text, just like a linguistic innovation. On the other hand, shared "conservations" have no classificatory value: what was already found in the original text or language can be preserved even in descendants that are quite different from one another.

Inscriptiones Graecae IX,1², fasc. 2 = Inscriptiones Acarnaniae, ed. G. Klaffenbach, p. 23, no. 298 (Thyrrheum in Acarnania, probably 3rd century B.C.; tr. Douglas E. Gerber):

Stranger, the dust that brings glory to men conceals here in its bosom Timocritus, honoured by the Muses. For when the brave man came into conflict with the sons of the Aetolians on behalf of his homeland, it was his desire either to be victorious or to die. He fell among the front ranks and left his father with pain beyond measure, but he did not lose sight of his noble upbringing. Taking to heart the Spartan declaration of Tyrtaeus, he chose valour ahead of life.

Τὸμ Μούσαις, ὦ ξεῖνε, τετιμένον ἐνθάδε κρύπτει
    Τιμόκριτογ κόλπωι κυδιάνειρα κόνις.
Αἰτωλῶν γὰρ παισὶ πάτρας ὕπερ εἰς ἔριν ἐλθὼν
    ὡγαθὸς ἢ νικᾶν ἤθελε<ν> ἢ τεθνάναι·
πίπτει δ᾿ ἐμ προμάχοισι λιπὼμ πατρὶ μύριον ἄλγος,        5
    ἀλλὰ τὰ παιδείας οὐκ ἀπέκρυπτε καλά·
Τυρταίου δὲ Λάκαιναν ἐνὶ στέρνοισι φυλάσσων
    ῥῆσιν τὰν ἀρετὰν εἵλετο πρόσθε βίου.

4 suppl. Werner Peek

In line 2, note terminal γ for ν before initial κ (cf. the pronunciation of ἀνάγκη). Similarly terminal μ for ν before initial μ in line 1. Klaffenbach notes these spellings on p. 97.

See Paul Friedländer, "A New Epigram by Damagetus," American Journal of Philology 63.1 (1942) 78-82. I haven't seen Emilio Fernández Galiano, ed., Posidipo de Pela (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto de Filología, 1987), where I think this is fragment XXXII (among the dubia), or Elisa Criveller, "Epigrammi funerari di Etolia e Acarnania tra III e II sec. a.C.," in Claudia Antonetti, ed., Lo spazio ionico e le comunità della Grecia nord-occidentale: territorio, società e istituzioni. Atti del convegno internazionale, Venezia, 7-9 gennaio 2010 (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2010 = Diabaseis, 1), pp. 429-457 (at 431-435).

Emil Cioran (1911-1995), De l'inconvénient d'être né, part IX (tr. ‎Richard Howard):

"Everything is filled with gods," said Thales, at the dawn of philosophy; at the other end, at this twilight we have come to, we can proclaim, not only out of a need for symmetry but even more out of respect for the evidence, that "everything is emptied of gods."

«Tout est rempli de dieux», disait Thalès, à l'aube de la philosophie; à l'autre bout, ce crépuscule où nous sommes parvenus, nous pouvons proclamer, non seulement par besoin de symétrie, mais encore par respect de l'évidence, que «tout est vide de dieux».

Thales, fragment 11 A 22 Diels-Kranz (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 9th ed., vol. I, p. 79):

Θαλῆς ᾠήθη πάντα πλήρη θεῶν εἶναι.