Laudator Temporis Acti

Oswyn Murray, in The Oxford History of the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 209-210:

The developed Greek city was a network of associations: as Aristotle saw, it was such associations which created the sense of community, of belonging, which was an essential feature of the polis: the ties of kinship by blood were matched with multiple forms of political and religious and social groupings, and of companionship for a purpose, whether it be voyaging or drinking or burial.

[....]

In such a world it might be argued that multiple ties limited the freedom of the individual, and there is certainly an important sense in which the conception of the individual apart from the community is absent from Greek thought: the freedom of the Greeks is public, externalized in speech and action. This freedom derives precisely from the fact that the same man belongs to a deme, a phratry, a family, a group of relatives, a religious association: and, living in this world of conflicting groups and social duties, he possesses the freedom to choose between their demands, and so to escape any particular form of dominant social patterning. It is this which explains the amazing creativity and freedom of thought of classical Athens: the freedom which results from belonging in many places is no less a freedom than that which results from belonging nowhere, and which creates a society united only in its neuroses.

The freedom which results from belonging nowhere, which creates a society united only in its neuroses—this sounds like an indictment of our modern society.

Excerpt from Colmán Elo (555-611)?, "Apgitir Chrábaid" ("The Alphabet of Devotion"), in Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus, Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery (1995; rpt. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 206:

What is best for the mind? Breadth and humility, for every good thing finds room in a broad, humble mind. What is worst for the mind? Narrowness and closedness, and constrictedness, for nothing good finds room in a narrow, closed, restricted mind.

Dov Zlotnick (1925-2014), Introduction to Saul Lieberman (1898-1983), Greek in Jewish Palestine/Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1994), p. x:

Rabbenu Tam (1100-1171), the greatest of the Tosafists, for example, wrote that it seemed to him that they "who emend needlessly will be sentenced to the chambers of hell."<sup>10

10</sup> Sepher Hayashar, ed. S.F. Rosenthal (New York, 1959), p. 75.

Mark Rutherford (pseudonym of William Hale White), Pages from a Journal, with Other Papers (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), pp. 202-203:

I have come to the conclusion that the time spent on the classics, both here and in Germany, is mostly thrown away. Take even Homer. I admit the greatness of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but do tell me, my dear godfather, whether in this nineteenth century, when scores of urgent social problems are pressing for solution, our young people ought to give themselves up to a study of ancient legends? What, however, are Horace, Catullus, and Ovid compared with Homer? Much in them is pernicious, and there is hardly anything in them which helps us to live. Besides, we have surely enough in Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, to say nothing of the poets of this century, to satisfy the imagination of anybody. Boys spend years over the Metamorphoses or the story of the wars of Aeneas, and enter life with no knowledge of the simplest facts of psychology. I look forward to a time not far distant, I hope, when our whole pedagogic system will be remodelled. Greek and Latin will then occupy the place which Assyrian or Egyptian hieroglyphic occupies now, and children will be directly prepared for the duties which await them.

John Keats, letter to George and Georgiana Keats (March 19, 1819):

I go among the Fields and catch a glimpse of a Stoat or a fieldmouse peeping out of the withered grass—the creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it. I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along—to what? the Creature has a purpose and his eyes are bright with it.

In keeping with the spirit of the health care bill currently under consideration by the United States Congress, perhaps the following idea might prove useful.

Strabo 3.3.7 (on the northern Iberians; tr. Horace Leonard Jones, with his notes):

Their sick they expose upon the streets, in the same way as the Egyptians¹ did in ancient times, for the sake of their getting suggestions from those who have experienced the disease.

¹ Since this custom was followed by the Assyrians (Herodotus 1.197 and Strabo 16.1.20), and since there is no other account of such a practice among the Egyptians, some of the editors have presumed to emend the text, perhaps rightly.

τοὺς δὲ ἀρρώστους, ὥσπερ οἱ Αἰγύπτιοι¹ τὸ παλαιόν, προτιθέασιν εἰς τὰς ὁδοὺς τοῖς πεπειραμένοις τοῦ πάθους ὑποθήκης χάριν.

¹ Kramer conjectures Ἀσσύριοι for Αἰγύπτιοι, citing Herodotus 1.197 and Strabo 16.1.20. So read Forbiger, Müller-Dübner, and Meineke.

Strabo 16.1.20 (tr. Horace Leonard Jones):

They place the sick where three roads meet and question those who pass by, on the chance that some one has a cure for the malady; and no one of those who pass by is so base as not to suggest some cure when he falls in with them if he has any in mind.

τοὺς δ᾿ ἀρρώστους εἰς τὰς τριόδους ἐκτιθέντες πυνθάνονται τῶν παριόντων, εἴ τίς τι ἔχοι λέγειν τοῦ πάθους ἄκος· οὐδείς τέ ἐστιν οὕτω κακὸς τῶν παριόντων, ὃς οὐκ ἐντυχών, εἴ τι φρονεῖ σωτήριον, ὑποτίθεται.

Herodotus 1.197 (tr. A.D. Godley):

I come now to the next wisest of their customs: having no use for physicians, they carry the sick into the market-place; then those who have been afflicted themselves by the same ill as the sick man's, or seen others in like case, come near and advise him about his disease and comfort him, telling him by what means they have themselves recovered of it or seen others so recover. None may pass by the sick man without speaking and asking what is his sickness.

δεύτερος δὲ σοφίῃ ὅδε ἄλλος σφι νόμος κατέστηκε· τοὺς κάμνοντας ἐς τὴν ἀγορὴν ἐκφορέουσι· οὐ γὰρ δὴ χρέωνται ἰητροῖσι. προσιόντες ὦν πρὸς τὸν κάμνοντα συμβουλεύουσι περὶ τῆς νούσου, εἴ τις καὶ αὐτὸς τοιοῦτο ἔπαθε ὁκοῖον ἂν ἔχῃ ὁ κάμνων ἢ ἄλλον εἶδε παθόντα, ταῦτα προσιόντες συμβουλεύουσι καὶ παραινέουσι ἅσσα αὐτὸς ποιήσας ἐξέφυγε ὁμοίην νοῦσον ἢ ἄλλον εἶδε ἐκφυγόντα. σιγῇ δὲ παρεξελθεῖν τὸν κάμνοντα οὔ σφι ἔξεστι, πρὶν ἂν ἐπείρηται ἥντινα νοῦσον ἔχει.

Related post: Health Care Reform.

Strabo 4.4.6 (tr. Horace Leonard Jones):

The following, also, is a thing peculiar to them, that they endeavour not to grow fat or pot-bellied, and any young man who exceeds the standard measure of the girdle is punished. So much for Transalpine Celtica.

ἴδιον δὲ καὶ τοῦτο· ἀσκεῖν γὰρ αὐτοὺς μὴ παχεῖς εἶναι μηδὲ προγάστορας, τὸν δ᾿ ὑπερβαλλόμενον τῶν νέων τό τῆς ζώνης μέτρον ζημιοῦσθαι. ταῦτα μὲν περὶ τῆς ὑπὲρ τῶν Ἄλπεων Κελτικῆς.

Related post: Slim.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), Minority Report (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 239, § 361:

Moderation in all things. Not too much life. It often lasts too long.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784), "Addition aux Pensées philosophiques," number 16, in his Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Michel Delon (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), p. 40 (my translation):

The God of the Christians is a father who cares very much about his apples, and very little about his children.

Le Dieu des chrétiens est un père qui fait grand cas de ses pommes, et fort peu de ses enfants.

Thanks to Ian Jackson for the reference to Delon's edition.

The genesis of modern literature, as explained by Karl Kraus (1874-1936), tr. Jonathan McVity:

In the beginning was the review copy, and a man received it from the publisher. Then he wrote a review. Then he wrote a book which the publisher accepted and sent on to someone else as a review copy. The man who received it did likewise. This is how modern literature came into being.

The original, from Kraus' Sprüche und Widersprüche (Munich: Albert Langen, 1909), p. 182:

Im Anfang war das Rezensionsexemplar, und einer bekam es vom Verleger zugeschickt. Dann schrieb er eine Rezension. Dann schrieb er ein Buch, welches der Verleger annahm und als Rezensionsexemplar weitergab. Der nächste, der es bekam, tat desgleichen. So ist die moderne Literatur entstanden.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), Minority Report (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 132, § 181:

What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell. It is a business almost indistinguishable from that of a seller of snake-oil for rheumatism. As for a lawyer, he is simply, under our cash-register civilization, one who teaches scoundrels how to commit their swindles without too much risk. As for a physician, he is one who spends his whole life trying to prolong the lives of persons whose deaths, in nine cases out of ten, would be a public benefit. The case of the pedagogue is even worse. Consider him in his highest incarnation: the university professor. What is his function? Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and, in large part, untrue.

Scholiast on Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 954 = Suda Θ 574 (tr. David A. Campbell):

This is also a proverb, 'anger is the last of a man to grow old', applied to older men, since the older they are, the stronger their anger. Alcaeus [fragment 442] mentions it as being of general application.

τοῦτο δὲ καὶ παροιμιακῶς λέγεται, ὅτι ὁ θυμὸς ἔσχατον γηράσκει. λέγεται δὲ διὰ τοὺς πρεσβυτέρους. ὅσῳ γὰρ γηράσκουσι τὸν θυμὸν ἐρρωμενέστερον ἔχουσι. καὶ Ἀλκαῖος ὡς λεγομένου κατὰ τὸ κοινὸν αὐτοῦ μιμνήσκεται.

Erasmus (Adagia I vii 13) translates the proverb as "Ira omnium tardissime senescit."

Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918-1937), tr. Charles Kessler (New York: Grove Press, 1999), p. 397 (September 22, 1930):

Henry Clews is a not untalented sculptor. He has ornamented the innumerable pillars of his castle with grotesque human and animal faces to express his loathing of the modern world as manifested by the middle class, democracy, the herd outlook, and so on. His fanatical hatred of everything modern has not however precluded him from taking advantage of all inventions and conveniences the contemporary age has to offer: telephones in every room, splendid plumbing, and so on.

Strabo 14.5.13 (tr. Horace Leonard Jones):

The people at Tarsus have devoted themselves so eagerly, not only to philosophy, but also to the whole round of education in general, that they have surpassed Athens, Alexandria, or any other place that can be named where there have been schools and lectures of philosophers. But it is so different from other cities that there the men who are fond of learning are all natives, and foreigners are not inclined to sojourn there; neither do these natives stay there, but they complete their education abroad; and when they have completed it they are pleased to live abroad, and but few go back home.

τοσαύτη δὲ τοῖς ἐνθάδε ἀνθρώποις σπουδὴ πρός τε φιλοσοφίαν καὶ τὴν ἄλλην παιδείαν ἐγκύκλιον ἅπασαν γέγονεν, ὥσθ᾿ ὑπερβέβληνται καὶ Ἀθήνας καὶ Ἀλεξάνδρειαν καὶ εἴ τινα ἄλλον τόπον δυνατὸν εἰπεῖν, ἐν ᾧ σχολαὶ καὶ διατριβαὶ φιλοσόφων γεγόνασι. διαφέρει δὲ τοσοῦτον, ὅτι ἐνταῦθα μὲν οἱ φιλομαθοῦντες ἐπιχώριοι πάντες εἰσί, ξένοι δ᾿ οὐκ ἐπιδημοῦσι ῥᾳδίως· οὐδ᾿ αὐτοὶ οὗτοι μένουσιν αὐτόθι, ἀλλὰ καὶ τελειοῦνται ἐκδημήσαντες, καὶ τελειωθέντες ξενιτεύουσιν ἡδέως, κατέρχονται δ᾿ ὀλίγοι.

There is a pair of asyndetic privative adjectives (ἀκίνητοι ἄδρομοι) in R.S.O. Tomlin, "'Remain like Stones, Unmoving, Un-running': Another Greek Spell against Competitors in a Foot-Race," Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 160 (2007) 161-166 (lines 27-31 of the tablet, on p. 163, with Tomlin's translation on p. 164):

                                                                                δῆϲον α[ὐτῶν]
τοὺϲ πόδοϲ, τὰ νεῦρα, τὰ ϲκέλη, τὸν θυμό[ν], τὴν ἀρε[τήν],
τὰ τριακόϲια πεντήκοντα πέ<ν>τε μέλη τῶν ϲωμάτων [αὐ-]
τῶν καὶ τῶν ψυχῶν, ἕνα μὴ δύνοντε προβένιν ἐν τῷ
ϲταδίῳ, ἂλλὰ μένωϲιν ὡϲ λίθοι ἀκίνητοι ἄδρομοι.

                                        Bind their
feet, sinews, legs, spirit, excellence,
the three hundred and fifty-five limbs of their bodies
and souls, that they be not able to proceed in the
stadium, but remain like stones, unmoving, un-running.

Labels: asyndetic privative adjectives

Anacreontea 48 (tr. David A. Campbell):

When Bacchus comes, my worries go to sleep, and I imagine that I have the wealth of Croesus; I want to sing beautifully; I lie garlanded with ivy and in my heart I disdain the world. Prepare the wine and let me drink it. Bring me a cup, boy, for it is far better that I should lie drunk than lie dead.

ὅταν ὁ Βάκχος ἔλθῃ,
εὕδουσιν αἱ μέριμναι,
δοκῶ δ᾿ ἔχειν τὰ Κροίσου.
θέλω καλῶς ἀείδειν·
κισσοστεφὴς δὲ κεῖμαι,        5
πατῶ δ᾿ ἅπαντα θυμῷ.
ὅπλιζ᾿· ἐγὼ δὲ πίνω.
φέρε μοι κύπελλον ὦ παῖ·
μεθύοντα γάρ με κεῖσθαι
πολὺ κρεῖσσον ἢ θανόντα.        10

Apparatus from M.L. West, Carmina Anacreontea, corr. ed. (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1993), p. 35:


Line 6 is more concretely and literally "I trample on everything in my heart."

Greek κύπελλον (beaker, goblet) and Latin cupa (cask, tub, barrel) are related to each other, and both are perhaps related to English cup: see Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, II (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970), p. 600; Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), p. 155; and the Oxford English Dictionary.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), Minority Report (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), pp. 97-98, § 127:

The public schools of the United States were damaged very seriously when they were taken over by the State. So long as they were privately operated the persons in charge of them retained a certain amount of professional autonomy, and with it went a considerable dignity. But now they are all petty jobholders, and show the psychology that goes with the trade. They have invented a bogus science of pedagogy to salve their egos, but it remains hollow to any intelligent eye. What they may teach or not teach is not determined by themselves, or even by any exercise of sound reason, but by the interaction of politics on the one side and quack theorists on the other. Even savages have reached a better solution of the educational problem. Their boys are taught, not by puerile eunuchs, but by their best men, and the process of education among them really educates. This is certainly not true of ours. Many a boy of really fine mind is ruined in school. Along with a few sound values, many false ones are thrust into his thinking, and he inevitably acquires something of the attitude of mind of the petty bureaucrats told off to teach him. In college he may recover somewhat, for the college teacher is relatively more free than the pedagogue lower down the scale. But even in college education has become corrupted by buncombe, and so the boy on the border line of intelligence is apt to be damaged rather than benefited. Under proper care he might be pushed upward. As it is, he is shoved downward. Certainly everyday observation shows that the average college course produces no visible augmentation in the intellectual equipment and capacity of the student. Not long ago, in fact, an actual investigation in Pennsylvania demonstrated that students often regress so much during their four years that the average senior is less intelligent, by all known tests, than the average freshman. Part of this may be due to the fact that many really intelligent boys, as soon as they discover the vanity of the so-called education on tap, quit college in disgust, but in large part, I suspect, it is a product of the deadening effect of pedagogy.

Id., p. 102, § 134:

A professor, even at his best, is a pedagogue, and a pedagogue is seldom much of a man.

Id., p. 133, § 182:

It is still an open question whether the pedagogical methods of today are better or worse than those prevailing in the little red schoolhouse of the past generations, and many intelligent persons believe that they are clearly worse. There is certainly no such doubt about the improvement of methods, say, in medicine, farming or the common mechanical processes.

Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, s.v. Secte, § 1 (tr. Abner Kneeland):

There is no sect in geometry; we never say,—An Euclidian, an Archimedean.

When truth is evident, it is impossible to divide people into parties and factions. Nobody disputes that it is broad day at noon.

Il n'y a point de secte en géométrie; on ne dit point un euclidien, un archimédien.

Quand la vérité est évidente, il est impossible qu'il s'élève des partis et des factions. Jamais on n'a disputé s'il fait jour à midi.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), "Socialism and Culture," Selections from Political Writings (1910-1920), tr. John Mathews (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), pp. 10-13 (at 11):

We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopaedic knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture really is harmful, particularly for the proletariat. It serves only to create maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity, so turning them almost into a barrier between themselves and others. It serves to create the kind of weak and colourless intellectualism that Romain Rolland has flayed so mercilessly, which has given birth to a mass of pretentious babblers who have a more damaging effect on social life than tuberculosis or syphilis germs have on the beauty and physical health of the body. The young student who knows a little Latin and history, the young lawyer who has been successful in wringing a scrap of paper called a degree out of the laziness and lackadaisical attitude of his professors — they end up seeing themselves as different from and superior to even the best skilled workman, who fulfils a precise and indispensable task in life and is a hundred times more valuable in his activity than they are in theirs. But this is not culture, but pedantry, not intelligence, but intellect, and it is absolutely right to react against it.

Bisogna disabituarsi e smettere di concepire la cultura come sapere enciclopedico, in cui l'uomo non è visto se non sotto forma di recipiente da empire e stivare di dati empirici; di fatti bruti e sconnessi che egli poi dovrà casellare nel suo cervello come nelle colonne di un dizionario per poter poi in ogni occasione rispondere ai vari stimoli del mondo esterno. Questa forma di cultura è veramente dannosa specialmente per il proletariato. Serve solo a creare degli spostati, della gente che crede di essere superiore al resto dell'umanità perché ha ammassato nella memoria una certa quantità di dati e di date, che snocciola ad ogni occasione per farne quasi una barriera fra sé e gli altri. Serve a creare quel certo intellettualismo bolso e incolore, cosí bene fustigato a sangue da Romain Rolland, che ha partorito tutta una caterva di presuntuosi e di vaneggiatori, piú deleteri per la vita sociale di quanto siano i microbi della tubercolosi o della sifilide per la bellezza e la sanità fisica dei corpi. Lo studentucolo che sa un po' di latino e di storia, l'avvocatuzzo che è riuscito a strappare uno straccetto di laurea alla svogliatezza e al lasciar passare dei professori crederanno di essere diversi e superiori anche al miglior operaio specializzato che adempie nella vita ad un compito ben preciso e indispensabile e che nella sua attività vale cento volte di piú di quanto gli altri valgano nella loro. Ma questa non è cultura, è pedanteria, non è intelligenza, ma intelletto, e contro di essa ben a ragione si reagisce.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.6 (tr. C. R. Haines):

The best way of avenging thyself is not to do likewise.

Ἄριστος τρόπος τοῦ ἀμύνεσθαι τὸ μὴ ἐξομοιοῦσθαι.

Breathing and accent of Ἄριστος are missing from Marcus Aurelius. Edited and Translated by C.R. Haines, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930? = Loeb Classical Library, 58), p. 132. The mistake persists in the Digital Loeb Classical Library. My hard copy has only a "Reprinted and revised" date of 1930, but the bibliography on p. xxxi includes works printed as late as 1966.

The same, as rendered in Pierre Hadot (1922-2010), The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, tr. Michael Chase (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 29:

The best way to get even with them is not to resemble them.

Gregory Hays' translation:

The best revenge is not to be like that.

Definition of the middle of ἀμύνω in Liddell-Scott-Jones:

keep or ward off from oneself, guard or defend oneself against, freq. with collat. notion of requital, revenge.

To my taste, this smacks too much of turning the other cheek, an attitude which would have been incomprehensible to many, if not most, ancient Greeks. A speaker in Thucydides 7.68.1 (tr. Benjamin Jowett) said:

We should remember in the first place that men are doing a most lawful act when they take vengeance upon an enemy and an aggressor, and that they have a right to satiate their heart's animosity; secondly, that this vengeance [ἀμύνασθαι], which is proverbially the sweetest of all things, will soon be within our grasp.

καὶ νομίσωμεν ἅμα μὲν νομιμώτατον εἶναι πρὸς τοὺς ἐναντίους οἳ ἂν ὡς ἐπὶ τιμωρίᾳ τοῦ προσπεσόντος δικαιώσωσιν ἀποπλῆσαι τῆς γνώμης τὸ θυμούμενον, ἅμα δὲ ἐχθροὺς ἀμύνασθαι ἐκγενησόμενον ἡμῖν καὶ τὸ λεγόμενόν που ἥδιστον εἶναι.

Likewise Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.11.13:

To exact vengeance is sweet.

τὸ τιμωρεῖσθαι ἡδύ.

See K.J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974; rpt. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), pp. 182-183, and W.V. Harris, "Lysias III and Athenian Beliefs about Revenge," Classical Quarterly 47 (1997) 363-366.

Commentary in Marcus Aurelius. Meditations, Books 1-6. Translated and with an Introduction and Commentary by Christopher Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 169-170:

Marcus, here as elsewhere (2.1, 5.22, 5.25.1, 5.28, 11.18.11–11.18.13, 11.18.16–11.18.18) rejects the standard Greco-Roman ethic of retaliation for wrongdoing and urges himself to instruct those who have done him wrong. The idea that retaliation involves 'becoming like' your wrongdoer (and thus harming yourself) evokes some Platonic passages (Tht. 177a, Lg. 728b), compare Epict. Diss. 2.10.26. The paradoxical idea that not becoming like those who wish to harm you is itself a kind of retaliation is a distinctive feature of this passage. See further on relevant Stoic ideas Long 2002: 250–4 (on Epictetus), Gill 2006:451–2.

Labels: typographical and other errors