Laudator Temporis Acti

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), "On the Conditions of a Private Library," as reprinted in Edward M. Wilson, "Samuel Pepys in Spain," Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 7.3 (1979) 322-337 (at 334; endnote omitted):

In distinction noe lesse from those of the more Extensive, Pompous, and Stationary Libraries, of PRINCES, UNIVERSITIES, COLLEGES, and other PUBLICK-SOCIETIES, than of the more Restrained though otherwise Voluminous COLLECTIONS incident to those of the PROFESSORS of PARTICULAR FACULTIES: as being calculated for the SELF-ENTERTAINMENT onely of a solitary, unconfined ENQUIRER into BOOKS, and VOTARY of CICERO'S OTIUM LITERATUM: Iis (dico) Literis quibus Infinitatem Rerum atque Naturae, et in hoc ipso Mundo Coelum, Terras, Maria, cognoscimus. Tusc. Disp. Lib. Wherein what I propose as principally to be attended to is,
1. As to the Generall Scope and Purpose of it:
The comprehending in fewest Books and least Room the greatest diversity of SUBJECTS, STYLES, and LANGUAGES its Owner's Reading will bear; with Reguard had to theyr AUTHORS, EDITIONS, and PROPORTIONS on each Subject, answerable to theyr Weight, and the Particular Genius of their said Owner.
2. In the Book-binders Works,
Decency and Uniformity; with some Marks of theyr Propriety.
3. In theyr Registry.
Clearness, Comprehensiveness, and Order, and that
                         Numericall
Three-fold, viz.  Alphabeticall
                         Classicall

Originally printed in J.R. Tanner, ed., Private Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Samuel Pepys (London: G. Bell and Sons, Limited, 1926), vol. II, pp. 247-248 (non vidi).

Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who a few years ago sent me this photograph of part of his private library:

The emperor's slave, Merope, thought that baths, wine, and sex were the things that made life worth living. Here are the views of a later emperor on those things.

Baths (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.24; tr. C.R. Haines):

What bathing is when thou thinkest of it—oil, sweat, filth, greasy water, everything revolting—such is every part of life and every object we meet with.

ὁποῖόν σοι φαίνεται τὸ λούεσθαι· ἔλαιον, ἱδρώς, ῥύπος, ὕδωρ γλοιῶδες, πάντα σικχαντά· τοιοῦτον πᾶν μέρος τοῦ βίου καὶ πᾶν ὑποκείμενον.

Wine (id., 6.13):

This Falernian is merely the juice of a grape-cluster.

ὁ Φάλερνος χυλάριόν ἐστι σταφυλίου.

Sex (id.):

Sexual intercourse ... is merely internal attrition and the spasmodic excretion of mucus.

καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν κατὰ τὴν συνουσίαν ἐντερίου παράτριψις καὶ μετά τινος σπασμοῦ μυξαρίου ἔκκρισις.

In my opinion, the slave woman was wiser than the emperor.


Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), At the Wine Shop (1869),
Guildhall Art Gallery, London, inv. 1513

Juvenal, Satires 4.2-3 (tr. Susanna Morton Braund):

... a monstrosity without a single good quality to make up for his faults ...

... monstrum nulla virtute redemptum
a vitiis ...

Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912),
A Scene from Pompeii, or The Siesta (1868),
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, inv. P03996

Machiavelli (1469-1527), Discourses on Livy 1.3.1 (tr. Harvey C. Mansfield):

As all those demonstrate who reason on a civil way of life, and as every history is full of examples, it is necessary to whoever disposes a republic and orders laws in it to presuppose that all men are bad, and that they always have to use the malignity of their spirit whenever they have a free opportunity for it. When any malignity remains hidden for a time, this proceeds from a hidden cause, which is not recognized because no contrary experience has been seen. But time, which they say is the father of every truth, exposes it later.

Come dimostrano tutti coloro che ragionano del vivere civile, e come ne è piena di esempli ogni istoria, è necessario a chi dispone una republica, ed ordina leggi in quella, presupporre tutti gli uomini rei, e che li abbiano sempre a usare la malignità dello animo loro, qualunque volta ne abbiano libera occasione; e quando alcuna malignità sta occulta un tempo, procede da una occulta cagione, che, per non si essere veduta esperienza del contrario, non si conosce; ma la fa poi scoprire il tempo, il quale dicono essere padre d'ogni verità.

G.H.S., "Two Letters to a Classical Friend. I," Classical Review 15.5 (June, 1901) 282-284 (at 283):

But the predominating impression which Virgil left upon my mind, was that of sheer fag, of the stiffest piece of grind which I had ever gone through. And you know I still retain the opinion that grind is one thing, and poetry quite another, as different (to put it briefly) as Martha and Mary.

Id. (at 283-284):

I felt, rightly or wrongly, that the study of the classics was not pursued for its own sake, but as part of an established system of education, of which the value and importance were rather taken for granted than really felt or proved. To me, and to most others on my own level of attainment, it was just mere cram and grind and shop, and could by no possibility be anything more. There was nothing in all this to gratify the love of Letters, the love of Nature, the love of Beauty. No experience could be less Hellenic, or less Humane. The classics, I then felt, and I feel still, were hackneyed to death, and nothing short of a miracle could impart to them the least touch of freshness. A classic text to me both was and is, a thing of verbs and adjectives; of the grammar and the lexicon; and the study of it had no more to do with Poetry than it had to do with Chemistry.

G.H.S., "Two Letters to a Classical Friend. II," Classical Review 15.6 (July, 1901) 320-322 (at 320):

I find that, so far as I am concerned, an Ode of Horace is the literary equivalent of a Chinese puzzle. With pains I can solve the puzzle or construe the text; but the result has neither beauty nor meaning. The whole thing leaves me weary and indifferent.

Id. (at 320-321):

My love for Lycidas and Adonais, and even my indifference to the Bucolics of Virgil, now led me to attempt Theocritus. I might as well have read so many consecutive pages of Liddell and Scott. And when Liddell and Scott come in at the door, Poetry flies out at the window. Clearly Theocritus was a task beyond me, a task for the man who makes the study of classical literature the main business of his life. I must be content to let that go. I had wished to follow downwards the tradition of pastoral poetry. That must now be left to others.

Id. (at 321):

I have somehow made my way through the first twelve books of the Iliad. Frankly, I find it detestable. Let me remind you once more that I am not passing judgment, I do but register the results of much painstaking labour. The vile jargon in which the poem is composed, half barbarism and half affectation; the inextricable confusion of the accidence, which keeps the reader in continual perplexity and embarrassment; the peculiar vagueness and obscurity of the vocabulary, which prevent him from receiving any clear or forcible impression; the sickening conventionalities of the style, the rhetoric and rhodomontade, the verbosity and diffuseness, the set phrases and recurring formulae, the epithets without meaning and adjectives which go without any word; the interminable declamation, as of the professional reciter mouthing polysyllables at so much a verse; the uniform monotonous flow of twaddle disguised in verbiage; the disjointed succession of episodes, without unity, or plan or progress; the tedious elaboration of trivial detail; the prating heroes and ignoble gods; have left upon my mind a sense of absolute nausea.

Id.:

Out of my unlucky experience, one broad result has clearly emerged, and for myself at least, is henceforth placed beyond the possibility of doubt. The classical literature is by its very nature a study for the specialist; no real appreciation of it is possible except to the specialist; and classical education is the education of the specialist or it is nothing. A subject so alien, so remote, so difficult, so technical, so elaborate, so artificial, can have no value for the purpose of general education. The fallacy which you classical men commit is that of supposing that the ancient languages and texts have, or can have, for your pupils, the same significance that they bear to yourselves.

Id. (at 321-322):

For most of us, what is called classical education means no more than an imperfect, and therefore useless, acquisition of the mechanical or linguistic part of the study; and that which alone has, in the Greek sense, musical, or, as we say, literary value, is never really assimilated. The texts read remain not a literature but a chrestomathy. We ask for bread and you give us a stone. In order to impart, in nineteen cases out of twenty, a mere smattering of the grammar and rhetoric of two dead languages, you have sacrificed all the opportunities of culture and the faculties of the mind. So far from inspiring the love of letters, it would be nearer the truth to say that you have stifled it. So far from communicating a real knowledge of any part of literature, you have stopped the way with your costly and useless commodities, your display of learning without life. In the few cases where your system has the only success of which it is capable it produces the professional scholar, for whom I have no less respect than yourself, though perhaps a less exclusive admiration. In the vast majority it generates the prig, taught to flatter himself upon his acquirements and to prefer form to substance; the smug, versed in his especial task of book-learning and ignorant of all beyond; or the dunce, whose small capacity has been extinguished by those who should have developed it.

H.L. Mencken, diary (November 25, 1938; on Dr. Dean Lewis):

The students in the Hopkins Medical School rather dislike him, but that is only because he is a harsh examiner. He never lets them get away with bluffs. Either they know the matter under discussion or he orders them to go back to their books. His phrase, "You had better look that up," is a byword at the Medical School.

J.P. Postgate (1853-1926), "Flaws in Classical Research," Proceedings of the British Academy 3 (1907-1908) 161-211 (at 183):

It is no business of the scientific inquirer after truth to sit in judgement on the tastes and morals of antiquity. Sympathy with his author is of some use to a student, but of none to a savant. Dispassionateness and insight are all that he requires. The admiration stirred in us by the greatness and splendour of an ancient monument of genius is prone to pass into a sentiment which dresses the figure of its worship in fictitious and anachronistic excellences, and resents as profanation any fact or hypothesis that would fasten upon the idol deeds, thoughts, or expressions of which the idolater personally disapproves. How strong and prevalent the sentiment is among us it is difficult to say, since its expression is generally confined to protests in unsigned reviews and private 'letters to the editor'. When the evidence opposed to it is overwhelming and admitted, it shuts its eyes or runs away; though it is up in arms on every fresh occasion. My own experience is that it is very strong indeed, and that there are but few who can be trusted to decide with equanimity certain questions affecting the private life, say, of a Sappho or a Tibullus. To the others my advice, if I might presume to offer it, would be this. If a scholar finds that one of two necessarily alternative conclusions is from its character repugnant to his feelings, this is a hint from his personality that he should leave the matter alone.

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), The American Senator, Part III, Chapter X:

"I can't understand," said Glomax, "how any man can be considered a good fellow as a country gentleman who does not care for sport. Just look at it all round. Suppose others were like him what would become of us all?"

"Yes indeed, what would become of us?" asked the two Botseys in a breath.

"Ho'd 'ire our 'orses, Runciman?" suggested Harry Stubbings with a laugh.

"Think what England would be!" said the Captain. "When I hear of a country gentleman sticking to books and all that, I feel that the glory is departing from the land."

"Sport" here is fox hunting.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.54 (tr. C.R. Haines):

That which is not in the interests of the hive cannot be in the interests of the bee.

τὸ τῷ σμήνει μὴ συμφέρον οὐδὲ τῇ μελίσσῃ συμφέρει.

Inscriptiones Graecae IX,1 883 (Corcyra, 2nd-3rd century A.D., my translation):

This advice I, Euodos, give to all mortals:
Give a share of good things to your soul; why are you its enemy?
And comfort your life with luxuriousness,
knowing that, if you go down to the drink of Lethe,
down below you will see nothing of the things above, ever,
when your soul has flown away from your limbs.

τοῦτ' Εὔοδος βροτοῖσι πᾶσι παραινῶ·
    τῇ ψυχῇ μετάδος καλ<ῶ>ν· <τί> ἔχθεις;
καὶ τὸν βίον τρυφῇ παρηγόρησον
    εἰδώς, ἢν καταβῇς ἐς πῶμα Λήθης
οὐδὲν τῶν ἐπάνω κάτω ποτ' ὄψει
    ψυχῆς ἐκ μελέων ἀποπταθείσης.

See Valentina Garulli, "Conversazioni in limine mortis: forme di dialogo esplicite e implicite nelle iscrizioni sepolcrali greche in versi," in Cristina Pepe and Gabriella Moretti, edd., Le parole dopo la morte: forme e funzioni della retorica funeraria nella tradizione greca e romana (Trent: Università degli Studi di Trento, 2014), pp. 59-96 (at 78-80).

Reinhold Merkelbach and Josef Stauber, Steinepigramme aus dem griechischen Osten, Bd. 2: Die Nordküste Kleinasiens (Marmarasee und Pontos) (Munich: K.G. Saur, 2001), p. 205:


This also appears in Friedrich Karl Dörner, ed., Tituli Bithyniae linguis Graeca et Latina conscripti: Paeninsula Bithynica praeter Calchedonem, Nicomedia et Ager Nicomedensis cum septemtrionali meridianoque litore Sinus Astaceni et cum Lacu Sumonensi (Vienna: Academia Scientiarum Austriaca, 1978 = Tituli Asiae Minoris, Vol. IV, Fasc. 1), number 109 (non vidi).

Here is the Greek, with an English translation:

[¯˘˘ ¯˘˘ ¯˘μ' ὁρᾶτ]ε νέκυν, παροδεῖται.
[οὔν]ομά μοι παγανὸν Ἀπολλώ[νι]ς ἐκλήθην,
οὗ πατρὶς Ἀπά[μι]α, νῦν δὲ Νικομηδείας με [γ]αῖᾳ
πρὸς δάπεδον κατέχει με μίτος καὶ νήματα Μοιρῶν.
ὀκτάκι νεικήσας τὸν ἐν σταδίοισιν ἀγῶναν,
τῇ δ' ἐνάτῃ πυγμῇ τὸ πεπρωμένον ὧδε ἀπέδωκε.
παῖζε, γέλα, παροδεῖτα, εἰδὼς ὅτι καὶ σὲ θανεῖν δεῖ.

Ἀλεξάνδρια ἡ σύμβιος αὐτοῦ ἐκ τῶν αὐτοῦ τὸ μνημεῖον ἀνέστησα μνείας χάριν· εἰ δέ τις τὸν βωμὸν τολμήσει καταστρέψε, δώσει προστείμου τῷ φίσκῳ (δην.) βφ'.

O passersby, you see me, a corpse.
For my civilian name I was called Apolloni(o)s.
My fatherland was Apameia, but now in the land of Nikomedeia
the thread and yarn of the Fates hold me fast in the earth.
Having won the contest in the amphitheater eight times,
in the ninth fight destiny delivered me over to this place.
Play, laugh, o passerby, knowing that you too must die.

Alexandria, his wife, with his earnings set up this memorial for the sake of remembrance. If anyone dares to disturb the tomb, he will pay a fine of 2500 denarii to the treasury.

Carl D. Buck (1866-1955), "A Semantic Note," Classical Philology 15.1 (January, 1920) 39-45 (at 42):

ψοφῶ 'die.' The regular Modern Greek word for 'die' is ἀπέθανα in the aorist, with a new analogical present ἀποθαίνω or πεθαίνω in place of the ancient ἀποθνήσκω. But ψοφῶ, in ancient Greek meaning 'make an inarticulate noise,' came to be used colloquially in the sense of 'die,' especially of animals or of men dying miserably, as from starvation. This use is attested for the twelfth century at least (Prodromus, I, 317, ψόφουν ἐκ τὴν πεῖναν 'I was dying of hunger'), and is doubtless much earlier.

Koraes, Atakta, I, 264 ff., connected this use with the noise made by the body falling in death, comparing the Homeric use of δουπέω to denote the dull thud of the corpse, e.g., δεδουπότος Οἰδιπόδαο 'when Oedipus had fallen.' But it is rather the inarticulate gasp of death that furnishes the transition, for which the closest parallel is the slang croak in the sense of 'die.' Compare also the use in the sense of 'die,' and with the same application and tone as ψοφῶ, of Fr. crever and Ital. crepare, whence NHG. krepieren. While this use may of course be derived from the usual meaning of the French and Italian verbs, namely 'burst,' it more probably represents an old colloquial expression which, like croak, grew out of the notion of noise that was dominant in the Latin verb (crepare 'crack, creak, rattle,' etc.).

---

A friend pointed out that Buck was born in Orland, Maine, not far from where I grew up. The article on Buck by William M. Calder III in Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists, ed. Ward W. Briggs, Jr. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 70-72, calls Buck's Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin "a book of numbing dullness" and says, "He was a soporific lecturer and an uninspiring teacher."

George S. Lane, "Carl Darling Buck," Language 31.2 (April-June, 1955) 181-189 (at 181-182):

To the end of his days, in spite of his long sojourn in the Middle West, he remained a 'Maine man'. When he walked down to his classes at the University of Chicago on a bad, snowy day, with his fur cap, his long, black, fur-lined greatcoat, and his high galoshes, he looked like any sturdy Maine citizen on his way to the general store or going about his daily routine.

Id. (at 185):

Buck was never a popular teacher, never what would be now considered a 'good' teacher by the criteria of the Colleges of Education. He probably never had enough undergraduate students at any one time to have made a student evaluation possible. If he had been graded by such students, I shudder to think of his score. Buck was a scholar's teacher: if you were not interested in his subject, you had better study something else; if you were not prepared, you had better go back and get your preparation.

Id. (at 187):

A man more modest of his own accomplishments has rarely lived. A short time before his death he was asked by a visiting scholar, who had come to honor him, how it felt to be the greatest living authority in a field (the reference was to the Greek dialects), and what one might prescribe, as it were, as the pattern to be followed to reach this eminence. Buck's lips parted in a slight smile: 'Just outlive all the rest,' he said.

A friend sent me the following photograph of the brass memorial plaque in honor of A.E. Housman in the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge.


Here is a transcription of the plaque:

HOC TITVLO COMMEMORATVR
ALFRED EDWARD HOUSMAN
PER XXV ANNOS LINGVAE LATINAE PROFESSOR KENNEDIANVS
ET HVIVS COLLEGII SOCIVS
QVI BENTLEII INSISTENS VESTIGIIS
TEXTVM TRADITVM POETARVM LATINARVM
TANTO INGENII ACVMINE TANTIS DOCTRINAE COPIIS
EDITORVM SOCORDIAM
TAM ACRI CAVILLATIONE CASTIGAVIT
VT HORVM STVDIORVM PAENE REFORMATOR EXSTITERIT
IDEM POETA
TENVI CARMINVM FASCICVLO
SEDEM SIBI TVTAM IN HELICONE NOSTRO VINDICAVIT
OBIIT PRID. KAL. MAI.
A.S. MDCCCCXXXVI AETATIS SVAE LXXVII
The transcription at the Chapel's web site (http://trinitycollegechapel.com/about/memorials/brasses/housman/) is incorrect in one letter. It transcribes Housman's name as HOVSMAN, but from the photograph it is clear that the name is spelled with a rounded U, not a V. Here is a translation, from the same web page:

This inscription commemorates Alfred Edward Housman, who was for twenty-five years Kennedy Professor of Latin and Fellow of the College. Following in Bentley's footsteps he corrected the transmitted text of the Latin poets with so keen an intelligence and so ample a stock of learning, and chastised the sloth of editors so sharply and wittily, that he takes his place as the virtual second founder of textual studies. He was also a poet whose slim volumes of verse assured him of a secure place on the British Helicon. He died on 30th April 1936 at the age of seventy-six.

The translation renders "A.S. MDCCCCXXXVI" as simply 1936. Presumably "A.S." stands for Anno Salvatoris or Anno Salutis, instead of the usual A.D. (Anno Domini). A.S.F. Gow composed the inscription.

I haven't seen Inscriptions from the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. Transcribed and Translated by James Clackson (Cambridge, 1990).

---

From Ian Jackson:

I have a copy of Clackson's book on the Trinity inscriptions. Your online source is simply a transcription of his 1990 text and translation, including the erroneous V (p. 98).

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), The American Senator, Part II, Chapter VI (Mrs. Masters complaining about her step-daughter Mary's refusal to marry Larry Twentyman; "that old woman" is Lady Ushant):

"She don't like him because he works for his bread,—that's what it is; and because she's been taught by that old woman to read poetry. I never knew that stuff do any good to anybody. I hate them fandangled lines that are all cut up short to make pretence. If she wants to read why can't she take the cookery book and learn something useful?"

William Jones (1746-1794), "Ode in Imitation of Alcaeus," Poetical Works, Vol. I (London: Stanhope Press, 1808), pp 97-98 (Greek standardized):

οὐ λίθοι οὐδὲ ξύλα οὐδὲ
τέχνη τεκτόνων αἱ πόλεις εἶεν,
ἀλλ᾿ ὅπου ποτ᾿ ἂν ὦσιν ἄνδρες
αὑτοὺς σῴζειν εἰδότες,
ἐνταῦθα καὶ τείχη καὶ πόλεις.
                 Alc. quoted by Aristides.

    What constitutes a state?
Not high-rais'd battlement or labour'd mound,
    Thick wall or moated gate;
Not cities proud with spires and turrets crown'd;
    Nor bays and broad-arm'd ports,
Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride,
    Not star'd and spangled courts,
Where low-brow'd baseness wafts perfume to pride.
    NO:—Men, high-minded men,
With powers as far above dull brutes endued
    In forest, brake, or den,
As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude;
    Men, who their duties know,
But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain,
    Prevent the long-aim'd blow,
And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain:
    These constitute a state,
And sovereign Law, that state's collected will,
    O'er thrones and globes elate,
Sits empress, crowning good, repressing ill;
    Smit by her sacred frown
The fiend, Discretion, like a vapour sinks,
    And e'en the' all-dazzling Crown
Hides his faint rays, and at her bidding shrinks.
    Such was this heav'n-loved isle,
Than Lesbos fairer and the Cretan shore!
    No more shall freedom smile?
Shall Britons languish, and be Men no more?
    Since all must life resign,
Those sweet rewards, which decorate the brave,
    'Tis folly to decline,
And steal inglorious to the silent grave.

The Greek (Alcaeus, fragment 426) translated by David A. Campbell:

Cities are not stones or timbers or the craft of builders; but wherever there are men who know how to defend themselves, there are walls and cities.

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 6 (endnote omitted):

The richness of the remains of Roman housing that continue to emerge, especially in Italy but also in the provinces, and the contrast with the general poverty of most pre-imperial Greek domestic architecture, bears testimony to the scale on which Romans pumped their resources into their homes, to their impendium furor.

For impendium furor read impendiorum furor. The phrase comes from Suetonius, Life of Nero 31.4 (ad hunc impendiorum furorem).

Labels: typographical and other errors

Mary Beard, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (London: Profile Books, 2008), p. 295:

Shrines and altars were set up at many crossroads, and one of the most distinctive and easily recognisable features of Pompeian houses is shrines that we now call by the Latin word lararium, shrine of the Lares or household gods (though the term was not used in Latin itself until centuries after the destruction of Pompeii).

There is no entry for lararium in the Oxford Latin Dictionary (which covers Latin only up to 200 A.D.). Alexander Souter, A Glossary of Later Latin to 600 A.D. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), s.v., p. 227, cites only "LAMPR. Alex. 29.2, 31.4, 5" (likewise Lewis & Short, and also Gaffiot). The following list was compiled with the help of Federica Giacobello, "Lararium (mondo romano)," in Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum, Vol. IV (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), pp. 262-264 (at 262), and Maddalena Bassani, Sacraria. Ambienti e piccoli edifici per il culto domestico in area vesuviana (Rome: Quasar, 2008), pp. 61-62.

Historia Augusta 4.3.5 (Life of Marcus Aurelius; tr. David Magie):

On his teachers in general, moreover, he conferred great honours, for he even kept golden statues of them in his chapel, and made it a custom to show respect for their tombs by personal visits and by offerings of sacrifices and flowers.

tantum autem honoris magistris suis detulit ut imagines eorum aureas in larario haberet ac sepulchra eorum aditu hostiis floribus semper honoraret.

Id. 18.29.2 (Life of Severus Alexander):

His manner of living was as follows: First of all, if it were permissible, that is to say, if he had not lain with his wife, in the early morning hours he would worship in the sanctuary of his Lares, in which he kept statues of the deified emperors—of whom, however, only the best had been selected—and also of certain holy souls, among them Apollonius, and, according to a contemporary writer, Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, and others of this same character and, besides, the portraits of his ancestors.

usus vivendi eidem hic fuit: primum, si facultas esset, id est si non cum uxore cubuisset, matutinis horis in larario suo, in quo et divos principes sed optimos electos et animas sanctiores, in quis Apollonium et, quantum scriptor suorum temporum dicit, Christum, Abraham et Orpheum et huiuscemodi ceteros habebat ac maiorum effigies, rem divinam faciebat.

Id. 18.31.4-5 (Life of Severus Alexander):

He used to call Vergil the Plato of poets and he kept his portrait, together with a likeness of Cicero, in his second sanctuary of the Lares, where he also had portraits of Achilles and the great heroes.

But Alexander the Great he enshrined in his greater sanctuary along with the most righteous men and the deified emperors.

Vergilium autem Platonem poetarum vocabat eiusque imaginem cum Ciceronis simulacro in secundo larario habuit, ubi et Achillis et magnorum virorum.

Alexandrum vero Magnum inter optimos et divos in larario maiore consecravit.

Id. 27.17.4 (Life of Tacitus):

All the gods in their private chapel fell down, overthrown either by an earthquake or by some mischance.

in larario di omnes seu terrae motu seu casu aliquo conciderunt.

Of course any information in the Historia Augusta must be taken with a grain of salt, but I'm only concerned here with occurrences of the word lararium.

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum IX 2125 (Vitulano, 236 B.C.; recto/verso added by me):

[recto]
PI[---]TI[---]AT[---]O[---]
Q(uintus) Satrius Secundus SID[---]ISIM[---]
e[t] signum scul(p)tum lara[rio
[verso]
Imp(eratori) Maximi-
no et Africa-
no co(n)s(ulibus) Silvano
Lusiano sellam
sintoniacis
R EVS[---]
[---]VS

See Peter F. Dorcey, The Cult of Silvanus: A Study in Roman Folk Religion (Leiden E.J. Brill, 1992), p. 36, n. 14:

A sella sintoniacis vowed to Silvanus seems to refer to a special seat reserved for the player of the syntonum, a type of castanet, who possibly played during rites (CIL IX 2125).

According to Bassani, op. cit., p. 62:

L'epigrafe è iscritta su una rupe sotto un rilievo in pietra calcarea in cui, entro una cornice delineata da colonnine e da un frontone, è raffigurato al centro Silvanus con falcetta nella destra e ramoscello (di cipresso?) nella sinistra; sulla destra è scolpito un cane e sulla sinistra un'ara con sopra tre pomi.

I looked for a picture of the relief but couldn't find one.

"Grammatici Incerti Glossae ad Vergil. Aen. XII Pertinentes ex Barthii Adversar. XXXIII, 13," in Servii Grammatici Qui Feruntur in Vergilii Carmina Commentarii, Vol. III, Fasc. II: Appendix Serviana Ceteros Praeter Servium et Scholia Bernensia Vergilii Commentatores Continens, ed. Hermann Hagen (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1902), pp. 523-524 (at 524, on Aeneid 12.199):

DIRI SACRARIA DITIS. Inferorum dicit secreta, quae nominari non possunt, et 'sacrarium' est locus, ubi praecluduntur, quae nolumus proferre, ut in templis, et 'donaría', ubi dona reconduntur, et 'lararia', ubi Lares Penates habitant. SACRARIA DITIS quia nihil excipit.

Thanks very much to Ian Jackson for sending me relevant pages from Bassani's book.


John William Waterhouse, The Household Gods

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), The Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich, II.216-228:

Lo, the weather is golden, the weather-glass, say they, rising;
Four weeks here have we read; four weeks will we read hereafter;
Three weeks hence will return and think of classes and classics.
Fare ye well, meantime, forgotten, unnamed, undreamt of,
History, Science, and Poets! lo, deep in dustiest cupboard,        220
Thookydid, Oloros' son, Halimoosian, here lieth buried!
Slumber in Liddell-and-Scott, O musical chaff of old Athens,
Dishes, and fishes, bird, beast, and sesquipedalian black-guard!
Sleep, weary ghosts, be at peace and abide in your lexicon-limbo!
Sleep, as in lava for ages your Herculanean kindred,        225
Sleep, and for aught that I care, 'the sleep that knows no waking,'
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Homer, Herodotus, Pindar, and Plato.
Three weeks hence be it time to exhume our dreary classics.

Ecclesiasticus 21.26(29):

The heart of fools is in their mouth: but the mouth of the wise is in their heart.

In ore fatuorum cor illorum, et in corde sapientium os illorum.