Laudator Temporis Acti

Marcel Detienne (1935-2019), Dionysos at Large, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 4, with notes on p. 68:

In Greek, however, the word "epidemic" belonged to the vocabulary of theophany. Emile Littré, the nineteenth-century French lexicographer, was aware of this when he introduced the word into the French language.⁶ It was a technical term used in talking about the gods. "Epidemics" were sacrifices offered to the divine powers when they came to visit a region or a temple or attended a feast or were present at a sacrifice.⁷ Symmetrically, "apodemics" were sacrifices offered upon the gods' departure. For there was a traffic of the gods, a traffic that became particularly heavy during Theoxenia, occasions when a city, individual, or god offered hospitality to some or all of the deities.⁸ The gods came to the place and lived there for a time; they were actually present,⁹ or "epidemized." Being resident but not sedentary, they resembled the Hippocratic physicians, itinerant practitioners who composed what were called Epidemics: sheafs of notes, brief protocols or, rather, minutes relating the course of the disease—a careful record of the symptoms, the crisis, the care administered, and the patient's reactions.¹⁰ The technique was that of a reporter, practiced by Ion of Chios, an intellectual of the fifth century B.C., in his work entitled Epidemics: a series of sketches, portraits, interviews with artists like Sophocles and politicians like Pericles and Kimon of Athens.¹¹

6. Littré, Dictionnaire, p. 1460. The word is in the plural.

7. See the bibliography in L. Weniger, "Theophanien altgriechische Götteradvente," Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 22 (1923-24):16-57, and F. Pfister, "Epiphanie," Realenzyklopädie Supplement IV (1924), c. 277-323. For a broader treatment see W.F. Otto, Theophania: Der Geist der altgriechischen Religion (Hamburg, 1956).

8. D. Wachsmuth, "Theoxenia," Kleine Pauly, V, 1979, C. 732-733. On the Theoxenia, a festival of the city of Delphi, see P. Amandry, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 68-69 (1944-1945):413-415, complementing the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 63 (1939):209-210.

9. According to Scholia to Pindar, Olympiques III, 1, ed. Drachmann, I, p. 105, 14-16.

10. Cf. A. Thivel, Cnide et Cos? (Paris, 1982), p. 33n60.

11. Ion of Chios in F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker I (1922), etc. (hereafter cited as F. Gr. Hist. with the number assigned to each historian along with the fragment indicated by the reference), 392 F. 4-7. See also B. Gentili and G. Cerri, Storia e Biografia nel pensiero antico (Rome-Bari, 1983), pp. 74-75.

Relevant entries from Liddell-Scott-Jones (9th ed., including supplement):






Robert Renehan, Greek Lexicographical Notes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975), p. 88:

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), The City in History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1961), pp. 295-296:

Contrary to still current prejudice, many medieval towns, in their remedial and preventive measures for health, were far in advance of their Victorian successors. Public hospitals were one of the definite Christian contributions to the city. Jerome relates that in A.D. 360 Fabiola gave up his [sic, should be her] villa for the care of the needy sick, otherwise left to die wretchedly in the streets of Rome. From that time on, very rapidly after the eleventh century, the holy orders founded hospitals in almost every town: there would be at least two in most German towns, one for lepers, and one for other types of disease, according to Heil; while in "big" cities such as Breslau, with its 30,000 inhabitants in the fifteenth century, there would be as many as fifteen, or one for every two thousand people. What modern city can show anything like such adequate accommodations?

And note: these are the rule, rather than exceptions. Toulouse in 1262 had seven leproseries and thirteen hospitals; and one of these hospitals contained fifty-six beds; while Florence in the thirteenth century, Giovanni Villani records, with a population of about 90,000 people, had thirty hospitals with more than a thousand beds. Here, too, both in their number and in their modest domestic scale, the medieval town still has something to teach its elephantine, dehumanized successor.

Official municipal physicians made their appearance in the fourteenth century, even before the Black Death: in Constance as early as 1312. In Venice, a permanent health magistracy was created in 1485, to which in 1556 inspection and enforcement machinery were added that long served as a model to the rest of Europe. Contagious diseases, incidentally, were usually isolated outside city walls. The value of isolation wards, with separate toilets, had long been proved by the better equipped monasteries. Finally, the establishment of quarantine, for people passing in and out of cities from foreign parts, was one of the major innovations of medieval medicine. Much as travellers hated it, the practice was based on sound empiric observations, erring only on the side of caution, by allowing for almost three times the necessary incubation period.

The curtailment of infectious diseases and the gradual eradication of leprosy in Europe, thanks to the same policy of strict isolation, was nothing less than a triumph of preventive medicine. The rationalist physicians of the early nineteenth century, who confidently regarded contagion and infection without direct contact as superstitious figments of the medieval imagination, were not in fact as acute observers of cause and effect as their medieval predecessors.

Attic skolion, preserved by Athenaus 15.594c, tr. William D. Furley and Jan Maarten Bremer, Greek Hymns, Vol. I (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), p. 259:

Pallas, Triton-born, Lady Athena,
preserve this city and its inhabitants
free of troubles and civic strife
and premature deaths: you and your father.

Greek text (id., Vol. II, p. 214):

Παλλὰς Τριτογένει', ἄνασσ' Ἀθάνα,
ὄρθου τήνδε πόλιν τε καὶ πολίτας
ἄτερ ἀλγέων καὶ στάσεων
καὶ θανάτων ἀώρων σύ τε καὶ πατήρ.

Notes (id., Vol. II, p. 215):

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), Waste Books J.19 (tr. Norman Alliston):

For quickening the philosophy that lies dormant in all of us writing is excellent. Anyone who has ever done any writing will have found that it invariably brings something to light of which, though latent in him, he was not clearly conscious before.

Zur Aufweckung des in jedem Menschen schlafenden Systems ist das Schreiben vortrefflich; und jeder, der je geschrieben hat, wird gefunden haben, daß Schreiben immer etwas erweckt, was man vorher nicht deutlich erkannte, ob es gleich in uns lag.

B.F. Cook, Greek Inscriptions (1987; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 26, with illustration on p. 28:

An ivy wreath is also used to separate two lines of verse on another grave stone with a slightly gruesome but moralising tone. A representation of a skeleton is carved in relief below the inscription, which reads:

εἰπεῖν τίς δύναται | σκῆνος λιπόσαρκον | ἀθρήσας,
εἴπερ Ὕλας | ἢ Θερσείτης ἦν, ὦ ‖ παροδεῖτα;

Who can say, having looked at a fleshless corpse,
whether it was Hylas or Thersites, passer-by?

Hylas was a beautiful youth who set off with Herakles to accompany the Argonauts. He disappeared en route for, having been sent off to get water, he was seized by the nymphs on account of his beauty (Apollodorus 1.9.19). Thersites on the other hand was 'the ugliest man who went to Troy', according to Homer (Iliad 2.216). The implication of the epigram is that the fair and the ugly were equal in death.

This is Inscriptiones Graecae XIV.2131 (undated, from Anzio, Italy).

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in 1773 (at Ostig in Sky):

[H]e that cannot live as he desires at home, listens to the tale of fortunate islands, and happy regions, where every man may have land of his own, and eat the product of his labour without a superior.

[....]

Whether the mischiefs of emigration were immediately perceived, may be justly questioned. They who went first, were probably such as could best be spared; but the accounts sent by the earliest adventurers, whether true or false, inclined many to follow them; and whole neighbourhoods formed parties for removal; so that departure from their native country is no longer exile. He that goes thus accompanied, carries with him all that makes life pleasant. He sits down in a better climate, surrounded by his kindred and his friends: they carry with them their language, their opinions, their popular songs, and hereditary merriment: they change nothing but the place of their abode; and of that change they perceive the benefit.

[....]

Some method to stop this epidemick desire of wandering, which spreads its contagion from valley to valley, deserves to be sought with great diligence. In more fruitful countries, the removal of one only makes room for the succession of another: but in the Hebrides, the loss of an inhabitant leaves a lasting vacuity; for nobody born in any other parts of the world will choose this country for his residence, and an Island once depopulated will remain a desert, as long as the present facility of travel gives every one, who is discontented and unsettled, the choice of his abode.

Let it be inquired, whether the first intention of those who are fluttering on the wing, and collecting a flock that they may take their flight, be to attain good, or to avoid evil. If they are dissatisfied with that part of the globe, which their birth has allotted them, and resolve not to live without the pleasures of happier climates; if they long for bright suns, and calm skies, and flowery fields, and fragrant gardens, I know not by what eloquence they can be persuaded, or by what offers they can be hired to stay.

But if they are driven from their native country by positive evils, and disgusted by ill-treatment, real or imaginary, it were fit to remove their grievances, and quiet their resentment; since, if they have been hitherto undutiful subjects, they will not much mend their principles by American conversation.

John Grisham, The Pelican Brief, chapter 1:

His ideology was simple; government over business, the individual over government, the environment over everything.

Id.:

Hatred was now America's favorite pastime.

Id.:

The streets are full of idiots and maniacs and zealots.

The Zen Poems of Ryōkan. Selected and Translated with an Introduction, Biographical Sketch, and Notes by Nobuyuki Yuasa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 81:

Many men I know in the world who crave this thing or that.
They are like blind silkworms bound fast in their cocoons.
All for their incurable desires for this-worldly hoarding,
They have lost freedom, and worry their hearts and bodies.
Year after year, their native goodness loses its strength.
They become more rooted in their folly, as years multiply.
One morning, they strike out on their journey to eternity.
They must travel by themselves, not a penny to serve them.
What they have amassed, they leave for strangers to enjoy,
And their names shall be forgotten as soon as they depart.
Can anyone commit a greater folly than these helpless men?
Alas, they provoke infinite pity, deep in my heart's core.

Dora P. Crouch, Water Management in Ancient Greek Cities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 27, with illustration on p. 249:

At Olynthos, one terra-cotta toilet was found, and a couple of urinals, all three so similar to ours in shape as to prove there is nothing new under the sun (J.W. Graham, 1938, pl. 55) (see Fig. 17.7).

The reference is to J.W. Graham, The Hellenic House (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938 = Excavations at Olynthus, VIII), unavailable to me.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams (June 27, 1813):

The summum bonum with me is now truly Epicurean, ease of body and tranquillity of mind; and to these I wish to consign my remaining days.

Byron (1788-1824), Manfred, Act II, Scene III (First Destiny speaking):

The city lies sleeping;
   The morn, to deplore it,
May dawn on it weeping:
   Sullenly, slowly,
The black plague flew o'er it,—        40
   Thousands lie lowly;
Tens of thousands shall perish—
   The living shall fly from
The sick they should cherish:
   But nothing can vanquish        45
The touch that they die from.
   Sorrow and anguish,
And evil and dread,
   Envelope a nation—
The blest are the dead,        50
Who see not the sight
   Of their own desolation;
This work of a night—
This wreck of a realm—this deed of my doing—
For ages I've done, and shall still be renewing!        55

Cicero, On the Laws 3.13.30 (tr. Niall Rudd):

For just as the whole state is apt to be infected by the vicious desires of its leaders, so it is healed and set right by their restraint.

Ut enim cupiditatibus principum et vitiis infici solet tota civitas, sic emendari et corrigi continentia.

Id. 3.14.31:

If you're prepared to go back over the records of history, it is plain that the state has taken its character from that of its foremost men. Whatever changes have taken place in the conduct of its leaders have been reproduced in the lives of the people.

Nam licet videre, si velis replicare memoriam temporum: qualescumque summi civitatis viri fuerint, talem civitatem fuisse; quaecumque mutatio morum in principibus exstiterit, eandem in populo secuturam.

secuturam APεL: securam B: secutam ς

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in 1773 (at Ostig in Sky):

When the power of birth and station ceases, no hope remains but from the prevalence of money. Power and wealth supply the place of each other. Power confers the ability of gratifying our desire without the consent of others. Wealth enables us to obtain the consent of others to our gratification. Power, simply considered, whatever it confers on one, must take from another. Wealth enables its owner to give to others, by taking only from himself. Power pleases the violent and proud: wealth delights the placid and the timorous. Youth therefore flies at power, and age grovels after riches.

Callimachus, Hecale, fragment 54 Hollis (329 Pfeiffer; tr. Adrian Hollis):

All night we speak ill of the kings.

νυκτὶ δ᾿ ὅλῃ βασιλῆας ἐλέγχομεν.

Helen Waddell (1889-1965), The Wandering Scholars (6th ed. 1932; rpt. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961), p. 41:

His [Bede's] cell at Jarrow, and the books that Benedict Biscop brought in so many journeys to Rome, bounded him in a nutshell and made him king of infinite space.

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

I can't parse what looks like Latin on the cover:

VIVAMUS VEL LIBERO PERIT AMERICAE

"This title will be released on August 4, 2020," according to amazon.com. Maybe there's time to change the cover. In the words of Bill Vallicella, "When it comes to Latin, and not just Latin, don't throw it if you don't know it."

Hat tip: Eric Thomson, who comments, "Googlatin for Dummies — Just type it in the box and hit the Enter key. Finis."

Antiphanes, fragment 228 (tr. S. Douglas Olson):

Tell me—what's the point of life? I say it's drinking. Look at the trees along torrent streams that stay moist all day and all night; how large and beautiful they grow! But those that resist are destroyed root and branch.

                       τὸ δὲ ζῆν, εἰπέ μοι,
τί ἐστι; – ∪ – τὸ πίνειν φήμ' ἐγώ.
ὁρᾷς παρὰ ῥείθροισι χειμάρροις ὅσα
δένδρων ἀεὶ τὴν νύκτα καὶ τὴν ἡμέραν
βρέχεται, μέγεθος καὶ κάλλος οἷα γίγνεται,
τὰ δ' ἀντιτείνοντ' αὐτόπρεμν' ἀπόλλυται.

Cicero, On the Laws 2.17.44 (tr. Niall Rudd):

I shall just put the matter briefly in this way: divine punishment is twofold; it involves harassing the minds of the guilty during life and, when they are dead, attaching such infamy to them that the living not only accept but also rejoice at their destruction.

tantum ponam brevi: duplicem poenam esse divinam, quod constet et ex vexandis vivorum animis, et ea fama mortuorum ut eorum exitium et iudicio vivorum et gaudio comprobetur.

Douglas Boin, Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar's Empire (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), pp. 1-2 (note omitted):

I have a confession to make. For a long time, I've been uncomfortable around early Christians.

In school, I was brought up on the adventure tales of Homer. In my mind, I've struggled for honor on the battlefield with the greatest of the Greek warriors, Achilles, and I've fought for my own survival while cast away at sea, lonely and heartbroken for home, like Odysseus. I've listened to the thunderous voices of men in togas and tuned in to hear political shouting matches, in Latin, fought by some of Rome's most privileged senators. From the dusty, sun-kissed streets of the Forum to the jeweled dome of Rome, the Pantheon, I've always found the ancient world a pleasant escape. Lyric poetry, Athenian tragedy, Greek comedy, even Roman concrete: there's always been a surprise around every turn. Call me a conservative, but I don't think there was ever anything wrong with the ancient world. It was perfectly fine the way it was—before it changed. And I knew whom to blame.

Everyone knows that early Christians were a ragtag bunch, tent makers and philosophy teachers, daughters of wealthy Romans and sons of Roman governors. To me, they've always seemed like an impenetrable clique, obstinately different. Whether praying in their churches, greeting each other with their secret signs, or practicing their favorite sport, dodging wild animals, the pathological way they stuck together as a group made me uneasy. I had my Rome, full of impressive aqueducts, packed racetracks, and stately mansions. They had theirs, with tales of resurrection and rebirth, many of which had been written in rather childish Greek grammar. What could we possibly have in common?

The Zen Poems of Ryōkan. Selected and Translated with an Introduction, Biographical Sketch, and Notes by Nobuyuki Yuasa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 73-74:

Such is the power of mutability that all our lives perish,
This minute and this minute, faster than any can foretell.
A youth's rosy cheeks wither, no matter how we prize them.
A man's bushy hairs droop till they are thin like strings.
Years weigh on your backs till your bone bends like a bow.
The skin on your weary face wrinkles like the ruffled sea.
A noise like that of a cicada attacks your ears all night.
Flowers flitter in your eyes all day, dazzling your sense.
When you rise or sit, you must vent out a long windy sigh,
And when you walk, you must support your weight on a cane.
You chase in your dreams the memories of your happy youth,
And count in despair the miseries of your over-ripe years.
How else can I describe the wretched state of an aged man,
But to compare it with a broken bough flung away in frost?
Yet we all must come to this state, sooner than we expect,
For time never spares us, once we are born in frail flesh.
Time creeps on, minute by minute, without a moment's stay,
And how long can we retain our youthful days against time?
The elements that constitute our flesh languish every day,
And, nightly, sick dullness overspreads our mind and body.
One morning you will find yourself far too weak to get up.
Then for many days following, you must lie upon your back.
The lips that you once used to whip others with eloquence,
What use do they have now, when you must sleep in silence?
Once your breath fails and leaves your body in sad stupor,
All the instruments of your perception lose their virtues.
Your friends and relatives will watch your face and mourn.
Your own family will lament, passing their hands over you.
However desperately they may call, you cannot answer them.
However loudly they may cry, you can never recognize them.
For you are already well on your way to timeless darkness.
Alas, you must make this solitary journey all by yourself.

Euripides, Cyclops 521-522 (Cyclops and Odysseus speaking; tr. Patrick O’Sullivan and Christopher Collard)

CY: So who is this Bacchus? Is he acknowledged as a god?
OD: The greatest for men's enjoyment of life.

Κυ. ὁ Βάκχιος δὲ τίς; θεὸς νομίζεται;
Οδ. μέγιστος ἀνθρώποισιν ἐς τέρψιν βίου.

Ford Madox Hueffer, aka Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Collected Poems (London: Martin Secker, 1916), pp. 20-21:

As boys we—I and my friends—read Shakespeare with avidity, Virgil to the extent of getting at least two Books of the Aeneid by heart, Horace with pleasure and Ovid's Persephone Rapta with delight. We liked very much the Bacchae of Euripides—I mean that we used to sit down and take a read in these things sometimes apart from the mere exigencies of the school curriculum. A little later Herrick moved us to ecstasy and some of Donne; we liked passages of Fletcher, of Marlowe, of Webster and of Kyd. At that time we really loved the Minnesingers, and fell flat in admiration before anything of Heine. The Troubadors and even the Northern French Epics we could not read—French poetry did not exist for us at all. If we read a French poem at all, we had always to read it twice, once to master the artificial rhythm, once for the sense.

Between seventeen and eighteen we read Rossetti, Catullus, Theocritus, Bion, Moschus and still Shakespeare, Herrick, Heine, Elizabethan and Jacobean lyrics, Crashaw, Herbert and Donne.

Peire Vidal (12th century), "A per pauc de chantar no·m lais," lines 25-26, tr. Veronica M. Fraser, The Songs of Peire Vidal: Translation & Commentary (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 135:

The whole world is turning in the wrong direction,
yesterday it seemed bad and today it is worse...

Totz lo mons torn'en tal biais
Que'ier lo vim mal et huei peior...

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter LI:

A smile of indignation expressed the refusal of Caled. "Ye Christian dogs, you know your option; the Koran, the tribute, or the sword."

Peire Vidal (12th century), "A per pauc de chantar no·m lais," 2nd stanza, tr. William D. Paden and Frances Freeman Paden, Troubadour Poems From the South of France (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007), p. 131:

At Rome false doctors and the Pope
Have so confounded holy Church
That they anger God himself;
They're so foolish and corrupt
That heresies are spreading,
And since these priests were first to sin,
Others follow, and do the same—
But I don't want to stir things up.

Qu'a Rom'an vout en tal pantais
l'Apostolis e·lh fals doctor
Sancta Gleiza, don Dieus s'irais;
que tan son fol e peccador,
per que l'eretge son levat.
E quar ilh commenso·l peccat,
greu es qui als far en pogues;
mas ieu no·n vuelh esser plaies.

Another translation, by Veronica M. Fraser, The Songs of Peire Vidal: Translation & Commentary (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 135:

The Apostle and the false doctors of Rome
have put Holy Church in such jeopardy
that they have angered God.
They are so foolish and sinful,
that they have caused the heretics to rise up.
They (of Rome) are the first to sin
and therefore it is difficult (for others) to behave otherwise;
but I do not wish to plead on their behalf.

A poem by Ryōkan (1758–1831), tr. Haruo Shirane, Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600-1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 922:

All my life I've had no interest in worldly success
I take it easy, leaving things to nature.
In my pocket, three cups of rice
By the stove, a bundle of brushwood
Why should I ask about ignorance or enlightenment?
Why should I know about the dust of profit and fame?
During the evening rain, inside the hut
I stretch out my two legs as I please.

Euripides, Cyclops 316-317 (tr. Patrick O’Sullivan and Christopher Collard):

Little man, wealth is god for the wise;
the rest is all pompous and fine-seeming words.

ὁ πλοῦτος, ἀνθρωπίσκε, τοῖς σοφοῖς θεός,
τὰ δ' ἄλλα κόμποι καὶ λόγων εὐμορφίαι.

Related posts:

• Catechism
• The Prayer of the Mammonites
• The Worship of Money
• Greatest and Highest of Gods
• The Goddess We Adore
• I Bow Before the Idol
• The Worship of Mammon

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in 1773 (at Bamff):

But it must be remembered that life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments; the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures; and we are well or ill at ease, as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is ruffled by small obstacles and frequent interruption. The true state of every nation is the state of common life. The manners of a people are not to be found in the schools of learning, or the palaces of greatness, where the national character is obscured or obliterated by travel or instruction, by philosophy or vanity; nor is public happiness to be estimated by the assemblies of the gay, or the banquets of the rich. The great mass of nations is neither rich nor gay. They whose aggregate constitutes the people are found in the streets and the villages, in the shops and farms; and from them collectively considered must the measure of general prosperity be taken. As they approach to delicacy a nation is refined; as their conveniences are multiplied, a nation, at least a commercial nation, must be denominated wealthy.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Great Trade Route (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1937), p. 392:

Here is the recipe of M. Baraut du Plessis for the terrifying Spanish national dish, gafpacho:

Cut into small dice two fresh tomatoes, two green peppers, two onions, a clove of garlic, and two fresh cucumbers. Put the whole into a very large soup-tureen, season it with a tumbler of olive oil, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, salt and pepper to taste. Add a pound of ice to the whole and let it melt. When the ice is melted throw into the tureen unleavened bread cut into little dice, about as much bread as vegetables and fill up with ice-cold water. Serve at once.

I don't understand why he calls the dish terrifying. I've eaten it often, always with pleasure.

Horace, Odes 2.3 (tr. David West):

Remember to keep your mind level when the path
is steep, and no less in good times to keep it tempered
  and well away from extravagant joy,
    Dellius, who will die

whether you spend every minute of your life in gloom,
or bless yourself lying all the long days of festivals
  in secluded meadows, drinking Falernian
    from the back of the cellar.

Why do the huge pine and the white poplar
love to ally their branches in hospitable shade?
  Why does the rushing river twist and strain
    as it scurries along?

Tell them to bring out the wine and fragrant oils
and all-too-short-lived flowers of the lovely rose,
  while your age and means and the black threads
    of the three sisters permit.

You will leave the upland woods and pastures you have bought,
your house in Rome, and villa lapped by the yellow Tiber,
  you will leave them and your heir
    will take possession of your high-built wealth.

It makes no difference whether you are rich and of the stock
of ancient Inachus, or a pauper born in the gutter
  and living under the open sky—
    you are the victim of Orcus, who knows no pity.

We are all herded to the same place. All our lots
are turning in the urn, and later or sooner
  they will be shaken out and will put us
    on the boat for an exile that never ends.

---

Aequam memento rebus in arduis
servare mentem, non secus in bonis
    ab insolenti temperatam
    laetitia, moriture Delli,

seu maestus omni tempore vixeris        5
seu te in remoto gramine per dies
    festos reclinatum bearis
    interiore nota Falerni.

quo pinus ingens albaque populus
umbram hospitalem consociare amant        10
    ramis? quid obliquo laborat
    lympha fugax trepidare rivo?

huc vina et unguenta et nimium brevis
flores amoenae ferre iube rosae,
    dum res et aetas et sororum        15
    fila trium patiuntur atra.

cedes coemptis saltibus et domo
villaque flavus quam Tiberis lavit;
    cedes, et exstructis in altum
    divitiis potietur heres.        20

divesne prisco natus ab Inacho
nil interest an pauper et infima
    de gente sub divo moreris,
    victima nil miserantis Orci.

omnes eodem cogimur, omnium        25
versatur urna serius ocius
    sors exitura et nos in aeternum
    exilium impositura cumbae.

2 in codd.: ut Housman
14 amoenae codd.: amoenos Cunningham

Arthur Darby Nock (1902-1963), "Religious Attitudes of the Ancient Greeks," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 85.5 (September 30, 1942) 472-482 (at 482):

We must not look for consistency in men's religious actions, any more than in their secular conduct: norms of belief and facts of practice, words and deeds do not fit: nor do men mean all that they say, in reverence or irreverence, least of all men as nimble of wit and tongue as were many of the Greeks. Religion is not all or nothing, certainly not among them.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in 1773 (August 18):

The carriages in common use are small carts, drawn each by one little horse; and a man seems to derive some degree of dignity and importance from the reputation of possessing a two-horse cart.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Great Trade Route (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1937), p. 252:

It is no use saying that after a diet of peas grown wholesale in vast fields, forced under electric light, with chemical manure, picked by the ton, left for three days to decay, canned with, let us say, a boric preservative and consumed two years later, a man will be the same as after a diet of the same vegetables grown in the sunlight on a sheltered plot, manured with natural composts or dung, picked by hand and maggoty or inferior pods rejected, the peas themselves not much more than twice as large as a pin head and cooked and on the table twenty minutes after they have left the vines. He won't. He won't be the same either physically or in immediate mentality. Eating dead peas out of a can is a dullness that adds to the slatternly indifference of the mass-worker; eating your own live peas twenty minutes off the vine is a mental stimulant both immediately and during several days of anticipation whilst you watch them coming to the exactly right moment for picking.

Peas from my son's garden (May 2020)

Pausanias 10.4.1 (tr. W.H.S. Jones):

From Chaeroneia it is twenty stades to Panopeus, a city of the Phocians, if one can give the name of city to those who possess no government offices, no gymnasium, no theater, no market-place, no water descending to a fountain, but live in bare shelters just like mountain cabins, right on a ravine.

στάδια δὲ ἐκ Χαιρωνείας εἴκοσιν ἐς Πανοπέας ἐστὶ πόλιν Φωκέων, εἴγε ὀνομάσαι τις πόλιν καὶ τούτους οἷς γε οὐκ ἀρχεῖα οὐ γυμνάσιόν ἐστιν, οὐ θέατρον οὐκ ἀγορὰν ἔχουσιν, οὐχ ὕδωρ κατερχόμενον ἐς κρήνην, ἀλλὰ ἐν στέγαις κοίλαις κατὰ τὰς καλύβας μάλιστα τὰς ἐν τοῖς ὄρεσιν, ἐνταῦθα οἰκοῦσιν ἐπὶ χαράδρᾳ.

Stendhal (1783-1842), A Roman Journal, tr. Haakon Chevalier (New York: The Orion Press, 1957), p. 56:

Pliny, the man who teaches us the greatest number of things on antiquity, because instead of making phrases like Cicero he talks plainly, tells us that the obelisk before St. Peter's was erected at the behest of Nuncoré, king of Egypt, in the city of Heliopolis.

L'homme qui nous apprend le plus de choses sur l'antiquité, parce qu'au lieu de faire des phrases comme Cicéron il conte net, Pline, nous dit que Nuncoré, roi d'Égypte, fit élever dans la ville d'Héliopolis l'obélisque qui est à Saint-Pierre.

Thanks to Karl Narveson for correcting a mistake I originally made in the French quotation.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Great Trade Route (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1937), pp. 328-329:

The world is dying because all across it has run the terrible mania for putting everybody but oneself up against a wall. Everybody. . . . Alle Juden, alle Christen, alle Franzosen. . . . Every Jew, Every Wop, every Dago. . . . Tous les Etrangers, les anglais, les boches, les américains. . . . From every State in the world, in every tongue, that one cry mounts to Heaven. . . . That shibboleth has run across the world with a rapidity ten . . . no, but a thousand . . . times greater than the mania that set all Christendom warring against Saracens, Provençaux, Bulgarians, and Moors . . . for the greater glory of the Redeemer and the recovery of His birthplace.

You must kill, you must kill, you must kill. . . . In the first place for the benefit of your fellow-countrymen. . . . I beg pardon, I mean citizens. . . . Then what? You don't much prosper because you have killed your world markets. . . . So what? . . . I will tell you what.

The dizzy air trembles above every one of the nations of Christendom and Heathenesse with yelled aspirations to Heaven for the blood of every inhabitant of every other nation. . . . But beneath that there is another note. . . . In every one of those nations half or part of the nation is beginning to yell for the putting up against the wall of the other half or part . . . and both halves or parts are trembling. In France the whole population is filled with anxiety. In every street Royalists, Fascists, Socialists, Communists are, each within their group, inciting the other to acts of violence . . . and trembling at the thought of what will happen to them if the other fellows win. Over the whole of this country spreads the mighty unease, the Right trembling and arming itself against a Left that trembles at the thought of what the Right is preparing against it . . . and yelling that all the Right must be put against a wall.

Theognis 183-192 (tr. Moses Hadas and James Willis, slightly modified):

Horses and asses and sheep we value according to breeding, Cyrnus, and wish them to be bred from the finest of sires. Yet our nobles gladly accept bad women, of low birth, to be their wives, if only the dowry is great. And a woman does not refuse a base companion in wedlock if he is rich: she admires wealthy men rather than good. Gold is what men adore; the base now mates with the noble; nobles mate with the base: money confuses the breed. So do not wonder, son of Polypaus, to see the breed of our townsmen daily grow worse: for excellence is mingling with worthlessness.

κριοὺς μὲν καὶ ὄνους διζήμεθα, Κύρνε, καὶ ἵππους
    εὐγενέας, καὶ τις βούλεται ἐξ ἀγαθῶν
βήσεσθαι· γῆμαι δὲ κακὴν κακοῦ οὐ μελεδαίνει        185
    ἐσθλὸς ἀνήρ, ἤν οἱ χρήματα πολλὰ διδῷ,
οὐδὲ γυνὴ κακοῦ ἀνδρὸς ἀναίνεται εἶναι ἄκοιτις
    πλουσίου, ἀλλ᾽ ἀφνεὸν βούλεται ἀντ᾽ ἀγαθοῦ.
χρήματα γὰρ τιμῶσι· καὶ ἐκ κακοῦ ἐσθλὸς ἔγημε
    καὶ κακὸς ἐξ ἀγαθοῦ· πλοῦτος ἔμειξε γένος.        190
οὕτω μὴ θαύμαζε γένος, Πολυπαΐδη, ἀστῶν
    μαυροῦσθαι· σὺν γὰρ μίσγεται ἐσθλὰ κακοῖς.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), The Decline of the West, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson, Vol. I (London: George Allen Unwin Ltd., 1926), pp. 353-354 (one footnote omitted):

Culture and Civilization — the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800 — on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture and Civilization — the organism born of Mother Earth, and the mechanism proceeding from hardened fabric. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and "facts." That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist — in the sense of the word valid for, and only valid for, Civilization — whether he wills it or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the garb of religion or not.

To Gothic and Doric men, Ionic and Baroque men, the whole vast form-world of art, religion, custom, state, knowledge, social life was easy. They could carry it and actualize it without "knowing" it. They had over the symbolism of the Culture that unstrained mastery that Mozart possessed in music. Culture is the self-evident. The feeling of strangeness in these forms, the idea that they are a burden from which creative freedom requires to be relieved, the impulse to overhaul the stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better account, the fatal imposition of thought upon the inscrutable quality of creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning to tire. Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a "natural law" is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men conceive of the State as an "order of society" which not only can be but must be altered¹ — then it is evident that something has definitely broken down. The Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the midst of the Culture-landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing into itself and using up.

Scientific worlds are superficial worlds, practical, soulless and purely extensive worlds. The ideas of Buddhism, of Stoicism, and of Socialism alike rest upon them.² Life is no longer to be lived as something self-evident — hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone choice — or to be accepted as God-willed destiny, but is to be treated as a problem, presented as the intellect sees it, judged by "utilitarian" or "rational" criteria. This, at the back, is what all three mean. The brain rules, because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live unconsciously, Civilization-men consciously. The Megalopolis — sceptical, practical, artificial — alone represents Civilization to-day. The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The "People" means the city-people, an inorganic mass, something fluctuating. The peasant is not democratic — this again being a notion belonging to mechanical and urban existence — and he is therefore overlooked, despised, detested. With the vanishing of the old "estates" — gentry and priesthood — he is the only organic man, the sole relic of the Early Culture. There is no place for him either in Stoic or in Socialistic thought.

¹ Rousseau's Contrat Social is paralleled by exactly equivalent productions of Aristotle's time.

² The first on the atheistical system of Sankhya, the second (through Socrates) on the Sophists, the third on English sensualism.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Great Trade Route (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1937), p. 227:

And sometimes when I shut my eyes and think of my own personal Utopia I imagine myself in a whitewood hut on one of the harsh, bare, sunbaked hillsides of Provence . . . with, of course, a great black cypress for shade. And nothing in it but a camp bed and a table made out of a bully-beef case and a chair made out of two—and an earthenware casserole for boiling or frying and a camp oven which I should build myself outside, for baking or roasting. That, I think, would be civilization.

Cicero, On the Laws 2.15.39 (tr. Niall Rudd):

I do notice how in theatres which once used to be filled with the agreeable plainness of Livius' and Naevius' tunes audiences now rock to and fro jerking their necks and eyes in time with the inflexions of the singer's voice. Ancient Greece used to punish that sort of thing severely. It foresaw far in advance that the deadly plague, gradually creeping into the citizens' minds and infecting them with pernicious crazes and pernicious ideas, would suddenly bring about the collapse of entire states...

The Latin text with an image of the critical apparatus from J.G.F. Powell, ed., M. Tullius Ciceronis De Re Publica, De Legibus, Cato Maior De Senectute, Laelius De Amicitia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 217:

Illud quidem <video>: quae solebant quondam compleri severitate iucunda Livianis et Naevianis modis, nunc ut eadem exsultent, <et> cervices oculosque pariter cum modorum flexionibus torqueant. Graviter olim ista vindicabat vetus illa Graecia, longe providens quam sensim pernicies illapsa civium <in> animos malis studiis malisque doctrinis repente totas civitates everteret...

---

Thanks to Eric Thomson for drawing my attention to another conjecture, by Harry Morgan, Music, Spectacle, and Society in Ancient Rome, 168 BC – AD 68 (Ph.D. thesis, Oxford, 2018), p. 80:

... nunc ut eadem exultent <theatra, et tibicines> cervices oculosque pariter cum modorum flexionibus torqueant ...

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Great Trade Route (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1937), pp. 222-223:

There have always been craftsmen and the craftsmen have always been the best men of their time, because a handicraft goes at a pace commensurate with the thoughts in a man's head. The craftsman is a connoisseur; he looks along the wood that he has planed; the table-top he has made and polished; the shoe sole he has just stitched; the back of the book he has just bound. Until it is just so and a little more, he is not content. His device is "make a good job of it," and scrawled with his broad-leaded pencil on the whitewash of his workshop wall are the words: "By hammer and hand all Art doth stand." So, if he turns his attention to other things, it is ten to one he will exact good jobs from others. He will have good food cooked to a turn; good, sound wine in a good-looking glass; well-woven cloth for his back; good feathers in a well-stuffed bed ... or maybe horse-hair. He will have good stout books that his mind can chew on; he will see that his cathedral climbs beautifully to heaven; that it gives him pleasure with its frescoes, good emotion with its music, and good comfort with its doctrine. He will have done his travelling as a journeyman and have seen that the world is good; now he will sit by the fire to hear what wonders there are still doing in foreign climes, and he will tell such a travelling fellow to bring him at his next coming such a tool from Toledo, such woollens from Bradford, or such and such sweetmeats from Montélimar for his children. And, above all, he will have good government and peace.

Homer, Odyssey 4.543-544 (Proteus to Menelaus; tr. Peter Green):

No longer, son of Atreus, waste time like this in ceaseless
weeping: no good will come of it!

μηκέτι, Ἀτρέος υἱέ, πολὺν χρόνον ἀσκελὲς οὕτω
κλαῖ᾽, ἐπεὶ οὐκ ἄνυσίν τινα δήομεν.

Brian Newbould, Schubert: The Music and the Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 45:

Composing a song is a reactive task, composing an instrumental piece a proactive one. In that sense the instrumental project taxes creativity the more, whether it's an undertaking large or small. A necessary part of what a composer has to do is impose a limitation on himself. The possibilities facing a musical creator are immense, until the first notes are penned. Thereafter the range of options narrows, for in the succession of one thought by another, coherent continuity is demanded. Composers welcome the narrowing of options, the proliferation of limitations, which makes their task more manageable. The hardest part of a piece, accordingly, is the beginning, because there are as yet no limitations. Limitations are created by the context set up in the opening bars. However, the adoption of a verbal text creates a context before a note of music is written down or conceived. The range of options is limited at the outset by the need to relate musical invention to a verbal fait accompli.

Cf. William Wordsworth:

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), The Decline of the West, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson, Vol. I (London: George Allen Unwin Ltd., 1926), pp. 341-342:

In this matter of morale, Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say "thou shalt" in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable. That, and nothing short of it, is, for us, morale. In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. Here Luther is completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with Jesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a claim to general and permanent validity. It is a necessity of the Faustian soul that this should be so. He who thinks or teaches "otherwise" is sinful, a back-slider, a foe, and he is fought down without mercy. You "shall," the State "shall," society "shall" — this form of morale is to us self-evident; it represents the only real meaning that we can attach to the word. But it was not so either in the Classical, or in India, or in China. Buddha, for instance, gives a pattern to take or to leave, and Epicurus offers counsel. Both undeniably are forms of high morale, and neither contains the will-element.

What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral dynamic. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic, sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no, wittingly or no, Socialists. Even Nietzsche, that most passionate opponent of "herd morale," was perfectly incapable of limiting his zeal to himself in the Classical way. He thought only of "mankind" and he attacked everyone who differed from himself. Epicurus, on the contrary, was heartily indifferent to others' opinions and acts and never wasted one thought on the "transformation" of mankind. He and his friends were content that they were as they were and not otherwise. The Classical ideal was indifference (ἀπάθεια) to the course of the world — the very thing which it is the whole business of Faustian mankind to master — and an important element both of Stoic and of Epicurean philosophy was the recognition of a category of things neither preferred nor rejected (ἀδιάφορα). In Hellas there was a pantheon of morales as there was of deities, as the peaceful coexistence of Epicureans, Cynics and Stoics shows, but the Nietzschean Zarathustra — though professedly standing beyond good and evil — breathes from end to end the pain of seeing men to be other than as he would have them be, and the deep and utterly un-Classical desire to devote a life to their reformation — his own sense of the word, naturally, being the only one. It is just this, the general transvaluation, that makes ethical monotheism and — using the word in a novel and deep sense — socialism. All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.

Dear Mike,

Thanks for notice of Schubert's sin of omission. Here he is on his Zseliz sojourn (29 October 1818) venting his anticlerical spleen to his like-minded brother:

You, Ignaz, are quite the old scrap-iron man. Your unforgiving hatred of the tribe of clerics is a testament to you. But you have no idea of the clerics around here, bigoted as an obstinate old animal, stupid as a donkey and coarse as a buffalo. You listen to sermons here that are worthy of the greatly revered Father Nepomucene. It is a pleasure to listen to the denunciation of sinners and wrongdoers from the pulpit here. The preacher brings a skull up to the pulpit and says: 'Look at this you pustulent crapfaces, this is how you will look one day.' Or: 'A youth goes into the tavern with a slut, they dance the whole night, then the two of them lie down drunk and when they get up in the morning there are three of them.' etc.

Du, Ignaz, bist noch ganz der alte Eisenmann. Der unversöhnliche Haß gegen das Bonzengeschlecht macht Dir Ehre. Doch hast Du keinen Begriff von den hiesigen Pfaffen, bigottisch wie ein altes Mistvieh, dumm wie ein Esel, u. roh wie ein Büffel, hört man hier Predigten, wo der so sehr venerierte Pater Nepomucene nichts dagegen ist. Man wirft hier auf der Kanzel mit Ludern, Kanaillen etc. herum, daß es eine Freude ist, man bringt einen Todtenschädel auf die Kanzel, u. sagt: Da seht her, ihr pukerschäkigten Gfriser, so werdet ihr einmahl aussehen. Oder: Ja, da geht der Bursch mit'n Mensch ins Wirtshaus, tanzt die ganze Nacht, dann legen sie sich besoffen nieder, u. stehen ihrer drey auf u.s.w. [Dok 75]

There's lots of interesting comment (on the German) and illustrations here: http://figures-of-speech.com/2019/05/mensch.htm

Best wishes,
Eric [Thomson]

Brian Newbould, Schubert: The Music and the Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 35-36 (footnote omitted):

At the same time, whatever his convictions amounted to, he was evidently unable to align them with the tenets of the institutionalized church. This much is an almost inevitable conclusion to be drawn from his free editing of the mass text, in various of his settings. A regular feature of this editorial licence is the omission of the words 'Et in unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam'. Had he not consistently omitted these words, from all his six settings, one might put the matter down to carelessness or suppose that he called the text to mind (from his regular singing of it) without checking it and his memory failed him. Equally, it could be imagined that by 'thinning out' the text of the Credo Schubert was hoping to reduce the disparity between the syllabic treatment that was desirable and traditional in a movement with a long text and the necessarily melismatic treatment of, for example, the Kyrie. There does remain a possibility that he found these words musically unpromising, not because of their connotation but because of their implied rhythm or the length of the verbal phrase as a whole; and that aesthetic objection to a particular section of text would then explain why his rejection of it was invariable. There are, on the other hand, phrases elsewhere in the Credo (and the Gloria, for that matter) that a composer might find somewhat intractable musically and feel tempted to omit; but Schubert omitted no other passage consistently. The line concerned is, of course, an article of the creed; and in this connection it is relevant to refer to an invitation Schubert received from a friend, Ferdinand Walcher, in 1827, which began with the words 'Credo in unum Deum!' (set to the notes of the Gregorian intonation) followed by 'You do not, I well know; but you will believe this — that Tietze is going to sing your Nachthelle [Night's Brightness] at the Little Society [i.e. Philharmonic Society] this evening.' This seems a clear enough suggestion that Walcher knew that Schubert did not swallow the creed hook, line and sinker, and although it may be wondered if documents from the last three years of Schubert's life are sure reflections of his outlook in 1814, the fact that his first mass makes the textual omission in question, as does the last one (the E flat of 1828) and all those between, rather points to an unchanging viewpoint in this respect on Schubert's part.

The omitted words mean "and in one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church."

Poem by Date Masamune (1567-1636), tr. Donald Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Grove Press, ©1955), p. 436:

Longing to attack the southern barbarians
[Directed against the Spanish and Portuguese soldiers and missionaries, who had arrived in Japan from the south.]

False religions delude the land with a ceaseless clamor.
I would strike the barbarian tribes, but the time comes not.
When will the great roc rise and southward soar?
Long have I waited the wind of his ten-thousand-mile wings.

Poem by Yanagawa Seigan (1789-1858), op. cit., p. 439:

No title
[An attack on the Shogunate]

You, whose ancestors in the mighty days
Roared at the skies and swept across the earth,
Stand now helpless to drive off wrangling foreigners—
How empty your title, "Queller of Barbarians"!

Here is a recipe for cassoulet from Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Great Trade Route (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1937), p. 217:

The recipe transcribed:

Cassoulet de Castelnaudary is made of white haricots, as new as possible, so that it is best eaten in the autumn when the beans come straight off the vines. They are stewed in mutton broth until just tender, then a piece of goose, a piece of mutton, some truffled liver-sausage in slices, a small quantity of tomato juice, fines herbes, and garlic to taste are added. Then the cassoulet in its earthen casserole is put on the corner of the stove to simmer for hours and hours, for twenty-four if you like, or longer. An hour or so before serving, it is gratiné'd — sprinkled with breadcrumbs and grated cheese with little lumps of butter and put into the oven.

Thanks very much to Dave Lull for help with this post.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Nathaniel Burwell (March 14, 1818):

A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed. When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading. Reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy, and nothing so bedecked comes amiss. The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life. This mass of trash, however, is not without some distinction; some few modelling their narratives, although fictitious, on the incidents of real life, have been able to make them interesting and useful vehicles of sound morality.

Related posts:

• Dangers of Reading Novels and Chaucer's Poems
• Novels
• To Students of French

Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), To Each His Own, tr. Adrienne Foulke (1968; rpt. New York: New York Review Books, 2000), pp. 102-103:

"You never leave the house?"

"Never, haven't for some years. At one point in my life, I made a few quite precise calculations: if I leave the house in search of the company of one intelligent person, one honest person, I run the risk of meeting en route a dozen thieves and half as many idiots who stand poised to communicate to me their views on mankind, the national government, the city administration, Moravia....Does it seem to you worth the trouble?"

"No, actually not."

"And then I am very comfortable at home, especially here." He pointed to the books and gestured as if to gather them all to him.

"A fine library," Laurana said.

"Not that I can always avoid stumbling into thieves and idiots even here. I'm speaking of writers, obviously, not their characters. But I easily get rid of them. I return them to the bookshop or I present them to the first fool who comes to call on me."

---

«Non esce mai di casa?»

«Mai, da parecchi anni... Ad un certo punto della mia vita ho fatto dei calcoli precisi: che se io esco di casa per trovare la compagnia di una persona intelligente di una persona onesta, mi trovo ad affrontare, in media, il rischio di incontrare dodici ladri e sette imbecilli che stanno lì pronti a comunicarmi le loro opinioni sull'umanità, sul governo, sull'amministrazione municipale, su Moravia… Le pare che valga la pena?»

«No, effettivamente no.»

«E poi, in casa ci sto benissimo: e specialmente qui dentro» levando le mani ad indicare ed accogliere tutti i libri d'intorno.

«Bella biblioteca» disse Laurana.

«Non è che non mi capiti, anche qui dentro, di imbattermi nei ladri, negli imbecilli... Parlo di scrittori, beninteso, non di personaggi... Ma me ne libero facilmente: li restituisco al libraio o li regalo al primo cretino che viene a farmi visita.»

Cicero, On the Laws 2.5.13 (tr. Niall Rudd):

What of the fact that many harmful and pernicious measures are passed in human communities—measures which come no closer to the name of laws than if a gang of criminals agreed to make some rules? If ignorant unqualifed people prescribe a lethal, instead of a healing, treatment, that treatment cannot properly be called 'medical'. In a community a law of just any kind will not be a law, even if the people (in spite of its harmful character) have accepted it.

The Latin text with an image of the critical apparatus from J.G.F. Powell, ed., M. Tullius Ciceronis De Re Publica, De Legibus, Cato Maior De Senectute, Laelius De Amicitia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 199:

Quid quod multa perniciose, multa pestifere sciscuntur in populis, quae non magis legis nomen attingunt quam si latrones aliquas consessu suo sanxerint? Nam neque medicorum praecepta dici vere possunt, si quae inscii imperitique pro salutaribus mortifera conscripserint, neque in populo lex cuicuimodi fuerit illa, etiamsi perniciosum aliquid populus acceperit.

Stella Bowen (1893-1947), Drawn from Life (1941; rpt. London: Virago, 1984), p. 152:

We began to meet folk with money. I felt awkward with people whose ways of living enabled them to ignore the soucis which governed the lives of ordinary people, who skimmed the cream and knew nothing of the dregs, and who dropped whatever bored them at a moment's notice. It was as though they belonged to a different race to whom the law of gravity did not apply, for they never came down to earth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), "The Rich Boy," The Short Stories (1989; rpt. New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 317-349 (at 318):

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

Paul Déroulède (1846-1912), quoted in Jonathan Fenby, The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), pp. 47-48:

The man who does not love his mother more than other mothers and his own country more than other countries loves neither his mother nor his country.

Celui qui n'aime pas sa mère plus que les autres mères et sa patrie plus que les autres patries n'aime ni sa mère, ni sa patrie.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), The Decline of the West, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson, Vol. I (London: George Allen Unwin Ltd., 1926), p. 336:

Greek daughter cities were planted by the hundred along the rim of the Mediterranean, but not one of them made the slightest real attempt to conquer and penetrate the hinterlands. To settle far from the coast would have meant to lose sight of "home," while to settle in loneliness — the ideal life of the trapper and prairie-man of America as it had been of Icelandic saga-heroes long before — was something entirely beyond the possibilities of Classical mankind. Dramas like that of the emigration to America — man by man, each on his own account, driven by deep promptings to loneliness — or the Spanish Conquest, or the Californian gold-rush, dramas of uncontrollable longings for freedom, solitude, immense independence, and of giantlike contempt of all limitations whatsoever upon the home-feeling — these dramas are Faustian and only Faustian. No other Culture, not even the Chinese, knows them.

The Hellenic emigrant, on the contrary, clung as a child clings to its mother's lap. To make a new city out of the old one, exactly like it, with the same fellow citizens, the same gods, the same customs, with the linking sea never out of sight, and there to pursue in the Agora the familiar life of the ζῷον πoλιτικόν — this was the limit of change of scene for the Apollinian life. To us, for whom freedom of movement (if not always as a practical, yet in any case as an ideal, right) is indispensable, such a limit would have been the most crying of all slaveries.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Great Trade Route (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1937), p. 189:

It would be as well here to define the Small Producer. He is the man who with a certain knowledge of various crafts can set his hand to most kinds of work that go to the maintenance of humble existences. He can mend or make a rough chest of drawers; he will make shift to sole a shoe or make a passable pair of sandals; he will contrive or repair hurdles, platters, scythe-handles, styes, shingle roofs, harrows. But, above all, he can produce and teach his family to produce good food according to the seasons. . . . In sufficiency to keep his household supplied independent of the flux of currencies and the tides of world supplies—and to have a surplus for his neighbours. He is the insurance premium of his race. In short—a Man.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.287:

The cause is hidden, but the effect is well known.

causa latet, vis est notissima.

Id. 7.551:

They harm with their breath and spread contagion far and wide.

adflatuque nocent et agunt contagia late.

Hat tip: Alan Crease.

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), Le Curé de Tours (tr. Katharine Prescott Wormeley):

Persons without minds are like weeds that delight in good earth; they want to be amused by others, all the more because they are dull within. The incarnation of ennui to which they are victims, joined to the need they feel of getting a divorce from themselves, produces that passion for moving about, for being somewhere else than where they are, which distinguishes their species...

Les gens sans esprit ressemblent aux mauvaises herbes qui se plaisent dans les bons terrains, et ils aiment d'autant plus être amusés qu'ils s'ennuient eux-mêmes. L'incarnation de l'ennui dont ils sont victimes, jointe au besoin qu'ils éprouvent de divorcer perpétuellement avec eux-mêmes, produit cette passion pour le mouvement, cette nécessité d'être toujours là où ils ne sont pas qui les distingue...

Cicero, On the Laws 2.2.5 (tr. Niall Rudd):

Yes, I maintain that he and all people from small towns have two countries, one by nature and the other by citizenship. By being born in Tusculum Cato was admitted to Roman citizenship. So he was a Tusculan by birth and a Roman by citizenship. One of his countries was local, the other legal. Your Attic friends, before Theseus ordered them all to leave the countryside and move into the city (or the astu, as it is called) belonged both to their own towns and to Attica. In the same way we think of our country both as our place of birth and as the one which admitted us to citizenship. But the one which takes its name from the state as a whole should have first place in our affections. That is the country for which we should be willing to die, to which we should devote ourselves heart and soul, and on whose altar we should dedicate and consecrate all that is ours. Yet the one which gave us birth is dear to us in a way not very different from that which took us in. And so I shall always insist that this is my country, even though the other is greater and includes this within it.

The Latin text with an image of the critical apparatus from J.G.F. Powell, ed., M. Tullius Ciceronis De Re Publica, De Legibus, Cato Maior De Senectute, Laelius De Amicitia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 194-195:

Ego mehercule et illi et omnibus municipibus duas esse censeo patrias, unam naturae, alteram civitatis; ut ille Cato, cum esset Tusculi natus, in populi Romani civitatem susceptus est. Ita cum ortu Tusculanus esset, civitate Romanus, habuit alteram loci patriam, alteram iuris. Ut vestri Attici, priusquam Theseus eos demigrare ex agris et in astu, quod appellatur, omnes se conferre iussit, et sui erant idem et Attici, sic nos et eam patriam dicimus ubi nati, et illam qua excepti sumus. Sed necesse est caritate eam praestare <e> qua rei publicae nomen <et> universae civitatis est, pro qua mori et cui nos totos dedere et in qua nostra omnia ponere et quasi consecrare debemus; dulcis autem non multo secus est ea quae genuit quam illa quae excepit. Itaque ego hanc meam esse patriam prorsus numquam negabo, dum illa sit maior, haec in ea contineatur.

Andrew R. Dyck in his commentary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 258, compares IG II² 11169, here translated by Marco Fantuzzi in Manuel Baumbach et al., edd., Archaic and Classical Greek Epigram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 299, n. 53:

Your body, Dionysios, is covered here by the earth, but your immortal soul is held by the power that controls all that is. To your friends, your mother and your sisters you have left behind grief that will always remember your love, though you are dead, while two countries — one where you were born, the other yours by law — loved you for your great goodness.

σῶμα μὲν ἐνθάδε σόν, Διονύσιε, γαῖα καλύπτει,
    ψυχὴν δε ἀθάνατον κοινὸς ἔχει ταμίας·
σοῖς δὲ φίλοις καὶ μητρὶ κασιγνήταις τε λέλοιπας
    πένθος ἀείμνηστον σῆς φιλίας φθίμενος·
δισσαὶ δ’ αὖ πατρίδες σ’ ἣ μὲν φύσει, ἣ δὲ νόμοισιν
    ἔστερξαν πολλῆς εἵνεκα σωφροσύνης.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), The Decline of the West, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson, Vol. I (London: George Allen Unwin Ltd., 1926), pp. 334-335 (footnotes omitted):

Every Culture possesses a proper conception of home and fatherland, which is hard to comprehend, scarcely to be expressed in words, full of dark metaphysical relations, but nevertheless unmistakable in its tendency. The Classical home-feeling which tied the individual corporally and Euclidean-ly to the Polis is the very antithesis of that enigmatic "Heimweh" of the Northerner which has something musical, soaring and unearthly in it. Classical man felt as "Home" just what he could see from the Acropolis of his native city. Where the horizon of Athens ended, the alien, the hostile, the "fatherland" of another began. Even the Roman of late Republican times understood by "patria" nothing but Urbs Roma, not even Latium, still less Italy. The Classical world, as it matured, dissolved itself into a large number of point-patriae, and the need of bodily separation between them took the form of hatreds far more intense than any hatred that there was of the Barbarian. And it is therefore the most convincing of all evidences of the victory of the Magian world-feeling that Caracalla in 212 A.D. granted Roman citizenship to all provincials. For this grant simply abolished the ancient, statuesque, idea of the citizen. There was now a Realm and consequently a new kind of membership.

[....]

Apollinian man, so long as he retained any effective remnant at all of his proper world-feeling, regarded "home" in the genuinely corporeal sense as the ground on which his city was built — a conception that recalls the "unity of place" of Attic tragedy and statuary. But to Magian man, to Christians, Persians, Jews, "Greeks," Manichaeans, Nestorians and Mohammedans, it means nothing that has any connexion with geographical actualities. And for ourselves it means an impalpable unity of nature, speech, climate, habits and history — not earth but "country," not point-like presence but historic past and future, not a unit made up of men, houses and gods but an idea, the idea that takes shape in the restless wanderings, the deep loneliness, and that ancient German impulse towards the South which has been the ruin of our best, from the Saxon Emperors to Hölderlin and Nietzsche.

Related post: Home.

Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), "The Knight and Death," tr. Joseph Farrell, in Open Doors and Three Novellas (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 81-151 (at 145-146):

He was walking now through the park. The children, yes, the children: so graceful, so much better fed than previously (the frail and hungry childhood of those who were now elderly), perhaps more intelligent and undoubtedly, overall, better informed. Yet he had for them an enormous compassion and apprehension. Will they still be here in 1999, in 2009, or in 2019, and what would this succession of decades bring them? Immersed in these thoughts, he realized he had reached, as it were, the threshold of prayer, which he glimpsed as a deserted, desolate garden.

He stopped to follow their games, to eavesdrop on what they were saying to each other. They were still capable of joy, of imagination, but lying in wait for them was a school without joy and without imagination, the television, the computer, the car from home to school and from school to home, and food which was rich but as tasteless as blotting paper. Never again, committed to memory, the multiplication tables, the poems ... "The maiden from the country came...," or "All trembling on the threshold...," or even "The cypresses which at Bolgheri...," torments of other times. Memory was to be abolished, all memory, and accordingly those exercises that aimed at making it flexible, subtle, or retentive.

---

Camminava ora per il parco. I bambini, ecco: così graziosi, tanto meglio nutriti che un tempo (l'infanzia gracile e affamata di quelli ora vecchi), forse più intelligenti e certamente, di tutto, molto più informati; ma ne aveva grande apprensione e compassione. Ci saranno, pensava, nel 1999, nel 2009, nel 2019: e che cosa il susseguirsi di questi decenni avrebbe portato per loro? E si accorse, così pensando, di essere arrivato come al cancello della preghiera, intravedendola come un giardino desolato, deserto.

Si soffermava a seguire i loro giochi, a sentire quel che si dicevano. Erano ancora capaci di gioia, di fantasia: ma li aspettava una scuola senza gioia e senza fantasia, la televisione, il computer, l'automobile da casa a scuola e da scuola a casa, il cibo ricco ma dall'indifferenziato sapore di carta assorbente. Non più, nella memoria, la tavola pitagorica, «La donzelletta vien dalla campagna...», «Scendeva dalla soglia...», «I cipressi che a Bolgheri...»: sevizie del passato. La memoria era da abolire, la Memoria; e quindi anche quegli esercizi che la rendevano duttile, sottile, prensile.

Thanks very much to Kenneth Haynes for the following comment:

The translator seems to have had trouble with one of the quotations. He added the word "poems" to Sciascia's bare list of opening phrases, not realizing that Italian schoolchildren had to memorize prose, too, and "Scendeva dalla soglia" was one of the regularly memorized passages from Manzoni's Promessi Sposi. "All trembling on the threshold" also misses the point, since the woman "came down from the threshold" with quiet dignity as she walked down the steps to place the body of her child Cecilia in the cart of the monatti (workers whose job it was to collect the corpses of plague victims).

Stella Bowen (1893-1947), Drawn from Life (1941; rpt. London: Virago, 1984), pp. 237-238:

At one-thirty someone would say, "what about lunch," and one of us would go down to Mme. Nickolai for a long loaf, some butter, black olives, garlic, sausage and a slice of ripe fromage de brie. A litre of vin rouge turned this into a feast and the lunch would prolong itself as a convivial occasion, fitting reward for a good morning's work.

This reminds Mrs. Laudator of Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), The Wind in the Willows (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908), p. 206:

'That is indeed an excellent suggestion,' said the Water Rat, and hurried off home. There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger's origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.

Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), Seven Gothic Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), p. 100:

I remember an old Danish bishop's saying to me that there are many ways to the recognition of truth, and that Burgundy is one of them.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), Great Trade Route (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1937), p. 114:

I remember that, when I used to go riding with Conrad, if we met an ordinary Anglican clergyman he would curse between his teeth. But if it was a Catholic priest from the near-by seminary he would turn pale and swing the mare round and go home. He said that Greek Orthodox priests were the most unlucky of all.

Stella Bowen (1893-1947), Drawn from Life (1941; rpt. London: Virago, 1984), p. 224:

I was born without the slightest desire to instruct or to reform society. To preach or convert or persuade opinion is a thing for which I have no gift or inclination.

Id., p. 227:

The difficulty is to avoid the perils of fanaticism as well as the paralysis that sometimes comes of seeing both sides at once. The loftiest wisdom ought surely to be able to see every side of everything simultaneously, but this kind of vision would seem to have no place in the world to-day. It belongs to a state of health and equilibrium, and society has become mortally sick.

Euripides, Cyclops 113-128 (Odysseus and Silenus speaking; tr. Patrick O’Sullivan and Christopher Collard):

OD: What land is this and who inhabits it?
SIL: The mound of Etna, the highest in Sicily.
OD: But where are the city-walls and the fortifications? [115]
SIL: There are none. The headlands are bereft of men, stranger.
OD: Who occupies the land? A race of beasts?
SIL: Cyclopes, who live in caves, not houses.
OD: Whose subjects are they? Or is power shared among the people?
SIL: They're loners; nobody is subject at all to anyone else. [120]
OD: Do they sow Demeter's crop? Or what do they live on?
SIL: On milk, cheese, and the meat of sheep.
OD: Do they have the drink of Bromius, the streams of the grape-vine?
SIL: Absolutely not. For that reason they inhabit a land where there is no dancing.
OD: Are they kind to strangers and do they honour divine laws regarding strangers? [125]
SIL: They say that strangers have the sweetest flesh.
OD: What are you saying? Do they delight in killing and eating men?
SIL: Nobody who has come here has not been eaten.

Οδ. τίς δ’ ἥδε χώρα καὶ τίνες ναίουσί νιν;
Σιλ. Αἰτναῖος ὄχθος Σικελίας ὑπέρτατος.
Οδ. τείχη δὲ ποῦ ’στι καὶ πόλεως πυργώματα; (115)
Σιλ. οὐκ ἔστ’· ἔρημοι πρῶνες ἀνθρώπων, ξένε.
Οδ. τίνες δ’ ἔχουσι γαῖαν; ἦ θηρῶν γένος;
Σιλ. Κύκλωπες, ἄντρ’ ἔχοντες, οὐ στέγας δόμων.
Οδ. τίνος κλύοντες; ἢ δεδήμευται κράτος;
Σιλ. μονάδες· ἀκούει δ’ οὐδὲν οὐδεὶς οὐδενός. (120)
Οδ. σπείρουσι δ’ – ἢ τῷ ζῶσι; – Δήμητρος στάχυν;
Σιλ. γάλακτι καὶ τυροῖσι καὶ μήλων βορᾷ.
Οδ. Βρομίου δὲ πῶμ’ ἔχουσιν, ἀμπέλου ῥοάς;
Σιλ. ἥκιστα· τοιγὰρ ἄχορον οἰκοῦσι χθόνα.
Οδ. φιλόξενοι δὲ χὤσιοι περὶ ξένους; (125)
Σιλ. γλυκύτατά φασι τὰ κρέα τοὺς ξένους φορεῖν.
Οδ. τί φῄς; βορᾷ χαίρουσιν ἀνθρωποκτόνῳ;
Σιλ. οὐδεὶς μολὼν δεῦρ’ ὅστις οὐ κατεσφάγη.

116 ἔστ’ Schenk: εἴσ’ L
117 ἦ Kirchhoff: ἢ L
120 μονάδες V. Schmidt: νομάδες L
123 ῥοάς Reiske: ῥοαῖς L

No city-walls, fortifications, houses, government, bread, wine, dancing, or hospitality.

W.S. Merwin (1927-2019), The Mays of Ventadorn (Washington: National Geographic, 2002), pp. 60-61:

One attractive element in the farming life that had evolved by then in the Quercy was an unobtrusive independence of spirit, a quality rooted in the practice of polyculture — the growing of more or less everything. It was an immemorial system encouraged by the variations of the crumpled landscape with its small irregular fields fitted into the stony contours, but deplored by theorists as inefficient, an impediment to the abstraction of agriculture and the relegation of it as a way of life. Its assumptions included having extended families loosely clustered in and around the small hamlets, each family owning plots of land of several kinds scattered within walking distance of where they lived. Most families possessed a few hectares of upland woods, a few hectares of open pasture in different places, a few hectares of arable land, which they farmed on a careful four-year system of rotation, a sizable number of ritually tended walnut trees, at least one vineyard, and at least one vegetable garden, besides which they grew their potatoes, often their peas and green beans, pumpkins, squash and corn for pigs, fodder beets for pregnant ewes and for lambs, in the fields closest to home. They grew much of what they ate, and all that they fed to their animals. They sold walnuts, plums, milk, wool, calves, lambs, cheese, and they raised tobacco some years as a cash crop. They thought that was the way it had always been. In the valleys the walls were beginning to be leveled year by year to enlarge the fields for mechanization, but on the slopes and ridges and out on the limestone plateaus the thin soil was spread unevenly in the waves of stone, and although in the sixties the planners in the capital inaugurated programs designed to eradicate the peasantry altogether, the imposition of a rational grid on the uplands was hampered and delayed by the terrain.

Related post: Dapes Inemptae.

An Occitan poem from Clermont-Ferrand, Bibliothèque communautaire et interuniversitaire, ms. 201, f. 89^v, in William D. Paden and Frances Freeman Paden, Troubadour Poems from the South of France (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007), p. 15:

Tomida femina
in tomida via sedea;
tomid infant
in falda sua tenea;        4
tomides mans
et tomidas pes,
tomidas carnes
que est colbe recebrunt;        8
tomide fust
et tomides fer
que istæ colbe donerunt.
Exsunt en dolores        12
d'os en polpa
[de polpa en curi]
de curi in pel
de pel in erpa.        16
Terra madre susipiat dolores.

The supplement in line 14 is due to Bernhard Bischoff.

Translation (op. cit., p. 16):

A swollen woman
Sat in a swollen road;
A swollen child
She held in her lap;
Swollen hand
And swollen feet,
Swollen flesh
That will take this blow;
Swollen wood
And swollen iron
That will give this blow.
The pain goes out
From bone to flesh,
From flesh to skin,
From skin to hair,
From hair to grass;
Let mother earth receive the pain.

Here is an image of the manuscript page:


Here is an image of the manuscript page upside down, on which the poem can be seen starting at the third line and then extending down the margin at the right side:


See also William D. Paden and Frances Freeman Paden, "Swollen Woman, Shifting Canon: A Midwife's Charm and the Birth of Secular Romance Lyric," PMLA 125.2 (March 2010) 306-321 (at 309):

Bischoff cited two Latin charms that resemble the second part of "Tomida femina." One, found in a late-ninth-century manuscript at Saint Gall, summons a worm in the hand:

Movat de ossa in pulpa,
de pulpa in pelle,
de pelle in pilo,
de pilo in terra.
Suscipe....
            ("Adiuva me, Deus" [Reiche])

Let it move from bones to flesh,
from flesh to skin,
from skin to hair,
from hair to earth.
Receive [it]

The other, in a Verona manuscript from about 900, conjures a puncte, a sore or abscess:

Coniuro te...
exi de osso in pulpa,
de pulpa in pelle,
de pelle in pilo,
de pilo in terra.
Terra matre, suscipe.
             ("Oratio ad puncte" [Meersseman])

I conjure you ...
go out from bone to flesh,
from flesh to skin,
from skin to hair,
from hair to earth.
Mother Earth, receive [it].

The Occitan poem and the Latin charms are examples of epipompē, or banishment of evil to a particular place. Richard Wünsch (1869-1915) first used the terms apopompē and epipompē to describe two different ways of banishing evil in "Zur Geisterbannung im Altertum," Festschrift zur Jahrhundertfeier der Universität zu Breslau = Mitteilungen der Schlesischen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde 13-14 (1911) 9-32. The difference between apopompē and epipompē can be seen most clearly in the Gospels. In most of the exorcisms recorded in the Gospels, Jesus simply drove demons away from the possessed (apopompē). But at Gadara (or Gerasa or Gergesa), Jesus drove the demons away to a particular place (epipompē), into a herd of pigs (Matthew 8.30-32; par. Mark 5.11-13 and Luke 8.32-33).

In our examples, the pain is progressively moved from one part of the body to another, until finally it is expelled from the body onto Mother Earth.