Ignoring One's Own Instructions

Petrarca, Petrarch's Letters to Classical Authors, tr. Mario Emilio Cosenza (Chicago, 1910), 1, Letter to M. T. Cicero, pp. 3-4 (with the translator's footnote):

. . . Forsooth, what boots it to instruct others, of what profit to discourse eternally on the virtues, and that too in most eloquent terms, if, at the same time, one turns a deaf ear to his own instructions? Ah, how much better had it been for a man of declining years, and especially for one devoted to studies, even as thou, to have lived his last days in the quiet of the country, meditating (as thou thyself hast said somewhere) on that everlasting life, and not on this fleeting one.1

1. The reference is very indefinite: “in tranquillo rure senuisse, de perpetua illa, ut ipse quodam loco ais, non de hac iam exigua vita cogitantem” (Vol. III, p. 263). The passages which Petrarch had in mind may have been De sen., 49: “If, however, we have something that may serve as food (so to speak) for study and learning, there is nothing more pleasant than a leisurely old age;” and 51: “I come now to the pleasures of a country life, with which I am infinitely delighted. None of these finds an obstruction in old age, and they are pleasures which appear to me to be most nearly suited to the life of a philosopher.” These two passages affirm that the sage should live a leisurely and studious old age in the country. As to meditating on the eternal life, Petrarch may have been thinking of Acad. pr., ii, 127:

By no means, however, do I hold that the studies of the natural philosophers should be excluded. Indeed, a consideration and contemplation of nature constitutes the natural food (so to speak) for our minds and talents. We are elevated thereby, and we seem to rise to a higher state of being. We disdain human affairs; and, in meditating on the higher and heavenly things, we scorn earthly matters as being small and insignificant—“cogitantesque supera atque caelestia haec nostra ut exigua et minima contemnimus.”

From Slaves, To Freedmen, To Dethroners

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I. (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire, p. 233:

From the time of Caligula, for several reigns, the most influential citizens were freedmen, who occupied the principal offices in the palace, and usually obtained complete ascendancy over the emperors. Through them alone petitions were presented. By their instrumentality the Imperial favours were distributed. They sometimes dethroned the emperors. They retained their power unshaken through a succession of revolutions. In wealth, in power, in the crowd of their courtiers, in the splendour of their palaces in life, and of their tombs in death, they eclipsed all others, and men whom the early Roman patricians would have almost disdained to notice, saw the proudest struggling for their favour.

To Love And Hate With Mouth And Heart

Theognis, The Maxims of Theognis, in: Rev. J. Banks, The Works of Hesiod, Callimachus, and Theognis (Bohn's Classical Library, 1879), p. 222:

Do not caress me in words, and keep your mind and heart elsewhere, if you love me and if there dwells in you a faithful mind. Either love me, cherishing a sincere mind, or disown and hate me, having raised a quarrel openly. But he who, with one tongue, has yet his mind at variance, this man, Cyrnus, is a formidable comrade, better as a foe than when a friend. 

Carlylian Image Of The Politician Seeking Popularity

Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. V., Stump-Orator, May 1, 1850:

Such a soul, though to the eye he still keeps tumbling about in the Parliamentary element, and makes "motions," and passes bills, for aught I know,—are we to define him as a living one, or as a dead? Partridge the Almanac-Maker, whose "Publications" still regularly appear, is known to be dead! The dog that was drowned last summer, and that floats up and down the Thames with ebb and flood ever since,—is it not dead? Alas, in the hot months, you meet here and there such a floating dog; and at length, if you often use the river steamers, get to know him by sight. "There he is again, still astir there in his quasi-stygian element!" you dejectedly exclaim (perhaps reading your Morning Newspaper at the moment); and reflect, with a painful oppression of nose and imagination, on certain completed professors of parliamentary eloquence in modern times. Dead long since, but not resting; daily doing motions in that Westminster region still,—daily from Vauxhall to Blackfriars, and back again; and cannot get away at all! Daily (from Newspaper or river steamer) you may see him at some point of his fated course, hovering in the eddies, stranded in the ooze, or rapidly progressing with flood or ebb; and daily the odor of him is getting more intolerable: daily the condition of him appeals more tragically to gods and men.

Literary Petrifactions

William Carew Hazlitt, The Confessions of a Collector, (London, 1897), ch. I., Confessions of a Collector, pp. 2-3:

We hear of the Fratres Poloni,1 five stupendous folios, brimful of erudition—books which seem, to our more frivolous and superficial and hurrying age, better suited to occupy a niche in a museum as a monumental testimony to departed scholarship—books, alas! which those blind instruments of the revolutionary spirit of change, the paper mill and the fire, draw day by day nearer to canonisation in a few inviolable resting-places, as in sanctuaries dedicated to the holy dead. They will enter on a new and more odorous life: we shall look awfully upon them as upon literary petrifactions, which to bygone ages were living and speaking things.

1. The Fratres Poloni (Eng.: The Polish Brethren) describe the collected works of those eminent Unitarian interpreters, who flourished in Poland, A. D. 1575-1660, and whose views, in a more condensed form, may be seen in the Racovian Catechism, translated into English by Rees, Lond. 12mo. 1818. [quoted from a footnote we find in: J. P. Dabney, Annotations on the New Testament, (Cambridge: 1829), pt. I., p. 148.]

Photius On Lucian

La Rue van Hook, The Literary Criticism in the Bibliotheca of Photius, (in: Classical Philology Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Apr., 1909)), II., The Romancers, pp. 184-5:

In nearly all of his works Lucian is writing a comedy on Greek things; on their error in god-making, their ungovernable and intemperate licentiousness, the monstrous beliefs and fictions of even the poets and their consequent mistakes in government, and the irregular course and vicissitudes of their lives throughout, the boastful nature of their very philosophers who have naught save hypocrisy and empty pretense. In a word, as we have said, his aim is to produce a comedy, in prose, of Greek life. He seems to be one of those who worship nothing seriously; he makes fun of and ridicules the creeds of others and does not posit what he himself believes, unless one calls not having a creed, a creed. In style he is of the best (ἄριστος) employing a diction which is clear, current, and very striking (ἐμφατικός). He is a lover, if anyone is, of distinctness (εὐκρίνεια) and purity, with brilliancy and grandeur in due proportion. His composition is so arranged that the reader seems not to be reading prose but it is as if a certain delightful song without definite accompaniment of music were dropping into the ears of the listener. And in a word, as we have said, his style is of the best (ἄριστος) and not in keeping with his subjects under discussion at which he knew how to laugh.

The Poets Of The Anthologia Palatina

John Addington Symonds, Studies on the Greek Poets, vol. II., (New York: 1880), ch. XXI., The Anthology, pp. 281-2:

If we might compare the study of Greek literature to a journey in some splendid mountain region, then we might say with propriety that from the sparkling summits where Æschylus and Sophocles and Pindar sit enthroned we turn in our less strenuous moods to gather the meadow flowers of Meleager, Palladas, Callimachus. Placing them between the leaves of the book of our memory, we possess an everlasting treasure of sweet thoughts, which will serve in after-days to remind us of those scenes of Olympian majesty through which we travelled. The slight effusions of these minor poets are even nearer to our hearts than the masterpieces of the noblest Greek literature. They treat with a touching limpidity and sweetness of the joys and fears and hopes and sorrows that are common to all humanity. They introduce us to the actual life of a bygone civilization, stripped of its political or religious accidents, and tell us that the Greeks of Athens or of Sidon thought and felt exactly as we feel. Even the Graffiti of Pompeii have scarcely more power to reconstruct the past and summon as in dreams the voices and the forms of long-since-buried men. There is yet another way in which the Anthology brings us closer to the Greeks than any other portion of their literature. The lyrists express an intense and exalted mood of the race in its divine adolescence. The tragedians exhibit the genius of Athens in its maturity. The idyllists utter a rich nightingale note from the woods and fields of Sicily. But the Anthology carries us through all the phases of Hellenic civilization upon its uninterrupted undercurrent of elegiac melody. The clear fresh light of the morning, the splendor of noonday, the mellow tints of sunset, and the sad gray hues of evening are all there. It is a tree which bears the leaves and buds and blossoms and fruitage of the Greek spirit on its boughs at once. Many intervals in the life of the nation which are represented by no other portion of its literature—the ending, for example, of the first century before Christ—here receive a brilliant illustration. Again, there is no more signal proof of the cosmopolitan nature of the later Greek culture than is afforded by the Anthology. From Rome, Alexandria, Palestine, Byzantium, no less than from the isles and continent of Greece, are recruited the poets, whose works are enshrined in this precious golden treasury of fugitive pieces.

Foreign And Civil Wars

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I., (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire, p. 232:

Foreign wars, which develop with great intensity distinctive national types, and divert the public mind from internal changes, are usually favourable to the conservative spirit; but civil wars are essentially revolutionary, for they overwhelm all class barriers and throw open the highest prizes to energy and genius.

A Most Soulless Type

H. J. Rose, The Core of Mythology, in: Greece and Rome Journal, vol. I., No. 3, May 1932, p. 129:

And these stories [of mythology] should be studied unspoiled, that is to say, in their earlier forms, not much later than the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. The stuff which passed for mythology in late times was an «elegant accomplishment» of the most soulless type. If, instead of saying that a man is valiant or a woman beautiful, one says that he is another Mars and she indistinguishable from Venus; if one avoids vulgar words like 'fire', 'water', and 'corn' in favour of Vulcan, Neptune, and Ceres; it soon becomes wearisome, as all well-worn artificialities of speech do, and more and more tasteless hyperboles and obscure allusions take all life and reality out of the style. It is not in this manner that the best of the Greeks used their traditional lore.

A Look Of Communion

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Edward Allwill's Collection of Letters, iv., Sylli to Clerdon, March 8, p. 394. In: Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994), trans. & edt. George di Giovanni.

I hold it close to me, I lend it hearth and fire, and do not rest until its inner being—the goodness, the beauty, the blessing—streams into me, and has received life and love in me. Behold! nothing shall perish that directed a look of communion me; whatever gave me life and took life from me shall not perish—not as long as I last anyway!

Frequent, Habitual Reading

Frederic Harrison, The Choice of Books and Other Literary Pieces (London: MacMillan and Co., 1886), pp. 78-9:

Now poetry and the highest kind of romance are exactly that order of literature which not only will bear to be read many times, but that of which the true value can only be gained by frequent, and indeed habitual, reading. A man can hardly be said to know the 12th Mass or the 9th Symphony, by virtue of having once heard them played ten years ago; he can hardly be said to take air and exercise because he took a country walk once last autumn. And so, he can hardly be said to know Scott or Shakespeare, Molière or Cervantes, when he once read them since the close of his schooldays, or amidst the daily grind of his professional life. The immortal and universal poets of our race are to be read and re-read till their music and their spirit are a part of our nature; they are to be thought over and digested till we live in the world they created for us; they are to be read devoutly, as devout men read their Bible and fortify their hearts with psalms. For as the old Hebrew singer heard the heavens declare the glory of their Maker, and the firmament showing his handiwork, so in the long roll of poetry we see transfigured the strength and beauty of humanity, the joys and sorrows, the dignity and struggles, the long life-history of our common kind.