Between Seneca And Plutarch Again, And The Judgment Of Quintilian

Arthur Murphy, The Works of Cornelius Tacitus, vol. VIII. (London, 1805), Notes on the Dialogue Concerning Oratory, pp. 285-288:

Menage says, if all the books in the world were in the fire, there is not one, whom he would so eagerly snatch from the flames as Plutarch. That author never tires him; he reads him often, and always finds new beauties. He cannot say the same of Seneca; not but there are admirable passages in his works, but when brought to the test, they lose their apparent beauty by a close examination. Seneca serves to be quoted in the warmth of conversation, but is not of equal value in the closet. Whatever be the subject, he wishes to shine, and, by consequence, his thoughts are too refined, and often false.

. . . Quintilian was his [Seneca's] contemporary; he saw, and heard the man, and, in less than twenty years after his death, pronounced judgment against him. In the conclusion of the first chapter of his tenth book, after having given an account of the Greek and Roman authors, he says, he reserved Seneca for the last place, because, having always endeavoured to counteract the influence of a bad taste, he was supposed to be influenced by motives of personal enmity. But the case was otherwise. He saw that Seneca was the favourite of the times, and, to check the torrent that threatened the ruin of all true eloquence, he exerted his best efforts to diffuse a sounder judgment. He did not wish that Seneca should be laid aside: but he could not, in silence, see him preferred to the writers of the Augustan age, whom that writer endeavoured to depreciate, conscious, that, having chosen a different style, he could not hope to please the taste of those, who were charmed with the authors of a former day. But Seneca was still in fashion; his partisans continued to admire, though it cannot be said that they imitated him. He fell short of the ancients, and they were still more beneath their model. Since they were content to copy, it were to be wished that they had been able to vie with him. He pleased by his defects, and the herd of imitators chose the worst. They acquired a vicious manner, and flattered themselves that they resembled their master. But the truth is, they disgraced him. Seneca, it must be allowed, had many great and excellent qualities; a lively imagination; vast erudition, and extensive knowledge. He frequently employed others to make researches for him, and was often deceived. He embraced all subjects; in his philosophy, not always profound, but a keen censor of the manners, and on moraa subjects truly admirable. He has brilliant passages, and beautiful sentiments; but the expression is in a false taste, the more dangerous, as he abounds with delightful vices. You would have wished that he had written with his own imagination, and the judgment of others. To sum up his character: had he known how to rate little things; had he been above the petty ambition of always shining; had he not been fond of himself; had he not weakened his force by minute and dazzling sentences; he would have gained, not the admiration of boys, but the suffrage of the judicious. At present he may be read with safety by those, who have made acquaintance with better models. His works afford the fairest opportunity of distinguishing the beauties of fine writing from their opposite vices. He has much to be approved, and even admired: but a just selection is necessary, and it is to be regretted that he did not choose for himself. Such was the judgment of Quintilian . . .

See also: Between Seneca And Plutarch

Between Seneca And Plutarch

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I. (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. 2, The Pagan Empire, p. 243-4:

Plutarch, whose fame as a biographer has, I think, unduly eclipsed his reputation as a moralist, may be justly regarded as the leader of this movement, and his moral writings may be profitably compared with those of Seneca, the most ample exponent of the sterner school. Seneca is not unfrequently self-conscious, theatrical, and overstrained. His precepts have something of the affected ring of a popular preacher. The imperfect fusion of his short sentences gives his style a disjointed and, so to speak, granulated character, which the Emperor Caligula happily expressed when he compared it to sand without cement; yet he often rises to a majesty of eloquence, a grandeur both of thought and of expression, that few moralists have ever rivalled. Plutarch, though far less sublime, is more sustained, equable, and uniformly pleasing. The Montaigne of antiquity, his genius coruscates playfully and gracefully around his subject; he delights in illustrations which are often singularly vivid and original, but which, by their excessive multiplication, appear sometimes rather the texture than the ornament of his discourse. A gentle, tender spirit, and a judgment equally free from paradox, exaggeration, and excessive subtilty, are the characteristics of all he wrote. Plutarch excels most in collecting motives of consolation; Seneca in forming characters that need no consolation. There is something of the woman in Plutarch; Seneca is all a man. The writings of the first resemble the strains of the flute, to which the ancients attributed the power of calming the passions and charming away the clouds of sorrow, and drawing men by a gentle suasion into the paths of virtue; the writings of the other are like the trumpet-blast, which kindles the soul with an heroic courage. The first is most fitted to console a mother sorrowing over her dead child, the second to nerve a brave man, without flinching and without illusion, to grapple with an inevitable fate.

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.

The Unchanging Human Heart

Emil Ludwig, Gifts of Life: A Retrospect, (Little, Brown, and Company, 1931) edt. Ethel Colburn Mayne, Preface, v.:

The lesson of all memoirs is that the human heart is unchanging, throughout all ages, classes, and varieties of opinion. 

Limits Of Language Before Nature And Before Geniuses

William White, Life of Emanuel Swedenborg, (Philadelphia, 1866), Intro. (writ by B. F. Barrett), pp. 7-8:

It is difficult to paint in language the grandest scenes in nature. To him who essays it, words seem powerless and wholly unequal to the task of conveying an adequate description. Any one who has stood by the side of Niagara, and listened to its deafening roar, and felt the grandeur and inspiration of the scene, is never quite satisfied with any written or oral description of that mighty cataract. And the reason is plain. It is not in the power of language, however skilfully employed, to kindle such emotions in the soul as are awakened by the scene itself.

The case is similar in regard to all great geniuses, and especially great authors. It is not easy to describe the loftiest human souls, or adequately to paint their characters in words. And those who are most familiar with their writings, are usually least satisfied with their biographies however vigorously or gracefully written. It is with the most gifted thinkers and writers as with the great Author of the volume of nature; they are best seen and understood in their works. And in any biographies wherein it is attempted to show us such men apart from, or outside of, their writings, it can hardly be otherwise than that they should appear considerably dwarfed. We miss those grand and symmetrical features which reveal themselves on every page of their works, but are to be truly seen no where else.

Wisdom And The Prime Of Life

Philo Alexandrinus, Every Good Man Is Free (Quod Omnis Probus Liber Sit), In: vol. IX. of Philo's works, (Loeb Classical Library, 1985), tr. F. H. Colson,  II, 13-15, pp. 17-19:

But since we have it on the sacred authority of Plato [Phædrus, 247A] that envy has no place in the divine choir, and wisdom is most divine and most free-handed, she never closes her school of thought but always opens her doors to those who thirst for the sweet water of discourse, and pouring on them an unstinted stream of undiluted doctrine, persuades them to be drunken with the drunkenness which is soberness itself. Then when like initiates in the mysteries they have taken their fill of the revelations, they reproach themselves greatly for their former neglect and feel that they have wasted their time and that their life while they lacked wisdom was not worth the living. It is well then that the young, all of them and everywhere, should dedicate the first fruits of the flower of their prime above all else to culture, wherein it is good for both youth and old age to dwell. . . .

That Friendship Is indispensable

Cicero, Lælius De Amicitia, 23 (tr. William Armistead Falconer):

Nay, even if anyone were of a nature so savage and fierce as to shun and loathe the society of men—such, for example, as tradition tells us a certain Timon of Athens once was—yet even such a man could not refrain from seeking some person before whom he might pour out the venom of his embittered soul. Moreover, the view just expressed might best be appraised if such a thing as this could happen: suppose that a god should remove us from these haunts of men and put us in some solitary place, and, while providing us there in plenteous abundance with all material things for which our nature yearns, should take from us altogether the power to gaze upon our fellow men—who would be such a man of iron as to be able to endure that sort of a life? And who is there from whom solitude would not snatch the enjoyment of every pleasure? True, therefore, is that celebrated saying of Archytas of Tarentum, I think it was—a saying which I have heard repeated by our old men who in their turn heard it from their elders. It is to this effect: «If a man should ascend alone into heaven and behold clearly the structure of the universe and the beauty of the stars, there would be no pleasure for him in the awe-inspiring sight, which would have filled him with delight if he had had someone to whom he could describe what he had seen.» Thus nature, loving nothing solitary, always strives for some sort of support, and man's best support is a very dear friend.

Quin etiam si quis asperitate ea est et inmanitate naturae, congressus ut hominum fugiat atque oderit, qualem fuisse Athenis Timonem nescio quem accepimus, tamen is pati non possit, ut non anquirat aliquem, apud quem evomat virus acerbitatis suae. Atque hoc maxime iudicaretur, si quid tale posset contingere, ut aliquis nos deus ex hac hominum frequentia tolleret et in solitudine uspiam collocaret atque ibi suppeditans omnium rerum, quas natura desiderat, abundantiam et copiam hominis omnino aspiciendi potestatem eriperet. Quis tam esset ferreus, qui eam vitam ferre posset, cuique non auferret fructum voluptatum omnium solitudo? Verum ergo illud est, quod a Tarentino Archyta, ut opinor, dici solitum nostros senes commemorare audivi ab aliis senibus auditum: «si quis in caelum ascendisset naturamque mundi et pulchritudinem siderum perspexisset, insuavem illam admirationem ei fore; quae iucundissima fuisset, si aliquem, cui narraret, habuisset.» Sic natura solitarium nihil amat semperque ad aliquod tamquam adminiculum adnititur; quod in amicissimo quoque dulcissimum est.

The New Gospel

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, pt. 1, ch. 2, §107, tr. Helen Zimmern:

. . . To recognise all this may be deeply painful, but consolation comes after; such pains are the pangs of birth. The butterfly wants to break through its chrysalis: it rends and tears it, and is then blinded and confused by the unaccustomed light, the kingdom of liberty. In such people as are capable of such sadness—and how few are!—the first experiment made is to see whether mankind can change itself from a moral into a wise mankind. The sun of a new gospel throws its rays upon the highest point in the soul of each single individual, then the mists gather thicker than ever, and the brightest light and the dreariest shadow lie side by side. Everything is necessity—so says the new knowledge, and this knowledge itself is necessity. Everything is innocence, and knowledge is the road to insight into this innocence. Are pleasure, egoism, vanity necessary for the production of the moral phenomena and their highest result, the sense for truth and justice in knowledge; were error and the confusion of the imagination the only means through which mankind could raise itself gradually to this degree of self-enlightenment and self-liberation—who would dare to undervalue these means? Who would dare to be sad if he perceived the goal to which those roads led? Everything in the domain of morality has evolved, is changeable, unstable, everything is dissolved, it is true; but everything is also streaming towards one goal. Even if the inherited habit of erroneous valuation, love and hatred, continue to reign in us, yet under the influence of growing knowledge it will become weaker; a new habit, that of comprehension, of not loving, not hating, of overlooking, is gradually implanting itself in us upon the same ground, and in thousands of years will perhaps be powerful enough to give humanity the strength to produce wise, innocent (consciously innocent) men, as it now produces unwise, guilt-conscious men,—that is the necessary preliminary step, not its opposite.

New Discoveries

W. Byrd Powell, The Natural History of the Human Temperaments, (Cincinnati, 1856), Preface, p. vii.:

It is well known that all new discoveries have to contend with the vanity of some, the selfishness of others, and the incredulity and ignorance of many. 

Regarding Our Predecessors

A. E. Housman, The Confines of Criticism (Cambridge: University Press, 1969), pp. 44-45:

I spoke just now of servility shown towards the living; and I think it significant that this is so often found in company with lack of due veneration towards the dead. My counsel is to invert this attitude, and to think more of the dead than of the living. The dead have at any rate endured a test to which the living have not yet been subjected. If a man, fifty or a hundred years after his death, is still remembered and accounted a great man, there is a presumption in his favour which no living man can claim; and experience has taught me that it is no mere presumption. It is the dead and not the living who have most advanced our learning and science; and though their knowledge may have been superseded, there is no supersession of reason and intelligence. Clear wits and right thinking are essentially neither of today nor yesterday, but historically they are rather of yesterday than of today: and to study the greatest of scholars of the past is to enjoy intercourse with superior minds. If our conception of scholarship and our methods of procedure are at variance with theirs, it is not indeed a certainty or a necessity that we are wrong, but it is a good working hypothesis; and we had better not abandon it until it proves untenable. Let us not disregard our contemporaries, but let us regard our predecessors more; let us be most encouraged by their agreement, and most disquieted by their dissent.