Classics quotes
WHO SAID THIS? “Not all those men who were enrolled in the five classes were called classici(“belonging to a class”), but only the men of the first class, who were rated at 125,000 asses or more. But those of the second class and of all the other classes, who were rated at a smaller sum than this, were called Infraclassem (“below class”)
Aulus Gellius (2nd CE)
WHO SAID THIS? “So then the works arose, no less towering in their grandeur than inimitable in the grace of their outlines, since the workmen eagerly strove to surpass themselves in the beauty of their handicraft.… For this reason the works of Pericles are all the more to be wondered at: they were created in a short time for all time. ... Such is the bloom of perpetual newness, as it were, upon these works of his, which makes them ever to look untouched by time, as though the unfaltering breath of an ageless spirit had been infused into them.”
Plutarch, Life of Pericles (100s CE)
WHO SAID THIS:
"The basic goal of classical studies is the reconstruction
of entire worlds, in all their different aspects.”
N. Morley, Classics: Why it Matters 41:
WHO SAID THIS:
"‘The classical world’ is a construct – part ancient, part
modern – one interpretation of a world that was complex and fluid. Classics doesn’t attempt to draw
a line around this imaginary object and claim it for its own; it takes the inherited ideas of ‘the classical’
as a starting point and opens them up to debate.”
N. Morley, Classics: Why It Matters 50
“Classicists are experts in considering as many different sorts of
evidence as possible, because we virtually never have enough of any of it – and of negotiating and
understanding the inevitable inconsistencies and contradictions that we find.”
Morley Classics Why It Matters 59
“Classicists spend much of their time debating uncertainties
and evaluating the relative plausibility of different interpretations, rather than being able to offer
hard-and-fast, yes-and-no answers to questions about what the world was like.”
Morley Classics Why It Matters 56
“The basic situation is that we know we have only a tiny proportion of everything ever written in antiquity, even of its finest literary and intellectual products,let alone more mundane
materials—and we know that what we have is not a random sample.”
Morley 54
“Some things survived because someone made an effort to
try to preserve them ... The most obvious example is texts... Because someone thought they were worth copying and re-copying over the centuries. This cost time and money; not every text was thought to be worth copying, or copied in sufficient quantities to increase the chances of it surviving into the early modern period and being recovered by scholars; and it is clear that ideas about which texts were worth preserving changed over time, with different judgements about value
and usefulness.”
Morley, Classics: Why It Matters 57
“His build is sublimely superhuman, and his stance bears witness to the fullness of his grandeur. An eternal springtime, as if in blissful Elysium, clothes the charming manliness of maturity with graceful youthfulness.... Gazing upon this masterpiece of art, I forget all else, and I myself adopt an elevated stance, in order to be worthy of gazing upon it. My chest seems to expand with veneration... and I feel myself transported to Delos and to the Lycian groves, places Apollo honored with his presence.”
J. J. Winckelmann
“Then there is our common Greekness: we are one in blood and one in language.
Herodotus 8.144.2
These Phoenicians ... brought with them to Hellas, among many other kinds of learning, the alphabet, which had been unknown before this, I think, to the Greeks. As time went on the
sound and the form of the letters were changed.”
(Herodotus 5.58.1)
I am the cup of Nestor good for drinking. Whoever drinks from this cup, desire for beautifully
crowned Aphrodite will seize him instantly.
Nestor's cup! :)
"In Archaic and Classical Greece there is nothing that can be usefully called a ‘standard language’ for all Greek speakers."
Clackson 50
“most varieties of literary Greek correspond to no single Greek dialect, and reproduce
varieties that can never have been the everyday spoken vernacular of any individual.”
Clackson 48:
“The person who sends me prays to the gods, so that the girl is not kind towards you... without you
[...] calm with [these] rivers... A good man made me (in good intention?) for a good man; may I not be
stolen by an evil man.”
?
“efforts were made to produce a classical Roman canon that was structurally similar to that of Greece. ...These writers hoped to secure for themselves and their works a reputation on a par with that of the Greek classics” (63)
Leonhardt Latin 64:
It is Latinitas that keeps the language pure and free of any fault.” The opposite is “barbarismus.”
(Rhetorica ad Herennium)
Arrius, if he wanted to say “winnings” (commoda) used to say “whinnings” (chommoda),
and for “ambush” (insidias) “hambush” (hinsidias);and thought he had spoken marvellously well,
whenever he said “hambush” with as much emphasis as possible.So, no doubt, his mother had said,
so his uncle the freedman, so his grandfather and grandmother on the mother’s side.
When he was sent into Syria, all our ears had a holiday; they heard the same syllables pronounced
quietly and lightly, and had no fear of such words for the future: when on a sudden a dreadful message
arrives, that the Ionian waves, ever since Arrius went there, are henceforth not “Ionian,” but “Hionian.
Catullus 84
“We cannot know Greek song except through philology, but we
need not therefore make singers philologists, in effect transferring to the text our own relation to the
Text.”
Ford “From Letters to Literature” 24:“
“Textualization: the passage of song from performance event to the object of reading”
(Ford, 18)
“I was onboard ship and I was reading [Euripides’ tragedy]
Andromeda…”
Aristophanes’ Frogs (405 BCE)
“Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts of tragedy, it is the least
artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of tragedy, we may be sure, is felt
even apart from representation and actors.”
Aristotle’ Poetics (330s):
“What I call textualization was the appropriation of such objects by highly literate
minorities who made the primary criterion of their value the play of language, the one aspect
of song a text can best capture. Then, as now, fixed written texts allowed interpretation to
exploit the precise observation of word usage and formal patterning.”
Ford 36:
“You will die and be still, never shall be memory left of you after this, nor regret when you are gone. You have not touched the flowers of the Muses, and thus, shadowy still in the domain
of Death, you must drift with a ghost’s fluttering wings, one of the darkened dead”
Sappho frag. 55 to a rival: (Lattimore, trans.)
“Kore (maiden) I must be called evermore; instead of marriage, by the gods this
name became my fate”
Tomb of Phrasikleia
“A copy below of the deeds of the divine Augustus, by which he subjected the whole wide earth to the
rule of the Roman people, and of the money which he spent for the state and Roman people, inscribed
on two bronze pillars, which are set up in Rome.”
Res Gestae Divi Augusti
“What was meaningful was the monumental nature of the text itself as writing. It was a signature of
empire, a written contract for the relations of centre and periphery and an articulation of the place of
individual citizens within a new world-system defined by the imperial ‘I’ which governs the verbs of the
document. ... To read The Res Gestae [text and monument] was to know one’s master.”
–J. Elsner, “Inventing Imperium: Texts and the Propaganda of Monuments in Augustan Rome.”
“Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common
but the meter, so that it would be right to call the one a poet (poiētēn), the other a natural philosopher (
physiologon) rather than a poet.”
Aristotle Poetics
“What Herodotus the Halicarnassian has learnt by inquiry (historiē) is here set forth: in order that
the memory of the past may not be blotted out from among men by time, and that great and marvellous
deeds done by Greeks and foreigners and especially the reason why they warred against each other
may not lack renown (kleos).”
Herodotus Histories 1.1:
“Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war
waged by the Peloponnesians and the Athenians against one another. He began the task at the very
outset of the war, in the belief that it would be great and noteworthy above all the wars that had gone
before. ...Indeed, as to the events of the period just preceding this, and those of a still earlier date, it was
impossible to get clear information on account of lapse of time; but from evidence which, on pushing
my inquiries to the furthest point, I find that I can trust, I think that they were not really great either as
regards the wars then waged or in other particulars.”
Thucydides History 1.1: Ferris op #1
“from the evidence that has been given, any one would not err who should hold the view that the state of affairs in antiquity was pretty nearly such as I have described it, not giving greater credence to the accounts, on the one hand, which the poets
have put into song, adorning and amplifying their theme, and, on the other, which the chroniclers have composed with a view rather of pleasing the ear than of telling the truth ...”
Thucydides History 1.21:
“But as to the facts of the occurrences of the war, I have thought it my duty to give them, not as
ascertained from any chance informant nor as seemed to me probable, but only after investigating with
the greatest possible accuracy each detail.... And the endeavour to ascertain these facts was a
laborious task....”
ThucydidesHistory 1.22:
“And it may well be that the absence of the fabulous (mythōdes)
from my narrative will seem less pleasing to the ear; but whoever shall wish to have a clear
view both of the events which have happened and of those which will some day, in all human
probability, happen again in the same or a similar way—for these to adjudge my history
profitable will be enough for me.”
Thucydides History 1.22:
“As to the speeches that were made by different men, either when they were about to begin the war or
when they were already engaged therein, it has been difficult to recall with strict accuracy the words
actually spoken, both for me as regards that which I myself heard, and for those who from various
other sources have brought me reports. Therefore the speeches are given in the language in which,
as it seemed to me, the several speakers would express, on the subjects under consideration, the
sentiments most befitting the occasion, though at the same time I have adhered as closely as possible
to the general sense of what was actually said.”
Thucydides History 1.22:
“It is not the function of a poet to relate what has happened but what may happen.
The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be
put into verse, and it would still be a species of history … The true difference is that one relates what
has happened, the other what may happen.”
Aristotle Poetics:
Gripped by a frenzied and excessive lust for pleasure, they [the poets] jumbled together laments and
hymns, mixed paeans and dithyrambs, and even imitated pipe tunes on the lyre. The result was a total
confusion of style.”
- Plato
Ancient theorists and critics do not recognize generic
ambiguity as an issue. They all share a certain confidence that poems do indeed belong
unambiguously to one genre or another. They show no interest at all in generic
indeterminacy, and do not even seem to recognize the possibility that the question of a
poem’s genre might be open for discussion.
Farrell “Classical Genre” 386: “
“In general, the practice of Greek and Latin poets was
far in advance of what their theoretical counterparts were able to articulate.
Farrell “Classical Genre” 399: