Seneca, de Tranquillitate Animi (5):

Could you find a city more miserable than Athens when the Thirty Tyrants were tearing it apart? They slaughtered 1,300 citizens, each one a noble person, and they didn’t come to the end of it, but rather, the savagery was a goad to itself. In that city there was the Areopagus, the most religious counsel, in which a senate and a people similar to a senate came together every day like a miserable college of butchers, an ill-starred court for the reverence of tyrants. Could that city catch a break, when there were within it as many tyrants as there were attendants? Not even the slightest hope of recovering their liberty was offered to their minds, nor did there appear a place for any remedy against such an onslaught of suffering. From where did so many a Harmodius come for that wretched city?

Yet Socrates was in the middle of it all. He consoled grieving fathers, exhorted those who despaired of their state, reproached the wealthy fearing for their riches with their late repentance of dangerous avarice, and circulated himself as a great exemplar for those who wished to imitate him by strutting around freely among his thirty masters.

Nevertheless, Athens itself killed him in prison. Liberty itself could not bear the liberty of the man who safely insulted the crowd of tyrants. Thus you may see that there is a chance for a wise man to rise to his own worth in an afflicted state, and yet in a flourishing and blessed one petulance, envy, and a thousand other idle vices may reign.

Numquid potes inuenire urbem miseriorem quam Atheniensium fuit, cum illam triginta tyranni diuellerent? Mille trecentos ciues, optimum quemque, occiderant, nec finem ideo faciebant, sed irritabat se ipsa saeuitia. In qua ciuitate erat Areos pagos, religiosissimum iudicium, in qua senatus populusque senatui similis, coibat cotidie carnificum triste collegium et infelix curia tyrannis augusta. Poteratne illa ciuitas conquiescere, in qua tot tyranni erant quot satellites essent? Ne spes quidem ulla recipiendae libertatis animis poterat offerri, nec ulli remedio locus apparebat contra tantam uim malorum: unde enim miserae ciuitati tot Harmodios?

Socrates tamen in medio erat, et lugentes patres consolabatur, et desperantes de re publica exhortabatur, et diuitibus opes suas metuentibus exprobrabat seram periculosae auaritiae paenitentiam, et imitari uolentibus magnum circumferebat exemplar, cum inter triginta dominos liber incederet.

Hunc tamen Athenae ipsae in carcere occiderunt, et qui tuto insultauerat agmini tyrannorum, eius libertatem libertas non tulit: ut scias et in afflicta re publica esse occasionem sapienti uiro ad se proferendum, et in florenti ae beata petulantium, inuidiam, mille alia inertia uitia regnare.

Osbert Lancaster, With an Eye to the Future (2):

Very different but no less successful was the technique of instruction employed by Mr. Jevons under whom we acquired the rudiments of Latin and made our first acquaintance with English verse. To this wholly admirable man had been given in abundant measure the power of communicating enthusiasm, and if on occasion he failed quite to infect us with his own passionate interest in the correct use of ‘ut’ he had other methods of enforcing attention. One had only to let one’s gaze stray to the window for a very few seconds, or to take the stealthiest glance at the copy of Chums concealed beneath the desk, to experience a sudden agonising pain in the ear occasioned by a piece of chalk thrown with a force and accuracy I have never seen equalled. But it was only in Latin class that I found myself very often in the target area, for in English literature he never needed to fall back on this peculiar skill to maintain my interest. Tennyson was, I think, his favourite poet and I can still thrill to the memory of his rendering of the ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’ accompanied by the great thwacks on the desk to emphasize the metre, for he was rightly determined that we should fully appreciate the importance of technique and not be encouraged to think that poetry was just a matter of expressing poetic sentiments. Nor, on the other hand, were we left in any doubt that poetry was sense as well as sound and woe betide the boy who, although word-perfect, recited in a monotonous, uncomprehending sing-song.

“Row us out from Desenzano, to your Sirmione row,

So they rowed and there we landed, O venusta Sirmio.”

“Now, Lancaster, what does ‘venusta’ mean? Barty-King, who was the tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago? Wigram, please translate ‘Frater ave atque vale’.” In my case, Jevons’ reward came many years later when, finding myself at San Virgilio gazing out over ‘the Garda lake below’ in the company of Harold and Vita Nicolson, I was able to go through the whole of the first verse while Harold was still scratching his head – the one and only occasion in my life when I have managed to achieve both the appropriate quotation and the appreciative audience at exactly the right moment.