- Oct 2022
-
laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com
-
Laudator Temporis Acti
https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/
Michael Gilleland is an antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon.
The title of the blog and Gilleland's calling himself a curmudgeon calls to mind Horace...
-
-
latin.stackexchange.com latin.stackexchange.com
-
[T.S.] Eliot stood—as he once famously said of himself—for conservatism in politics, classicism in literature, and Catholicism, or rather Anglo-Catholicism, in religion. He looked back into the past, the mediaeval past, as a confirmed laudator temporis acti and in the mediaeval past he looked back not only to John Donne among the metaphysical poets, nor only to William Shakespeare among the Elizabethan dramatists, but before them to the great Dante among Italian poets and behind Dante, though not so obviously, to St. Thomas Aquinas among the scholastic theologians. (From "T.S. Eliot's Metaphysics" by Peter Milward, Culture and Civilization 2009.)
-
-
Local file Local file
-
laudator temporis acti
laudator temporis acti translates as "a praiser of times past"
Calls to mind:
Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod quaerit et inventis miser abstinet ac timet uti, vel quod res omnis timide gelideque ministrat, dilator, spe longus, iners avidusque futuri, difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti se puero, castigator censorque minorum. —Horace's Ars Poetica (line 173)
Many ills encompass an old man, whether because he seeks gain, and then miserably holds aloof from his store and fears to use it, or because, in all that he does, he lacks fire and courage, is dilatory and slow to form hopes, is sluggish and greedy of a longer life, peevish, surly, given to praising the days he spent as a boy, and to reproving and condemning the young. (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough)
In Horace's version he's talking about a old curmudgeon and the phrase often has a pejorative tinge. It generally is used to mean someone who defends earlier periods of history ("the good old days") usually prior to their own lives and which they haven't directly experienced, as better than the present.
Compare this with the sentiment behind Donald J. Trump's "Make America Great Again". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again
The end of the passage also has historical precedent and hints of "You kids get off my lawn!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_kids_get_off_my_lawn!
-