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← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

Reading language

Book I Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Time

On the nature and parts of time, and the many things of which it is a cause.²⁴⁸

1 Sophocles

Time uncovers everything and brings it into ⟨the⟩ light.

2 Xenophanes

The gods did not reveal everything to mortals from the beginning; by searching, however, they discover better in time.²⁴⁹

3 Philemon

Pamphilus, as time walks on it makes not only bodies grow, but troubles too.²⁵⁰

4 ⟨Chaeremon⟩

There is nothing in human affairs that those who search do not discover in time.²⁵¹

5 Antiphanes

Of all who share the secret, time frightens me the most: I cannot find a way to escape its notice forever.²⁵²

6 Theodectes

But, wretched Thyestes, endure: bite down on anger’s bridle. I urge this on you, though you are sharpened to fury now; boundless time dims everything and brings it under its hand.²⁵³

7 Agathon

I have never thought it right to court the times.²⁵⁴

8 Menander

To learn the whole affair correctly takes time.²⁵⁵

9 The same author

Master, it befits the wise among mortals to examine the truth in the course of time.²⁵⁶

10 Critias

Time is a remedy for all anger.²⁵⁷

11 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

After a shadow, time grows old most quickly.

12 ⟨An unidentified poet⟩

In time, old things become new again.²⁵⁸

13 Nicostratus, The Spartans

Nothing is harder to please than time: the same things never please this god.

14 Agathon

They say that time is wise by nature.

15 ⟨Simonides⟩

For no deed is there a greater test than time, which has revealed even the mind within a man’s breast.²⁵⁹

16 ⟨An unidentified lyric poet⟩

Would that opportunity were as clearly visible as it is hidden, opportunity, which grows most through watchful care.²⁶⁰

17 Sophocles

In view of this, hide nothing: time, which sees and hears everything, unfolds it all.²⁶¹

18 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

Time, O Time, together with the mighty need of life, you discover many wise things for those who seek.²⁶²

19 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

Those who do something wicked cannot escape notice: time sees keenly, for it sees everything.

20 Euripides, Alope

Time will tell everything to those who come later; he is a chatterbox, speaking even to those who do not ask.²⁶³

21 Sophocles, Oedipus (614-615)

Time alone reveals a just man, but you could recognize a bad one in a single day.

22 Simonides, Epigrams

Time, with his sharp teeth, wears everything away, even the mightiest.

23 Sophocles, Ajax (646-649)

Long, uncountable time brings forth all hidden things and hides what has appeared. Nothing is beyond expectation: even a dreadful oath and stubborn minds are conquered.²⁶⁴

24 ⟨The same author, Ajax (714)⟩

Great time withers everything.

25 Euripides, Hippolytus

Time, as it passes, tends to tell the truth about everything.

26 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

Time brings all hidden things into the light.

27 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

But time will show these things; for it alone is the judge of human beings.

28 ⟨An unidentified tragic poet⟩

Time eventually makes a just man known.

29 Philemon

In time all things come to be and are judged.

30 Chaeremon

Walking slowly, time reaches everything.²⁶⁵

31 Menander

Nothing in mortal life is beyond belief, nor could it be: time and the ways of living beings weave many strange and marvelous things.²⁶⁶

32 Chaeremon

There is nothing in human affairs that those who search do not discover in time.

33 The same author

Time softens everything and works it to completion.

34 Philemon

All the arts that have arisen, Laches, were taught by time, not by the teacher.

35 †Anagenes

Long time tests everything and brings it to light, Nicophon.²⁶⁷

36 Hermippus

He is round in appearance, you rascal, and goes around in a circle, holding everything within himself. He gives birth to us as he runs around the whole earth. He is called the year; being circular, he ⟨has⟩ no end and no beginning. Forever wheeling his body, he never stops running through the day, day after day.²⁶⁸

37 Cleobulus the sage, Riddles

One father, ⟨and⟩ twelve sons; each of them has sixty daughters, divided into two kinds in appearance: some are white to look upon, others black; though immortal, all of them pass away.²⁶⁹

38 Moschion

First I shall go back and unfold in words human life’s beginning and its condition. There was once that age, there was a time when mortals lived in ways resembling beasts, dwelling in mountain caves and sunless ravines. There was as yet no roofed house, no broad city fortified with towers of stone. No curved ploughs cut the dark soil, nurse of nourishing grain; no laboring iron tended the flourishing vineyards of wine that prompts the Bacchic cry. The earth was barren, †deaf and flowing.²⁷⁰ Carnivorous feeding gave them feasts in which they killed one another. Law was lowly, while Violence shared the throne of Zeus, and the weak were food for the stronger.²⁷¹

38 Moschion, continued

But when time, which gives birth to everything and nourishes it, changed mortal life to its opposite, whether drawing on Prometheus’s care, or on necessity, or through long experience making nature itself the teacher, then the grain of holy Demeter was discovered for cultivated food, and Bacchus’s sweet spring was found. Earth, once unsown, was now ploughed by oxen drawing the yoke. People fortified towns and built sheltered houses; they brought a life grown wild into a civilized way of living. From then on law ordained that the dead be covered in tombs and that dust be allotted to unburied corpses, leaving no visible reminder of the impious feasting of the past.²⁷²

248.The chapter combines poetic sayings about time’s effects with philosophical definitions. Ousia asks what time is; the later reports answer in terms of motion, measure, number, and interval.

249.Mortals are the searchers in the second line. “Discover better” preserves the comparative: inquiry brings improvement, without a claim that it has reached a final, complete result.

250.Pragmata can mean affairs, difficulties, or troubles. The comic contrast with bodily growth favors “troubles” here, though the surrounding scene is absent.

251.These lines recur as excerpt 32, where Chaeremon’s name is transmitted. The supplied heading here follows that parallel; both occurrences are retained.

252.Time is personified as someone who knows what the speaker has done. Aei, “always” or “forever,” makes concealment something that cannot last indefinitely.

253.The bridle figures restraint of anger; the next image presents the angry man as a sharpened blade. The printed text incorporates repairs to damaged wording.

254.“Court the times” interprets charisasthai chronois as accommodating prevailing circumstances. Both key words depend on editorial corrections; the isolated line gives no further context.

255.The Greek is an infinitival maxim, literally “to learn the whole affair correctly with time.”

256.The heading links the lines to Menander. The apparatus questions their attribution and records uncertainty in the opening construction; the translation follows the printed text.

257.Wachsmuth retains the heading but suggests that Critias’s name may belong to one of the following excerpts. The attribution is therefore not secure.

258.Wachsmuth leaves the poet unidentified rather than attaching this line to Nicostratus. The Latin descriptive headings for anonymous poets are rendered in Greek and English.

259.Basanos is a test or touchstone. The attribution to Simonides is supplied from the editorial evidence discussed by Wachsmuth; it is not an intact author-heading here.

260.Kairos is the opportune or critical moment, distinct from time simply passing. The second line associates making the most of that moment with attentiveness. Wachsmuth rejects the earlier attachment of Agathon’s name.

261.The apparatus identifies the lines through a parallel quotation as belonging to Sophocles’s Hipponous. The seeing and hearing of personified time make it an inescapable witness.

262.“Need” follows chrēmosynāi, an editorial correction to a damaged word. The source leaves the tragic poet unidentified; the name Sophocles is assigned to the preceding excerpt.

263.The printed heading is retained, but Wachsmuth questions whether these comic-sounding lines belong to Euripides and whether the heading was displaced.

264.The image of capture applies to both an oath and a fixed resolve: neither is beyond time’s power to alter. The excerpt presents a dramatic speaker’s reflection on change.

265.The last word contains an editorial supplement and remains difficult. “Reaches everything” follows the printed to pan, literally “the whole”; the apparatus offers alternatives including “reaches the end.”

266.Poikillei suggests making something varied or intricate. The final phrase adds living beings’ ways or dispositions to time as a source of unexpected events.

267.The dagger marks a corrupt author-name. “Anagenes” only transliterates what is printed; it is not a secure identification. Exelenchei combines the ideas of testing and exposing.

268.The year is pictured as a circular living figure that brings the speakers into being. The isolated excerpt does not identify who “we” are. The long verse lines are preserved without imposing an English meter.

269.The riddle can be read as the year, its twelve months, and thirty days paired with thirty nights in each month. The riddle uses a schematic month rather than asserting that every observed month has thirty days. Individual days pass, while the cycle continues.

270.The dagger marks a corrupt line. The literal “deaf and flowing” reproduces the printed words without claiming a coherent recovered sense; the apparatus proposes several incompatible repairs.

271.The poem gives time a civilizing role, moving from violence to agriculture, settled homes, and burial. Law and Violence are personified as rival powers.

272.The poem leaves several explanations of progress open: Prometheus’s care, necessity, and nature teaching through experience. Demeter’s grain and Bacchus’s wine stand for cultivated food and drink. Burial closes the imagined transition away from cannibalism.