The true lover of antiquity

To truly convey a love of the past, one must free oneself of the present:

The cult of antiquity has always been a kind of madness at Babylon.  Credit for this must be given to Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king.  He spent his life digging up forgotten cities.  When Cyrus invaded Babylonia, Nabonidus was so busy trying to decipher the contents of the foundation stone of a thirty-two-century-old temple that he never noticed that he was no longer king until he returned to the city one evening and found Cyrus in residence at the new palace.  At least that's the story the black-haired people like to tell.  Actually, Nabonidus was captured, imprisoned, freed.  He then went back to his digging.

Between Nabonidus and his friend Amasis, the pharaoh of Egypt, the past was--and is--constantly being not only disinterred but imitated.  Nothing can ever be old enough or ugly enough for the true lover of antiquity. 

Gore Vidal, Creation, p. 314

So & So From Wherever

Michel de Montaigne, Of Glory, (tr. Charles Cotton)

Of so many thousands of valiant men who have died within these fifteen hundred years in France with their swords in their hands, not a hundred have come to our knowledge.  The memory, not of the commanders only, but of battles and victories, is buried and gone; the fortunes of above half of the world, for want of a record, stir not from their place, and vanish without duration.

Matthew Arnold, Rugby Chapel

What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth? --
Most men eddy about
Here and there -- eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and then they die --
Perish; -- and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves,
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean,  have swell'd,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.