Two Thousand Five Hundred Years of Occasional Misanthropy

A professor at my Canadian alma mater shared this quotation when George W. Bush was re-elected President of the US. (After well over a year of disastrous wars that many classmates, professors, and I deeply opposed.)

Πολλά τα δεινά κουδέν ανθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.

When researching the quotation years ago, I found this translation:

MANY a wonder lives and moves, but the wonder of all is man,
That courseth over the grey ocean, carried of Southern gale,
Faring amidst high-swelling seas that rudely surge around,
And Earth, supreme of mighty Gods, eldest, imperishable,
Eternal, he with patient furrow wears and wears away
As year by year the plough-shares turn and turn [...].

From Sophocles: The Seven Plays in English Verse (1906) [Project Gutenberg] by Lewis Campbell

Leaping to the present day, and watching in the TV evening news the rubble to which Ukrainian apartment buildings are reduced during the ongoing invasion, I think Sophocles was wrong. I doubt whether we rule the Earth, and would propose that the Earth subsumes us.

Either way the word for 'wonderful' is etymologically a twisty word in ancient Greek; looking at the root of it, δεινός can also mean "fearful, terrible." (Ungeheuerlich in German.)

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Far less ambivalent, this passage from Aeschylus's The Libation Bearers:

πολλὰ μὲν γᾶ τρέφει 

δεινὰ καὶ δειμάτων ἄχη, 

πόντιαί τ᾽ ἀγκάλαι κνωδάλων 

ἀνταίων βρύουσι: 

Many are the horrors, dread and appalling, bred of earth, and the arms of the deep teem with hateful monsters.

I think it was as a figurative piece of fantasy; but these metaphorical horrors and monsters we can recognize as the spirits inhabiting our physical landscape today.

From Aeschylus (1926) [Cambridge: Harvard University Press; found on Perseus] by Herbert Weir Smyth 

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These 2,500-year-old verses make me think again of my Opapa's findings:

As long ago as ancient Egypt, history has just kept repeating itself.