9/1/2023 0 Comments Bad company ruins good moralsThis attribution appears to be due to Jerome in his Commentary on Titus (chapter 1), although some others also mention it unfortunately, I have neither a hardcopy nor an online version of this work, so I only know this through a secondary source. The most common attribution is to the comedies of Menander. Socrates seems to be the only person to attribute the line to the tragedies of Euripides. There's lots of room for the line being in one of the many lost plays. We only have at most 19 complete plays out of an oeuvre that may have originally had as many as 90, and the ones we had are a bit of an odd selection, since we get them from one anthology of ten plays that was probably used in schools and one surviving volume of a larger alphabetical collection of his plays (which is why so many of the titles of Euripides' extant plays start with H or I), somewhat as if we were trying to reconstruct Shakespeare from a school textbook and volume 3 of an alphabetical collected works. It's worth keeping in mind that this doesn't mean much. Unfortunately, the line doesn't occur in any extant play by Euripides. Whence did he get the saying, ‘The Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, slow-bellies,’ but from a perusal of The Oracles of Epimenides, the Cretan Initiator? Or how would he have known this, ‘For we are also his offspring,’ had he not been acquainted with The Phenomena of Aratus the astronomer? Again this sentence, ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners,’ is a sufficient proof that he was conversant with the tragedies of Euripides. Should any one imagine that in making these assertions we wrest the Scriptures from their legitimate construction, let it be remembered that the Apostle not only does not forbid our being instructed in Greek learning, but that he himself seems by no means to have neglected it, inasmuch as he knows many of the sayings of the Greeks. In context ( Book III, Chapter 16), Socrates is talking about our very subject, Paul's quotations from Greek pagan literature: In his Ecclesiastical History, from the fifth century, Socrates Scholasticus claims that it is a quotation of Euripides. It actually is a good iambic line in the Greek, and so is exactly the sort of thing you would expect to find in a Greek tragedy or comedy. 'Bad company corrupts good character' is widely regarded from very early as a quotation. Another passage in which Paul seems to be quoting a pagan author is in I Corinthians 15:ĭo not be misled: “Bad company corrupts good character.” Come back to your senses as you ought, and stop sinning for there are some who are ignorant of God-I say this to your shame.
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