from A Practical Introduction to Greek Accentuation, preface to the second edition (Henry W. Chandler)

Among the lesser evils of existence must surely be numbered the necessity of turning once again to an insipid subject long since thrown aside and forgotten.  This I have been obliged to do, and to perform the dismal duty of revision under some considerable disadvantages.  All my original notes and collections were consigned to the flames years ago, in the firm belief that they would never more be wanted; and the loss of such materials it is now impossible to repair.  In circumstances so embarrassing real help is hard to get.  The indefatigable Lobeck is the only man who collected words of like form on a large scale, and his works were pretty freely used in the first edition.  A few more references to them are now added.  Beyond consulting Lobeck and the Paris Thesaurus, I could do little more than read the grammarians and scholiasts over again and glean a few fresh facts.  In this way, however, considerable additions have been made to the book, though, by enlarging the pages and practising the arts of typographical compression, the original number of pages has barely been exceeded.  Some parts have been rewritten, and scarcely a single paragraph reappears without some change and, it is hoped, improvement.  That all defects have been made good it would be unreasonable to expect, for in the first place, he who deals with Greek accentuation independently, as I have done, has to contend with hosts of petty details which distract his attention, and not unfrequently exhaust his patience.  Every alteration has to be made with the greatest circumspection, and it would be wonderful indeed, where the chances of error are so great, if I have not sometimes gone astray.  In the next place, it is proverbially difficult to detect one's own mistakes, and here let it be remembered that, though I invited criticism and correction, I have received no assistance of any sort or kind.  Let those who noticed faults in the first edition know that they alone are answerable if those faults are repeated in the second.  They had but to speak, and whatever was false or misleading would have been corrected.  All censure now comes too late to be of any use to me.

[...]

In bidding a last farewell to a subject in which I never took more than a languid interest, I may be permitted to say that in England, at all events, every man will accent his Greek properly who wishes to stand well with the world.  He whose accents are irreproachable may indeed be no better than a heathen, but concerning that man who misplaces them, or, worse still, altogether omits them, damaging inferences will certainly be drawn, and in most instances with justice.

Fragment of a Greek Tragedy (A.E. Housman)

ALCMAEON  CHORUS

Cho. O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?

My object in enquiring is to know.
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,

Nod with your hand to signify as much.
Alc. I journeyed hither a Boeotian road.
Cho. Sailing on horseback or with feet for oars?
Alc. Plying by turns my partnership of legs.
Cho. Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
Alc. Mud’s sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.
Cho. To learn your name would not displease me much.
Alc. Not all that men desire do they obtain.
Cho. Might I then hear at what your presence shoots?
Alc. A shepherd’s questioned mouth informed me that –
Cho. What? for I know not yet what you will say.
Alc. Nor will you ever, if you interrupt.
Cho. Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.
Alc. – this house was Eriphyla’s, no one’s else.
Cho. Nor did he shame his throat with hateful lies.
Alc. Might I then enter, passing through the door?
Cho. Go, chase into the house a lucky foot.
And, O my son, be, on the one hand, good,
And do not, on the other hand, be bad;
For that is very much the safest plan.
Alc. I go into the house with heels and speed.

CHORUS

In speculation                                             (Strophe)
I would not willingly acquire a name
For ill-digested thought,
But, after pondering much,
To this conclusion I at last have come:
Life is uncertain.
This truth I have written deep
In my reflective midriff,
On tablets not of wax.
Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there
For many reasons: Life, I say, is not
A stranger to uncertainty.
Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This fact did I discover,
Nor did the Delphic tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingenuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.

Why should I mention                                 (Antistrophe)
The Inachian daughter, loved of Zeus,
Her whom of old the gods,
More provident than kind,
Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
A gift not asked for:
And sent her forth to learn
The unfamiliar science
Of how to chew the cud?
She, therefore, all about the Argive fields,
Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,
Nor did they disagree with her.
Yet, howso’er nutritious, such repasts,
I do not hanker after.
Never may Cypris for her seat select
My dappled liver!
Why should I mention lo? Why indeed?
I have no notion why.

But now does my boding heart                    (Epode)
Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
A strain not meet for the dance.
Yea, even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes
(The right, nor omit I the left)
Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many shipwrecks of cows.
I therefore in a Cissian strain lament,
And to the rapid,
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.

Eriphyla: (within) O, I am smitten with a hatchet’s jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
Cho. I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
Erip. He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.
Cho. I would not be reputed rash, but yet
I doubt if all be gay within the house.
Erip. O! O! another stroke! That makes the third.
He stabs me to the heart against my wish.
Cho. If that be so, thy state of health is poor;
But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

Autumn Journal IX (Louis MacNeice)

Now we are back to normal, now the mind is

    Back to the even tenor of the usual day

Skidding no longer across the uneasy cambers

    Of the nightmare way.

We are safe though others have crashed the railings

    Over the river ravine; their wheel-tracks carve the bank

But after the event all we can do is argue

    And count the widening ripples where they sank.

October comes with rain whipping around the ankles

    In waves of white at night:

And filling the raw clay trenches (the parks of London

    Are a nasty sight).

In a week I return to work, lecturing, coaching,

    As impresario of the Ancient Greeks

Who wore the chiton and lived on fish and olives

    And talked philosophy or smut in cliques;

Who believed in youth and did not gloze the unpleasant

    Consequences of age;

What is life, one said, or what is pleasant

    Once you have turned the page

Of love?  The days grow worse, the dice are loaded

    Against the living man who pays in tears for breath;

Never to be born was the best, call no man happy

    This side death.

Conscious - long before Engels - of necessity

    And therein free

They plotted out their life with truism and humour

    Between the jealous heaven and the callous sea.

And Pindar sang the garland of wild olive

    And Alcibiades lived from hand to mouth

Double-crossing Athens, Persia, Sparta,

    And many died in the city of plague, and many of drouth

In Sicilian quarries, and many by the spear and arrow

    And many more who told their lies too late

Caught in the eternal factions and reactions

    Of the city-state.

And free speech shivered on the pikes of Macedonia

    And later on the swords of Rome

And Athens became a mere university city

    And the goddess born of the foam

Became the kept hetaera, heroine of Menander,

    And the philosopher narrowed his focus, confined

His efforts to putting his own soul in order

    And keeping a quiet mind.

And for a thousand years they went on talking,

    Making such apt remarks,

A race no longer of heroes but of professors

    And crooked business men and secretaries and clerks;

Who turned out dapper little elegiac verses

    On the ironies of fate, the transience of all

Affections, carefully shunning an over-statement

    But working the dying fall.

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it

    Page by page

To train the mind or even to point a moral

    For the present age:

Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,

    The golden mean between opposing ills

Though there were exceptions of course but only exceptions - 

    The bloody Bacchanals on the Thracian hills.

So the humanist in his room with Jacobean panels

    Chewing his pipe and looking on a lazy quad

Chops the Ancient World to turn a sermon

    To the greater glory of God.

But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;

    These dead are dead

And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas

    I think instead

Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists

    The careless athletes and the fancy boys,

The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics

    And the Agora and the noise

Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring

    Libations over graves

And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly

    I think of the slaves.

And how one can imagine oneself among them

    I do not know;

It was all so unimaginably different

    And all so long ago.

Dover Beach (Matthew Arnold)

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in. 

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. 

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

from Bluff Your Way in the Classics (Ross Leckie)

Thucydides (460-400 BC)

By means of making up speeches in his History for the people who made up the war in which they say what he thought they thought they did or ought to, might have, could have done, thereby explaining, commenting, elucidating and rationalising in accord with a History written not for the applause of the moment but for all time and resting on what he himself saw and on the reports of others, after careful research aiming at the greatest possible accuracy in each case, he wrote a history of and, to a large extent, created the Peloponnesian War.

The Return of Odysseus (George Bilgere)

When Odysseus finally does get home
he is understandably upset about the suitors,
who have been mooching off his wife for twenty years,
drinking his wine, eating his mutton, etc.

In a similar situation today he would seek legal counsel.
But those were different times. With the help
of his son Telemachus he slaughters roughly
one hundred and ten suitors
and quite a number of young ladies,
although in view of their behavior
I use the term loosely. Rivers of blood
course across the palace floor.

I too have come home in a bad mood.
Yesterday, for instance, after the department meeting,
when I ended up losing my choice parking spot
behind the library to the new provost.

I slammed the door. I threw down my book bag
in this particular way I have perfected over the years
that lets my wife understand
the contempt I have for my enemies,
which is prodigious. And then with great skill
she built a gin and tonic
that would have pleased the very gods,
and with epic patience she listened
as I told her of my wrath, and of what I intended to do
to so-and-so, and also to what's-his-name.

And then there was another gin and tonic
and presently my wrath abated and was forgotten,
and peace came to reign once more
in the great halls and courtyards of my house.