Louis MacNeice, "The Gloomy Academic"

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... 
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.

--Louis MacNeice, "The Gloomy Academic"