complaints about millennials from ancient greece and rome

agingwunderkind:

sigaloenta:

thoodleoo:

1. ungrateful, wait with eagerness for the day of their fathers’ deaths (seneca’s de beneficiis)
2. travel everywhere, take up agriculture instead of letting nature provide (tibullus 1.3)
3. carp at their parents, praise evil-doers and their violent deeds (hesiod, works and days)
4. spend too much time talking about philosophy and pretending to be greek to fight wars (plutarch, life of cato the elder)
5. bad at riding horses (horace, odes 3.24)
6. can’t lift boulders (homer, iliad 20)
7. still can’t lift boulders (vergil, aeneid 12)

8. spend all their time declaiming about pirate-chieftains and tyrannicides and oracles commanding human sacrifices and what kind of preparation is that for the real world? (Eumolpus in Petronius, Messala in Tacitus’ Dialogus, a bunch of others)

9. only care about snappy one-liners and ignore good periodic Ciceronian prose (Quintilian, IO 10)

9. take up stupid trendy fads like vegetarianism (Seneca the Younger’s father yelled at him about this, apparently)

10. use philosophy as an excuse to avoid the duties of a Roman senator (Tacitus, Hist. 4.4)

tag urself i’m 10