Monday, May 10, 2010
Reading Thucydides
Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, to which is added Porsoniana (London: Robson, Levey, and Franklyn, 1856), p. 323 (on Richard Porson):
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He confessed to me and the present Bishop of Durham (Maltby), that he knew comparatively little of Thucydides,—that, when he read him, he was obliged to mark with a pencil, in almost every page, passages which he did not understand.I can't find the source of Benjamin Jowett's definition of a scholar, mentioned by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1982; rpt. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 158:
Jowett defined a scholar as a man who read Thucydides with his feet on the mantlepiece; by that test he was a scholar, scarcely by any other.
