Wednesday, February 07, 2018
Learning by Heart
John Edwin Sandys (1844-1922), A History of Classical Scholarship, Vol. III: The Eighteenth Century in Germany, and the Nineteenth Century in Europe and the United States of America (1908; rpt. New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1958), p. 152 (on Friedrich Mezger):
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It may be added that he was led to his well-known theory of catch-words in Pindar by the practice of learning each ode by heart before commenting on it5.Walter Headlam (1866–1908), introduction to Herodas, The Mimes and Fragments (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1922), p. ix:
5 Biogr. Jahrb. 1894, 78-86.
The text has been difficult to restore and explain: it is not, when restored and explained, difficult to appreciate. At first critics were all puzzled, and the art is indeed of a new species. Still it is surprising and not encouraging that so many allusions have been left unexplained, considering that somewhere, if we can only find it, there exists the clue to a solution of them all. There is only one way: learn your author by heart—every word, and then set to work to read.
