Laudator Temporis Acti

William M. Calder III, "Harvard Classics, 1950-1956: Reminiscences of S. Dow, J.P. Elder, J.H. Finley, W.C. Greene, Werner Jaeger, A.D. Nock, Joshua Whatmough and C.H. Whitman," Eikasmos 4 (1993) 39-49 (at 47-48):

The comparative Indo-Europeanist, Joshua Whatmough, was an hilariously amusing Englishman. He detested classicists and was delighted that an architect and not a classicist deciphered Linear B, «the greatest discovery since Bentley discovered the digamma!» He often said the only reason to read Thucydides was to find grammatical peculiarities. He insisted that Dawn in Homer was rosy-toed, not rosy-fingered. Daktylos could be either. He was fighting battles still with colleagues who had died when we were children. He would cite an unfortunate sentence of E.K. Rand on Ovid, Amores 1. 6: «the tone of this poem is parody ... permeating the substance like a perfume invisible but appreciable by those who have the sense of smell»; and add: «What Rand said is, 'Ovid, Amores 1. 6 smells', and this I do not understand.» He included the remark in his first Sather.

Joshua Whatmough, Poetic, Scientific and other Forms of Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956 = Sather Classical Lectures, 29), p. 26:

Rand's remark (apropos also of Catullus) that "we moderns are oblivious to form" is, as we shall see, nearer the mark (if I may be allowed to write insensible for his oblivious), but goes on, alas, "and search for spirit." Far worse (I say nothing of his mixed metaphors, which he did not write to sustain any theory of synaesthesia) is his comment on Ovid Amores 1.6: "the tone of this poem is parody . . . permeating the substance like a perfume, invisible but appreciable by those who have the sense of smell," with its implication that Rand had, but I have not, this sense of smell. Be that as it may, I have, let me insist, a sense of sense, and of nonsense, and of the difference between sense and nonsense. What Rand said is, "Ovid Amores 1.6 smells," and this I do not understand. Such a statement, nonsensical as it is, is meaningless; it is neither connectible with experience nor communicable to others, it evokes no response: for smell has to do with the inhibition of certain enzymes contained in the olfactory organs, changes in the concentration of which are converted into distinguishable neural signals. Education in such meaningless rubbish as comment on the smell of a poem is demoralizing. I know whereof I speak; I know also that it took a quarter of a century to shake myself free of it. Read Ovid if you will, trifler as he was; but do not tell me that any poem is pervaded by perfume. I know, or think I know, what Rand may have meant; but he did not say it.

Rand's "unfortunate sentence" appeared in his book The Building of Eternal Rome (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943), p. 135:

The tone of this poem is parody, not openly displayed as in a Culex or a "Battle of Frogs and Mice," but here and throughout this volume of Amores permeating the substance like a perfume, invisible but appreciable, by those who have the sense of smell.