Laudator Temporis Acti

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 38.4 (1917) 454-460 (at 457-458):

Lysias is to me a name to conjure with, and I hope I shall be pardoned for recalling the part the son of Kephalos has played in my life—for my living has also been my life, as it is with all real teachers of Greek. Yes—the name itself has interested me, and some years ago, forgetting my favourite quotation 'non omnis aetas, Lyde, ludo convenit', I set up a mock defence of Teichmüller's identification of the Dionysodoros of Plato's Euthydemus with Lysias. Lysias, I said, is evidently the short for Lysanias, the name of his grandfather, and I propounded the equation Λυσανίας = Λυαίος = Διόνυσος—a winged word which was promptly hawked at by a mousing owl of a German reviewer.¹ My first acquaintance with Lysias goes back to 1850, when I bought out of my scant allowance a copy of the Berlin ed. of the Attic orators, to find alas! as I went on in my studies that I had been swindled by somebody. A leaf of the Παναθηναϊκός of Isokrates had taken the place of a leaf of the Περὶ παραπρεσβείας of Demosthenes. This is no solitary experience in the case of German editions, and I have occasionally registered a complaint (e.g. A.J.P. VIII 119). The mention of those Berlin days calls up the image of Johannes Franz (Φρασικλῆς) who admitted me to his Schola Graeca and gave me the name Χρυσοβραχίων. He too is a Lysianic reminiscence, for he edited Lysias in the year in which I was born. For years my favourite edition was the pretty pocket-edition by Westermann, which I proceeded to disfigure by marginal and other notes. It perished, to my sorrow, in the flood of water turned upon my library at the time of the Johns Hopkins fire. The scholar to whom I owe my first introduction to Lysias was Rauchenstein, the same who helped me in my first studies of Pindar. It may seem strange to some that the same man should have been an enthusiastic student of two authors so diverse as Lysias and Pindar (A.J.P. XXIV 108), but such a one has never considered the processes of wine-taster and tea-taster. Somewhere in the 'to-hu bo-hu' of my MSS there is a Greek exercise-book, based on Lysias, a safer model than Xenophon. Fifty years ago when a local Sir Oracle said to me that his test of Greek scholarship was a mastery of Pindar and Athenaeus, I ventured to remark that my test was an honest enjoyment of Lysias.

¹ A.J.P. XXXV 364.