Laudator Temporis Acti

Richard Doeblin, review of Appendix Vergiliana. Recognoverunt et adnotatione critica instruxerunt W.V. Clausen, F.R.D. Goodyear, E.J. Kenney, J.A. Richmond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), in Classical Philology 63.3 (July, 1968) 247-251 (at 250-251, footnote omitted):

It is my duty to come now to the gravest defect in this book, which is the incompetence of Goodyear. Goodyear's work is ignorant, mindless, and tasteless. His Ciris, as you have seen, is appalling. His Aetna, on which I shall shortly publish an article, is truly portentous in its ignorance, ugliness, and stupidity.

The eminent Latinists H.D. Jocelyn and C.O. Brink vigorously defended Goodyear in letters to the editor (with a rather anemic rejoinder by Doeblin) in "Correspondence," Classical Philology 64.2 (April, 1969) 115-116. So far as I can tell, Doeblin never followed up on his promise to review Goodyear's separate edition and commentary on Aetna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). Indeed, Doeblin (1940-1994) seems never to have published another word on any classical subject.

F.R.D. Goodyear himself could be a harsh critic—he was even once dubbed "Housman redivivus". See, for example, his dismissal of the "Swedish school" of Tacitean scholars (Einar Löfstedt, Gunnar Sörbom, Nils Eriksson), in his commentary on Tacitus' Annals, vol. I, p. 24:

Indeed I must go further: much of their work is shoddy, ill-considered, and misleading.

On Goodyear (1936-1987) see the obituaries by James Diggle, Proceedings of the British Academy 74 (1988) 361-372, J.B. Hall, Acta Classica 31 (1988) 5-11, and H.D. Jocelyn, Gnomon 60.8 (1988) 763-765. F.R.D. Goodyear