A splendid ruin, like a Greek statue with nose knocked off, arms gone, privy parts lost, but still Greek, splendid in decay, and capable of saying mighty things.I have not read the novel, and I owe the quotation to an essay by Barry Baldwin entitled "Classicists in Fiction".
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, July 16, 2007
New Testament Greek
In Robinson Davies' novel The Rebel Angel (Penguin Books, 1983), a Greek professor named Simon Darcourt describes New Testament Greek thus (p. 46):