Jowett defined a scholar as a man who read Thucydides with his feet on the mantlepiece; by that test he was a scholar, scarcely by any other.A neatly phrased insult! I haven't been able to locate any such printed definition of a scholar by Benjamin Jowett, who translated Plato and Thucydides. Presumably to pass the test you would need to read the Greek text only, with no help from a dictionary, grammar, or commentary. Thucydides was considered hard to understand even in antiquity. Cicero (Orator 9.30) said, about the speeches in Thucydides, "ipsae illae contiones ita multas habent obscuras abditasque sententias vix ut intellegantur."
"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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Saturday, May 03, 2008
Definition of a Scholar
Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1982; rpt. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 158: