Fritz Heichelheim, who had studied under some of the great continental scholars of the 1920s and 30s, had what could only be called a religious devotion to scholarship. Hounded out of Germany in 1937, he had spent a decade in England before emigrating to Canada, by which time he had published two large volumes on Ancient Economic History and over 400 articles. I was never quite sure what his classes made of him. For one thing, he had retained a strong German accent; so in his first lecture on Greek history bewilderment was relieved only when a student passed around a note saying 'Essence' = 'Athens'.Hat tip: Ian Jackson.
"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 02, 2012
Essence = Athens
Niall Rudd, It Seems Like Yesterday (Produced in Aid of the Classical Association Centennial Fund, 2003), p. 21: