His students were fascinated by his style and learning, and they enjoyed mimicking his accent with its fudged r's. On one occasion, after rejecting all the orthodox explantions for the fall of the Roman Empire, he said, 'It was almost entirely due to glain lust.' For a moment they wondered if this was some sexual deviation they'd never heard of, but in the end realised that the factor in question was grain rust.
"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, March 04, 2013
The Fall of the Roman Empire
Niall Rudd, It Seems Like Yesterday (Produced in Aid of the Classical Association Centennial Fund, 2003), p. 19 (on Gilbert Bagnani, Professor at the University of Toronto):