The book is only doing its best to reflect a traditional conception of 'the Classics'. But I for one wish that we did not still label ourselves with that quaint label, which seems to say to the world 'our study is concerned with the great writers who ought to form the basis of your education'. I wish we had a name corresponding to Altertumswissenschaft, that would strengthen the conception of the study of antiquity as a unity and as a science.
"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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Tuesday, February 18, 2014
A Quaint Label
M.L. West, Hellenica: Selected Papers on Greek Literature and Thought, Vol. III: Philosophy, Music and Metre, Literary Byways, Varia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 485: