It is easy to carp. The blame rests not with the hand that wrote the book, but with the absurd academic system that rewards effuse scribbling and frowns upon concise lucidity. It is not by accident that Louis Robert had never written a thèse.
"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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Sunday, May 18, 2014
An Absurd Academic System
J. Linderski, review of Marianne Bonnefond-Coudry, Le Sénat de la république romaine de la guerre d'Hannibal à Auguste: Pratiques délibératives et prise de décision (Rome: École française de Rome, 1989), in American Journal of Philology 113.1 (Spring 1992) 125-128 (at 127-128), rpt. in Roman Questions II. Selected Papers (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), pp. 37-39 (at 39):