A commentary on a fragmentary work normally requires much more space than a commentary on a fully surviving author. In a surviving author the context for every piece of information is automatically provided; for fragments the historical and literary context of each piece has to be divined by a modern commentator.
"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 31, 2014
Commentaries on Fragments
J. Linderski, review of Gary Forsythe, The Historian L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi and the Roman Annalistic Tradition (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994), in American Journal of Philology 117 (1996) 329–332 (at 330), rpt. in Roman Questions II. Selected Papers (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), pp. 299-302 (at 300):