The opus of Bonnefond-Coudry will be immensely useful; yet when we proceed to details (and the book will be used as an encyclopedia) doubts emerge. There are often too many words and too few facts (morbus thesarum Franco-Gallicarum). And the facts are not always the right facts, and if they are right they are not always presented in a right way.
"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 25, 2014
Morbus Thesarum Franco-Gallicarum
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 126), rpt. in Roman Questions II. Selected Papers (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007), pp. 37-39 (at 38):