By now I am convinced of three things: 1. every commentator copies his predecessor(s); 2. though carefully seeing to it that the really good comments, preferably those from the 17th century, be omitted; 3. "L'étude approfondie des réalités doit nécessairement précéder le jugement esthétique: sans elle il n'est point d'interprétation littéraire" (L. Robert, in L'Épigramme grecque, Entretiens Hardt, XIV, Genève 1967, 201).Related post: Scholarly Psittacism.
"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 11, 2014
Three Things
H.S. Versnel, "A Parody on Hymns in Martial V 24 and Some Trinitarian Problems," Mnemosyne 27 (1974) 365-405 (at 366, n. 3):