There is a rather obvious lesson to be drawn from all this Quellenforschung, that we philologists are more than occasionally an incestuous and lazy lot, too ready to rely on our predecessors' commentaries instead of checking their sources ourselves. It would be folly to ignore the work of earlier scholars, but it is equally wrong to accept that work uncritically as, particularly in the case of minor details, we too often do.Related posts:
"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, September 02, 2014
A Lazy Lot
Vincent J. Rosivach, "Sources of Some Errors in Catullan Commentaries," Transactions of the American Philological Association 108 (1978) 203-216 (at 216, footnote omitted):