The secret of his power was I believe also the source of his greatness as a historian. It was not his extraordinary learning (of which even Fraenkel was said to be afraid), or his ability to range over the whole of European history. It was his refusal to distinguish between scholarship and life; history was not a discipline to be practised in working hours in an institutional environment according to certain rules: it was a way of life, to be pursued with the same passionate commitment as life itself.
"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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Friday, July 28, 2017
A Way of Life
Oswyn Murray, "Arnaldo Momigliano, 1908-1987,"
Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987) xi-xii (at xii):