A large number of classicists today might be classified as romantic escapists, impelled to burrow for warmth into the womb of a pre-industrial, non-atomic, unmechanized antiquity.If I dared to call myself a classicist, I would plead guilty as charged.
"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).
Pages
▼
Sunday, September 24, 2017
Escapists
Peter Green, "The Humanities Today," Essays in Antiquity (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1960), pp. 1-25 (at 8):