I am delighted to find that you hold an opinion in common with one I have long entertained, and indeed cherished. It is, that the character of the Romans under the Empire has been drawn by very unfair hands, and exhibited to us through a very questionable medium — that of a satirical historian, Tacitus; a scandal-loving biographer, Suetonius; a professed satirist, Juvenal; and a writer who lived long after the time of any of them, and under a new order of men and things — Dion Cassius.Hat tip: Ian Jackson.
"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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Thursday, September 28, 2017
The Character of the Romans Under the Empire
William Bodham Donne, letter to Richard Chenevix Trench (August 16, 1873):