Anyone reading a straight prose translation of Horace may well wonder why anyone bothers to read such stuff in any language, and why Horace bothered to write it in the first place.
"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, April 03, 2018
Stuff
Horace, Epodes and Odes. A New Annotated Latin Edition by Daniel H. Garrison (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1991), p. vii (from the editor's Preface):