These details I have thought it appropriate to repeat, in the very words in which they were formulated and handed down, although the memory of every practice, religious and secular, has been effaced by our preference for all that is new and foreign in place of what is native and traditional.
etsi omnis divini humanique moris memoria abolevit nova peregrinaque omnia priscis ac patriis praeferendo, haud ab re duxi verbis quoque ipsis, ut tradita nuncupataque sunt, referre.
"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, October 17, 2019
Our Preference
Livy 8.11.1 (tr. Betty Radice):