What one looks for in a work of reference is the primary evidence, complete and on clear record. There is no call for long disquisitions or doxology. By contrast, the scholarship of the recent age all too often allows the facts to be choked in verbiage or sunk in bibliography.
"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, March 23, 2023
A Work of Reference
Ronald Syme, "Missing Persons III," in his Roman Papers, II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 530-540 (at 540):