Like environment, the influence of race and extraction on character is of great importance. It would be folly to deny it. Folly also to deny the difficulties of a topic that offers such scope for cloudy thought and obscure language.
"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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Monday, March 06, 2023
Folly
Ronald Syme, review of W. Weber, Rom: Herrschertum und Reich im
zweiten Jahrhundert, in his Roman Papers, I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 55-61 (at 58):