In all this I have perhaps wearied you with my prattling and my idle talk, being afflicted with a sort of dullness of wit (for you see I have been praising myself, as Astydamas4 did).Related posts:
4 An Athenian tragic poet of the middle of the fourth century B.C. He wrote a laudatory inscription to be carved upon a pedestal of a bust of himself which the people had voted in his honour, and Philemon the comic poet gibed at him in the line, σαυτὴν ἐπαινεῖς ὥσπερ Αστυδάμας ποτέ, "You praise yoursewlf, as Astydamas once did." See Philemon, frag. 190 (Kock), and Suidas, s.v. σαυτὸν ἐπαινεῖς.
ταῦτα ἴσως κατηδολέσχησά σου καὶ κατελήρησα, παθών τι βλακώδες· ἐπῄνεσα γὰρ ἐμαυτὸν ὥσπερ Αστυδάμας.
"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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Saturday, August 17, 2024
Astydamas
Julian, Letters 26 (381 D; tr. Roy J. Deferrari, with his note):