When men pass judgment on the past, they tend to award the palm to high culture, which has normally (and indeed exclusively) been the product of cities and of minorities. Athens is praised, and Rome—while the slaves and serfs and the voiceless earth-coloured rustics are conveniently forgotten.
"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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Friday, December 27, 2024
Forgotten
Ronald Syme (1903-1989), Colonial Élites: Rome, Spain and the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 27: