Ritschl, the admired teacher of Gildersleeve and Nietzsche, was also beloved by the second-rate who needed a doctorate as the union card to secure a minor teaching post. He made the catastrophic error of substituting "what needs doing" for the important. That is, he turned research into the higher crossword. He specialized in Plautus, an author with nothing of importance to say to an educated man of intelligence...Eduard Fraenkel was "an educated man of intelligence."
"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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Sunday, June 01, 2025
Plautus
William M. Calder III, "Classical Schoolarship in the United States: An Introductory Essay," in Ward W. Briggs, Jr., ed., Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. xxi-xxxix (at xxix):