I also attended a seminar on Greek epigraphy with Hiller v. Gaertringen, a son-in-law of Wilamowitz. One day he said: "If you can't see anything on the stone, and if you can't feel anything with your fingers, you must use your finest instrument, your tongue." With that he handed us a piece of stone. It went round the table, and we, all the four of us, solemnly licked the stone.Hat tip: Alan Crease.
"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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Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Epigraphy
Otto Skutsch (1906-1990), "Recollections of Scholars I Have Known," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 94 (1992) 387-408 (at 396, footnote omitted):