Laudator Temporis Acti

'Then 'twas the Roman, Now ’tis I', Anecdotal Evidence (April 30, 2026):

A.E. Housman died ninety years ago today, on April 30, 1936, at age seventy-seven. The poet was a classical scholar who edited Juvenal, Lucan and Propertius, and is famous for his five-volume critical edition of the minor Roman poet Manilius' Astronomicon.

This is misleading. Although Housman prepared an edition of Propertius, it was never published. See S.J. Heyworth, "Housman and Propertius," in D.J. Butterfield and C.A. Stray, edd., A.E. Housman: Classical Scholar (2009; rpt. London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 11-28 (at 11):

Fixed points are provided by Housman's letter to Macmillan offering the edition (11 December 1885 = Burnett 1.58-9: 'The collection and arrangement of materials for the commentary will naturally demand further time and labour; and I therefore judge it best that the text with its apparatus criticus should be issued separately'), and by the publication in the Journal of Philology in 1892-3 of the three papers laying out his view of 'The Manuscripts of Propertius', for this effectively marked the end of his efforts to get an edition published (Cambridge University Press having followed Oxford and Macmillan in declining to publish a book: cf. University Library, Cambridge, Pr.B.13.9.59). Yet Housman's manuscript survived the scholar himself, and Professor Sandbach told more than once the story of visiting A.S.F. Gow, Housman's colleague at Trinity, in his rooms in 1936, and finding him stoking the fire in which he was burning the famously unpublished edition.