To my mind, it is a miracle that in a world afflicted by Attention Deficit Disorder anyone would labor over, publish, distribute, or purchase six hundred pages dissecting descriptors in two lengthy, three thousand year old poems that barely ten thousand human beings can read in their eclectic, original idiolect, one never spoken by a single soul.
"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, August 02, 2026
A Miracle
Donald Lateiner, review of James H. Dee, Epitheta hominum apud Homerum = The epithetic phrases for the Homeric heroes: a repertory of descriptive expressions for the human characters of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2000), in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.01.14: