Volume 29, Number 14 · September 23, 1982
Classic Classicists
By Bernard Knox
History of Classical Scholarship
by U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, translated by Alan Harris, edited with an introduction and notes by Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Johns Hopkins University Press, 189 pp., $20.00
There is no lack of books that explore the influence of classical, particularly Greek, civilization on the thought, art, and literature of succeeding ages, including our own; general surveys abound and detailed studies, like the two books on the Greeks and the Victorians recently reviewed in this journal,[1] appear with some regularity. The history of classical scholarship, however, is an entirely different and less attractive subject: it deals not with the writers, thinkers, artists, historians, and statesmen who have adapted the classical legacy for their own purposes but with the scholars who, versed in the ancient languages and at home in the minutiae of ancient history, have toiled away at the tasks of establishing and interpreting the corrupt and difficult texts handed down through the centuries, of collecting and classifying the vast agglomerations of historical and archaeological data.
Review, 892 words
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