Herodotus

I read somewhere recently, possibly in the TLS, about a splendid spoof of Herodotus taking the form of the ancient savant reporting on a visit to London Zoo. So off to Amazon to buy same, to find that it was available for a modest price from India. The spoof has now turned up, but it turns out also to take the form of the winning entry for the 1907 Gaisford Prize for Greek Prose, written by one John Beazley, sometime scholar of Balliol College, Oxford. The same Beazley whose main claim to fame is his description and classification of Greek pots. He also gave his name to the Beazley Archive at the Classical Art Research Centre, also Oxford. See references 1 and 2. But, sadly, a curiosity from which I will be able to extract little further value. Some snaps of the reprint follow.

Front cover

Back cover

Title page

First page

Another page

Notice that the spoof extends to side notes in German. Perhaps part of the fun was poking fun at scholars across the water; scholars whom I believe fancied themselves as Grecians. And a few years after this spoof came out, built the Pergamon Museum in Berlin to prove it.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Beazley.

Reference 2: https://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/archive/history.htm.