phaethontean

Updated: May 19, 2025

Besides I am attempting an arduous and, so to say, Phaethontean task to do my best to restore the works of Jerome, which have been partly corrupted by those half-learned persons, and are partly owing to the lack of knowledge of antiquities and of Greek literature forgotten or mangled or mutilated or at least full of mistakes and monstrosities; not merely to restore them but to elucidate them with commentaries, so that each reader will acknowledge to himself that the great Jerome, considered by the ecclesiastical world as the most perfect in both branches of learning, the sacred and the profane, can indeed be read by all, but can only be understood by the most learned.

Johan Huizinga - Erasmus and the Age of Reformation