It has been quite a while since I last read through Middlemarch, and when I think of the book it is more likely to be in connection with electoral shenanigans than with anything else. Yet I remember that somewhere in Henry Adams's letters he wrote to a friend that he, Adams, was turning into a dreadful Casaubon, taking George Eliot's unfortunate cleric, author of the projected Key to All Mythologies, as the type of the pedant.
The other day, I followed up a reference in Peter Green's Antioch to Actium to see where exactly one finds the attribution to Callimachus of the dictum "big book, big evil." The note says Athenaeus 2.72a. Of the Perseus project's three versions of Athenaeus's The Deipnosophists, the first had the corresponding numbering. But where one expects items at Perseus to be "chunked" by book, or by chapter or (if Biblical) verse, the first version of The Deipnosophists on Perseus, is by "casaubonpage". This was something of a surprise.
It appears, though, that the "casaubonpage" takes its name from the French philologist Isaac Casaubon (1579-1614). Wikipedia says that the editing of and commentary on The Deipnosophists was Isaac Casaubon's magnum opus. Judging from what I see on Perseus, either the commentary was large or the pages were small.
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