avoid the atmosphere of easy acrimony which sometimes haunts footnotes

--- Henry Steel Commager, The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study, quoted by Burton Raffel in his Translator's Introduction to The essential Horace: Odes, epodes, satires, and epistles (1983), p. xvii

Commager as quoted by Raffel:

I have made an effort to avoid the atmosphere of easy acrimony which sometimes haunts footnotes. Since we have inevitably to stand upon the shoulder of previous scholars, it ill becomes us to step on their toes getting there.