Doubt not that many a soul then, was the simpler, and
purer, and better, for reading the sweet singer of Syracuse. He has his
immoralities; but they are the immoralities of his age: his
naturalness, his sunny calm and cheerfulness, are all his own.
And now, to leave the poets, and speak of those grammarians to whose
corrections we owe, I suppose, the texts of the Greek poets as they now
stand. They seem to have set to work at their task methodically enough,
under the direction of their most literary monarch, Ptolemy
Philadelphus. Alexander the AEtolian collected and revised the
tragedies, Lycophron the comedies, Zenodotus the poems of Homer, and the
other poets of the Epic cycle, now lost to us. Whether Homer prospered
under all his expungings, alterations, and transpositions--whether, in
fact, he did not treat Homer very much as Bentley wanted to treat
Milton, is a suspicion which one has a right to entertain, though it is
long past the possibility of proof. Let that be as it may, the critical
business grew and prospered. Aristophanes of Byzantium wrote glossaries
and grammars, collected editions of Plato and Aristotle, aesthetic
disquisitions on Homer--one wishes they were preserved, for the sake of
the jest, that one might have seen an Alexandrian cockney's views of
Achilles and Ulysses! Moreover, in a hapless moment, at least for us
moderns, he invented Greek accents; thereby, I fear, so complicating and
confusing our notions of Greek rhythm, that we shall never, to the end
of time, be able to guess what any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric
Hexameter, sounded like.
Pages:
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72