Laokoon - Softcover

Reseña del editor

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 Excerpt: ...reduction. In it everything that in the poet raises the gods above god-like men utterly vanishes. The strength, size, and swiftness, of which Homer always bestowed upon his deities a much higher and more extraordinary degree than he attributes to his most eminent heroes,3 must sink, in the painting, to the shivered against the limbs of the gods, and scattered, as sand, around them. Xepalv airoppiiavrts ax otiSeos 'lSaloio $dKov 67r' aW-qKovs' at 5e tyafidOotfft '6fiotai peTa SteffKiByavro 6euv nepl 5 affxtra yvta pnyvvfjava dta rvrQa.... An artificial refinement, which is the destruction of the main subject. It heightens our conceptions of the bodies of the gods, but makes the weapons which they employ against one another ridiculous. If gods hurl stones at one another, these stones must be capable of injuring the gods, or we appear to see a troop of mischievous boys pelting one another with lumps of earth. Here, therefore, as ever, old Homer proves the wisest, and all the censure with which cold critics have assailed him, all the rivalry in which lesser geniuses have engaged with him, serve only to set his wisdom in its happiest light. Meanwhile I do not deny that Quintus's description contains some excellent and original features, but they are such as become the stormy fire of a modern poet rather than the modest greatness of Homer. The cry of the gods, for instance, the sound of which ascends to the heights of heaven, and pierces to the lowest depths of the earth, which shakes vehemently the mountain, and the town, and the fleet, but is not heard of man, seems to me a very significant stroke. The cry was so loud that the diminutive organs of human hearing were incapable of receiving it. 3 No one who has even cursorily read Homer will question this asserti...