Art and Humanity in Homer (Paperback)

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.1896 Excerpt: ... WOMANHOOD IN THE ILIAD npHE Iliad offers us the oldest picture ' which we have of the life of man on the continent of Europe. This picture is also a most vivid and beautiful one. There is a constant temptation, therefore, to treat the poem as a starting-point and substantial basis for the history of our civilization. Any attempt of this kind, however, seems, as has been indicated, almost utterly vain and elusive. Before we undertake to recover, by sifting the materials at our command, the true picture of Homeric manners, customs, and beliefs, let us seriously imagine Macaulay's New Zealander, three thousand years hence, employed in reconstructing England as it was under the Tudors, with no materials save the Faery Queen and Chaucer's Knight's Tale. Or, to match the Theogony and Works and Days of Hesiod, let him be furnished with Pilgrim's Progress and Snowbound. Instead of the fragments of the Greek lyric poets, we may generously permit Andrew Lang's Blue Book of Poetry to drift down intact. We should still fail to recognize our kinsfolk in the picture he would draw. Perhaps, however, our feeling can be better illustrated by a flgui-e. A traveller, crossing the Alps by rail at night, may be awakened by a peal of thunder, and, pushing aside his curtains, sees, perchance, across a wide intervale, a panorama of stately mountains, their outlines half shrouded in storm-clouds. The scene is illuminated for a single instant by the unearthly glare of the lightning. The next second he falls back into dreamless slumber. In the morning, indeed for life, that picture abides with him: whether in memory or in imagination he hardly knows, but certainly little associated, if at all, with the scenes, whatever they may be, that greet him in the familiar light of the sun. The...