Out of Stock
Overview
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II LITERATURE.? I. LITERARY INFLUENCES ' There is through all art a filiation. If you see a great master, yon will always find that he used what was good in his predecessors, and that it was this which made him great. Men like Raphael do not spring out of the ground. They took their root in the antique and in the best which had been done before them. Had they not used the advantages of their time there would be little to say about them.'?Goethe, Concersations with Edcermann, Jan. 4, 1827. 'Among the deadliest of poetical sins is imitation.'?Carlvle, Essoy on the State of German Literature. Somewheee about the year 400 A.d. a great educational work was composed by the scholar Macrobius. He gathered up all that he considered best in the current criticism of Virgil, and, with some other cognate matter?literary, archaeological, and physiological reminiscences?he constructed a long dialogue. The characters who take part in the conversation are some of the leading men in the pagan society of the time, with a few scholars and savants, and in particular Servius. The time is the festival of the Saturnalia, from which the book takes its name, and the scene is laid from day to day in the houses of Praetextatus, Flavian, and Symmachus, the chief political leaders of the pagan party. A large part of the dialogue is given up to the criticism of Virgil, but we might be over-estimating the seriousness of Roman society at the time if we believed that the guests enjoyed equally the whole of the discussion. The scholar Eustathius, for example, has spoken of Virgil's debt to Homer, and Avianius (the father of Symmachus) asks him to continue and enumerate all that Virgil has borrowed, ' for what could be more delightful than to hear two supreme poets saying the same thing.' ' Give m..
| ISBN-13 | 9780217057943 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217057942 |
| Weight | 0.85 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.58 In |
| List Price | $19.84 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 258 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
View All Offers
Sort by:
Price
