contradiction, even into the shadow of every
contradiction, of which Homer was guilty: he fritters away his life in
tearing Homeric rags to tatters and sewing them together again, rags
that he himself was the first to filch from the poet's kingly robe. A
third feels ill at ease when examining all the mysterious and
orgiastic sides of antiquity: he makes up his mind once and for all to
let the enlightened Apollo alone pass without dispute, and to see in
the Athenian a gay and intelligent but nevertheless somewhat immoral
Apollonian. What a deep breath he draws when he succeeds in raising
yet another dark corner of antiquity to the level of his own
intelligence!--when, for example, he discovers in Pythagoras a
colleague who is as enthusiastic as himself in arguing about politics.
Another racks his brains as to why OEdipus was condemned by fate to
perform such abominable deeds--killing his father, marrying his
mother. Where lies the blame! Where the poetic justice! Suddenly it
occurs to him: OEdipus was a passionate fellow, lacking all Christian
gentleness--he even fell into an unbecoming rage when Tiresias called
him a monster and the curse of the whole country. Be humble and meek!
was what Sophocles tried to teach, otherwise you will have to marry
your mothers and kill your fathers! Others, again, pass their lives in
counting the number of verses written by Greek and Roman poets, and
are delighted with the proportions 7:13 = 14:26. Finally, one of them
brings forward his solution of a question, such as the Homeric poems
considered from the standpoint of prepositions, and thinks he has
drawn the truth from the bottom of the well with +ana+ and +kata+. All
of them, however, with the most widely separated aims in view, dig and
burrow in Greek soil with a restlessness and a blundering awkwardness
that must surely be painful to a true friend of antiquity: and thus it
comes to pass that I should like to take by the hand every talented or
talentless man who feels a certain professional inclination urging him
on to the study of antiquity, and harangue him as follows: 'Young sir,
do you know what perils threaten you, with your little stock of school
learning, before you become a man in the full sense of the word? Have
you heard that, according to Aristotle, it is by no means a tragic
death to be slain by a statue? Does that surprise you? Know, then,
that for centuries philologists have been trying, with ever-failing
strength, to r