Lectures on Literature Author:Columbia University 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: GREEK LITERATURE By Edward Delay An Perry, Jay Professor Of Greek Among the many apocryphal stories of the puzzled schoolboy one of the most delightful tells ... more »of a youth who was asked to give a brief account of the Ancient Greeks. He wrote: "The Ancient Greeks were that marvelous nation that lived all at the same tune, and all in the same place, and always thought just alike." And as I think of certain widely prevalent ideas about the ancients a picture comes into my mind: an engraving entitled "The Age of Pericles," showing the great Athenian haranguing (no other word will do) a motley group of heroic figures, all quite undisturbed by the hammering and pounding of masons and carpenters close by, who are busily engaged in erecting the Parthenon and the Propylaea. We hear much loose talk of "The Greek Spirit" and "Greek Ideals"; but if we ask what they were, we often find conceptions not very different from those of the puzzled schoolboy and the artist of "The Age of Pericles." And really it is no wonder. The oldest literary monuments in the Greek language, the Homeric Poems, must, it seems to me, have assumed practically their present form by 800 B.c. On the other hand, about the latest of the authors who preserved or reproduced in imitation the truly classical spirit, Lucian, may have lived till about 200 A.d. That is a stretch of a thousand years during which countless minds of the greatest keenness worked at the creation and perfection of new types of literary form, or the perpetuation of the types that had best stood the testof use. But those thousand years by no means represent the whole life of ancient Greek Literature. The Homeric Poems mark the close, not the beginning, of a long literary epoch. Their language is not entirely homogeneous, — far from it. It gives us no...« less