Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry - 1921 Author:Thomas Love Peacock 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: NOTES 3, 2o. a beggar or a thief: Peacock exaggerates little. The formula of the Odyssey to guests of respectable appearance is ' Strangers, who are ye ? When... more »ce sail ye over the wet ways ? On some trading enterprise, or at adventure do ye rove, even as sea-robbers, over the brine, for they wander at hazard of their own lives bringing bale to alien men.' It is thus that Telemachus and his company are greeted at the feast of Nestor, and Odysseus and his folk in the cave of the Cyclops. It was on a visit to Autolycus, ' his mother's noble father, who outdid all men in thievery and skill in swearing,' that Odysseus gained his famous scar. Or beggary might be assumed from the stranger's appearance, as Eumaeus and Melanthius and the suitors successively assumed it from the rags of Odysseus on his return. The passage cited from Thucydides deals at some length with the prevalence of piracy among both Hellenes and Barbarians in earlier times, when ' as yet, such an occupation was held to be honourable and not disgraceful.' 6, 1. building cities . . . symphony ; these are commonplaces, but the conjunction makes me suspect that Peacock, as well as Shelley, had been reading Sidney: ' So as Amphion was sayde to move stones with his Poetrie to build Thebes ; and Orpheus to be listened to by beastes, indeed stony and beastly people.' -—An Apologie for Poetrie, ed. Shuckburgh, 1896, page 3. 7, 26. and music probably : Peacock's opinions on the music and painting of classical Greece may be found by the curious in Chapter XIV of Gryll Grange ; Shelley's, in his Discourse on the Manners of the Ancients. 8, 13. The history of Herodotus is half a poem : this passage also suggests that Peacock was familiar with some sentences of Sidney: 'And even Historiographers, although theyr...« less