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History of criticism and literary taste in Europe
History of criticism and literary taste in Europe Author:George Saintsbury 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: Poetry " (one would compound for this alone), " On the Beauty of Words,"1 " On Well- and Ill-sounding Letters," " On Homer or Right Style and Glosses,"2 "On the ... more »Aoedic Art," "On Verbs(?),"s . and an Onomasticon. But Democritus lived in the fifth century before Christ, and Diogenes in the second century after Christ; the historian's attribution is unsupported, and he has no great character for accuracy; while, worst of all, he himself tells us that there were six Democriti, aud that of the other five one was a musician, another an epigrammatist, and a third (most suspiciously) a technical writer on rhetoric. It stands fatally to reason that as all these (save the Chian musician) seem to have been more modern, and as the works mentioned would exactly fall in with the business of the musician and the teacher of rhetoric, they are far more likely, if they ever existed (and Diogenes seems to cite rather the catalogue of a certain Thrasylus than the books themselves), not to have been the work of the Laughing Philosopher. At any rate, even if they were, we are utterly ignorant of their tenor. That the other great Abderite, Protagoras, the disciple of Democritus himself, wrote on subjects of the kind, there can be no reasonable doubt. It is practically impossible that he should not have done so, though we have not the exact title of any. He is said to have been the first to distinguish the parts of an oration by name, to have made some important advances in technical grammar, and to have lectured on the poets. But here again we have no texts to appeal to, nor any certain fact. Yet perhaps it is not mere critical whim to doubt whether, if we had these texts also, we should be much further advanced. The titles of those attributed to Democritus, if we could accept The Sophists the att...« less