Sunday, February 28, 2010
Ancients and Moderns
Samuel Butler, Notebooks:
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If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.Frederic De Forest Allen, quoted by J.B. Greenough in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 9 (1898) 31:
We call the Romans ancient, but when they were alive they thought themselves as modern as anybody.
