Sunday, May 26, 2024
Amazing and Miraculous
Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), Explorations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 341-342:
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It still strikes me with amazement when I open a book of speeches by Demosthenes and begin to hear the voice, the very syllables and cadences, of a man who died some twenty-three centuries ago. Surely it is almost miraculous that we can take up the Aeneid of Vergil, reproduced by machinery that would have astounded Vergil, on a material he had never seen, in a format he could scarcely have imagined, and after two millennia find that, undimmed by time and change, his poetry still sings, his mystical visions still transport us as they did his first readers, and the subtleties of his poetic architecture still hold secrets only half discovered.
