Proceedings, 1908, Vol. 6

Angebote / Angebote:

Excerpt from Proceedings, 1908, Vol. 6: With Rules and List of Members In an age of few written texts and no exact scholarship, the Iliad and Odyssey had only survived, as it were, by a series of miracles. There had been much interpolation, much confusion, much cutting up but the organic unity and organic life of the poems were so complete and so powerful that they had come through substantially intact. The text of the Odyssey, the various texts of the Iliad, which were collected by the enthusiasm and industry of Athenian scholars, enabled them to reinstate and give universal currency to an Iliad and Odyssey which were in substance the authentic Homer. The term I have just used must be more closely defined if it is not to be misunderstood. The authentic Homer was not a fixed text. This is no paradox, it only seems paradoxical because we are so accustomed to poems which have assumed a fixed text - before the invention of printing as well as after from the moment of publication. But when reading and writing were arts laboriously exercised and confined to a small number of skilled experts, there was no such thing as publication. A poet then retained his poem more in his own possession, he did more freely, more as a matter of course, what it is his natural tendency to do - remodelled, retouched, recast, rearranged, reworded, what still remained ¿uid and plastic in his hands. If he chose, this process only ended with his life. Even after that, it went on among those into whose hands the poem passed, so far as they were not restrained by reverence for the text as they had received it. For the Odyssey, with its close-knit and masterly construction, little had to be done. The larger and more elastic scheme of the Iliad had admitted more variation and interpolation it had paid the price also of its wider diffusion and its greater popularity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.