Or, again, look at Homer.
The "Iliad" is from two to three thousand years older than "Macbeth,"
and yet it is as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. We have
there no lessons save in the emotions which rise in us as we read. Homer
had no philosophy; he never struggles to press upon us his views about
this or that; you can scarcely tell, indeed, whether his sympathies are
Greek or Trojan: but he represents to us faithfully the men and women
among whom he lived. He sang the tale of Troy, he touched his lyre, he
drained the golden beaker in the halls of men like those on whom he was
conferring immortality. And thus, although no Agamemnon, king of men,
ever led a Grecian fleet to Ilium; though no Priam sought the midnight
tent of Achilles; though Ulysses and Diomed and Nestor were but names,
and Helen but a dream, yet, through Homer's power of representing men
and women, those old Greeks will still stand out from amidst the
darkness of the ancient world with a sharpness of outline which belongs
to no period of history except the most recent. For the mere hard
purposes of history, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are the most effective
books which ever were written.
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