Livingstone, On the Ancient Greek Literature

Page 10

In the dawn of a literature at least, we expect roughness and crudity, an uncertain judgement and a faltering hand; but the first known Greek poem, like Athena in the myth, is born full grown and mature. Yet its makers made the story and the rich language and the elaborate and unrivalled metre for themselves. It does not lessen this achievement that the Homeric poems may have been the fine flower of a period of poetic growth; the work that went to form them was done by Greeks. But it needs imagination to appreciate the difficulty of the task which they undertook unconsciously and performed without theory or deliberate purpose by the mere light of nature.

It is hard to create even a primitive poetic vocabulary, where one does not exist, and there is nothing primitive about

ὁι δ' ὡς τ' αιγυπιοι γαμψωνυχες αγκυλοχειλαι πετρη εφ' ὑψηλη μεγαλα κλαζοντε μαχωνται,

{hoi d' hôs t' aigypioi gampsônyches ankylocheilai petrê eph' hypsêlê megala klazonte machôntai,}

or

ὁσσον δ' ηεροειδες ανηρ ιδεν οφθαλμοισιν ἡμενος εν σκοπιη, λευσσων επι οινοπα ποντον, τοσσον επιθρωσκουσι θεων ὑψηχεες ἱπποι.[111]

{hosson d' êeroeides anêr iden ophthalmoisin hêmenos en skopiê, leussôn epi oinopa ponton, tosson epithrôskousi theôn hypsêchees hippoi.}

[111] Iliad, xvi. 428 f.: 'As vultures with crooked talons and curved beaks that upon some high crag fight, screaming loudly.' Ibid. v. 770 f.: 'As far as a man's view ranges in the haze, as he sits on a point of outlook and gazes over the wine-dark sea, so far at a spring leap the loud-neighing horses of the gods.'

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R. W. Livingstone
On the Ancient Greek Literature

Learned Freeware

R. W. Livingstone On the Ancient Greek Literature

Learned Freeware

R. W. Livingstone
On the Ancient Greek Literature