Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/livingstone-greek-literature.asp?pg=25

ELPENOR - Home of the Greek Word

Three Millennia of Greek Literature
 

R. W. Livingstone 
On the Ancient Greek Literature

From, R. W. Livingstone, Literature,
in R.W. Livingstone (ed.), The Legacy of Greece, Oxford University Press, 1921.

ELPENOR EDITIONS IN PRINT

HOMER

PLATO

ARISTOTLE

THE GREEK OLD TESTAMENT (SEPTUAGINT)

THE NEW TESTAMENT

PLOTINUS

DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE

MAXIMUS CONFESSOR

SYMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN

CAVAFY

More...


Page 25

It is ungrateful to cavil at this moralizing and didactic temper, which animates a large part of the nation and is responsible for much of the British achievement. But its place is in the world of action not in that of letters, and it does not produce the greatest literature or the truest thought. The Greeks might have gained by a greater infusion of it: we, on the other hand, can learn something from their intellectual disinterestedness which in political and social controversies would make opposing views more intelligible and the path to truth easier and plainer, in literature would free us from excesses that are followed by reaction to a contrary excess, and in national life would guard us from the materialism which besets an industrial and commercial age. It is not confined to the Greeks; but by no people is the ideal of intellectual truth more clearly and universally exhibited than by those who first brought it into an indifferent world, and who built upon it their literature and art no less than their science and philosophy.


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Cf. Elpenor's Bilingual Anthology of Greek Literature * Greek History Resources
A History of Greek Philosophy * A Sketch of the history of Greek literature
Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome

Three Millennia of Greek Literature


Greek Literature - Ancient, Medieval, Modern

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/livingstone-greek-literature.asp?pg=25