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From, R. W. Livingstone, Literature,
in R.W. Livingstone (ed.), The Legacy of Greece, Oxford University Press, 1921.
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Page 7
Compare the story of Hector and Andromache with some famous passage from any of these writers. 'So spake glorious Hector and stretched out his arm to his boy. But the child shrunk crying to the bosom of his fair-girdled nurse, dismayed at the look of his dear father and in fear of the bronze and the horsehair crest that nodded fiercely from his helmet's top. Then his dear father and his lady mother laughed aloud: forthwith glorious Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it, all gleaming, on the earth; then kissed he his dear son and danced him in his arms, and spoke in prayer to Zeus and all the gods, "O Zeus and all ye gods, grant that this my son may be as I am, pre-eminent among the Trojans, and as valiant in might, and may he be a great king of Troy." So he spoke and laid his son in his dear wife's arms; and she took him to her fragrant bosom, smiling through tears. And her husband had pity to see her and caressed her with his hand, and spoke and called her by her name: "Dear one, I pray thee be not of oversorrowful heart; no man against my fate shall send me to my death; but destiny, I ween, no man hath escaped." So spake glorious Hector and took up his horsehair-crested helmet; and his dear wife departed to her home, often looking back and letting fall great tears. And she came to the well-built house of man-slaying Hector, and found therein her many handmaidens, and stirred lamentation in them all. So they wept for Hector, while he yet lived, in his house; for they thought that he would no more come back to them from battle.'[109] These are emotions shared by mankind twenty centuries before Christ and twenty centuries after him, common equally to Shakespeare or Napoleon and to the stupidest and least educated of mankind; and these emotions are expressed with a simplicity as elemental as themselves. Subjects as simple may be found in our literature; expression as direct would be hard to find. Even a primitive like Chaucer is the heir of dimly apprehended inheritances from Greece and Rome, and is haunted by fancies from lost and living fairylands of literature. It is in our Bible that we find the elemental feelings of Homer and an expression even more direct. 'And she departed and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba. And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child under one of the shrubs. And she went and sat her down over against him a good way off, as it were a bowshot: for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat down over against him, and lift up her voice, and wept.'[110]
[109] Homer, Iliad, vi. 466 ff. (with omissions: chiefly from the translation of Lang, Leaf, and Myers). It should be remembered that, of the three figures in this scene, the husband will be dead in a few days, while within a year the wife will be a slave and the child thrown from the city wall.
[110] Genesis xxi. 14 f.
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
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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/livingstone-greek-literature.asp?pg=7
