United States or Seychelles ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


And, finally, there was the Master who reminded his most intimate friends of a sentence of his about Greek literature, which occurs in the Introduction to the Phoedrus: "Under the marble exterior of Greek literature was concealed a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion," says the Master.

To these truly ingenious, and philosophical works of Æsop, we shall add those of his imitator Phoedrus, which in purity and elegance of style, are inferiour to none. We shall add also the Lyrick Poetry of Alcman, which is no servile composition; the sublime Morals of Epictetus, and the incomparable comedies of Terence.

We know that, in some way or other, perhaps during those early years at Florence among the members of the Platonic Academy, Michelangelo absorbed the doctrines of the Phoedrus and Symposium. His poems abound in references to the contrast between Uranian and Pandemic, celestial and vulgar, Eros.

"There is also," says Socrates in the Phoedrus, "a third kind of madness, which is the possession of the Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other members."

He had studied the poets, and wrote tolerable Latin and Italian verses; in a word, his taste was calculated to form mine, and give some order to that chaos of insignificant trash with which my brain was encumbered; but whether my prating had misled him, or that he could not support the trouble of teaching the elementary parts of Latin, he put me at first too high; and I had scarcely translated a few fables of Phoedrus before he put me into Virgil, where I could hardly understand anything.

He had studied the poets, and wrote tolerable Latin and Italian verses; in a word, his taste was calculated to form mine, and give some order to that chaos of insignificant trash with which my brain was encumbered; but whether my prating had misled him, or that he could not support the trouble of teaching the elementary parts of Latin, he put me at first too high; and I had scarcely translated a few fables of Phoedrus before he put me into Virgil, where I could hardly understand anything.

In accomplishing this great object, I have presented the reader in my notes with nearly the substance in English of all the following manuscript Greek Commentaries and Scholia on Plato; viz. of the Commentaries of Proclus on the Parmenides and First Alcibiades; and of his Scholia on the Cratylus; of the Scholia of Olympiodorus on the Phaedo, Gorgias, and Philebus; and of Hermeas on the Phoedrus.