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Updated: May 11, 2025
In the second class we have the substitution of prose romances for the bucolic and erotic poetry of the Alexandrian and Sicilian writers. In the third class the revival, by Nonnus and his followers, of a learned epos, of much the same kind as the poems of Callimachus. She presided in the public school at Alexandria, where she taught mathematics and the philosophy of Ammonius and Plotinus.
The background is the pre-Hellenic 'Urdummheit'; the new shape impressed upon it is the great anthropomorphic Olympian family, as defined in the Homeric epos and, more timidly, in Hesiod. But of Hesiod we must speak later. Now who are these Olympian Gods and where do they come from? Homer did not 'make' them out of nothing. But the understanding of them is beset with problems.
The readers of this class enjoy a serious and pathetic poem as they do a sermon: a simple and playful work, as an inebriating draught; and if on the one hand they have so little taste as to demand edification from a tragedy or from an epos, even such as the "Messias," on the other hand they will be infallibly scandalized by a piece after the fashion of Anacreon and Catullus.
We moderns, on the other hand, are eminently fortunate, because within the cycle of our thoughts revolves the entire epos of the ancient world.
All the species of pure art epos, drama, lyric poetry, history are worthless in this worthless world; but in no species is the intellectual decay of the Ciceronian age reflected with so terrible a clearness as in its historiography. Literature Subsidiary to History Caesar's Report
No remains have been preserved of these -incunabula- of the Roman epos and drama. That the ancestral lays were traditional is self-evident, and is abundantly demonstrated by the fact that they were regularly recited by children; but even in the time of Cato the Elder they had completely passed into oblivion.
We shall now ask our readers to follow us out into these movements themselves, that, as before we saw how the world is centred in each human soul, we may now see how each soul develops itself in the world; for thither it is that the ever-widening cycles of the Eleusinian epos will inevitably lead us.
His Orestes speaks and feels as Aechylus himself would... Sophocles... takes the saga exactly as he finds it. He knows that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about their consciences; they killed in the fine old ruthless way. He does not try to make them real to himself at the cost of making them false to the spirit of the epos...
It exhibits the intimate blending of the German and Christian elements, and their full development in splendid productions, for this was the period of the German national epos, the "Nibelungenlied," and of the "Minnegesang." This was a period which has nothing to compare with it in point of art and poetry, save perhaps, and that imperfectly, the heroic and post-Homeric age of early Greece.
It is true that the endeavour to replace the gods and heroes of legend by the kings and consuls of Rome resembles the attempt of the giants to storm heaven by means of mountains piled one above another: without a world of gods there is no ancient epos and no ancient drama, and poetry knows no substitutes.
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