A history of classical scholarship ... / by John Edwin Sandys.

  • John Edwin Sandys
Date:
1903-08
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of classical scholarship ... / by John Edwin Sandys. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    62/708 page 32
    In connexion with the use of Homer as an educational text¬ book, we may recall two anecdotes of some little interest in Plutarch’s Life of AlcibiadesWe are there told that when Alcibiades ‘ was just emerging from boyhood, he went to a school¬ master and asked him for a book of Homer; and, on the master’s replying that he had nothing whatsoever of Homer’s, Alcibiades struck him with his fist, and went on his way’. Another school¬ master told him that he ‘ had a copy of Homer, emended by him¬ self’. ‘What?’ said Alcibiades, ‘are you really content to teach reading and writing, when you are capable of emending Homer ? Why are you not instructing young men?’ The first of these anecdotes shows that a young Athenian held he had a right to expect even an elementary teacher to possess part at least of the poems of Homer; the second presents us with an early example of amateur textual criticism; and both imply that Homer was really better suited as a text-book for young men than for mere children. In the earliest play of Aristophanes there was a scene in which a father, who believed in the old-fashioned style of Aristophanes ... .... poetic education, is represented as examining his son as to the meaning of certain ‘hard words in Homer’1 2: the son, who has a preference for the prose of practical life, retorts by asking his father the meaning of obsolete terms in the laws of Solon. In the Frogs, ‘ the divine Homer ’ is counted among the nobler poets, because he is preeminently the poet of the art of war3. He is also quoted or parodied in several passages4. Turning from the comic poet to one of the gravest of the ancient rhetoricians, we find Isocrates, in his letter Isocrates of exhortation to Nicocles, expressing his own admiration for Homer and for the early tragic poets5, and rebuking his contemporaries for preferring the most paltry comedy 1 Plut. Alcib. 7. 2 Aristoph. AatraXeA, quoted by Galen in praef. lexici Hippocratici, p. 404 Franz, rrpos ravra cru \l£ov 'Op-ppeiovs ^\d>rras, tL KaXovcn Kopvp(3a..., tl KaXova’ apevpva Kappua. 3 Frogs 1036. 4 Birds 575, 685, 910, 914, Peace 1089 ff, Clouds 1056. 5 Isocr. 2 § 48.
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