I.—TWENTY-FIVE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ON “COLLEGE GREEK COURSE IN ENGLISH”—FROM PAGE 83 TO PAGE 187.
1. Q. Who is foremost among Greek philosophers? A. Socrates.
2. Q. Who is foremost of Greek philosophical writers? A. Plato.
3. Q. What four works have been the fruit, direct or indirect, of Plato’s “Republic?” A. Cicero’s “De Republica,” St. Augustine’s “City of God,” Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia,” and Bacon’s “New Atlantis.”
4. Q. In any just representation of Plato, who could not but be a very conspicuous figure? A. Socrates.
5. Q. In the first extract given from Plato’s “Republic,” what does the speaker, Glaucon, undertake to set forth for Socrates to overthrow? A. A notion which he avers to be current and accepted among men, that injustice is better policy than justice.
6. Q. From the discussion of the nature of justice and injustice, to what does Plato make a very unexpected passage? A. To that form of discussion which has given its name to the “Republic”—the ideal state.
7. Q. Who has recently made a scholarly and adequate translation of Plato’s entire works into English? A. Mr. Jowett.
8. Q. How is the so-styled “Platonic love” defined in the “Republic?” A. “A friend should use no other familiarity to his love than a father would use to his son, and this only for a virtuous end, and he must first have the other’s consent.”
9. Q. What was the “Socratic dæmon” to which Plato alludes in his “Republic?” A. A benign and beneficent influence—a kind of divinity within him that governed the conduct of Socrates.
10. Q. How is the Timæus of Plato described? A. As of all the writings of Plato the most obscure and most repulsive to modern readers, while the most influential of all over the ancient and mediæval world.
11. Q. What are some of the other best known works of Plato? A. “The Laws,” the “Symposium,” the “Phædrus,” the “Gorgias,” and the “Parmenides.”
12. Q. What is the name of the dialogue in which Plato tells of the end of Socrates? A. The “Phædo.”
13. Q. What was the sentence of antiquity in regard to Plato? A. That Zeus, if he had spoken Greek, would have spoken it like Plato.
14. Q. Who was a distinguished pupil of Plato? A. Aristotle, and in influence on human thought he equaled and rivaled his master.
15. Q. How does our author state the difference between ancient tragedy and modern, in a single antithetical sentence? A. Modern tragedy presents real life idealized; ancient tragedy presents an ideal life realized.
16. Q. What did Greek tragedy have for its chief purpose? A. To teach.
17. Q. How were Greek tragedies represented? A. By daylight, in the open air, before assemblages that numbered their tens of thousands of spectators.
18. Q. What is said of the dress of the actors? A. The actors wore masks on their faces and buskins on their feet. Beside this they wore a kind of wig designed to make them look taller, and dressed with padding to make them look larger.
19. Q. Who were the three masters of Greek tragedy? A. Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
20. Q. When and where was Æschylus born? A. In 525 B. C., in an Attic village near Athens.
21. Q. In the present volume, from what tragedy of Æschylus are selections presented? A. “Prometheus Bound.”
22. Q. Who was Prometheus? A. A mythical being of superhuman rank, who stole fire from heaven and brought it to men. For this offense against Zeus he was condemned to be chained alive to a rocky cliff in the Caucasus.
23. Q. What other great tragic poet was contemporary with Æschylus? A. Sophocles.
24. Q. From what masterpiece of Sophocles are the selections of the present volume made? A. “Œdipus Tyrannus, or Œdipus the King.”
25. Q. How is this tragedy considered by, perhaps, the majority of qualified critics? A. To be not only the best work of Sophocles, but the “bright, consummate flower” of all Greek tragedy.