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Inhumanity: even in the "Antigone," even in Goethe's "Iphigenia."
The want of "rationalism" in the Greeks.
Young people cannot understand the political affairs of antiquity.
The poetic element: a bad expectation.
79
Do the philologists know the present time? Their judgments on it as Periclean; their mistaken judgments when they speak of Freytag's[8] genius as resembling that of Homer, and so on; their following in the lead of the litterateurs; their abandonment of the pagan sense, which was exactly the classical element that Goethe discovered in Winckelmann.
[8] Gustav Freytag: at one time a famous German novelist. —TR.
80