Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains.
Swift’s most popular work, Gulliver’s Travels, derives its hint from Lucian’s True History, and all that peculiar vein of humour which runs through the Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books, is, consciously or unconsciously, the parallel of the characteristic irony of the same Lucian.
Of Shelley’s debts to Greece one can hardly estimate the amount. Says he himself: “The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome and modern Italy and our own country has been to me like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment.” During his travels in Italy “the Greek tragedies,” says Mrs. Shelley, “were his most familiar companions in his wanderings, and the sublime majesty of Aeschylus filled him with wonder and delight.” We find him reading Homer, Hesiod, Theocritus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Plutarch, Plato; he even translates portions of these; he steeps himself to the lips in the literature of Greece. His own soul and genius were by nature akin to those of Plato, and his training lent to his genius clear capacity. Among those of his works which most manifestly bear the Greek impress are the lyrical drama of Hellas—which, he says, was suggested by the Persae of Aeschylus—and the drama of Prometheus Unbound, which is meant for a sequel to the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Not that his drama of Prometheus is fashioned wholly like the Greek; its architecture is less simple, its character is more rhetorical, more ornamented, more metaphysical. But it owes its whole existence to the fact that Shelley lived so long in a world of Greek literature, a world very remote from that in which he moved and had his being. His Adonais—
I weep for Adonais—he is dead!
O weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost that binds so dear a head!
is an echo of Theocritus, his Ode to Liberty an echo of Pindar, his Epipsychidion an outcome of Plato. His enthusiasm for Greece may be gathered from his Hellas:
The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return;
The earth doth like a snake renew