[49]. We do not presume to be critical upon the Bœotian schoolmaster’s Greek; but no modern student would take him for an authority in prosody. He says the impetuosity of the genius of Homer hurried him into a false quantity in the first line of the Iliad, in the word Θεὰ. Plutarch was forgetful of the rule of a purum in the vocative. His prejudice is sufficiently shown in his essay On the Malignity of Herodotus, whom he disliked, because the historian did not speak over favourably of the Bœotians. “Plutarch was a Bœotian, and thought it indispensably incumbent on him to vindicate the cause of his countrymen.”—Beloe’s Herod.
[50]. The “devotion”—the estimation in which the Athenians held their gods, at the very time of their building magnificent temples, and of their highest perfection in art, we may fairly gather from their dramatic performances. If Zeus himself was treated with little reverence, other deities to whom they erected statues fared worse. Bacchus is exhibited on the stage as a coward—Hercules as a glutton.—Vide Aristophanes and Euripides. So much for the motives invented for the Athenians by Mr Jones. Had such motives been appealed to, not a drachma would have been obtained.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
- Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling.
- Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
- Re-indexed footnotes using numbers and collected together at the end of the last chapter.