Also, if anyone anxious for self-culture could take the Bible as a starting-point, and follow up all the different allusions to the nations of the earth—study the early civilisations of Egypt and Assyria, going on to Greece, Rome and Asia Minor, for example—he would find himself well educated in ancient history before he was aware of it.
The influence of Bible study upon the character, even in the way of culture, is very wonderful. Take, for instance, the Scotch peasantry of a generation or two ago. Devout, versed in the Scriptures and probably little else, what a fine mental type many of their children have exhibited! One could name novelists, philosophers, divines, who have traced their power of thought and charm of diction to the influence of the home where riches were not, but a sturdy, simple, religious faith, based upon a daily study of the Bible, prevailed.
“Every several mind needs different books,” but every mind needs the Book of books.
Apart from the Bible, there are two books of which you should know something: the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer.
This possibly sounds far too learned to many girls who read this page. They have a vague idea that they must know Greek before they can approach what their schoolboy brothers regard as a task. And if they never hear of these names in the daily run of life, they feel all the more reluctant to attack what sounds repellent and incomprehensible.
If any girl with an average amount of intelligence can get Butcher and Lang’s translation of the Odyssey, she will doubtless be charmed, and any such ideas of repulsion as we have mentioned will be swept quite out of her mind. This translation reads like a romance or fairy tale of old. Jebb’s Primer of Greek Literature, published at one shilling, will be a help to its full comprehension, and a Greek History may also be useful. Smith’s Smaller History of Greece is very good.
The Iliad and the Odyssey are probably at least twenty-seven centuries old; and they still appeal to the human heart. Mr. Gladstone said he felt himself “in heaven when he was breathing the pure atmosphere of Homer.” And a child also can delight in their pages. The present writer will never forget the charm to her, as a little girl, of Pope’s version of the Odyssey, with outline illustrations by Flaxman.
Although the Iliad and the Odyssey are poems, the translations that will appeal most strongly to English girl-readers, we think, are the prose versions by Andrew Lang and his colleagues. These are written in an exquisitely simple style, nearer to the original than the sonorous lines of Pope, Chapman, Lord Derby, Worsley, and many others.
Besides the Iliad and Odyssey, which treat of the very dawn of history, there are other works of which you should know something. One might write a volume on the subject of Greek literature, but it is inopportune here to mention more than a few books. The Apology, Crito and Phædo of Plato, are translated in Dean Church’s Trial and Death of Socrates. They are dialogues telling that immortal story. The plays of Æschylus are issued in English in Morley’s Universal Library, published by Routledge at a shilling. The Alcestis of Euripides has been beautifully translated by Robert Browning in Balaustion’s Adventure, which tells the fascinating story of the capture of a Rhodian girl by the Syracusans, and the way in which she won her liberty by reciting the play Alcestis. The plays of Euripides as a whole are well translated by Arthur S. Way, M.A. (Macmillan); and the plays of Æschylus by Dean Plumptre. Miss Anna Swanwick has rendered the Agamemnon of Æschylus into charming English.