Apology for poetry - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 edition. Excerpt: ..." In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry." And again: " They are the institutors of laws and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion." 2 32. Orpheus, Linus. These, like Musaeus, and perhaps Hesiod and Homer, are semi-mythical personages. In discussing the legends concerning them Mahaffy says Hist. Grk. Lit. I. 10): " But the very fact of the forging of the name of Orpheus, Musaeus, and others proves clearly the antiquity of these names, and that the poetry ascribed to them was of a character quite different from that of the Epos. The very frequent allusions of Plato, on the other hand, who even in three places quotes the words of Orpheus, show clearly that he accepted Orpheus and Musaeus, whom he usually co-ordinates, as ancient masters of religious song, and on a par with Homer and Hesiod. This general acceptance of Orpheus as a real personage, with no less frequent suspicions as to the genuineness of the current Orphic books, appears in other Greek writers; e.g. Aristotle cites the so-called Orphic poems, just as he cites the so-called Pythagorean books. Apart from these casual allusions, our really explicit authorities are the antiquaries of later days, to whom we owe almost all the definite knowledge we possess. Pausanias, in particular, not only speaks constantly of these poets, but refers to some of their hymns which he had heard, and it is he and Strabo who afford us the materials for constructing a general theory about them." Of Linus, Mahaffy says (I. 14): "There are other names...