Laocoon : $b An essay upon the limits of painting and poetry. With remarks illustrative of various points in the history of ancient art.Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim
Philosophy
Laocoon : $b An essay upon the limits of painting and poetry. With remarks illustrative of various points in the history of ancient art.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim
Aesthetics -- Early works to 1800; Agesander. Laocoön group
We read in Pliny (lib. 34, sect. 19): “Eundem [Myro] vicit et Pythagoras
Leontinus, qui fecit statiodromon Astylon, qui Olympiæ ostenditur: et
Libyn puerum tenentem tabulam, eodem loco, et mala ferentem nudum.
Syracusis autem claudicantem: cujus hulceris dolorem sentire etiam
spectantes videntur.” “Pythagoras Leontinus surpassed him (Myro). He
made the statue of the runner, Astylon, which is exhibited at Olympia,
and in the same place a Libyan boy holding a tablet, and a rude statue
bearing apples; but at Syracuse a limping figure, the pain of whose sore
the beholders themselves seem to feel.” Let us examine these last words
more closely. Is there not evident reference here to some person well
known as having a painful ulcer? “Cujus hulceris,” &c. And shall that
“cujus” be made to refer simply to the “claudicantem,” and the
“claudicantem,” perhaps, to the still more remote “puerum?” No one had
more reason to be known by such a malady than Philoctetes. I read,
therefore, for “claudicantem,” “Philoctetem,” or, at least, both
together, “Philoctetem claudicantem,” supposing that, as the words were
so similar in sound, one had crowded out the other. Sophocles represents
him as στίβον κατ’ ἀνάγκην ἕρπειν, compelled to drag his limping gait,
and his not being able to tread as firmly on his wounded foot would have
occasioned a limp.
Note 7, p. 24.
When the chorus perceives Philoctetes under this accumulation of
miseries, his helpless solitude seems the circumstance that chiefly
touches them. We hear in every word the social Greek. With regard to one
passage, however, I have my doubts. It is this:—
Ἵν’ αὐτὸς ἦν πρόσουρος οὐκ ἔχων βάσιν,
οὐδέ τιν’ ἐγχώρων,
κακογείτονα παρ’ ᾧ στόνον ἀντίτυπον
βαρυβρῶτ’ ἀποκλαύ—
σειεν αἱματηρόν.
Lit.: I myself, my only neighbor, having no power to walk, nor any
companion, a neighbor in ill, to whom I might wail forth my echoing,
gnawing groans, bloodstained.
The common translation of Winshem renders the lines thus:—
Ventis expositus et pedibus captus
Nullum cohabitatorem
Nec vicinum ullum saltem malum habens, apud quem gemitum mutuum.
Gravemque ac cruentum
Ederet.
The translation of Thomas Johnson differs from this only in the choice
of words:—
Ubi ipse ventis erat expositus, firmum gradum non habens,
Nec quenquam indigenarum,
Nec malum vicinum, apud quem ploraret
Vehementur edacem
Sanguineum morbum, mutuo gemitu.
One might think he had borrowed these words from the translation of
Thomas Naogeorgus, who expresses himself thus (his work is very rare,
and Fabricius himself knew it only through Operin’s Catalogue):—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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