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
a neighbor in ill, one who is overtaken by a similar misfortune with
ourselves, or from friendship shares our sufferings; so that the whole
expression, οὐδ’ ἔχων τιν’ ἐγχώρων κακογείτονα, is to be translated
simply by “neque quenquam indigenarum mali socium habens.” The new
English translator of Sophocles, Thomas Franklin, must have been of my
opinion. Neither does he find an evil neighbor in κακογείτων, but
translates it simply “fellow-mourner.”
Exposed to the inclement skies,
Deserted and forlorn he lies,
No friend nor fellow-mourner there,
To soothe his sorrow and divide his care.
Note 8, p. 34.
Saturnal. lib. v. cap. 2. “Non parva sunt alia quæ Virgilius traxit a
Græcis, dicturumne me putatis quæ vulgo nota sunt? quod Theocritum sibi
fecerit pastoralis operis autorem, ruralis Hesiodum? et quod in ipsis
Georgicis, tempestatis serenitatisque signa de Arati Phænomenis
traxerit? vel quod eversionem Trojæ, cum Sinone suo, et equo ligneo
cæterisque omnibus, quæ librum secundum faciunt, a Pisandro pene ad
verbum transcripserit? qui inter Græcos poetas eminet opere, quod a
nuptiis Jovis et Junonis incipiens universas historias, quæ mediis
omnibus sæculis usque ad ætatem ipsius Pisandri contigerunt, in unam
seriem coactas redegerit, et unum ex diversis hiatibus temporum corpus
effecerit? in quo opere inter historias cæteras interitus quoque Trojæ
in hunc modum relatus est. Quæ fideliter Maro interpretando, fabricatus
est sibi Iliacæ urbis ruinam. Sed et hæc et talia ut pueris decantata
prætereo.”
Not a few other things were brought by Virgil from the Greeks, and
inserted in his poem as original. Do you think I would speak of what is
known to all the world? how he took his pastoral poem from Theocritus,
his rural from Hesiod? and how, in his Georgics, he took from the
Phenomena of Aratus the signs of winter and summer? or that he
translated almost word for word from Pisander the destruction of Troy,
with his Sinon and wooden horse and the rest? For he is famous among
Greek poets for a work in which, beginning his universal history with
the nuptials of Jupiter and Juno, he collected into one series whatever
had happened in all ages, to the time of himself, Pisander. In which
work the destruction of Troy, among other things, is related in the same
way. By faithfully interpreting these things, Maro made his ruin of
Ilium. But these, and others like them, I pass over as familiar to every
schoolboy.
Note 9, p. 35.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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