{"id":39,"date":"2005-08-16T23:46:59","date_gmt":"2005-08-17T03:46:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.2\/~curculio\/?p=39"},"modified":"2013-08-19T00:11:33","modified_gmt":"2013-08-19T05:11:33","slug":"macaulay-on-the-greek-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=39","title":{"rendered":"Macaulay On The Greek Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

From one of Macaulay’s Calcutta letters:<\/p>\n

\n

I have at stray hours read Longus’s Romance and Xenophon’s Ephesiaca: and I mean to go through Heliodorus, and Achilles Tatius, in the same way. Longus is prodigiously absurd; but there is often an exquisite prettiness in the style. Xenophon’s Novel is the basest thing to be found in Greek. It was discovered at Florence, little more than a hundred years ago, by an English envoy. Nothing so detestable ever came from the Minerva Press.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Trevelyan’s footnote on the third sentence:<\/p>\n

\n

Xenophon the Ephesian lived in the third or fourth century of the Christian era. At the end of his work Macaulay has written: ‘A most stupid, worthless performance, below the lowest trash of an English circulating library.’ Achilles Tatius he disposes of with the words ‘Detestable trash;’ and the Æthiopics of Heliodorus, which he appears to have finished on Easter-day, 1837, he pronounces ‘The best of the Greek Romances, which is not saying much for it.’<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay<\/em>, i.422.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From one of Macaulay’s Calcutta letters: I have at stray hours read Longus’s Romance and Xenophon’s Ephesiaca: and I mean to go through Heliodorus, and Achilles Tatius, in the same way. Longus is prodigiously absurd; but there is often an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[42,137,318],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-greek-literature","tag-greek-novel","tag-macaulay","tag-nachleben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":669,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}