Xanthian Marbles The Nereid Monument PDF Download

Excerpt from Xanthian Marbles: The Nereid Monument; An Historical and Mythological Essay The elucidation of the composition of Homeric Lycia, throws light on that of Troy that has ever been an enigma. After every allowance made for Greek modes of representing foreign character, and for the unscrupulous liberties of the poetic sense of keeping, as explanatory of the great resem blance between the Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad, there still was felt to remain an unexplained phenomenon. Lycia solves the difficulty of reconciling the Greek characteristics of the Troad and Trojans, with their Asiatic and Thracian relationship, by exhibiting the possibility of a case, that seems to have appeared too hopeless even for statement as an hypothesis, -the superinduction of Greek habits and worships on a people neither Hellenic nor Pelasgian, purely barbarian. Thucydides had long ago remarked, that the later dis tinction between Greek and Barbarian was not apparent in Homer's delineation of Achaian and Trojan, and cited illustrations of the progress of the separation. But these examples gave no information how great were still the differences, in defiance of which so much sympathy and communication were practicable, and went little way to characterize the period as it must now be conceived. A period is to be inferred when, within whatever limits, attraction was as much the rule between Greek and Barbarian, as was repulsion afterwards; an age of mutual receptiveness and transfusion, in striking contrast to the antagonism that succeeded it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.