"There are changes of fashion in story-telling; and the ancient world, like our own, has seen times where people thought it 'modern' to say they liked disgusting stories, though the ancients never quite reached the modern fancy for tales of such very dirty little people, living dingy lives and doing mean things. Not all vulgarity is modern. But, if the fashion for such stuff appears and re-appears, it never lasts very long. Dirt and dinginess lack variety and are not really interesting. Esquemeling's stories of the pirates, for instance, are in the end dull, and they would be a great deal duller but for the seamanship that enables the pirate to scour the Caribbean, and the great fighting qualities, courage, strategy, tactics, and so on, that help him to sack the Spanish towns and capture his thousands of pieces of eight. The rest of his story is tiresome enough. It takes a lot of virtue to make vice interesting; and the great Greek poet [Homer] saw (and, as the Greeks said, he was always right) that the splendid qualities in men and women are the interesting ones." (The ancient world, T.R. Glover, p.29)
Ik las dit pas, en vond het een mooi citaat. Eerder schreef ik al zoiets over moraal en schoonheid. Overigens is het altijd al de mode om een beetje vuiligheid in verhalen te stoppen omdat men onrustig lijkt te worden als het echt over het goede gaat. De Griekse sagen hebben echter misschien wel dezelfde tekortkoming.
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