‘—­almost always’ [he says] opposing and coercing them in all sorts of ways throughout life, sometimes more violently with the pains of medicine and gymnastic; then again more gently;—­ threatening, and also reprimanding the desires, passions, fears, as if talking to a thing which is not herself; as Homer in the Odyssey represents Odysseus doing in the words

[Greek:  stethos de plexas kradien enipape mutho: 
        tetlathi de, kradie; kai kynteron allo pot etles]

  He beat his breast, and thus reproached his heart: 
  Endure, my heart; far worse hast thou endured.

Do you think [asks Socrates] that Homer wrote this under the idea that the soul is a harmony capable of being led by the affections of the body, and not rather of a nature which should lead and master them—­herself a far diviner thing than any harmony?

A Greek, then, will use Homer—­his Bible—­minutely on niceties of conduct or broadly on first principles of philosophy or religion.  But equally, since it is poetry all the time to him, he will take—­or to instance particular writers, Aristotle and the late Greek, Longinus will take—­a single hexameter to illustrate a minute trick of style or turn of phrase, as equally he will choose a long passage or the whole “Iliad,” the whole “Odyssey,” to illustrate a grand rule of poetic construction, a first principle of aesthetics.  For an example—­’Herein,’ says Aristotle, starting to show that an Epic poem must have Unity of Subject—­’Herein, to repeat what we have said before, we have a further proof of Homer’s superiority to the rest.  He did not attempt to deal even with the Trojan War in its entirety, though it was a whole story with a definite beginning, middle and end—­ feeling apparently that it was too long a story to be taken in at one view or else over-complicated by variety of incidents.’  And as Aristotle takes the “Iliad”—­his Bible—­to illustrate a grand rule of poetical construction, so the late writer of his tradition—­Longinus—­will use it to exhibit the core and essence of poetical sublimity; as in his famous ninth chapter, of which Gibbon wrote: 

The ninth chapter ... {of the [Greek:  PERI UPSOUS] or “De Sublimitate” of Longinus} is one of the finest monuments of antiquity.  Till now, I was acquainted only with two ways of criticising a beautiful passage:  the one, to show, by an exact anatomy of it, the distinct beauties of it, and whence they sprung; the other, an idle exclamation, or a general encomium, which leaves nothing behind it.  Longinus has shown me that there is a third.  He tells me his own feelings upon reading it; and tells them with so much energy, that he communicates them.  I almost doubt which is more sublime, Homer’s Battle of the Gods, or Longinus’s Apostrophe to Terentianus upon it.

Well, let me quote you, in translation, a sentence or two from this chapter, which produced upon Gibbon such an effect as almost to anticipate Walter Pater’s famous definition, ’To feel the virtue of the poet, of the painter, to disengage it, to set it forth—­these are the three stages of the critic’s duty.’