ding
Homer, recanted in the verses--

With subtle wit you took away
Our former adoration:
The Iliad, you may us say,
Was mere conglomeration.
Think it not crime in any way:
Youth's fervent adoration
Leads us to know the verity,
And feel the poet's unity.

The reason of this want of piety and reverence must lie deeper; and many
are in doubt as to whether philologists are lacking in artistic capacity
and impressions, so that they are unable to do justice to the ideal, or
whether the spirit of negation has become a destructive and iconoclastic
principle of theirs. When, however, even the friends of antiquity,
possessed of such doubts and hesitations, point to our present classical
philology as something questionable, what influence may we not ascribe
to the outbursts of the "realists" and the claptrap of the heroes of the
passing hour? To answer the latter on this occasion, especially when we
consider the nature of the present assembly, would be highly
injudicious; at any rate, if I do not wish to meet with the fate of
that sophist who, when in Sparta, publicly undertook to praise and
defend Herakles, when he was interrupted with the query: "But who then
has found fault with him?" I cannot help thinking, however, that some of
these scruples are still sounding in the ears of not a few in this
gathering; for they may still be frequently heard from the lips of noble
and artistically gifted men--as even an upright philologist must feel
them, and feel them most painfully, at moments when his spirits are
downcast. For the single individual there is no deliverance from the
dissensions referred to; but what we contend and inscribe on our banner
is the fact that classical philology, as a whole, has nothing whatsoever
to do with the quarrels and bickerings of its individual disciples. The
entire scientific and artistic movement of this peculiar centaur is
bent, though with cyclopic slowness, upon bridging over the gulf between
the ideal antiquity--which is perhaps only the magnificent blossoming of
the Teutonic longing for the south--and the real antiquity; and thus
classical philology pursues only the final end of its own being, which
is the fusing together of primarily hostile impulses that have only
forcibly been brought together. Let us talk as we will about the
unattainability of this goal, and even designate the goal itself as an
illogical pretension--the aspiration for it i