fore they ascribed
them to the old culture they were trying to paint.

Lying was traditionally a Greek vice. The Greek lied as
naturally as the Persian told the truth. Homer wishes to set
forth Ulysses, one of his heroes, adorned with all heroic
perfections. He was so far Greek as not to think of lying as a
quality to detract; he proudly makes Ulysses a "lord of lies."
Perhaps nothing in Crete itself would have taught him better; if
we may believe Epimenides and Saint Paul. On the other hand, he
was a great-hearted and compassionate man; compassionate as
Shakespeare was. Now the position of women in historical Greece
was very low indeed; the position of women in Egypt, as we know,
was very high indeed. This was a question to touch such a man to
the quick; the position he gives women is very high: very much
higher than it was in Periclean Athens, with all the advance that
had been made by that time in general culture. Andromache, in
Homer, is the worthy companion and helpmeet of Hector; not a
Greek, but Egyptian idea.

Homer's contemporary, Hesiod, tells in his _Works and Days_ of
the plebeian and peasant life of his time. Hesiod had not the
grace of mind or imagination to idealize anything; he sets down
the life of the lower orders with a realism comparable to that of
the English Crabbe. It is an ugly and piteous picture he gives.
Homer, confining himself in the main to the patrician side of
things, does indeed give hints that the lot of the peasant and
slave was miserable; he does not quite escape some touches from
the background of his own day. Nor did Shakespeare, trying to
paint the life of ancient Athens, escape an English Elizabethan
Background; Bully Bottom and his colleagues are straight from
the wilds of Warwickshire; the Roman mob is made up of London
prentices, cobblers and the like. Learned Ben, on the other
hand, contrives in his _Sejanus_ and his _Catiline,_ by dint and
sheer intellect and erudition, to give us correct waxwork and
clockwork Romans; there are no anachronisms in Ben Johnson;
never a pterodactyl walks down _his_ Piccadilly. But Shakespeare
rather liked to have them in his; with his small Latin and less
Greek, he had to create his human beings--draw them from the
life, and from the life he saw about him. The deeper you see
into life, the less the costumes and academic exactitudes matter;
you keep your imagination for the great things, and let the
externals worry about themse