We should also note the relative irrelevance of large parts of Homer.That sounds pretty stinging out of context. It's not much better in context - he's forming a comparative analysis of the chariot race in the Iliad and the boat race in the Aeneid. It dates him; it's too subjective. The whole book reads this way, including the title - 'Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry'. It belongs to an age where a man can write an entire book on what he thinks of Vergil with the dramatic vigour of a detective novel. It's not so much that I disagree with what he says; I just think that opinions don't seem to go too far on the page these days: it reads much more like a series of nostalgic lectures; like these observations have been growing inside him for some time, a seed planted the moment he first heard of Vergil, and after struggling through academia, and the ignorance of both students and colleagues, the world must know.
In my case, we should be grateful that of the 1200 lines I've been set to learn from the Iliad, around a hundred are repeated verbatim. It really is a memory game.
"I say, I say, I say: I went to the curved-black-swift-ships and I brought with me.. seven shining cauldrons, ten talents of gold, three tripods un-touched by fire, twelve slave girls - and a partridge in a pear tree."
Hilarity.
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