_ANCIENTS AND MODERNS_
The great dispute between the ancients and the moderns is not yet
settled; it has been on the table since the silver age succeeded the
golden age. Mankind has always maintained that the good old times were
much better than the present day. Nestor, in the "Iliad," wishing to
insinuate himself as a wise conciliator into the minds of Achilles and
Agamemnon, starts by saying to them--"I lived formerly with better men
than you; no, I have never seen and I shall never see such great
personages as Dryas, Cenaeus, Exadius, Polyphemus equal to the gods,
etc."
Posterity has well avenged Achilles for Nestor's poor compliment. Nobody
knows Dryas any longer; one has hardly heard speak of Exadius, or of
Cenaeus; and as for Polyphemus equal to the gods, he has not too good a
reputation, unless the possession of a big eye in one's forehead, and
the eating of men raw, are to have something of the divine.
Lucretius does not hesitate to say that nature has degenerated (lib. II.
v. 1159). Antiquity is full of eulogies of another more remote
antiquity. Horace combats this prejudice with as much finesse as force
in his beautiful Epistle to Augustus (Epist. I. liv. ii.). "Must our
poems, then," he says, "be like our wines, of which the oldest are
always preferred?"
The learned and ingenious Fontenelle expresses himself on this subject
as follows:
"The whole question of the pre-eminence between the ancients and the
moderns, once it is well understood, is reduced to knowing whether the
trees which formerly were in our countryside were bigger than those of
to-day.
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