Yet myths, though difficult to reconcile with chronology, are always practical: they insist on some point of tradition, however distorted the meaning may have become in the telling.
Some say that when the brothers met they were moved by true affection; that Esau forgave Jacob as they kissed and embraced; and that equal loving-kindness was shown between the many cousins, their children. Others, however, say that when Esau fell upon Jacob’s neck, he tried to bite through his jugular vein, but the neck became hard as ivory, blunting Esau’s teeth, which he therefore gnashed in futile rage.
We no longer saw the war as one between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.
At last, hopelessly surveying myself all over, I was obliged to face the mortifying fact that I had been transformed not into a bird, but into a plain jackass.
All civil wars are dynastic wars, my lord King; all overseas wars are trade wars,” agreed the portly Hyrian.
Two are needed to make a comradeship, but only one to dissolve it.
None the less he allowed “triumphal ornaments” – an embroidered robe, a statue, a chaplet, and so on – to be awarded to those who would otherwise have earned a triumph; this should be a sufficient incentive to any good soldier to fight a necessary war.
Once you give way to a metaphor, Claudius, which is rare, you pursue it too far. Surely you remember Athenodorus’s injunctions against this sort of thing? Well, call Sejanus the maggot and get it done with; then return to your usual homely style!
Conversations between persons who do not like one another’s selves are always sterile.
To use the majesty of law for revenging any petty act of private spite is to make a public confession of weakness, cowardice and an ignoble spirit.” There.
The lives of such characters as Heracles, Daedalus, Teiresias, and Phineus span several generations, because these are titles rather than names of particular heroes.
For my experience as a historian is that more documents survive by chance than by intention.
The bad poet is likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply as the poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow been given the power of translating experience into images and emblems, or of melting words in the furnace of his mind and making them flow into the channels prepared to take them.
How Graves came to fasten on Claudius as his narrator I have no means of knowing, whether it was after long deliberation or came as a shaft of light. But it is hard to imagine a better vehicle for recounting the first half-century of Imperial Rome – a chronicler who lived at the very centre of its far from healthy heart.
Before the succession of Deiphobe, whom Augustus often consulted, and Amalthea, who is still alive and most famous, there had been a run of very poor Sibyls for nearly 300 years. The cavern lies behind a pretty little Greek temple sacred to Apollo and Artemis – Cumae was an Aeolian Greek colony.
A third general cause of confusion has been timidity. A fear of feeling definitely committed to any statement that might cause trouble or inconvenience seems to haunt almost everyone in Britain who holds a public position, however unimportant.
War was ever an expensive luxury to any nation but to poor carnivores as the Huns or Vikings who had little to lose and much to gain.
I’ll tell you a story. There was once a badly wounded man lying on the battle-field waiting for the surgeon to dress his wound, which was covered with flies. A lightly wounded comrade saw the flies and was going to drive them away. ‘Oh, no,’ cried the wounded man, ’don’t do that! These flies are almost gorged with my blood now and aren’t hurting me nearly so much as they did at first: if you drive them away their place will be taken at once by hungrier ones, and that will be the end of me.
However, to think with perfect clarity in a poetic sense one must first rid oneself of a great deal of intellectual encumbrance, including all dogmatic doctrinal prepossessions: membership of any political party or religious sect or literary school deforms the poetic sense – as it were, introduces something irrelevant and destructive into the magic circle, drawn with a rowan, hazel or willow rod, within which the poet insulates himself for the poetic act.
This is not by any means my first book: in fact literature, and especially the writing of history – which as a young man I studied here at Rome under the best contemporary masters – was, until the change came, my sole profession and interest for more than thirty-five years.