M. Cornford, Bruno Snell, and E. R. Dodds, among others, and one which Gaston Bachelard cited as the first stage in his theory of Western scientific and philosophical development. How many have made the early Greeks say what they wished them to, because what they have said to us is mainly in bits and pieces, in a language we don’t know how to pronounce, and in words that refer to a world we have lost, if we ever possessed it, a world we have filled with our own feelings, like those of a childhood we want to think was happy and promising beyond all expectation. Our own awe built those temples and we were the ones who worshiped there. Even when, almost with relief, we decide that the glorious Greeks were really just as mean and murderous as we are; sometimes as stupid as their sheep; still worse, that they watered their wine; our revisions are but patina on the columns of the temples where the great statues stood, where Socrates discovered the immateriality of the soul, and, in the plays, Agamemnon died.
