When I can remember to do it, I keep an eye out for what might be the world’s greatest footnote. At the top of my list is this specimen from Professor H.D.F. Kitto:
Why should we not begin to assume, for a change, that Euripides and Sophocles, being very great and sincere artists, though entirely different by temperament, were, as artists, sympathetically interested in and appreciative of each other’s words and methods? There is no evidence for such a view, but neither, I think, is there real evidence for the impression one is given that they were self-conscious, self-righteous, and censorious rivals. A good theme for an imaginary conversation: the two poets in a group of Athenian notables, from Pericles downwards; the others try desperately to start a philosophic or moral discussion between the two poets, but the poets will talk of nothing but dramatic technique — how to use the chorus, and whether a resolved is more effective than an unresolved dochmiac.
That’s a an important thought, and I can’t believe the professor put it in a footnote. Though Kitto published this piece the year before I was born, I also suffered under “the impression one is given” when I went to college.
I wish some writer or fiction or drama would run with that imaginary conversation.
• Source: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954, p. 351.
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