Show description

This eschewal is 20 Funeral Games in Homer and Virgil clearly deliberate in an epic which both aims to subordinate the individual in the interests of the common good and looks to long-term universal peace rather than a short-term nationalistic war. Of the major contestants in the foot race Nisus, Euryalus and Diores are all Trojans, Salius is a Greek who presumably joined Aeneas at Buthrotum, and Helymus is a Sicilian. Nationalist fervour may add a little edge to the fervour of the contestants, although Virgil, in making Entellus and Acestes, both Sicilians, win the boxing and the archery, is clearly not eager, here or anywhere else in the Aeneid, to pursue a narrow nationalist line.

Edward Larrissy 33 When Oscar Wilde asserts that 'Wark is the curse of the drinking classes' he is not suggesting that the leisured classes should be earnest (at least, not according to the 'straight' definition). Rather he is alluding to an aristocratic manner of life in which the creation of art is the natural flowering of an existence in which the pleasures of conversation, love, friendship and art are the normal round and the proper goal. When Wilde visited Rome he kissed the Pope's hand. But the same evening, in the Protestant cemetery, he prostrated himself on Keats's grave.

But for Pater art is one intensity among others, though superior to others because more refined and exquisite. Yet Edward Larrissy 35 Browning and aestheticism approach each other subtly: Dorian Gray bears more than a superficial resemblance to 'My Last Duchess'. For the former shows how morally ugly is a devotion to beautiful appearances devoid of love, while the latter suggests that there is something potentially deadening in the aesthetic impulse even when it is most subject to the ends of fidelity to life.