For
poetry is the companion of the camps.
I dare undertake, Orlando Furioso or honest King Arthur will never
displease a soldier; but the quiddity of _ens_ and _prima materia_
will hardly agree with a corslet; and therefore, as I said in the
beginning, even Turks and Tartars are delighted with poets. Homer, a
Greek, flourished before Greece flourished. And if to a slight
conjecture a conjecture may be opposed, truly it may seem that, as by
him their learned men took almost their first light of knowledge, so
their active men received their first motions of courage. Only
Alexander's example may serve, who by Plutarch is accounted of such
virtue that fortune was not his guide but his footstool; whose acts
speak for him, though Plutarch did not: indeed, the Phoenix of warlike
princes. This Alexander left his schoolmaster, living Aristotle, behind
him, but took dead Homer with him; he put the philosopher Calisthenes
to death for his seeming philosophical, indeed mutinous stubbornness.
But the chief thing he ever was heard to wish for was that Homer had
been alive.
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