Ancient Literary Evidence
Literary analysis has been going on since classical Greece, when the writers of those times read previous works on the subject. No definitive answers were ever forthcoming by this method; rather, it served to define the problems better. The method perhaps reached a peak in the Victorian era when new methods of systematic comparison began to be applied in philology. Typical of the era is the long and detailed study of William Ewart Gladstone, who among his many talents was a trained classicist. All the evidence presented in this section is covered in the article on Gladstone. Until further ancient texts come to light, advances on the subject cannot be made. The most likely source of progress regarding the Pelasgians continues to be archaeology and related sciences.
Read more about this topic: Pelasgians
Famous quotes containing the words ancient, literary and/or evidence:
“I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
Those undreamt accidents that have made me
Seeing that Fame has perished this long while,
Being but a part of ancient ceremony
Notorious, till all my priceless things
Are but a post the passing dogs defile.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)