C. E. M. Joad quote

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Nevertheless Jona, we can pick at Virgil all we want, but who in in our last 500 years has been able to be a better poet? We can try to raise up Milton, Tasso, Ariosto to the standard, but the project is hopeless, the comparisons have already all been made and none of those authors is able to rise up to the same stature as he. The same is true of other authors, like Livy, with whose magnitude, grandeur, scope of history hardly a modern historian can stand an even close comparison; perhaps only Gibbon; certainly none of the German historians that I'm aware of, even the legendary ones like Niebuhr or Mommsen. Same applies even more to somebody like Cicero, who appeared to be a not a one-sided but a universal genius. One feels we could restart the contest between the Ancients and Moderns right here!