C. E. M. Joad quote

[SigniferOne]

Yes, but if you pop the "cui bono" question, it may be so because of completely other reasons than its subjective quality.

If I can pop the "cui bono" question, then surely the the classicists and the learned elite of Europe who insisted on pedagogical memorization of Virgil could ask it too. And if they made kids memorize 12,000 lines of verbatim ancient Latin text which in truth they saw as of just regular quality, then one can posit a serious case of schizophrenia among the European literate elite for the last several centuries.

But I'm being facetious of course, there are tons of authors which mention Virgil as being better than what Europe had come up with so far. For example a 17th century French critic Rene Rapin had a famous series of comparison between Roman and Greek authors (e.g. Virgil and Homer), because he thought that nothing modern could be found in comparison. The very fact that I mentioned Ariosto, Tasso and Milton (the greatest modern epic poets), is because of precisely such a comparison in an 18th century work of criticism, to a resounding result against them.