C. E. M. Joad quote

[Rumo]

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.

René Rapin (also known as Renatus Rapinus) was a 17th century (and so far we're in the 21st ) Jesuit scholar, writing works (also verses) in Latin. Is he a fair member of the jury?
Anyway the criteria for comparison are .... ?

We are dwarves on shoulders of giants, as some late medieval minds used to say. But especially from Renaissance onwards, there has been this hype on Graeco-Roman antiquities, that ancients were greater than us in many ways.