Jonathan Barnes

‘Theaetetus is flying’: Plato presented the sentence as a paradigm falsehood; good Aristotelians later argued that its falsity was apodictically certain. For the impossibility of human flight seemed to follow ineluctably from two seemingly irrefragable truths. First, there’s no flying without wings. ‘Flight,’ according to Aristotle, ‘is the form of locomotion peculiarly appropriate to birds,’ and it is properly accomplished by means of wings. (A stock example in the ancient logic books ran: ‘If the earth flies, it has wings.’) Secondly, men have no wings. According to Aristotle again, ‘birds cannot have an upright posture like men. For the nature of their wings is useful to them given the way in which their bodies are in fact constituted, but if they were upright the wings would be useless – as they are on the Cupids which painters depict. And it is clear that no man – nor anything else of a similar form – could be winged: for the possession of wings would be useless for them in their natural movement, and nature makes nothing contrary to nature.’ Only things with wings can fly; no man can have wings: therefore no man can fly. Flying is strictly for the birds.’

Greek, Sir, said he, is like lace; every man gets as much of it as he can.’ So Johnson in 1780. An early editor punctiliously observed that ‘this was said twenty-five or thirty years ago, when lace was very generally worn.’ Two centuries later lace is quite out of fashion.

Every pilgrim who ascends the Acropolis is seized by the splendour of the Parthenon, its ruined elegance, its marmoreal serenity. But the pilgrimage is secular: although we know that the Parthenon was a temple, we do not experience it as a numinous haunt of the gods. The power of its finished form is now perhaps beyond imagination: but it may be doubted whether even the vast chryselephantine statue of Athene which it housed – and which was, by all accounts, incomparable in its vulgarity – added any awfulness to the place. The museum visitor who contemplates a marble Aphrodite may likewise know that Aphrodite was a Greek goddess. But her smooth contours are unlikely to excite thoughts of religious passion.

Who else would refer in the space of a hundred pages to a newly discovered papyrus of Stesichorus, a Zurich medical dissertation on the fear of being buried alive, and four 19th-century Danish followers of Hegel? George Steiner’s erudition is as exuberant as ever. The latest book, like its predecessors, teems with esoteric references, recondite allusions and jackdaw juxtapositions. It resounds with the clangour of dropping names.