On not Knowing Greek by Virginia Woolf

For it is vain and foolish to talk of Knowing Greek, since in our / ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since / we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to / laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and / ourselves there is not only difference of race and tongue but a / tremendous breach of tradition. All the more strange, then, is it that / we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn / back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of / Greek, though from what incongruous odds and ends, with what slight / resemblance to the real meaning of Greek, who shall say?

It is obvious in the first place that Greek literature is the impersonal / literature. Those few hundred years that separate John Paston from / Plato, Norwich from Athens, make a chasm which the vast tide of European / chatter can never succeed in crossing. When we read Chaucer, we are / floated up to him insensibly on the current of our ancestors' lives, and / later, as records increase and memories lengthen, there is scarcely a / figure which has not its nimbus of association, its life and letters, / its wife and family, its house, its character, its happy or dismal / catastrophe. But the Greeks remain in a fastness of their own. Fate has / been kind there too. She has preserved them from vulgarity, Euripides / was eaten by dogs; Æschylus killed by a stone; Sappho leapt from a / cliff. We know no more of them than that. We have their poetry, and that / is all.