{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 224/1923-04-13/p013","lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"It was out of an extraordinarily deep perception that the well-known scholar and writer on the history of Art, Hermann Grimm, drew a clear line of division between the Greeks and the Romans. When we learn history at school or at the university, we are, he said, exhorted to take pains to *understand* what we learn; but as we go back over the evolution of mankind, we *can* only understand history as far back as Roman times. Cicero and Caesar we can still understand, for up to a point they are similar to the man of the present day,—although it must be said that the understanding generally brought to a study of Caesar is far from being free and natural. If we were not so thoroughly drilled and trained to it, we would never take much interest in Caesar! We would leave it to the pupils in military schools. Generally speaking, however, it is possible to trace a continuous stream back from our own day to Rome. A certain element of pedantry, which has gradually been creeping into man's life and has to-day reached a kind of culmination, first began to show itself in Rome. But, thinks Hermann Grimm, if we are honest with ourselves, we cannot claim to understand Pericles or Alcibiades. We understand them in the same way as we understand characters in fairy tales. As a matter of fact, it is only through a deeper study of Anthroposophy that one can come again to an understanding of the soul life of such figures; as you know, we have sought here again and again to enter into the whole way in which a Greek thinks and forms his ideas. Hermann Grimm is aware of the distance that lies between the inner life of a Greek and the inner life of a man of the present day. To the Roman we can still feel ourselves near; then comes a great gulf. The way the Greeks are described in the schools to-day is really deplorable! They are made out to be just like ourselves. They were not so at all, their whole life of soul was of a different character altogether. We need to look round for quite other methods to describe the Greeks. You could not have more striking evidence of this than when the learned Wilamowitz undertakes to translate the Greek tragedians. The whole affair is simply a disgrace. I need hardly say, there is nothing of the Greek tragedies left in his translations, not a trace! And yet people are immensely pleased, quite enchanted with them. *Their* dramatis personae simply do not exist in the tragedies themselves.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"The Recovery of the Living Source of Speech","site_heading":null,"date":"1923-04-13","location":null,"word_count":440,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/224/1923-04-13/p013","alignment_confidence":"high","alignment_reason":"beads:length","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":{"scope":"unit","status":"not_established","translator":null,"identified_edition":"Singles","book_title":null,"publisher":null,"publisher_inferred":false,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA224/English/Singles/19230413p01.html","evidence":null,"reason":"no_translator_named","note":"Neither the lecture's own page nor rsarchive's lecture list names a translator for it. No translator is established for this lecture: nothing at the level of the lecture names one. Do not attribute this English to a translator, and do not borrow a credit from another lecture of the volume. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["English"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","edition_basis":null,"is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/224/1923-04-13/p013"},{"lang":"en","edition":"English","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/224/1923-04-13/p013","paragraph_aligned":true}],"record":{"record_type":"unknown","scope":"volume","note":"How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.","evidence":null,"evidence_translation":null,"evidence_source":null},"german_anchor":{"de_prefix":"1923-04-13","de_passages":[{"locus":"GA 224/1923-04-13/p017","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/224/1923-04-13/p017"},{"locus":"GA 224/1923-04-13/p018","url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/224/1923-04-13/p018"}],"bead_confidence":"high","length_check":{"de_words":389,"en_words":440,"ratio":1.13,"partial":false},"correspondence":"established","note":"English passage numbering is edition-relative, so the same number need not name the same paragraph in the German. The German original passage(s) above are the edition-invariant anchor — fetch them (lang='de') to verify wording before quoting across editions."},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":1.07,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":4874,"original_word_count":4538,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"scope":"unit","status":"not_established","translator":null,"identified_edition":"Singles","book_title":null,"publisher":null,"publisher_inferred":false,"match_score":1.0,"source_url":"https://www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA224/English/Singles/19230413p01.html","evidence":null,"reason":"no_translator_named","note":"Neither the lecture's own page nor rsarchive's lecture list names a translator for it. No translator is established for this lecture: nothing at the level of the lecture names one. Do not attribute this English to a translator, and do not borrow a credit from another lecture of the volume. Cite the German for anything load-bearing.","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"ok","checked_against":["GA 224/1923-04-13/p017","GA 224/1923-04-13/p018"],"missing_from_translation":[],"present_only_in_translation":[],"bead_confidence":"high","note":"Every load-bearing name in the German counterpart appears in this English passage. That is a check on NAMES only: a translation can keep every name and still reverse who acts on whom, change a number, or soften a claim. Read the German for anything you intend to rest an argument on."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}