Note 7 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTION

From Homer to the tragedies of Seneca, a full thousand years, the same handful of myth-figures (Thyestes, Clytæmnestra, Heracles and the like) appear time after time without alteration, whereas in the poetry of the West, Faustian Man figures, first as Parzeval or Tristan, then (modified always into harmony with the epoch) as Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and eventually Faust or Werther, and now as the hero of the modern world-city romance, but is always presented in the atmosphere and under the conditions of a particular century.