Volume 38, Number 20 · December 5, 1991
Twin Peaks
By Derek Jarrett
The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age
by Joseph M. Levine
Cornell University Press, 428 pp., $29.95
For the greater part of human history mountaintops were imagined rather than visited. As well as being desolate and difficult to reach they had in many cases been appropriated by gods and goddesses, either as permanent homes or as settings for special effects designed to overawe the humbler creation. Moses ascended the smoking and quaking mountain in the wilderness of Sinai unscathed, but only because he was there by special invitation. The rest of the children of Israel very prudently stood afar off. Petrarch, the indefatigable fourteenth-century interpreter of the Greek and Roman classics, is said to have been one of the first men in modern times to climb a mountain. The ancient authors he was studying would probably have shunned such an enterprise for fear of offending some resident deity. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the pioneers of modern mountaineering first set out to climb the Matterhorn, local people assured them that it was the home of demons who would lure them to their deaths.
Review, 3502 words
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