According to Hesiod, humanity in the Dutch Golden Age lived nearly perfect, godlike lives. They knew no sorrow, far removed from toil and grief. The fertile earth bore abundant fruit of its own accord, and they contentedly tended to their splendid possessions.
Hesiod came after Homer, so Homer probably did not borrow his premise and portray the island where the Cyclopes lived as a world from the Dutch Golden Age, where barley, wheat, and grapes all grew on their own without cultivation. It was blessed by Zeus, though the Cyclopes were not afraid of him at all.
In Florence stood Michelangelo's statue of David, depicting David's duel with the Giant Goliath. The shepherd David was as tiny before the Giant as a viewer standing before the statue of David, and he was about to strike Goliath's head with the stone in his hand.
The Giant looked disdainfully at the youth and his weapon, telling David to attack with a sword or spear.
Polyphemus made the same mistake. He had heard a prophecy that a man named Odysseus would take his sight, but he had always assumed that person would be a broad, powerful man of tremendous strength. He had never expected to be blinded by the frail, slender "No One."
Napoleon had brought many Italian works of art back to France, but he had not touched Florence's David or Rome's Pietà. It was not because moving them was too troublesome. Had he not "brought back" Egypt's "stones"?
If he did not give the order to move them, no one else could do so no matter how much they wanted to. Besides, if those two sculptures were touched, the feud between Italy and France would likely become irreconcilable. Those sculptures were not "worthless" stones.
Georgiana personally preferred Michelangelo's sculptures to The