> Great epics in music and poetry, literature and painting are great because they are serious. That is a difficult claim to back up if you look at the literatu

> Great epics in music and poetry, literature and painting are great because they are serious. That is a difficult claim to back up if you look at the literature from Greece and Rome that was thought worth preserving over the centuries. A lot of plays by Plautus, for example, are pretty low comedy comparable to our low comedy today, but they nonetheless entered the canon of “great art”.