Literary and General Lectures and Essays | Page 8

delineation of the victor's form, while he obtained in
him a model, usually of the very highest type, for perfecting his idea of
some divinity. The possibility of gaining the right to a statue gave a
fresh impulse to all competitors in the public games, and through them
to the gymnastic training throughout all the states of Greece, which
made the Greeks the most physically able and graceful, as well as the
most beautiful people known to the history of the human race,--a
people who, reverencing beauty, reverenced likewise grace or acted
beauty, so utterly and honestly, that nothing was too humble for a free
man to do, if it were not done awkwardly and ill. As an instance,
Sophocles himself--over and above his poetic genius, one of the most
cultivated gentlemen, as well as one of the most exquisite musicians,
dancers, and gymnasts, and one of the most just, pious, and gentle of all

Greece--could not, by reason of the weakness of his voice, act in his
own plays, as poets were wont to do, and had to perform only the office
of stage-manager. Twice he took part in the action, once as the blind
old Thamyris playing on the harp, and once in his own lost tragedy, the
"Nausicaa." There in the scene in which the Princess, as she does in
Homer's "Odyssey," comes down to the sea-shore with her maidens to
wash the household clothes, and then to play at ball-- Sophocles
himself, a man then of middle age, did the one thing he could do better
than any there--and, dressed in women's clothes, among the lads who
represented the maidens, played at ball before the Athenian people.
Just sixty years after the representation of the "Antigone," 10,000
Greeks, far on the plains of Babylon, cut through the whole Persian
army, as the railway train cuts through a herd of buffalo, and then
losing all their generals by treacherous warfare, fought their way north
from Babylon to Trebizond on the Black Sea, under the guidance of a
young Athenian, a pupil of Socrates, who had never served in the army
before. The retreat of Xenophon and his 10,000 will remain for ever as
one of the grandest triumphs of civilisation over brute force: but what
made it possible? That these men, and their ancestors before them, had
been for at least 100 years in training, physical, intellectual, and moral,
which made their bodies and their minds able to dare and suffer like
those old heroes of whom their tragedy had taught them, and whose
spirits they still believed would help the valiant Greek. And yet that
feat, which looks to us so splendid, attracted, as far as I am aware, no
special admiration at the time. So was the cultivated Greek expected to
behave whenever he came in contact with the uncultivated barbarian.
But from what had sprung in that little state, this exuberance of
splendid life, physical, aesthetic, intellectual, which made, and will
make the name of Athens and of the whole cluster of Greek republics
for ever admirable to civilised man? Had it sprung from long years of
peaceful prosperity? From infinite making of money and comfort,
according to the laws of so-called political economy, and the dictates of
enlightened selfishness? Not so. But rather out of terror and agony, and
all but utter ruin--and out of a magnificent want of economy, and the
divine daring and folly of self-sacrifice.

In Salamis across the strait a trophy stood, and round that trophy, forty
years before, Sophocles, the author of "Antigone," then sixteen years of
age, the loveliest and most cultivated lad in Athens, undraped like a
faun, with lyre in hand, was leading the Chorus of Athenian youths,
and singing to Athene, the tutelary goddess, a hymn of triumph for a
glorious victory--the very symbol of Greece and Athens, springing up
into a joyous second youth after invasion and desolation, as the grass
springs up after the prairie fire has passed. But the fire had been terrible.
It had burnt Athens at least, down to the very roots. True, while
Sophocles was dancing, Xerxes, the great king of the East, foiled at
Salamis, as his father Darius had been foiled at Marathon ten years
before, was fleeing back to Persia, leaving his innumerable hosts of
slaves and mercenaries to be destroyed piecemeal, by land at Platea, by
sea at Mycale. The bold hope was over, in which the Persian, ever since
the days of Cyrus, had indulged--that he, the despot of the East, should
be the despot of the West likewise. It seemed to them as possible,
though not as easy, to subdue the Aryan Greek, as it had been to subdue
the Semite and the Turanian, the Babylonian and the Syrian; to riffle
his temples, to