Literary and General Lectures and Essays | Page 9

destroy his idols, carry off his women and children as
colonists into distant lands, as they had been doing with all the nations
of the East. And they had succeeded with isolated colonies, isolated
islands of Greeks, and the shores of Asia Minor. But when they dared,
at last, to attack the Greek in his own sacred land of Hellas, they found
they had bearded a lion in his den. Nay rather-- as those old Greeks
would have said--they had dared to attack Pallas Athene, the eldest
daughter of Zeus--emblem of that serene and pure divine wisdom, of
whom Solomon sang of old: "The Lord possessed me in the beginning
of His way, before His works of old. When He prepared the heavens, I
was there, when He appointed the foundation of the earth, then was I by
him, as one brought up with Him, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing
always before Him: rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth; and my
_delight was with the sons of men_"--to attack Athene and her brother
Apollo, Lord of light, and beauty, and culture, and grace, and
inspiration--to attack them, not in the name of Ormuzd, nor of any
other deity, but in the name of mere brute force and lust of conquest.
The old Persian spirit was gone out of them. They were the symbols
now of nothing save despotism and self-will, wealth and

self-indulgence. They, once the children of Ormuzd or light, had
become the children of Ahriman or darkness; and therefore it was, as I
believe, that Xerxes' 1000 ships, and the two million (or, as some have
it, five million) human beings availed naught against the little fleets and
little battalions of men who believed with a living belief in Athene and
Apollo, and therefore--ponder it well, for it is true--with a living belief,
under whatsoever confusions and divisions of personality, in a God
who loved, taught, inspired men, a just God who befriended the
righteous cause, the cause of freedom and patriotism, a Deity, the echo
of whose mind and will to man was the song of Athene on Olympus,
when she
Chanted of order and right, and of foresight, and order of peoples;
Chanted of labour and craft, wealth in the port and the garner; Chanted
of valour and fame, and the man who can fall with the foremost,
Fighting for children and wife, and the field which his father
bequeathed him. Sweetly and cunningly sang she, and planned new
lessons for mortals. Happy who hearing obey her, the wise unsullied
Athene.
Ah, that they had always obeyed her, those old Greeks. But meanwhile,
as I said, the agony had been extreme. If Athens had sinned, she had
been purged as by fire; and the fire--surely of God-- had been terrible.
Northern Greece had either been laid waste with fire and sword, or had
gone over to the Persian, traitors in their despair. Attica, almost the
only loyal state, had been overrun; the old men, women, and children
had fled to the neighbouring islands, or to the Peloponnese. Athens
itself had been destroyed; and while young Sophocles was dancing
round the trophy at Salamis, the Acropolis was still a heap of blackened
ruins.
But over and above their valour, over and above their loyalty, over and
above their exquisite aesthetic faculty, these Athenians had a resilience
of self-reliant energy, like that of the French--like that of the American
people after the fire of Chicago; and Athens rose from her ashes to be
awhile, not only, as she had nobly earned by suffering and endurance,
the leading state in Greece, but a mighty fortress, a rich commercial

port, a living centre of art, poetry, philosophy, such as this earth has
never seen before or since.
On the plateau of that little crag of the Acropolis some eight hundred
feet in length, by four hundred in breadth--about the size and shape of
the Castle Rock at Edinburgh--was gathered, within forty years of the
battle of Salamis, more and more noble beauty than ever stood together
on any other spot of like size.
The sudden relief from crushing pressure, and the joyous consciousness
of well-earned honours, made the whole spirit-nature of the people
blossom out, as it were, into manifold forms of activity, beauty,
research, and raised, in raising Greece, the whole human race
thenceforth.
What might they not have done--looking at what they actually did--for
the whole race of man?
But no--they fell, even more rapidly than they rose, till their grace and
their cultivation, for them they could not lose, made them the willing
ministers to the luxury, the frivolity, the sentimentality, the vice of the
whole old world--the Scapia or Figaro of the old world--infinitely able,
but with all his ability consecrated to the service