Literary and General Lectures and Essays | Page 9

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 of his own base self. The Greekling--as Juvenal has it--in want of a dinner, would climb somehow to heaven itself, at the bidding of his Roman master.
Ah what a fall! And what was the inherent weakness which caused that fall?
I say at once--want of honesty. The Greek was not to be depended on; if it suited him, he would lie, betray, overreach, change sides, and think it no