Chapter 31

GRECIAN LITERATURE AND ART I FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE PERSIAN TO THE CLOSE OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WARS. (500-403 B.C.)

LITERATURE.

In a former chapter we briefly traced the growth of Grecian literature and art from their beginnings down to the time of the Persian wars. Within this period, as we noticed, their progress was the greatest in the Grecian colonies, while, of the cities of central Greece, the one destined to become pre-eminent in literature and the fine arts--Athens--contributed less than several others to intellectual advancement. "She produced no artists to be compared with those of Argos, Corinth, Si'cy-on, and of many other cities, while she could boast of no poets as celebrated as those of the Ionian and Æolian schools." But at the opening of the Persian wars the artistic and literary talent of Greece began to center in Athens, and with the close of that contest properly begins the era of Athenian greatness. Athens, hitherto inferior in magnitude and political importance, having borne the brunt and won the highest martial honor of the conflict with Persia, now took the lead, as well in intellectual progress as in political ascendancy. To this era PROFESSOR SYMONDS refers, as follows:

"It was the struggle with Xerxes which developed all the latent energies of the Greeks, which intensified their national existence, and which secured for Athens, as the central power on which the scattered forces of the race converged, the intellectual dictatorship of Hellas. It was a struggle of spiritual energy against brute force, of liberty against oppression, of intellectual freedom against superstitious ignorance, of civilization against barbarism; and Athens, who had fought and won this battle of the Spirit--by spirit we mean the greatness of the soul, liberty, intelligence, and everything which raises men above brutes and slaves, and makes them free beneath the arch of heaven--became immediately the recognized impersonation of the spirit itself. Whatever was superb in human nature found its natural home and sphere in Athens. We hear no more of the colonies. All great works of art and literature are now produced in Athens, and it is to Athens that the sages come to teach and to be taught." [Footnote: "The Greek Poets." First Series, p. 19.]

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I. LYRIC POETRY.

SIMON'IDES AND PINDAR.

The rapid progress made in the cultivation of lyric poetry preceding the Persian wars found its culmination, during those wars, in Simonides of Ceos, the most brilliant period of whose life was spent at Athens; and in Pindar, a native of Thebes, who is considered the greatest lyric poet of all ages. The life of Simonides was a long one, reaching from 556 to 469 B.C. "Coming forward at a time," says MAHAFFY, "when the tyrants had made poetry a matter of culture, and dissociated it from politics, we find him a professional artist, free from all party struggles, alike welcome at the courts of tyrants and among the citizens of free states; he was respected throughout all the Greek world, and knew well how to suit himself, socially and artistically, to his patrons. The great national struggle with Persia gave him the opportunity of becoming the spokesman of the nation in celebrating the glories of the victors and the heroism of the fallen patriots; and this exceptional opportunity made him quite the foremost poet of his day, and decidedly better known and more admired than Pindar, who has so completely eclipsed him in the attention of posterity." [Footnote: "Classical Greek Literature," vol. i., p. 207.]

Simonides was the intimate friend of Miltiades and Themistocles at Athens, of Pausanias at Sparta, and of the tyrants of Sicily. In the first named city he composed his epigrams on Marathon, Thermopylæ, Salamis, and Platæa--"poems not destined to be merely sung or consigned to parchment, but to be carved in marble or engraved in letters of imperishable bronze upon the works of the noblest architects and statuaries." In his elegy upon Marathon he carried away the prize from Æschylus. He was a most prolific poet, and his writings, comprising all the subjects that human life, with its joys and sorrows, its hopes and disappointments, could furnish, are noted for their sweetness and pure and exquisite polish. He particularly excelled in the pathetic; and the most celebrated of the existing fragments of his muse, the "Lamentation of Dan'a-ë," is a piece of this character. The poem is based upon a tradition concerning Danaë, the daughter of Acris'ius, King of Argos, and her infant son, the offspring of Jove. Acrisius had been told by the oracle that his life would be taken by a son that his daughter should bear, and, for his own preservation, when the boy had reached the age of four years, Acrisius threw both him and his mother into a chest and set them adrift on the sea. But they were rescued by Dictys, a fisherman of the Island of Seri'phus, whose brother Polydec'tes, king of the country, received and protected them. The boy grew up to manhood, and became the famous hero Per'seus, who accidentally killed Acrisius at the funeral games of Polydectes. The following is the

Lamentation of Dan'a-ë.

While, around her lone ark sweeping, Wailed the winds and waters wild, Her young cheeks all wan with weeping, Danae clasped her sleeping child; And "Alas!" cried she, "my dearest, What deep wrongs, what woes are mine; But nor wrongs nor woes thou fearest In that sinless rest of thine. Faint the moonbeams break above thee, And within here all is gloom; But, fast wrapped in arms that love thee, Little reck'st thou of our doom. Not the rude spray, round thee flying, Has e'en damped thy clustering hair; On thy purple mantlet lying, O mine Innocent, my Fair! Yet, to thee were sorrow sorrow, Thou wouldst lend thy little ear; And this heart of thine might borrow, Haply, yet a moment's cheer. But no: slumber on, babe, slumber; Slumber, ocean's waves; and you, My dark troubles, without number-- Oh, that ye would slumber too! Though with wrongs they've brimmed my chalice, Grant, Jove, that, in future years, This boy may defeat their malice, And avenge his mother's tears!" --Trans. by W. PETER.

Simonides was nearly eighty years old when he gained his last poetical prize at Athens, making the fiftieth that he had won. He then retired to Syracuse, at the invitation of Hi'ero, where he spent the remaining ten years of his life. He was a philosopher as well as poet, and his wise sayings made him a special favorite with the accomplished Hiero. When inquired of by that monarch concerning the nature of God, Simonides requested one day for deliberating on the subject; and when Hiero repeated the question the next day, the poet asked for two days more. As he still went on doubling the number of days, the monarch, lost in wonder, asked him why he did so. "Because," replied Simonides, "the longer I reflect on the subject, the more obscure does it appear to me to be."

Pindar, the most celebrated of all the lyric poets of Greece, was born about 520 B.C. At an early age he was sent to Athens to receive instruction in the art of poetry: returning to Thebes at twenty, his youthful genius was quickened and guided by the influence of Myr'tis and Corin'na, two poetesses who then enjoyed great celebrity in Bœotia. At a later period "he undoubtedly experienced," says THIRLWALL, "the animating influence of that joyful and stirring time which followed the defeat of the barbarian invader, though, as a Theban patriot, he could not heartily enjoy a triumph by which Thebes as well as Persia was humbled." But his enthusiasm for Athens, which he calls "the buttress of Hellas," is apparent in one of his compositions; and the Athenians specially honored him with a valuable present, and, after his death, erected a bronze statue to his memory. It is probable, however, that while he was sincerely anxious for the success of Greece in the great contest, he avoided as much as possible offending his own people, whose sympathies and hopes lay the other way.

The reputation of Pindar early became so great that he was employed, by various states and princes, to compose choral songs for special occasions. Like Simonides, he "loved to bask in the sunshine of courts;" but he was frank, sincere, and manly, assuming a lofty and dignified position toward princes and others in authority with whom he came in contact. He was especially courted by Hiero, despot of Syracuse, but remained with him only a few years, his manly disposition creating a love for an independent life that the courtly arts of his patron could not furnish. As his poems show, he was a reserved man, learned in the myths and ceremonies of the times, and specially devoted to the worship of the gods. "The old myths," says a Greek biographer, "were for the most part realities to him, and he accepted them with implicit credence, except when they exhibited the gods in a point of view which was repugnant to his moral feelings; and he accordingly rejects some tales, and changes others, because they are inconsistent with his moral conceptions." As a poet correctly describes him, using one of the names commonly applied to him,

Pindar, that eagle, mounts the skies, While virtue leads the noble way. --PRIOR.

The poems of Pindar were numerous, and comprised triumphal odes, hymns to the gods, pæans, dirges, and songs of various kinds. His triumphal odes alone have come down to us entire; but of some of his other compositions there are a few sublime and beautiful fragments. The poet and his writings cannot be better described than in the following general characterization by SYMONDS:

"By the force of his originality Pindar gave lyrical poetry a wholly new direction, and, coming last of the great Dorian lyrists, taught posterity what sort of thing an ode should be. His grand pre-eminence as an artist was due, in great measure, to his personality. Frigid, austere, and splendid; not genial like that of Simonides, not passionate like that of Sappho, not acrid like that of Archil'ochus; hard as adamant, rigid in moral firmness, glittering with the strong, keen light of snow; haughty, aristocratic, magnificent--the unique personality of the man Pindar, so irresistible in its influence, so hard to characterize, is felt in every strophe of his odes. In his isolation and elevation Pindar stands like some fabled heaven-aspiring peak, conspicuous from afar, girdled at the base with ice and snow, beaten by winds, wreathed round with steam and vapor, jutting a sharp and dazzling outline into cold blue ether. Few things that have life dare to visit him at his grand altitude. Glorious with sunlight and with stars, touched by rise and set of day with splendor, he shines when other lesser lights are dulled. Pindar among his peers is solitary. He had no communion with the poets of his day. He is the eagle; Simonides and Bacchyl'ides are jackdaws. He soars to the empyrean; they haunt the valley mists. Noticing this rocky, barren, severe, glittering solitude of Pindar's soul, critics have not infrequently complained that his poems are devoid of individual interest. Possibly they have failed to comprehend and appreciate the nature of this sublime and distant genius, whose character, in truth, is just as marked as that of Dante or of Michael Angelo."

After giving some illustrations of the impression produced upon the imagination by a study of Pindar's odes, the writer proceeds with his characterization, in the following language: "He who has watched a sunset attended by the passing of a thunder-storm in the outskirts of the Alps--who has seen the distant ranges of the mountains alternately obscured by cloud and blazing with the concentrated brightness of the sinking sun, while drifting scuds of hail and rain, tawny with sunlight, glistening with broken rainbows, clothe peak and precipice and forest in the golden veil of flame-irradiated vapor--he who has heard the thunder bellow in the thwarting folds of hills, and watched the lightning, like a snakes tongue, flicker at intervals amid gloom and glory --knows, in Nature's language, what Pindar teaches with the voice of Art. It is only by a metaphor like this that any attempt to realize the Sturm and Drang of Pindar's style can be communicated. As an artist he combines the strong flight of the eagle, the irresistible force of the torrent, the richness of Greek wine, and the majestic pageantry of Nature in one of her sublimer moods." [Footnote: "The Greek Poets." First Series, pp. 171, 174.]

Pindar, as we have seen, was compared to an eagle, because of the daring flights and lofty character of his poetry--a simile which has been beautifully expressed in the following lines by GRAY:

The pride and ample pinion That the Theban eagle bare, Sailing with supreme dominion, Through the azure deeps of air.

Another image, also, has been employed to show these features of his poetry. The poet POPE represents him riding in a gorgeous chariot sustained by four swans:

Four swans sustain a car of silver bright, With heads advanced and pinions stretched for flight; Here, like some furious prophet, Pindar rode, And seemed to labor with th' inspiring god.

A third image, given to us by HORACE, represents another characteristic of Pindar, which may be called "the stormy violence of his song:"

As when a river, swollen by sudden showers, O'er its known banks from some steep mountain pours; So, in profound, unmeasurable song, The deep-mouthed Pindar, foaming, pours along. --Trans. by FRANCIS.

As a sample of the religious sentiment of Pindar we give the following fragment of a threnos translated by MR. SYMONDS, which, he says, "sounds like a trumpet blast for immortality, and, trampling underfoot the glories of this world, reveals the gladness of the souls that have attained Elysium:"

For them, the night all through, In that broad realm below, The splendor of the sun spreads endless light; 'Mid rosy meadows bright, Their city of the tombs, with incense-trees And golden chalices Of flowers, and fruitage fair, Scenting the breezy air, Is laden. There, with horses and with play, With games and lyres, they while the hours away.

On every side around Pure happiness is found, With all the blooming beauty of the world; There fragrant smoke, upcurled From altars where the blazing fire is dense With perfumed frankincense, Burned unto gods in heaven, Through all the land is driven, Making its pleasant place odorous With scented gales, and sweet airs amorous.

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II. THE DRAMA.

One of the most striking proofs that we possess of the rapid growth and expansion of the Greek mind, is found in the rise of the Drama, a new kind of poetical composition, which united the leading features of every species before cultivated, in a new whole "breathing a rhetorical, dialectical, and ethical spirit" --a branch of literature that peculiarly characterized the era of Athenian greatness. Its elements were found in the religious festivals celebrated in Greece from the earliest ages, and especially in the feast of Bacchus, where sacred odes of a grave and serious character, intermixed with episodes of mythological story recited by an actor, were sung by a chorus that danced around the altar. A goat was either the principal sacrifice on these occasions, or the participants, disguised as Satyrs, had a goat-like appearance; and from the two Greek words representing "goat" and "song" we get our word tragedy, [Footnote: From the Greek tragos, "a goat," and o'de, "a song."] or goat-song. At some of the more rustic festivals in honor of the same god the performance was of a more jocose or satirical character; and hence arose the term comedy, [Footnote: From the Greek ko'me, "a village," and o'de, "a song."] from the two Greek words signifying "village" and "song"--village-song. In the teller of mythological legends we find the first germ of dialogue, as the chorus soon came to assist him by occasional question and remark. This feature was introduced by Thespis, a native of Ica'ria, in 535 B.C., under whose direction, and that of Phryn'icus, his pupil, the first feeble rudiments of the drama were established. In this condition it was found by Æschylus, in 500 B.C., who brought a second actor upon the scene; whence arose the increased prominence of the dialogue, and the limitation and subsidiary character of the chorus. Æschylus also added more expressive masks, and various machinery and scenes calculated to improve and enlarge dramatic representation. Of the effect of this new creation upon all kinds of poetical genius we have the following fine illustration from the pen of BULWER:

"It was in the very nature of the Athenian drama that, when once established, it should concentrate and absorb almost every variety of poetical genius. The old lyrical poetry, never much cultivated in Athens, ceased in a great measure when tragedy arose; or, rather, tragedy was the complete development, the new and perfected consummation, of the dithyrambic ode. Lyrical poetry transmigrated into the choral song as the epic merged into the dialogue and plot of the drama. Thus, when we speak of Athenian poetry we speak of dramatic poetry--they were one and the same. In Athens, where audiences were numerous and readers few, every man who felt within himself the inspiration of the poet would necessarily desire to see his poetry put into action--assisted with all the pomp of spectacle and music, hallowed by the solemnity of a religious festival, and breathed by artists elaborately trained to heighten the eloquence of words into the reverent ear of assembled Greece. Hence the multitude of dramatic poets; hence the mighty fertility of each; hence the life and activity of this--the comparative torpor and barrenness of every other-- species of poetry."

1. TRAGEDY.

MELPOM'ENE, one of the nine Muses, whose name signifies "To represent in song," is said to have been the inventress of tragedy, over which she presided, always veiled, bearing in one hand the lyre, as the emblem of her vocation, and in the other a tragic mask. As queen of the lyre, every poet was supposed to proclaim the marvels of her song, and to invoke her aid.

Queen of the lyre, in thy retreat The fairest flowers of Pindus glow, The vine aspires to crown thy seat, And myrtles round thy laurel grow: Thy strings adapt their varied strain To every pleasure, every pain, Which mortal tribes were born to prove; And straight our passions rise or fall, As, at the wind's imperious call, The ocean swells, the billows move.

When midnight listens o'er the slumbering earth, Let me, O Muse, thy solemn whispers hear: When morning sends her fragrant breezes forth, With airy murmurs touch my opening ear, --AKENSIDE.

ÆSCHYLUS.

Æschylus, the first poet who rendered the drama illustrious, and into whose character and writings the severe and ascetic doctrines of Pythagoras entered largely, was born at Eleu'sis, in Attica, in 525 B.C. He fought, as will be remembered, in the combats of Marathon and Salamis, and also in the battle of Platæa. He therefore flourished at the time when the freedom of Greece, rescued from foreign enemies, was exulting in its first strength; and his writings are characteristic of the boldness and vigor of the age. In his works we find the fundamental idea of the Greek drama--retributive justice. The sterner passions alone are appealed to, and the language is replete with bold metaphor and gigantic hyperbole. Venus and her inspirations are excluded; the charms of love are unknown: but the gods--vast, majestic, in shadowy outline, and in the awful sublimity of power-pass before and awe the beholder. [Footnote: see Grote's "History of Greece," Chap. lxvii.] Says a prominent reviewer: "The conceptions of the imagination of Æschylus are remarkable for a sort of colossal sublimity and power, resembling the poetry of the Book of Job; and those poems of his which embody a connected story may be said to resemble the stupendous avenues of the Temple of Elora, [See Index.] with the vast scenes and vistas; its strange, daring, though rude sculptures; its awful, shadowy, impending horrors. Like the architecture, the poems, too, seem hewn out of some massy region of mountain rock. Æschylus appears as an austere poet-soul, brooding among the grand, awful, and terrible myths which have floated from a primeval world, in which traditions of the Deluge, of the early, rudimental struggle between barbaric power and nascent civilization, were still vital."

"The personal temperament of the man," says DR. PLUMPTRE, [Footnote: "The Tragedies of Æschylus," by E. H. Plumptre, D.D.] seems to have been in harmony with the characteristics of his genius. Vehement, passionate, irascible; writing his tragedies, as later critics judged, as if half drunk; doing (as Sophocles said of him) what was right in his art without knowing why; following the impulses that led him to strange themes and dark problems, rather than aiming at the perfection of a complete, all-sided culture; frowning with shaggy brows, like a wild bull, glaring fiercely, and bursting into a storm of wrath when annoyed by critics or rival poets; a Marlowe rather than a Shakspeare: this is the portrait sketched by one who must have painted a figure still fresh in the minds of the Athenians. [Footnote: Aristophanes, in The Frogs.] Such a man, both by birth and disposition, was likely to attach himself to the aristocratic party, and to look with scorn on the claims of the demos to a larger share of power; and there is hardly a play in which some political bias in that direction may not be traced."

Æschylus wrote his plays in trilogies, or three successive dramas connected. Of the eighty tragedies that he wrote, only seven have been preserved. From three of these, The Persians, Prome'theus, and Agamemnon, we have given extracts descriptive of historical and mythological events. The latter is the first of three plays on the fortunes of the house of A'treus, of Myce'næ; and these three, of which the Choëph'oroe and Eumenides are the other two, are the only extant specimen of a trilogy. The Agamemnon is the longest, and by some considered the grandest, play left us by Æschylus. "In the Agamemnon," says VON SCHLEGEL, "it was the intention of Æschylus to exhibit to us a sudden fall from the highest pinnacle of prosperity and renown into the abyss of ruin. The prince, the hero, the general of the combined forces of the Greeks, in the very moment of success and the glorious achievement of the destruction of Troy, the fame of which is to be re-echoed from the mouths of the greatest poets of all ages, in the very act of crossing the threshold of his home, after which he had so long sighed, and amidst the fearless security of preparations for a festival, is butchered, according to the expression of Homer, 'like an ox in the stall,' slain by his faithless wife, his throne usurped by her worthless seducer, and his children consigned to banishment or to hopeless servitude." [Footnote: "Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature," by Augustus William on Schlegel. Black's translation.]

Among the fine passages of this play, the death of Agamemnon, at the hand of Clytemnes'tra, is a scene that the poet paints with terrible effect. Says MR. EUGENE LAWRENCE, [Footnote: "A Primer of Greek Literature," by Eugene Lawrence, p.55.] "Mr. E. C. Stedman's version of the death of Agamemnon is an excellent one. A horror rests upon the palace at Mycenæ; there is a scent of blood, the exhalations of the tomb. The queen, Clytemnestra, enters the inner room, terrible as Lady Macbeth. A cry is heard:

"'Agam. Woe's me! I'm stricken a deadly blow within!' "'Chor. Hark! who is't cries "a blow?" Who meets his death?' "'Agam. Woe's me! Again! again! a second time I'm stricken!' "'Chor. The deed, methinks, from the king's cry, is done.'

At length the queen appears, standing at her full height, terrible, holding her bloody weapon in her hand. She seeks no concealment. She proclaims her guilt:

"'I smote him! nor deny that thus I did it; So that he could not flee or ward off doom. A seamless net, as round a fish, I cast About him, yea, a deadly wealth of robe, Then smote him twice; and with a double cry He loosed his limbs; and to him fallen I gave Yet a third thrust, a grace to Hades, lord Of the under-world and guardian of the dead.'"

But the most finished of the tragedies of Æschylus is Choëphoroe, which is made the subject of the revenge of Ores'tes, son of Agamemnon, who avenges the murder of his father by putting his mother to death. For this crime the Eumenides represents him as being driven insane by the Furies; but his reason was subsequently restored. It is the chief object of the poet, in this tragedy, to display the distress of Orestes at the necessity he feels of avenging his father's death upon his mother. To this BYRON refers in Childe Harold:

O thou! who never yet of human wrong Left the unbalanced scale--great Nem'esis! Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss, And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss For that unnatural retribution--just, Had it but been from hands less near--in this, Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!

At the close of an interesting characterization of Æschylus and his works--much too long for a full quotation here--PROFESSOR MAHAFFY observes as follows:

"We always feel that Æschylus thought more than he expressed, that his desperate compounds are never affected or unnecessary. Although, therefore, he violated the rules that bound weaker men, it is false to say that be was less an artist than they. His art was of a different kind, despising what they prized, and attempting what they did not dare, but not the less a conscious and thorough art. Though the drawing of character was not his main object, his characters are truer and deeper than those of poets who attempted nothing else. Though lyrical sweetness had little place in the gloom and terror of his Titanic stage, yet here too, when he chooses, he equals the masters of lyric song. So long as a single Homer was deemed the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, we might well concede to him the first place, and say that Æschylus was the second poet of the Greeks. But by the light of nearer criticism, and with a closer insight into the structure of the epic poems, we must retract this judgment, and assert that no other poet among the Greeks, either in grandeur of conception or splendor of execution, equals the untranslatable, unapproachable, inimitable Æschylus." [Footnote: "Classical Greek Literature," vol. i., p.275.]

SOPHOCLES.

Æschylus was succeeded, as master of the drama, by Sophocles-- the Raffaelle of the drama, as Bulwer calls him--who was also one of the generals of the Athenian expedition against Samos in the year 440 B.C. He brought the drama to the greatest perfection of which it was susceptible. In him we find a greater range of emotions than in Æschylus--figures more distinctly seen, a more expanded dialogue, simplicity of speech mixed with rhetorical declamation, and the highest degree of poetic beauty. Says a late writer: "The artist and the man were one in Sophocles. We cannot but think of him as specially created to represent Greek art in its most refined and exquisitely balanced perfection. It is impossible to imagine a more plastic nature, a genius more adapted to its special function, more fittingly provided with all things needful to its full development, born at a happier moment in the history of the world, and more nobly endowed with physical qualities suited to its intellectual capacity."

Sophocles composed one hundred and thirteen plays, but only seven of them are extant. Of these the most familiar is the tragedy of OEd'ipus Tyran'nus--"King OEdipus." It is not only considered his masterpiece, but also, as regards the choice and disposition of the fable on which it is founded, the finest tragedy of antiquity. A new interest has been given to it in this country by its recent representation in the original Greek. Of its many translations, it is conceded that none have done, and none can do it justice; they can do little more than give its plan and general character. The following, in brief, is the story of this famous tragedy:

OEdipus Tyrannus.

La'i-us, King of Thebes, was told by the Delphic oracle that if a son should be born to him, by the hand of that son he should surely die. When, therefore, his queen, Jocasta, bare him a son, the parents gave the child to a shepherd, with orders to cast it out, bound, on the hill Cithæ'ron to perish. But the shepherd, moved to compassion, deceived the parents, and intrusted the babe to a herdsman of Pol'ybus, King of Corinth; and the wife of Polybus, being childless, named the foundling OEdipus, and reared it as her own.

Thirty years later, OEdipus, ignorant of his birth, and being directed by the oracle to shun his native country, fled from Corinth; and it happened at the same time that his father (Laius) was on his way to consult the oracle at Delphi, for the purpose of ascertaining whether the child that had been exposed had perished or not. As father and son, strangers to each other, met in a narrow path in the mountains, a dispute arose for the right of way, and in the contest that ensued the father was slain.

Immediately after this event the goddess Juno, always hostile to Thebes, sent a monster, called the sphinx, to propound a riddle to the Thebans, and to ravage their territory until some one should solve the riddle--the purport of which was, "What animal is that which goes on four feet in the morning, on two at noon, and on three at evening?" OEdipus, the supposed son of Polybus, of Corinth, coming to Thebes, solved the riddle, by answering the sphinx that it was man, who, when an infant, creeps on all fours, in manhood goes on two feet, and when old uses a staff. The sphinx then threw herself down to the earth and perished; whereupon the Thebans, in their joy, chose OEdipus as king, and he married the widowed queen Jocasta, by whom he had two sons and two daughters. Although everything prospered with him--as he loved the Theban people, and was beloved by them in turn for his many virtues--soon the wrath of the gods fell upon the city, which was visited by a sore pestilence. Creon, brother of the queen, is now sent to consult the oracle for the cause of the evil; and it is at the point of his return that the drama opens. He brings back the response

"That guilt of blood is blasting all the state;"

that this guilt is connected with the death of Laius, and that

"Now the god clearly bids us, he being dead, To take revenge on those who shed his blood,"

OEdipus engages earnestly in the business of unraveling the mystery connected with the death of Laius, the cause of all the Theban woes. Ignorant that he himself bears the load of guilt, he charges the Thebans to be vigilant and unremitting in their efforts,--

"And for the man who did the guilty deed, Whether alone he lurks, or leagued with more, I pray that he may waste his life away, For vile deeds vilely dying; and for me, If in my house, I knowing it, he dwells, May every curse I spake on my head fall."

A blind and aged priest and prophet, Tire'sias, is brought before OEdipus, and, being implored to lend the aid of prophecy to "save the city from the curse" that had fallen on it, he at first refuses to exert his prophetic power.

Tiresias. Ah! Reason fails you an, but ne'er will I Say what thou bidd'st, lest I thy troubles show. I will not pain myself nor thee. Why, then, All vainly question? Thou shalt never know.

But, urged and threatened by the king, he at length exclaims:

Tier. And has it come to this? I charge thee, hold To thy late edict, and from this day forth Speak not to me, nor yet to these, for thou-- Thou art the accursed plague-spot of the land!

OEdipus at first believes that the aged prophet is merely the tool of others, who are engaged in a conspiracy to expel him from the throne; but when Jocasta, in her innocence, informs him of the death of Laius, names the mountain pass in which he fell, slain, as was supposed, by a robber band, and describes his dress and person, OEdipus is startled at the thought that he himself was the slayer, and he exclaims,

"Great Zeus! what fate hast thou decreed for me? Woe! woe! 'tis all too clear."

Yet there is one hope left. The man whom he slew in that same mountain pass fell by no robber band, and, therefore, could not have been Laius. Soon even this hope deserts him, when the story is truly told. He learns, moreover, that he is not the son of Polybus, the Corinthian king, but a foundling adopted by his queen. Connecting this with the story now told him by Jocasta, of her infant son, whom she supposed to have perished on the mountain, the horrid truth begins to dawn upon all. Jocasta rushes from the presence of OEdipus, exclaiming,

"Woe! woe! ill-fated one! my last word this, This only, and no more for evermore."

When the old shepherd, forced to declare the truth, tells how he saved the life of the infant, and gave it into the keeping of the herdsman of Polybus, the evil-starred OEdipus exclaims, in agony of spirit:

"Woe! woe! woe! all cometh clear at last. O light! may this my last glance be on thee, Who now am seen owing my birth to those To whom I ought not, and with whom I ought not In wedlock living, whom I ought not slaying."

Horrors still thicken in this terrible tragedy. Word is brought to OEdipus that Jocasta is dead--dead by her own hand! He rushes in:

Then came a sight Most fearful. Tearing from her robe the clasps, All chased with gold, with which she decked herself, He with them struck the pupils of his eyes, With words like these--"Because they had not seen What ills he suffered and what ills he did, They in the dark should look, in time to come, On those whom they ought never to have seen, Nor know the dear ones whom he fain had known." With such-like wails, not once or twice alone, Raising his eyes, he smote them; and the balls, All bleeding, stained his cheek, nor poured they forth Gore drops slow trickling, but the purple shower Fell fast and full, a pelting storm of blood.

The now blind and wretched OEdipus, bewailing his fate and the evils he had so unwittingly brought upon Thebes, begs to be cast forth with all speed from out the land.

OEdipus. Lead me away, my friends, with utmost speed Lead me away; the foul, polluted one, Of all men most accursed, Most hateful to the gods.

Chorus. Ah, wretched one, alike in soul and doom, I fain could wish that I had never known thee.

OEdipus. Ill fate be his who from the fetters freed The child upon the hills, And rescued me from death, And saved me--thankless boon! Ah! had I died but then, Nor to my friends nor me had been such woe.

A touching picture is presented in the farewell of OEdipus, on departing from Thebes to wander an outcast upon the earth. The tragedy concludes with the following moral by the chorus:

Chorus. Ye men of Thebes, behold this OEdipus, Who knew the famous riddle, and was noblest. Whose fortune who saw not with envious glances? And lo! in what a sea of direst trouble He now is plunged! From hence the lesson learn ye, To reckon no man happy till ye witness The closing day; until he pass the border Which Severs life from death unscathed by sorrow. --Trans. by E. H. PLUMPTRE.

Character of the Works of Sophocles.

The character of the works of Sophocles is well described in the following extract from an Essay on Greek Poetry, by THOMAS NOON TALFOURD: "The great and distinguishing excellence of Sophocles will be found in his excellent sense of the beautiful, and the perfect harmony of all his powers. His conceptions are not on so gigantic a scale as those of Æschylus; but in the circle which he prescribes to himself to fill, not a place is left unadorned; not a niche without its appropriate figure; not the smallest ornament which is incomplete in the minutest graces. His judgment seems absolutely perfect, for he never fails; he is always fully master of himself and his subject; he knows the precise measure of his own capacities; and while he never attempts a flight beyond his reach, he never debases himself nor his art by anything beneath him.

"Sophocles was undoubtedly the first philosophical poet of the ancient world. With his pure taste for the graceful he perceived, amidst the sensible forms around him, one universal spirit of Jove pervading all things. Virtue and justice, to his mind, did not appear the mere creatures of convenience, or the means of gratifying the refined selfishness of man; he saw them, having deep root in eternity, unchanging and imperishable as their divine author. In a single stanza he has impressed this sentiment with a plenitude of inspiration before which the philosophy of expediency vanishes--a passage that has neither a parallel nor equal of its kind, that we recollect, in the whole compass of heathen poetry, and which may be rendered thus: 'Oh for a spotless purity of action and of speech, according to those sublime laws of right which have the heavens for their birthplace, and God alone for their author--which the decays of mortal nature cannot vary, nor time cover with oblivion, for the divinity is mighty within them and waxes not old!'"

Sophocles died in extreme old age, "without disease and without suffering, and was mourned with such a sincerity and depth of grief as were exhibited at the death of no other citizen of Athens."

Thrice happy Sophocles! in good old age, Blessed as a man, and as a craftsman blessed, He died: his many tragedies were fair, And fair his end, nor knew be any sorrow. --PHRYN'ICHUS.

Wind, gentle evergreen, to form a shade Around the tomb where Sophocles is laid; Sweet ivy wind thy boughs, and intertwine With blushing roses and the clustering vine. Thus will thy lasting leaves, with beauties hung, Prove grateful emblems of the lays he sung, Whose soul, exalted by the god of wit, Among the Muses and the Graces writ. --SIM'MIAS, the Theban.

EURIP'IDES.

Contemporary with Sophocles was Euripides, born in 480 B.C., the last of the three great masters of the drama--the three being embraced within the limits of a single century. Under Sophocles the principal changes effected in the outward form of the drama were the introduction of a third actor, and a consequent limitation of the functions of the chorus. Euripides, however, changed the mode of handling tragedy. Unlike Sophocles, who only limited the activity of the chorus, he disconnected it from the tragic interest of the drama by giving but little attention to the character of its songs. He also made some other changes; and, as one writer expresses it, his innovations "disintegrated the drama by destroying its artistic unity." But although perhaps inferior, in all artistic point of view, to his predecessors, the genius of Euripides supplied a want that they did not meet. Although his plays are all connected with the history and mythology of Greece, in them rhetoric is more prominent than in the plays of either Æschylus or Sophocles; the legendary characters assume more the garb of humanity; the tender sentiments--love, pity, compassion--are invoked to a greater degree, and an air of exquisite delicacy and refinement embellishes the whole. These were the qualities in the plays of Euripides that endeared him to the Greeks of succeeding ages, and that gave to his works such an influence on the Roman and modern drama.

Of Euripides MR. SYMONDS remarks: "His lasting title to fame consists in his having dealt with the deeper problems of life in a spirit which became permanent among the Greeks, so that his poems never lost their value as expressions of current philosophy. Nothing strikes the student of later Greek literature more strongly than this prolongation of the Euripidean tone of thought and feeling. In the decline of tragic poetry the literary sceptre was transferred to comedy; and the comic playwrights may be described as the true successors of Euripides. The dialectic method, which he affected, was indeed dropped, and a more harmonious form of art than the Euripidean was created for comedy by Menan'der, when the Athenians, after passing through their disputatious period, had settled down into a tranquil acceptation of the facts of life. Yet this return to harmony of form and purity of perception did not abate the influence of Euripides. Here and there throughout his tragedies he had said, and well said, what the Greeks were bound to think and feel upon important matters; and his sensitive, susceptible temperament repeated itself over and over again among his literary successors. The exclamation of Phile'mon that, if he could believe in immortality, he would hang himself to see Euripides, is characteristic not only of Philemon, but also of the whole Macedonian period of Greek literature." [Footnote: "The Greek Poets." Second Series, p. 300.]

Euripides wrote about seventy-five plays, of which eighteen have come down to us. The Me-de'a, which is thought to be his best piece, is occupied with the circumstances of the vengeance taken by Medea on the ungrateful Jason, the hero of the Argonautic expedition, for whom she had sacrificed all, and who, after his return, abandoned her for a royal Corinthian bride. [Footnote: See Argonautic Expedition, p. 81.] But the most touching of the plays of Euripides is the Alces'tis, founded on the fable of Alcestis dying for her husband, Adme'tus. MILTON thus alludes to the story, in his sonnet on his deceased wife:

Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave, Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.

The substance of the story is as follows:

Admetus, King of Phe'ræ, in Thessaly, married Alcestis, who became noted for her conjugal virtues. Apollo, when banished from heaven, received so kind treatment from Admetus that he induced the Fates to prolong the latter's life beyond the ordinary limit, on condition that one of his own family should die in his stead. Alcestis at once consented to die for her husband, and when the appointed time came she heroically and composedly gave herself to death. Soon after her departure, however, the hero Hercules visited Admetus, and, pained with the profound grief of the household, he rescued Alcestis from the grim tyrant Death and restored her to her family. The whole play abounds in touching scenes and descriptions; and the best modern critics concede that there is no female character in either Æschylus or Sophocles, not even excepting Antig'one, that is so great and noble, and at the same time so purely tender and womanly, as Alcestis. "Where has either Greek or modern literature," says MAHAFFY, "produced a nobler ideal than the Alcestis of Euripides? Devoted to her husband and children, beloved and happy in her palace, she sacrifices her life calmly and resignedly--a life which is not encompassed with afflictions, but of all the worth that life can be, and of all the usefulness which makes it precious to noble natures." [Footnote: "Social Life in Greece, p. 189.] We give the following short extract from the poet's account of the preparations made by Alcestis for her approaching end:

Alcestis Preparing for Death.

When she knew The destined day was come, in fountain water She bathed her lily-tinctured limbs, then took From her rich chests, of odorous cedar formed, A splendid robe, and her most radiant dress. Thus gorgeously arrayed, she stood before The hallowed flames, and thus addressed her prayer: "O queen, I go to the infernal shades; Yet, ere I go, with reverence let me breathe My last request: protect my orphan children; Make my son happy with the wife he loves, And wed my daughter to a noble husband; Nor let them, like their mother, to the tomb Untimely sink, but in their native land Be blessed through lengthened life to honored age."

Then to each altar in the royal house She went, and crowned it, and addressed her vows, Plucking the myrtle bough: nor tear, nor sigh Came from her; neither did the approaching ill Change the fresh beauties of her vermeil cheek. Her chamber then she visits, and her bed; There her tears flowed, and thus she spoke: "O bed To which my wedded lord, for whom I die, Led me a virgin bride, farewell! to thee No blame do I impute, for me alone Hast thou destroyed: disdaining to betray Thee, and my lord, I die: to thee shall come Some other woman, not more chaste, perchance More happy." As she lay she kissed the couch, And bathed it with a flood of tears: that passed, She left her chamber, then returned, and oft She left it, oft returned, and on the couch Fondly, each time she entered, cast herself. Her children, as they hung upon her robes, Weeping, she raised, and clasped them to her breast Each after each, as now about to die. --Trans. by POTTER.

Euripides died in the year 406 B.C., in Macedon, to which country he had been compelled to go on account of domestic troubles; and the then king, Archela'us honored his remains with a sumptuous funeral, and erected a monument over them.

Divine Euripides, this tomb we see So fair is not a monument for thee, So much as thou for it; since all will own That thy immortal fame adorns the stone.

We have now observed the transitions through which Grecian tragedy passed in the hands of its three great masters, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. As GROTE says, "The differences between these three poets are doubtless referable to the working of Athenian politics and Athenian philosophy on the minds of the two latter. In Sophocles we may trace the companion of Herodotus; in Euripides the hearer of Anaxag'oras, Socrates, and Prod'icus; in both, the familiarity with that wide-spread popularity of speech, and real, serious debate of politicians and competitors before the dikastery, which both had ever before their eyes, but which the genius of Sophocles knew how to keep in subordination to his grand poetical purpose." To properly estimate the influence which the tragedies exerted upon the Athenians, we must remember that a large number of them was presented on the stage every year; that it was rare to repeat anyone of them; that the theatre of Bacchus, in which they were represented, accommodated thirty thousand persons; that, as religious observances, they formed part of the civil establishment; and that admission to them was virtually free to every Athenian citizen. Taking these things into consideration, GROTE adds: "If we conceive of the entire population of a large city listening almost daily to those immortal compositions whose beauty first stamped tragedy as a separate department of poetry, we shall be satisfied that such powerful poetic influences were never brought to act upon any other people; and that the tastes, the sentiments, and the intellectual standard of the Athenians must have been sensibly improved and exalted by such lessons." [Footnote: "History of Greece," Chap, lxvii.]

2. COMEDY.

Another marked feature of Athenian life, and one but little less influential than tragedy in its effects upon the Athenian character, was comedy. It had its origin, as we have seen, in the vintage festivals of Bacchus, where the wild songs of the participants were frequently interspersed with coarse witticisms against the spectators. Like tragedy, it was a Dorian invention, and Sicily seems to have early become the seat of the comic writers. Epichar'mus, a Dorian poet and philosopher, was the first of these to put the Bacchic songs and dances into dramatic form. The place of his nativity is uncertain, but he passed the greater part of his life at Syracuse, in the society of the greatest literary men of the age, and there he is supposed to have written his comedies some years prior to the Persian war. It seems, however, that comedy was introduced into Attica by Susa'rion, a native of Meg'ara, long before the time of Epichar'mus (578 B.C.). But the former's plays were so largely made up of rude and abusive personalities that they were not tolerated by the Pisistrati'dæ, and for over a century we bear nothing farther of comedy in Attica--not until it was revived by Chion'ides, about 488 B.C., or, according to some authorities, twenty years later.

Under the contemporaries or successors of Chionides comedy became an important agent in the political warfare of Athens, although it was frequently the subject of prohibitory or restrictive legal enactments. "Only a nation," says a recent writer, "in the plenitude of self-contentment, conscious of vigor, and satisfied with its own energy, could have tolerated the kind of censorship the comic poets dared to exercise."

Characterization of the Old Comedy.

In the preliminary discourse to his translation of the Comedies of Aristophanes, MR. THOMAS MITCHELL, an English critic of note, makes these observations upon the character of the Old Comedy: "The Old Comedy, as it is called, in contradistinction to what was afterward named the Middle and the New, stood in the extreme relation of contrariety and parody to the tragedy of the Greeks --it was directed chiefly to the lower orders of society at Athens; it served in some measure the purposes of the modern journal, in which public measures and the topics of the day might be fully discussed; and in consequence the dramatis personæ were generally the poet's own contemporaries, speaking in their own names and acting in masks, which, as they bore only a caricature resemblance of their own faces, showed that the poet, in his observations, did not mean to be taken literally. Like tragedy, comedy constituted part of a religious ceremony; and the character of the deity to whom it was more particularly dedicated was stamped at times pretty visibly upon the work which was composed in his honor. The Dionysian festivals were the great carnivals of antiquity--they celebrated the returns of vernal festivity or the joyous vintage, and were in consequence the great holidays of Athens--the seasons of universal relaxation.

"The comic poet was the high-priest of the festival; and if the orgies of his divinity (the god of wine) sometimes demanded a style of poetry which a Father of our Church probably had in his eye when he called all poetry the devil's wine, the organ of their utterance (however strange it may seem to us) no doubt considered himself as perfectly absolved from the censure which we should bestow on such productions: in his compositions he was discharging the same pious office as the painter, whose duty it was to fill the temples of the same deity with pictures which our imaginations would consider equally ill-suited to the habitations of divinity. What religion therefore forbids among us, the religion of the Greeks did not merely tolerate but enjoin. Nor was the extreme and even profane gayety of the comedy without its excuse. To unite extravagant mirth with a solemn seriousness was enjoined by law, even in the sacred festival of Ceres.

"While the philosophers, therefore, querulously maintained that man was the joke and plaything of the gods, the comic poet reversed the picture, and made the gods the playthings of men; in his hands, indeed, everything was upon the broad grin: the gods laughed, men laughed, and animals laughed. Nature was considered as a sort of fantastic being, with a turn for the humorous; and the world was treated as a sort of extended jest-book, where the poet pointed out the bon-mots [Footnote: French; pronounced bong-mos.] and acted in some degree as corrector of the Press. If he discharged this office sometimes in the sarcastic spirit of a Mephistopheles, this, too, was considered as part of his functions. He was the Ter'roe Fil'ius [Footnote: Terroe Filius, son of the earth; that is, a human being.] of the day; and lenity would have been considered, not as an act of discretion, but as a cowardly dereliction of duty."

It was in the time of Pericles that the comedy just described first dealt with men and subjects under their real names; and in one of the plays of Crati'nus--under whom comedy received its full development--Cimon is highly eulogized, and his rival, Pericles, is bitterly derided. With unmeasured and unsparing license comedy attacked, under the veil of satire, not only all that was really ludicrous or base, but often cast scorn and derision on that which was innocent, or even meritorious. For the reason that the comic writers were so indiscriminate in their attacks, frequently making transcendent genius and noble personality, as well as demagogism and personal vice, the butt of comic scorn; their writings have but little historical value except in the few instances in which they are corroborated by higher authority.

ARlSTOPH'ANES.

Among the contemporaries of Cratinus were Eu'polis and Aristophanes, the latter of whom became the chief of what is known as the Old Attic Comedy. Of his life little is known; but he was a member of the conservative or aristocratic party at Athens, directing his attacks chiefly against the democratic or popular party of Pericles, and continuing to write comedies until about 392 B.C. While his comedies are replete with coarse wit, they are wonderfully brilliant, and contain much, also, that is pure and beautiful. As a late writer has well said, "Beauty and deformity came to him with equal abundance, and his wonderful pieces are made up of all that is low and all that is pure and lovely."

The Muses, seeking for a shrine Whose glories ne'er should cease, Found, as they strayed, the soul divine Of Aristophanes. --PLATO, trans. by MERIVALE.

MR. GROTE characterizes the comedies of Aristophanes as follows: "Never probably will the full and unshackled force of comedy be so exhibited again. Without having Aristophanes actually before us it would have been impossible to imagine the unmeasured and unsparing license of attack assumed by the old comedy upon the gods, the institutions, the politicians, philosophers, poets, private citizens, specially named--and even the women, whose life was entirely domestic--of Athens. With this universal liberty in respect of subject there is combined a poignancy of derision and satire, a fecundity of imagination and variety of turns, and a richness of poetical expression such as cannot be surpassed, and such as fully explains the admiration expressed for him by the philosopher Plato, who in other respects must have regarded him with unquestionable disapprobation. His comedies are popular in the largest sense of the word, addressed to the entire body of male citizens on a day consecrated to festivity, and providing for their amusement or derision, with a sort of drunken abundance, out of all persons or things standing in any way prominent before the public eye." [Footnote: "History or Greece," Chap. lxvii.]

In his introduction to the Dialogues of Plato, REV. WILLIAM SEWELL, an English clergyman and author, observes that "Men smile when they hear the anecdote of Chrys'ostom, one of the most venerable fathers of the Church, who never went to bed without something from Aristophanes under his pillow." He adds: "But the noble tone of morals, the elevated taste, the sound political wisdom, the boldness and acuteness of the satire, the grand object, which is seen throughout, of correcting the follies of the day, and improving the condition of his country--all these are features in Aristophanes which, however disguised, as they intentionally are, by coarseness and buffoonery, entitle him to the highest respect from every reader of antiquity." Yet, while the purposes of Aristophanes were in the main praiseworthy, and the persons and things he attacked generally deserving of censure, he spared the vices of his own party and associates; and, like all satirists, for effect he often traduced character, as in the case of the virtuous Socrates. In an attack on the Sophists, in his play of the Clouds, he gives to Socrates the character of a vulgar Sophist, and holds him up to the derision of the Athenian people. But, as another has said, "Time has set all even; and 'poor Socrates,' as Aristophanes called him--as a far loftier bard has sung--

'Poor Socrates, By what he taught, and suffered for so doing, For truth's sake suffering death unjust, lives now, Equal in fame to proudest conquerors.'" --MILTON.

The Comedy of the "Clouds."

It is curious to observe in the Clouds of Aristophanes that while the main object of the poet is to ridicule Socrates, and through him to expose what he considers the corrupt state of education in Athens, he does not disdain to mingle with his low buffoonery the loftiest flights of the imagination--reminding us of the not unlike anomaly of Shakspeare's sublime simile of the "cloud-capp'd towers," in the Tempest. In one part of the play, Strepsi'ades, who has been nearly ruined in fortune by his spendthrift son, goes to Socrates to learn from him the logic that will enable him "to talk unjustly and--prevail," so that he may shirk his debts! He finds the master teacher suspended in air, in a basket, that he may be above earthly influences, and there "contemplating the sun," and endeavoring to search out "celestial matters." To the appeal of Strepsiades, Socrates, interrupted in his reveries, thus answers:

Socrates. Old man, sit you still, and attend to my will, and hearken in peace to my prayer. (He then addresses the Air.) O master and king, holding earth in your swing, O measureless infinite Air; And thou, glowing Ether, and Clouds who enwreathe her with thunder and lightning and storms, Arise ye and shine, bright ladies divine, to your student, in bodily forms.

Then we have the farther prayer of Socrates to the Clouds, in which is pictured a series of the most sublime images, colored with all the rainbow hues of the poet's fancy. We are led, in imagination, to behold the dread Clouds, at first sitting, in glorious majesty, upon the time-honored crest of snowy Olympus --then in the soft dance beguiling the nymphs "'mid the stately advance of old Ocean"--then bearing away, in their pitchers of sunlight and gold, "the mystical waves of the Nile," to refresh and fertilize other lands; at one time sporting on the foam of Lake Mæo'tis, and at another playing around the wintry summits of Mi'mas, a mountain range of Ionia, The farther invocation of the Clouds is thus continued:

Socrates. Come forth, come forth, ye dread Clouds, and to earth your glorious majesty show; Whether lightly ye rest on the time-honored crest of Olympus, environed in snow, Or tread the soft dance 'mid the stately advance of old Ocean, the nymphs to beguile, Or stoop to enfold, with your pitchers of gold, the mystical waves of the Nile, Or around the white foam of Mæotis ye roam, or Mimas all wintry and bare, O hear while we pray, and turn not away from the rites which your servants prepare.

Then the chorus comes forward and answers, as if the Clouds were speaking:

Chorus. Clouds of all hue, Now rise we aloft with our garments of dew, We come from old Ocean's unchangeable bed, We come till the mountains' green summits we tread, We come to the peaks with their landscapes untold, We gaze on the earth with her harvests of gold, We gaze on the rivers in majesty streaming, We gaze on the lordly, invisible sea; We come, for the eye of the Ether is beaming, We come, for all Nature is flashing and free. Let us shake off this close-clinging dew From our members eternally new, And sail upward the wide world to view, Come away! Come away!

Socr. O goddesses mine, great Clouds and divine, ye have heeded and answered my prayer. Heard ye their sound, and the thunder around, as it thrilled through the petrified air?

Streps. Yes, by Zeus! and I shake, and I'm all of a quake, and I fear I must sound a reply, Their thunders have made my soul so afraid, and those terrible voices so nigh--

Socr. Don't act in our schools like those comedy-fools, with their scurrilous, scandalous ways. Deep silence be thine, while these Clusters divine their soul-stirring melody raise.

To which the chorus again responds. But we have not room for farther extracts. The description of the floating-cloud character of the scene is acknowledged by critics to be inimitable. There is one passage, in particular, in which Socrates, pointing to the clouds that have taken a sudden slanting downward motion, says:

"They are drifting, an infinite throng, And their long shadows quake over valley and brake"--

which, MR. RUSKIN declares, "could have been written by none but an ardent lover of the hill scenery--one who had watched hour after hour the peculiar, oblique, sidelong action of descending clouds, as they form along the hollows and ravines of the hills. [Footnote: The line in Greek, which is so vividly descriptive of this peculiar appearance and motion of the clouds--

dia toy koiloy kai toy daseoy autai plagiai--

loses so much in the rendering, that the beauty of the passage can be fully appreciated only by the Greek scholar.] There are no lumpish solidities, no billowy protuberances here. All is melting, drifting, evanescent, full of air, and light as dew."

Choral Song from "The Birds."

In the following extract from the comedy of The Birds, Aristophanes ridicules the popular belief of the Greeks in signs and omens drawn from the birds of the air. Though undoubtedly an exaggeration, it may nevertheless be taken as a fair exposition of the superstitious notions of an age that had its world-renowned "oracles," and as a good example of the poet's comic style. The extract is from the Choral Song in the comedy, and is a true poetic gem.

Ye children of man! whose life is a span, Protracted with sorrow from day to day; Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous, Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay! Attend to the words of the sovereign birds, Immortal, illustrious lords of the air, Who survey from on high, with a merciful eye, Your struggles of misery, labor, and care. Whence you may learn and clearly discern Such truths as attract your inquisitive turn-- Which is busied of late with a mighty debate, A profound speculation about the creation, And organical life and chaotical strife-- With various notions of heavenly motions, And rivers and oceans, and valleys and mountains, And sources of fountains, and meteors on high, And stars in the sky.... We propose by-and-by (If you'll listen and hear) to make it all clear.

All lessons of primary daily concern You have learned from the birds (and continue to learn), Your best benefactors and early instructors. We give you the warnings of seasons returning: When the cranes are arranged, and muster afloat In the middle air, with a creaking note,

Steering away to the Libyan sand, Then careful farmers sow their lands; The craggy vessel is hauled ashore; The sail, the ropes, the rudder, and oar Are all unshipped and housed in store. The shepherd is warned, by the kite re-appearing, To muster his flock and be ready for shearing. You quit your old cloak at the swallow's behest, In assurance of summer, and purchase a vest.

For Delphi, for Ammon, Dodo'na--in fine, For every oracular temple and shrine-- The birds are a substitute, equal and fair; For on us you depend, and to us you repair For counsel and aid when a marriage is made-- A purchase, a bargain, or venture in trade: Unlucky or lucky, whatever has struck ye-- A voice in the street, or a slave that you meet, A name or a word by chance overheard-- If you deem it an omen you call it a bird; And if birds are your omens, it clearly will follow That birds are a proper prophetic Apollo. --Trans. by FRERE.

* * * * *

III. HISTORY.

As we have stated in a former chapter, literary compositions in prose first appeared among the Greeks in the sixth century B.C., and were either mythological, or collections of local legends, whether sacred or profane, of particular districts. It was not until a still later period that the Grecian prose writers, becoming more positive in their habits of thought, broke away from speculative and mystical tendencies, and began to record their observations of the events daily occurring about them. In the writings of Hecatæ'us of Mile'tus, who flourished about 500 B.C., we find the first elements of history; and yet some modern writers think he can lay no claim whatever to the title of historian, while others regard him as the first historical writer of any importance. He visited Greece proper and many of the surrounding countries, and recorded his observations and experiences in a work of a geographical character, entitled Periodus. He also wrote another work relating to the mythical history of Greece, and died about 467 B.C.

HEROD'OTUS.

MAHAFFY considers Hecatæ'us "the forerunner of Herodotus in his mode of life and his conception of setting down his experiences;" while NIE'BUHR, the great German historian, absolutely denies the existence of any Grecian histories before Herodotus gave to the world the first of those illustrious productions that form another bright link in the literary chain of Grecian glory. Born in Halicarnas'sus about the year 484, of an illustrious family, Herodotus was driven from his native land at an early age by a revolution, after which he traveled extensively over the then known world, collecting much of the material that he subsequently used in his writings. After a short residence at Samos he removed to Athens, leaving there, however, about the year 440 to take up his abode at Thu'rii, a new Athenian colony near the site of the former Syb'aris. Here he lived the rest of his life, dying about the year 420. Lucian relates that, on completing his work, Herodotus went to Olympia during the celebration of the Olympic games, and there recited to his countrymen the nine books of which his history was composed. His hearers were delighted, and immediately honored the books with the title of the Nine Muses. A later account of this scene says that Thucydides, then a young man, stood at the side of Herodotus, and was affected to tears by his recitations.

Herodotus modestly states the object of his history in the following paragraph, which is all the introduction that he makes to his great work: "These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and, withal, to put on record what were their grounds of feud." [Footnote: Rawlinson's translation.] But while he portrays the military ambition of the Persian rulers, the struggles of the Greeks for liberty, and their final triumph over the Persian power, he also gives us a history of almost all the then known world. "His work begins," says MR. LAWRENCE, "with the causes of the hostility between Persia and Greece, describes the power of Croe'sus, the wonders of Egypt, the expedition of Darius into Scythia, and closes with the immortal war between the allied Greeks and the Persian hosts. To his countrymen the story must have had the intense interest of a national ode or epic. Athens, particularly, must have read with touching ardor the graceful narrative of its early glory; for when Herodotus finished his work the brief period had already passed away. What Æschylus and the other dramatists painted in brief and striking pictures on the stage, Herodotus described with laborious but never tedious minuteness. His pure Ionic diction never wearies, his easy and simple narrative has never lost its interest, and all succeeding ages have united in calling him 'the Father of History.' His fame has advanced with the progress of letters, and has spread over mankind."

The following admirable description of Herodotus and of his writings is from an essay on "History," by LORD MACAULAY:

Herodotus and his Writings.

"Of the romantic historians, Herodotus is the earliest and the best. His animation, his simple-hearted tenderness, his wonderful talent for description and dialogue, and the pure, sweet flow of his language, place him at the head of narrators. He reminds us of a delightful child. There is a grace beyond the reach of affectation in his awkwardness, a malice in his innocence, an intelligence in his nonsense, and an insinuating eloquence in his lisp. We know of no other writer who makes such interest for himself and his book in the heart of the reader. He has written an incomparable book. He has written something better, perhaps, than the best history; but he has not written a really good history; for he is, from the first to the last chapter, an inventor. We do not here refer merely to those gross fictions with which he has been reproached by the critics of later times, but we speak of that coloring which is equally diffused over his whole narrative, and which perpetually leaves the most sagacious reader in doubt what to reject and what to receive. The great events are, no doubt, faithfully related; so, probably, are many of the slighter circumstances, but which of them it is impossible to ascertain. We know there is truth, but we cannot exactly decide where it lies.

"If we may trust to a report not sanctioned, indeed, by writers of high authority, but in itself not improbable, the work of Herodotus was composed not to be read, but to be heard. It was not to the slow circulation of a few copies, which the rich only could possess, that the aspiring author looked for his reward. The great Olympian festival was to witness his triumph. The interest of the narrative and the beauty of the style were aided by the imposing effect of recitation--by the splendor of the spectacle, by the powerful influence of sympathy. A critic who could have asked for authorities in the midst of such a scene must have been of a cold and skeptical nature, and few such critics were there. As was the historian, such were the auditors--inquisitive, credulous, easily moved by the religious awe of patriotic enthusiasm. They were the very men to hear with delight of strange beasts, and birds, and trees; of dwarfs, and giants, and cannibals; of gods whose very names it was impiety to utter; of ancient dynasties which had left behind them monuments surpassing all the works of later times; of towns like provinces; of rivers like seas; of stupendous walls, and temples, and pyramids; of the rites which the Magi performed at daybreak on the tops of the mountains; of the secrets inscribed on the eternal obelisks of Memphis. With equal delight they would have listened to the graceful romances of their own country. They now heard of the exact accomplishment of obscure predictions; of the punishment of climes over which the justice of Heaven had seemed to slumber; of dreams, omens, warnings from the dead; of princesses for whom noble suitors contended in every generous exercise of strength and skill; and of infants strangely preserved from the dagger of the assassin to fulfil high destinies.

"As the narrative approached their own times the interest became still more absorbing. The chronicler had now to tell the story of that great conflict from which Europe dates its intellectual and political supremacy--a story which, even at this distance of time, is the most marvelous and the most touching in the annals of the human race--a story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful; with all that is pathetic and animating; with the gigantic caprices of infinite wealth and despotic power; with the mightier miracles of wisdom, of virtue, and of courage. He told them of rivers dried up in a day, of provinces famished for a meal; of a passage for ships hewn through the mountains; of a road for armies spread upon the waves; of monarchies and commonwealths swept away; of anxiety, of terror, of confusion, of despair! and then of proud and stubborn hearts tried in that extremity of evil and not found wanting; of resistance long maintained against desperate odds; of lives dearly sold when resistance could be maintained no more; of signal deliverance, and of unsparing revenge. Whatever gave a stronger air of reality to a narrative so well calculated to inflame the passions and to flatter national pride, was certain to be favorably received."

THUCYDIDES.

Greater even than Herodotus, in some respects, but entirely different in his style of composition, was the historian Thucydides, who was born in Athens about 471 B.C. In early life he studied in the rhetorical and sophistical schools of his native city; and he seems to have taken some part in the political agitations of the period. In his forty-seventh year he commanded an Athenian fleet that was sent to the relief of Amphip'olis, then besieged by Bras'idas the Spartan. But Thucydides was too late; on his arrival the city had surrendered. His failure to reach there sooner appears to have been caused by circumstances entirely beyond his control, although some English scholars, including GROTE, declare that he was remiss and dilatory, and therefore Deserving of the punishment he received--banishment from Athens. He retired to Scaptes'y-le, a small town in Thrace; and in this secluded spot, removed from the shifting scenes of Grecian life, he devoted himself to the composition of his great work. Tradition asserts that he was assassinated when about eighty years of age, either at Athens or in Thrace.

The history of Thucydides, unfinished at his death, gives an account of nearly twenty-one years of the Peloponnesian war. The author's style is polished, vigorous, philosophical, and sometimes so concise as to be obscure. We are told that even Cicero found some of his sentences almost unintelligible. But, as MAHAFFY says: "Whatever faults of style, whatever transient fashion of involving his thoughts, may be due to a Sophistic education and to the desire of exhibiting depth and acuteness, there cannot be the smallest doubt that in the hands of Thucydides the art of writing history made an extraordinary stride, and attained a degree of perfection which no subsequent Hellenic (and few modern) writers have equaled. If the subject which he selected was really a narrow one, and many of the details trivial, it was nevertheless compassed with extreme difficulty, for it is at all times a hard task to write contemporary history, and more especially so in an age when published documents were scarce, and the art of printing unknown. Moreover, however trivial may be the details of petty military raids, of which an account was yet necessary to the completeness of his record, we cannot but wonder at the lofty dignity with which he has handled every part of the subject. There is not a touch of comedy, not a point of satire, not a word of familiarity throughout the whole book, and we stand face to face with a man who strikes us as strangely un-Attic in his solemn and severe temper." [Footnote: "History of Greek Literature," vol. ii., p. 117.]

The following comparison, evidently a just one, has been made between Thucydides and Herodotus:

Thucydides and Herodotus.

"In comparing the two great historians, it is plain that the mind and talents of each were admirably suited to the work which he took in hand. The extensive field in which Herodotus labored afforded an opportunity for embellishing and illustrating his history with the marvels of foreign lands; while the glorious exploits of a great and free people stemming a tide of barbarian invaders and finally triumphing over them, and the customs and histories of the barbarians with whom they had been at war, and of all other nations whose names were connected with Persia, either by lineage or conquest, were subjects which required the talents of a simple narrator who had such love of truth as not willfully to exaggerate, and such judgment as to select what was best worthy of attention. But Thucydides had a narrower field. The mind of Greece was the subject of his study, as displayed in a single war which was, in its rise, progress, and consequences, the most important which Greece had ever seen. It did not in itself possess that heart-stirring interest which characterizes the Persian war. In it united Greece was not struggling for her liberties against a foreign foe, animated by one common patriotism, inspired by an enthusiastic Jove of liberty; but it presented the sad spectacle of Greece divided against herself, torn by the jealousies of race, and distracted by the animosities of faction.

"The task of Thucydides, therefore, was that of studying the warring passions and antagonistic workings of one mind; and it was one which, in order to become interesting and profitable, demanded that there should be brought to bear upon it the powers of a keen, analytical intellect. To separate history from the traditions and falsehoods with which it had been overlaid, and to give the early history of Greece in its most truthful form; to trace Athenian supremacy from its rise to its ruin, and the growing jealousy of other states, whether inferiors or rivals, to which that supremacy gave rise; to show its connection with the enmities of race and the opposition of politics; to point out what causes led to such wide results; how the insatiable ambitions of Athens, gratifying itself in direct disobedience to the advice of her wise statesman, Pericles, led step by step to her ultimate ruin,--required not a mere narrator of events, however brilliant, but a moral philosopher and a statesman. Such was Thucydides. Although his work shows an advance, in the science of historical composition, over that of Herodotus, and his mind is of a higher, because of a more thoughtful order, yet his fame by no means obscures the glory which belongs to the Father of History. Their walks are different; they can never be considered as rivals, and therefore neither can claim superiority." [Footnote: "Greek and Roman Classical Literature," by Professor R. W. Browne, King's College, London.]

* * * * *

IV. PHILOSOPHY.

ANAXAG'ORAS.

The most illustrious of the Ionic philosophers, and the first distinguished philosopher of this period of Grecian history, was Anaxagoras, who was born at Clazom'enæ in the year 499 B.C. At the age of twenty he went to Athens, where he remained thirty years, teaching philosophy, and having for his hearers Pericles, Socrates, Euripides, and other celebrated characters. While the pantheistic systems of Tha'les, Heracli'tus, and other early philosophers admitted, in accordance with the fictions of the received mythology, that the universe is full of gods, the doctrine of Anaxagoras led to the belief of but one supreme mind or intelligence, distinct from the chaos to which it imparts motion, form, and order. Hence he also taught that the sun is an inanimate, fiery mass, and therefore not a proper object of worship. He asserted that the moon shines by reflected light, and he rightly explained solar and lunar eclipses. He gave allegorical explanations of the names of the Grecian gods, and struck a blow at the popular religion by attributing the miraculous appearances at sacrifices to natural causes. For these innovations he was stoned by the populace, and, as a penalty for what was considered his impiety, he was condemned to death; but through the influence of Pericles his sentence was commuted to banishment. He retired to Lamp'sacus, on the Hellespont, where he died at the age of seventy-two.

A short time before his death the senate of Lampsacus sent to Anaxagoras to ask what commemoration of his life and character would be most acceptable to him. He answered, "Let all the boys and girls have a play-day on the anniversary of my death." The suggestion was observed, and his memory was honored by the people of Lampsacus for many centuries with a yearly festival. The amiable disposition of Anaxagoras, and the general character of his teachings, are pleasantly and very correctly set forth in the following poem, which is a supposed letter from the poet Cleon, of Lampsacus, to Pericles, giving an account of the philosopher's death:

The Death of Anaxagoras.

Cleon of Lampsacus, to Pericles: Of him she banished now let Athens boast; Let now th' Athenian raise to him they stoned A statue. Anaxagoras is dead! To you who mourn the master, called him friend, Beat back th' Athenian wolves who fanged his throat, And risked your own to save him--Pericles-- I now unfold the manner of his end:

The aged man, who found in sixty years Scant cause for laughter, laughed before he died, And died still smiling: Athens vexed him not! Not he, but your Athenians, he would say, Were banished in his exile!

When the dawn First glimmers white o'er Lesser Asia, And little birds are twittering in the grass, And all the sea lies hollow and gray with mist, And in the streets the ancient watchmen doze, The master woke with cold. His feet were chill, And reft of sense; and we who watched him knew The fever had not wholly left his brain, For he was wandering, seeking nests of birds, An urchin from the green Ionian town Where he was born. We chafed his clay-cold limbs; And so he dozed, nor dreamed, until the sun Laughed out--broad day--and flushed the garden gods Who bless our fruits and vines in Lampsacus.

Feeble, but sane and cheerful, he awoke, And took our hands and asked to feel the sun; And where the ilex spreads a gracious shade We placed him, wrapped and pillowed; and he heard The charm of birds, the whisper of the vines, The ripple of the blue Propontic sea. Placid and pleased he lay; but we were sad To see the snowy hair and silver beard Like withering mosses on a fallen oak, And feel that he, whose vast philosophy Had cast such sacred branches o'er the fields Where Athens pastures her dull sheep, lay fallen, And never more should know the spring! Confess You too had grieved to see it, Pericles!

But Anaxagoras owned no sense of wrong; And when we called the plagues of all your gods On your ungrateful city, he but smiled: "Be patient, children! Where would be the gain Of wisdom and divine astronomy, Could we not school our fretful minds to bear The ills all life inherits? I can smile To think of Athens! Were they much to blame? Had I not slain Apollo? plucked the beard Of Jove himself? Poor rabble, who have yet Outgrown so little the green grasshoppers From whom they boast descent, are they to blame? [Footnote: The Athenians claimed to be of indigenous origin-- Autoch'tho-nes, that is, Aborigines, sprung from the earth itself. As emblematic of this origin they wore in their hair the golden forms of the cicada, or locust, often improperly called grasshopper, which was believed to spring from the earth. So it was said that the Athenians boasted descent from grasshoppers.]

"How could they dream--or how believe when taught-- The sun a red-hot iron ball, in bulk Not less than Peloponnesus? How believe The moon no silver goddess girt for chase, But earth and stones, with caverns, hills, and vales? Poor grasshoppers! who deem the gods absorbed In all their babble, shrilling in the grass! What wonder if they rage, should one but hint That thunder and lightning, born of clashing clouds, Might happen even with Jove in pleasant mood, Not thinking of Athenians at all!"

He paused; and, blowing softly from the sea, The fresh wind stirred the ilex, shaking down Through chinks of sunny leaves blue gems of sky; And lying in the shadow, all his mind O'ershadowed by our grief, once more he spoke: "Let not your hearts be troubled! All my days Hath all my care been fixed on this vast blue, So still above us; now my days are done, Let it have care of me! Be patient, meek, Not puffed with doctrine! Nothing can be known; Naught grasped for certain: sense is circumscribed; The intellect is weak, and life is short!"

He ceased, and mused a little while we wept. "And yet be nowise downcast; seek, pursue! The lover's rapture and the sage's gain Less in attainment lie than in approach. Look forward to the time which is to come! All things are mutable, and change alone Unchangeable. But knowledge grows! The gods Are drifting from the earth like morning mist; The days are surely at the doors when men Shall see but human actions in the world! Yea, even these hills of Lampsacus shall be The isles of some new sea, if time fail not!"

And now the reverend fathers of our town Had heard the master's end was very near, And come to do him homage at the close, And ask what wish of his they might fulfil. But he, divining that they thought his heart Might yearn to Athens for a resting-place, Said gently, "Nay; from everywhere the way To that dark land you wot of is the same. I feel no care; I have no wish. The Greeks Will never quite forget my Pericles, And when they think of him will say of me, 'Twas Anaxagoras taught him!"

Loath to go, No kindly office done, yet once again The reverend fathers pressed him for a wish. Then laughed the master: "Nay, if still you urge, And since 'twere churlish to reject good-will, I pray you, every year, when time brings back The day on which I left you, let the boys-- All boys and girls in this your happy town-- Be free of task and school for that one day."

He lay back smiling, and the reverend men Departed, heavy at heart. He spoke no more, But, haply musing on his truant days, Passed from us, and was smiling when he died. --WILLIAM CANTON, in The Contemporary Review.

The teachings of Anaxagoras were destined to attain to wide-spread power over the Grecian mind. As auguries, omens, and prodigies exercised a great influence on the public affairs of Greece, a philosophical explanation of natural phenomena had a tendency to diminish respect for the popular religion in the eyes of the multitude, and to leave the minds of rulers and statesmen open to the influences of reason, and to the rejection of the follies of superstition. The doctrines taught by Anaxagoras were the commencement of the contest between the old philosophy and the new; and the varying phases of the struggle appear throughout all subsequent Grecian history.

THE SOPHISTS.

In the fifth century there sprang up in Greece a set of teachers who traveled about from city to city, giving instruction (for money) in philosophy and rhetoric; under which heads were included political and moral education. These men were called "Sophists" (a term early applied to wise men, such as the seven sages), and though they did not form a sect or school, they resembled one another in many respects, exerting an important, and, barring their skeptical tendencies, a healthful influence in the formation of character. Among the most eminent of these teachers were Protag'oras of Abde'ra, Gor'gias of Leontini, and Prod'icus of Ce'os. That great philosopher of a later age, Plato, while condemning the superficiality of their philosophy, characterized these men as important and respectable thinkers; but their successors, by their ignorance, brought reproach upon their calling, and, in the time of Socrates, the Sophists--so-called--had lost their influence and had fallen into contempt. "Before Plato had composed his later Dialogues," says MAHAFFY, "they had become too insignificant to merit refutation; and in the following generation they completely disappear as a class." This author thus proceeds to give the causes of their fall:

"It is, of course, to be attributed not only to the opposition of Socrates at Athens, but to the subdivision of the profession of education. Its most popular and prominent branch--that of Rhetoric--was taken up by special men, like the orator An'tiphon, and developed into a strictly defined science. The Philosophy which they had touched without sounding its depths was taken up by the Socratic schools, and made the rule and practice of a life. The Politics which they had taught were found too general; nor were these wandering men, without fixed home, or familiarity with the intricacies of special constitutions, likely to give practical lessons to Greece citizens in the art of state-craft. Thus they disappear almost as rapidly as they rose--a sudden phase of spiritual awakening in Greece, like the Encyclopædists of the French." [Footnote: "History of Classical Greek literature," vol. ii., p. 63.]

SOCRATES.

The greatest teacher of this age was Socrates, who was born near Athens in 469 B.C. His father was a sculptor, and the son for some time practiced the same profession at Athens, meanwhile aspiring toward higher things, and pursuing the study of philosophy under Anaxagoras and others. He served his country in the field in the severe struggle between Sparta and Athens, where he was distinguished for his bravery and endurance; and when upward of sixty years of age he was chosen to represent his district in the Senate of Five Hundred. Here, and under the subsequent tyranny, his integrity remained unshaken; and his boldness in denouncing the cruelties of the Thirty Tyrants nearly cost him his life. As a teacher, Socrates assumed the character of a moral philosopher, and he seized every occasion to communicate moral wisdom to his fellow-citizens. Although often classed with the Sophists, and unjustly selected by Aristophanes as their representative, the whole spirit of his teachings was directly opposed to that class. Says MAHAFFY, "The Sophists were brilliant and superficial, he was homely and thorough; they rested in skepticism, he advanced through it to deeper and sounder faith; they were wandering and irresponsible, he was fixed at Athens, and showed forth by his life the doctrines he preached." GROTE, however, while denying that the Sophists were intellectual and moral corrupters, as generally charged, also denies that the reputation of Socrates properly rests upon his having rescued the Athenian mind from their influences. He admires Socrates for "combining with the qualities of a good man a force of character and an originality of speculation as well as of method, and a power of intellectually working on others, generically different from that of any professional teacher, without parallel either among contemporaries or successors." [Footnote: "History of Greece," Chap. lxviii.]

Socrates taught without fee or reward, and communicated his instructions freely to high and low, rich and poor. His chief method of instruction was derived from the style of Zeno, of the Eleatic school, and consisted of attacking the opinions of his opponents and pulling them to pieces by a series of questions and answers. [Footnote: A fine example of the Socratic mode of disputation may be seen In "Alciphron; or, the Minute Philosopher," by George Berkeley, D.D., Bishop of Cloyne, Ireland. It is a defence of the Christian religion, and an exposé of the weakness of infidelity and skepticism, and is considered one of the most ingenious and excellent performances of the kind in the English tongue.] He made this system "the most powerful instrument of philosophic teaching ever known in the history of the human intellect." The philosopher was an enthusiastic lover of Athens, and he looked upon the whole city as his school. There alone he found instruction and occupation, and through its streets he would wander, standing motionless for hours in deep meditation, or charming all classes and ages by his conversation. Alcibiades declared of him that, "as he talks, the hearts of all who hear leap up, and their tears are poured out." The poet THOMSON, musing over the sages of ancient time, thus describes him:

O'er all shone out the great Athenian sage, And father of Philosophy! Tutor of Athens! he, in every street, Dealt priceless treasure; goodness his delight, Wisdom his wealth, and glory his reward. Deep through the human heart, with playful art, His simple question stole, as into truth And serious deeds he led the laughing race; Taught moral life; and what he taught he was.

Of the unjust attack made upon Socrates by the poet Aristophanes we have already spoken. That occurred in 423 B.C., and, as a writer has well said, "evaporated with the laugh"--having nothing to do with the sad fate of the guiltless philosopher twenty-four years after. Soon after the restoration of the democracy in Athens (403 B.C.) Socrates was tried for his life on the absurd charges of impiety and of corrupting the morals of the young. His accusers appear to have been instigated by personal resentment, which he had innocently provoked, and by envy of his many virtues; and the result shows not only the instability but the moral obliquity of the Athenian character. He approached his trial with no special preparation for defence, as he had no expectation of an acquittal; but he maintained a calm, brave, and haughty bearing, and addressed the court in a bold and uncompromising tone, demanding rewards instead of punishment. It was the strong religious persuasion (or belief) of Socrates that he was acting under a divine mission. This consciousness had been the controlling principle of his life; and in the following extracts which we have taken from his Apology, or Defence, in which he explains his conduct, we see plain evidences of this striking characteristic of the great philosopher:

The Defence of Socrates. [Footnote: From the translation by Professor Jowett, of Oxford University.]

"Strange, indeed, would be my conduct, O men of Athens, if now, when, as I conceive and imagine, God orders me to fulfil the philosopher's mission of searching into myself and other men, I were to desert my post through fear of death, or any other fear: that would indeed be strange, and I might justly be arraigned in court for denying the existence of the gods, if I disobeyed the oracle because I was afraid of death: then I should be fancying I was wise when I was not wise. For this fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which he in his fear apprehends to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance? And this is the point in which, as I think, I am superior to men in general, and in which I might, perhaps, fancy myself wiser than other men--that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know; but I do know that injustice and disobedience to a better, whether God or man, is evil and dishonorable, and I will never fear or avoid a possible good rather than a certain evil. And therefore should you say to me, 'Socrates, this time we will not mind An'ytus, and will let you off, but upon one condition, that you are not to inquire and speculate in this way any more, and that if you are caught doing this again you shall die'--if this were the condition on which you let me go, I should reply, 'Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, and exhorting, after my manner, any one whom I meet.' I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue come money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching; and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, my influence is ruinous indeed. But if anyone says that this is not my teaching, he is speaking an untruth. Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say to you, do as Anytus bids or not as Anytus bids, and either acquit me or not; but whatever you do, know that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times."

Socrates next refers to the indignation that he may have occasioned because he has not wept, begged, and entreated for his life, and has not brought forward his children and relatives to plead for him, as others would have done on so serious an occasion. He says that he has relatives, and three children; but he declares that not one of them shall appear in court for any such purpose --not from any insolent disposition on his part, but because he believes that such a course would be degrading to the reputation which he enjoys, as well as a disgrace to the state. He then closes his defence as follows:

"But, setting aside the question of dishonor, there seems to be something wrong in petitioning a judge, and thus procuring an acquittal, instead of informing and convincing him. For his duty is not to make a present of justice, but to give judgment; and he has Sworn that he will adjudge according to the law, and not according to his own good pleasure; and neither he nor we should get into the habit of perjuring ourselves--there can be no piety in that. Do not, then, require me to do what I consider dishonorable, and impious, and wrong, especially now, when I am being tried for impiety. For if, O men of Athens, by force of persuasion and entreaty, I could overpower your oaths, then I should be teaching you to believe that there are no gods, and convict myself, in my own defence, of not believing in them. But that is not the case; for I do believe that there are gods, and in a far higher sense than that in which any of my accusers believe in them. And to you and to God I commit my cause, to be determined by you as is best for you and me."

As he had expected, and as the tenor of his speech had assured his friends would be the case, Socrates was found guilty--but by a majority of only five or six in a body of over five hundred. He would make no proposition, as was his right, for a mitigation of punishment; and after sentence of death had been passed upon him he spent the remaining thirty days of his life in impressing on the minds of his friends the most sublime lessons in philosophy and virtue. Many of these lessons have been preserved to us in the works of Plato, in whose Phoe'do, which pictures the last hours of the prison life of Socrates, we find a sublime conversation on the immortality of the soul. The following is an extract from this work:

Socrates' Views of a Future State.

"When the dead arrive at the place to which their demon leads them severally, first of all they are judged, as well those who have lived well and piously as those who have not. And those who appear to have passed a middle kind of life, proceeding to Ach'eron, and embarking in the vessels they have, on these arrive at the lake, and there dwell; and when they are purified, and have suffered punishment for the iniquities they may have committed, they are set free, and each receives the reward of his good deeds according to his deserts; but those who appear to be incurable, through the magnitude of their offences, either from having committed many and great sacrileges, or many unjust and lawless murders, or other similar crimes, these a suitable destiny hurls into Tartarus, whence they never come forth. But those who appear to have been guilty of curable yet great offences, such as those who through anger have committed any violence against father or mother, and have lived the remainder of their life in a state of penitence, or they who have become homicides in a similar manner--these must, of necessity, fall into Tartarus; but after they have fallen, and have been there a year, the wave casts them forth, the homicide into Cocy'tus, [Footnote: Co-cy'tus] but the parricides and matricides into Pyriphleg'ethon; [Footnote: Pyr-i-phlege-thon, "fire-blazing;" one of the rivers of hell] but when, being borne along, they arrive at the Acheru'sian lake, [Footnote: Ach'e-ron. Cocytus signifies the river of wailing; Pyriphlegethon, the river that burns with fire; Acheron, the river of woe; and the Styx, another river of the lower world, the river of hatred. Thus Homer, in describing "Pluto's murky abode," says:

There, into Acheron runs not alone Dread Pyriphlegethon, but Cocytus loud, From Styx derived; there also stands a rock, At whose broad base the roaring rivers meet. Odyssey. B. X.] there they cry out to and invoke, some, those whom they slew, others, those whom they injured; and, invoking them, they entreat and implore them to suffer them to go out into the lake and to receive them; and if they persuade them, they go out, and are freed from their sufferings; but if not, they are borne back to Tartarus, and thence again to the rivers, and they do not cease from suffering this until they have persuaded those whom they have injured--for this sentence was imposed on them by the judges. But those who are found to have lived an eminently holy life--these are they who, being freed and set at large from these regions in the earth as from a prison--arrive at the pure abode above, and dwell on the upper parts of the earth. And among these, those who have sufficiently purified themselves by philosophy shall live without bodies throughout all future time, and shall arrive at habitations yet more beautiful than these, which it is neither easy to describe, nor at present is there sufficient time for the purpose.

"For the sake of these things which we have described we should use every endeavor to acquire virtue and wisdom in this life, for the reward is noble and the hope great. To affirm positively, however, that these things are exactly as I have described them, does not become a man of sense; but that either this, or something of the kind, takes place with respect to our souls and their habitations--since our soul is certainly immortal--appears to me most fitting to be believed, and worthy the hazard for one who trusts in its reality; for the hazard is noble, and it is right to allure ourselves with such things, as with enchantments; for which reason I have prolonged my story to such length. On account of these things, then, a man ought to be confident about his soul, who during this life has disregarded all the pleasures and ornaments of the body as foreign from his nature, and who, having thought that they do more harm than good, has zealously applied himself to the acquirement of knowledge, and who, having adorned his soul not with a foreign but with its own proper ornaments--temperance, justice, fortitude, freedom, and truth-- thus waits for his passage to Hades as one who is ready to depart whenever destiny shall summon him."

After some farther conversation with his friends respecting the disposition to be made of his body, and having said farewell to his family, Socrates drank the fatal hemlock with as much composure as if it had been the last draught at a cheerful banquet, and quietly laid himself down and died. "Thus perished," says DR. SMITH, "the greatest and most original of Grecian philosophers, whose uninspired wisdom made the nearest approach to the divine morality of the Gospel." As observed by PROFESSOR TYLER of Amherst College, "The consciousness of a divine mission was the leading trait in his character and the main secret of his power. This directed his conversations, shaped his philosophy, imbued his very person, and controlled his life. This was the power that sustained him in view of approaching death, inspired him with more that human fortitude in his last days, and invested his dying words with a moral grandeur that 'has less of earth in it than heaven.'" [Footnote: Preface to "Plato's Apology and Crito."] There was a more special and personal influence, however, to which Socrates deemed himself subject through life, and which probably moved him to view death with such calmness.

With all his practical wisdom, the great philosopher was not free from the control of superstitious fancies. He not only always gave careful heed to divinations, dreams, and oracular intimations, but he believed that he was warned and restrained, from childhood, by a familiar spirit, or demon, which he was accustomed to speak of familiarly and to obey implicitly. A writer, in alluding to this subject, says: "There is no more curious chapter in Grecian biography than the story of Socrates and his familiar demon, which, sometimes unseen, and at other times, as he asserted, assuming human shape, acted as his mentor; which preserved his life after the disastrous battle of De'lium, by pointing out to him the only secure line of retreat, while the lives of his friends, who disregarded his entreaties to accompany him, were sacrificed; and which, again, when the crisis of his fate approached, twice dissuaded him from defending himself before his accusers, and in the end encouraged him to quaff the poisoned cup presented to his lips by an ungrateful people."

ART.

Having briefly traced the history of Grecian literature in its best period, it remains to notice some of the monuments of art, "with which," as ALISON says, "the Athenians have overspread the world, and which still form the standard of taste in every civilized nation on earth."

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I. SCULPTURE AND PAINTING.

Grecian sculpture, as we have seen, had attained nearly the summit of its perfection at the commencement of the Persian wars. Among those who now gave to it a wider range may be mentioned Pythagoras, of Rhegium, and Myron, a native of Eleu'theræ. The former executed works in bronze representing contests of heroes and athletes; but he was excelled in this field by Myron, who was also distinguished for his representations of animals. The energies of sculpture, however, were to be still more directly concentrated and perfected in a new school. That school was at Athens, and its master was Phid'ias, an Athenian painter, sculptor, and architect, who flourished about 460 B.C. "At this point," observes LÜBKE, [Footnote: "Outlines of the History of Art," by Wilhelm Lübke; Clarence Cook's edition.] "begins the period of that wonderful elevation of Hellenic life which was ushered in by the glorious victory over the Persians. Now, for the first time, the national Hellenic mind rose to the highest consciousness of noble independence and dignity. Athens concentrated within herself, as in a focus, the whole exuberance and many-sidedness of Greek life, and glorified it into beautiful unity. Now, for the first time, the deepest thoughts of the Hellenic mind were embodied in sculpture, and the figures of the gods rose to that solemn sublimity in which art embodied the idea of divinity in purely human form. This victory of the new time over the old was effected by the power of Phidias, one of the most wonderful artist-minds of all time."

Phidias was intrusted by Pericles with the superintendence of the public works erected or adorned by that lavish ruler, and his own hands added to them their most valuable ornaments. But before he was called to this employment his statues had adorned the most celebrated temples of Greece. "These inimitable works," says GILLIES, [Footnote: Gillies's "History of Ancient Greece," p. 178.] "silenced the voice of envy; and the most distinguished artists of Greece--sculptors, painters, and architects--were ambitious to receive the directions, and to second the labors of Phidias, which were uninterruptedly employed, during fifteen years, in the embellishment of his native city." The chief characteristic of Phidias was ideal beauty of the sublimest order in the representation of divinities and their worship; and he substituted ivory for marble in those parts of statues that were uncovered, such as the face, hands, and feet, while for the covered portion he substituted solid gold in place of wood concealed with real drapery. The style and character of his work are well described by LÜBKE, as follows:

"That Phidias especially excelled in creating images of the gods, and that he preferred, as subjects for his art, those among the divinities the essence of whose nature was spiritual majesty, marks the fundamental characteristic of his art, and explains its superiority, not only to all that had been produced before his time, but to all that was contemporary with him, and to all that came after him. Possessed of that unsurpassable masterly power in the representation of the physical form to which Greek art, shortly before his time, had attained by unceasing endeavor, his lofty genius was called upon to apply these results to the embodiment of the highest ideas, and thus to invest art with the character of sublimity, as well as with the attributes of perfect beauty. Hence it is said of him, that he alone had seen images of the gods, and he alone had made them visible to others. Even in the story that, in emulation with other masters, he made an Amazon, and was defeated in the contest by his great contemporary Polycle'tus, we see a confirmation of the ideal tendency of his art. But that his works realized the highest conceptions of the people, and embodied the ideal of the Hellenic conception of the divinity, is proved by the universal admiration of the ancient world. This sublimity of conception was combined in him with an inexhaustible exuberance of creative fancy, an incomparable care in the completion of his work, and a masterly power in overcoming every difficulty, both in the technical execution and in the material."

Probably the first important work executed by Phidias at Athens was the colossal bronze image of Minerva, which stood on the Acropolis. It was nearly seventy feet in height, and was visible twenty miles out at sea. It was erected by the Athenians, in memory of their victory over the Persians, with the spoils of Marathon. A smaller bronze statue, on the same model, was also erected on the Acropolis. But the greatest of the works of Phidias at Athens was the ivory and gold statue of Minerva in the Parthenon, erected with the booty taken at Salamis. It was forty feet high, representing the goddess, "not with her shield raised as the vigorous champion of her people, but as a peaceful, protecting, and victory-giving divinity." Phidias was now called to Elis, and there he executed his crowning work, the gold and ivory statue of Jupiter at Olympia. "The father of the gods and of men was seated on a splendid throne in the cella of his Olympic temple, his head encircled with a golden olive-wreath; in his right hand he held Nikè, who bore a fillet of victory in her hands and a golden wreath on her head; in his left hand rested the richly-decorated sceptre." The throne was adorned with gold and precious stones, and on it were represented many celebrated scenes. "From this immeasurable exuberance of figures," says LÜBKE, "rose the form of the highest Hellenic divinity, grand and solemn and wonderful in majesty. Phidias had represented him as the kindly father of gods and men, and also as the mighty ruler in Olympus. As he conceived his subject he must have had in his mind those lines of Homer, in which Jupiter graciously grants the request of Thetis:

'As thus he spake, the son of Saturn gave The nod with his dark brows. The ambrosial curls Upon the sovereign one's immortal head Were shaken, and with them the mighty Mount Olympus trembled.'" [Footnote: Iliad, I., 528-580. Bryant's translation.]

While the art of painting was early developed in Greece, certainly as far back as 718 B.C., the first painter of renown was Polygno'tus, of Tha'sos, who went to Athens about 463 B.C., and established there what was called "the Athenian school" of painting. Aristotle called him "the painter of character," as he was the first to give variety to the expression of the countenance, and ease and grace to the outlines of figures or the flow of drapery. He painted many battle scenes, and with his contemporaries, Diony'sius of Col'oplon, Mi'con, and others, he embellished many of the public buildings in Athens, and notably the Temple of Theseus, with representations of figures similar to those of the sculptor. About 404 B.C. painting reached a farther degree of excellence in the hands of Apollodo'rus, a native of Athens, who developed the principles of light and shade and gave to the art a more dramatic range. Of this school Zeux'is, Parrha'sius, and Timan'thes became the chief masters.

PARRHASIUS.

Of the artists of this period it has been asserted by some authorities that Parrhasius was the most celebrated, as he is said to have "raised the art of painting to perfection in all that is exalted and essential;" uniting in his works "the classic invention of Polygnotus, the magic tone of Apollodorus, and the exquisite design of Zeuxis." He was a native of Ephesus, but became a citizen of Athens, where he won many victories over his contemporaries. One of these is recorded by Pliny as having been achieved in a public contest with Zeuxis. The latter displayed a painting of some grapes, which were so natural as to deceive the birds, that came and pecked at them. Zeuxis then requested that the curtain which was supposed to screen the picture of Parrhasius be withdrawn, when it was found that the painting of Parrhasius was merely the representation of a curtain thrown over a picture-frame. The award of merit was therefore given to Parrhasius, on the ground that while Zeuxis had deceived the birds, Parrhasius had deceived Zeuxis himself.

The Roman philosopher Seneca also tells a story of Parrhasius as follows: While engaged in making a painting of "Prometheus Bound," he took an old Olynthian captive and put him to the torture, that he might catch, and transfer to canvas, the natural expression of the most terrible of mortal sufferings. This story, we may hope, is a fiction; but the incident is often alluded to by the poets, and the American poet WILLIS has painted the alleged scene in lines scarcely less terrible in their coloring than those pallid hues of death-like agony which we may suppose the painter-artist to have employed.

Parrhasius and his Captive.

Parrhasius stood gazing forgetfully Upon his canvas. There Prometheus lay, Chained to the cold rocks of Mount Cau'casus-- The vulture at his vitals, and the links Of the lame Lemnian festering in his flesh; [Footnote: Vulcan; the Olympian artist, who, when hurled from heaven, fell upon the Island of Lemnos, in the Ægean. He forged the chain with which Prometheus was bound.] And, as the painter's mind felt through the dim, Rapt mystery, and plucked the shadows forth With its far-reaching fancy, and with form And color clad them, his fine, earnest eye Flashed with a passionate fire; and the quick curl Of his thin nostril, and his quivering lip, Were like the wing'd god's, breathing from his flight. [Footnote: The winged god Mercury.]

"Bring me the captive now! My bands feel skilful, and the shadows lift From my waked spirit airily and swift, And I could paint the bow. Upon the bended heavens, around me play Colors of such divinity to-day.

"Ha! bind him on his back! Look! as Prometheus in my picture here! Quick, or he faints! stand with the cordial near! Now--bend him to the rack! Press down the poisoned links into his flesh, And tear agape that healing wound afresh!

"So, let him writhe! How long Will he live thus? Quick, my good pencil, now! What a fine agony works upon his brow! Ha! gray-haired, and so strong! How fearfully he stifles that short moan! Gods! if I could but paint a dying groan!

"'Pity' thee! So I do. I pity the dumb victim at the altar; But does the robed priest for his pity falter? I'd rack thee though I knew A thousand lives were perishing in thine! What were ten thousand to a fame like mine?

"Yet there's a deathless name! A spirit that the smothering vault shall spurn, And like a steadfast planet mount and burn; And, though its crown of flame Consumed my brain to ashes as it shone, By all the fiery stars I'd bind it on!

"Ay, though it bid me rifle My heart's last fount for its insatiate thirst; Though every life-strung nerve be maddened first; Though it should bid me stifle The yearning in my throat for my sweet child, And taunt its mother till my brain went wild--

"All--I would do it all Sooner than die, like a dull worm, to rot-- Thrust foully into earth to be forgot! O heavens! but I appall Your heart, old man! Forgive--ha! on your lives Let him not faint!--rack him till he revives!

"Vain--vain--give o'er. His eye Glazes apace. He does not feel you now; Stand back! I'll paint the death-dew on his brow. Gods I if he do not die But for one moment--one--till I eclipse Conception with the scorn of those calm lips!

"Shivering! Hark! he mutters Brokenly now: that was a difficult breath-- Another? Wilt thou never come, O Death? Look how his temple flutters! Is his heart still? Aha! lift up his head! He shudders--gasps--Jove help him! So--he's dead!"

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How like a mounting devil in the heart Rules the unreined ambition! Let it once But play the monarch, and its haughty brow Glows with a beauty that bewilders thought, And unthrones peace forever. Putting on The very pomp of Lucifer, it turns The heart to ashes, and with not a spring Left in the bosom for the spirit's lip, We look upon our splendor and forget The thirst of which we perish!

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II. ARCHITECTURE.

In Architecture, too, thy rank supreme! That art where most magnificent appears The little builder, man; by thee refined, And smiling high, to full perfection brought. --THOMSON.

We have already referred, in general terms, to the monuments of art for which the era of Athenian greatness was distinguished, and have stated that it was more particularly in the "Age of Pericles" that Athenian genius and enthusiasm found their full development, in the erection or adornment of those miracles of architecture that crowned the Athenian Acropolis or surrounded its base. The following eloquent description, from the pen of BULWER, will convey a vivid idea of the magnitude and the brilliancy of the labors performed for

The Adornment of Athens.

"Then rapidly progressed those glorious fabrics which seemed, as Plutarch gracefully express it, endowed with the bloom of a perennial youth. Still the houses of private citizens remained simple and unadorned; still were the streets narrow and irregular; and, even centuries afterward, a stranger entering Athens would not at first have recognized the claims of the mistress of Grecian art. But to the homeliness of her common thoroughfares and private mansions the magnificence of her public edifices now made a dazzling contrast. The Acropolis, that towered above the homes and thoroughfares of men--a spot too sacred for human habitation-- became, to use a proverbial phrase, 'a city of the gods.' The citizen was everywhere to be reminded of the majesty of the state --his patriotism was to be increased by the pride in her beauty-- his taste to be elevated by the spectacle of her splendor.

"Thus flocked to Athens all who throughout Greece were eminent in art. Sculptors and architects vied with one another in adorning the young empress of the seas: then rose the masterpieces of Phidias, of Callic'rates, of Mnesicles, which, either in their broken remains, or in the feeble copies of imitators less inspired, still command so intense a wonder, and furnish models so immortal. And if, so to speak, their bones and relics excite our awe and envy, as testifying of a lovelier and grander race, which the deluge of time has swept away, what, in that day, must have been their brilliant effect, unmutilated in their fair proportions-- fresh in all their lineaments and hues? For their beauty was not limited to the symmetry of arch and column, nor their materials confined to the marbles of Pentel'icus and Pa'ros. Even the exterior of the temples glowed with the richest harmony of colors, and was decorated with the purest gold: an atmosphere peculiarly favorable to the display and the preservation of art, permitted to external pediments and friezes all the minuteness of ornament --the brilliancy of colors, such as in the interior of Italian churches may yet be seen--vitiated, in the last, by a gaudy and barbarous taste. Nor did the Athenians spare any cost upon the works that were, like the tombs and tripods of their heroes, to be the monuments of a nation to distant ages, and to transmit the most irrefragable proof 'that the power of ancient Greece was not an idle legend.'" [Footnote: "Athens: Its Rise and Fall," pp. 256, 257.]

1. THE ACROPOLIS AND ITS SPLENDORS.

The Acropolis, the fortress of Athens, was the center of its architectural splendor. It is a rocky height rising abruptly out of the Attic plain, and was accessible only on the western side, where stood the Propylæ'a, a magnificent structure of the Doric order, constructed under the direction of Pericles by the architect Mnesicles, and which served as the gate as well as the defence of the Acropolis. But the latter's chief glory was the Parthenon, or Temple of Minerva, built in the time of Pericles by Icti'nus and Callic'rates, and which stood on the highest point, near the center. It was constructed entirely of the most beautiful white marble from Mount Pentelicus, and its dimensions were two hundred and twenty-eight feet by one hundred and two --having eight Doric columns in each of the two fronts, and seventeen in each of the sides, and also an interior range of six columns in each end. The ceiling of the western part of the main building was supported by four interior columns, and of the eastern end by sixteen. The entire height of the building above its platform was sixty-five feet. The whole was enriched within and without with matchless works of art by various artists under the direction of Phidias--its chief wonder, however, being the gold and ivory statue of the Virgin Goddess, the work of Phidias himself, elsewhere described.

This magnificent structure remained entire until the year 1687, when, during a siege of Athens by the Venetians, a bomb fell on the devoted Parthenon, and, setting fire to the powder that the Turks had stored there, entirely destroyed the roof and reduced the whole building almost to ruins. The eight columns of the eastern front, however, and several of the lateral colonnades, are still standing; and the whole, dilapidated as it is, retains an air of inexpressible grandeur and sublimity.

The Parthenon.

Fair Parthenon! yet still must fancy weep For thee, thou work of nobler spirits flown. Bright as of old the sunbeams o'er thee sleep In all their beauty still--and thine is gone! Empires have sunk since thou wast first revered, And varying rites have sanctified thy shrine. The dust is round thee of the race that reared Thy walls, and thou--their fate must still be thine! But when shall earth again exult to see Visions divine like theirs renewed in aught like thee?

Lone are thy pillars now--each passing gale Sighs o'er them as a spirit's voice, which moaned That loneliness, and told the plaintive tale Of the bright synod once above them throned. Mourn, graceful ruin! on thy sacred hill Thy gods, thy rites, a kindred fate have shared: Yet art thou honored in each fragment still That wasting years and barbarous hands have spared; Each hallowed stone, from rapine's fury borne, Shall wake bright dreams of thee in ages yet unborn.

Yes; in those fragments, though by time defaced, And rude, insensate conquerors, yet remains All that may charm th' enlightened eye of taste, On shores where still inspiring freedom reigns. As vital fragrance breathes from every part Of the crushed myrtle, or the bruised rose, E'en thus th' essential energy of art There in each wreck imperishably glows! The soul of Athens lives in every line, Pervading brightly still the ruins of her shrine. --MRS. HEMANS.

North of the Parthenon stood the Erechthe'um, an irregular but beautiful structure of the Ionic order, dedicated to the worship of Neptune and Minerva. Considerable remains of it are still standing. In addition to the great edifices of the Acropolis referred to, which were adorned with the most finished paintings and sculptures, the entire platform of the hill appears to have been covered with a vast composition of architecture and sculpture, consisting of temples, monuments, and statues of gods and heroes. The whole Acropolis was at once the fortress, the sacred enclosure, and the treasury of the Athenian people--forming the noblest museum of sculpture, the richest gallery of painting, and the best school of architecture in the world.

2. OTHER ARCHITECTURAL MONUMENTS OF ATHENS.

Beneath the southern wall of the Acropolis was the Theatre of Bacchus, capable of seating thirty thousand persons, and the seats of which, rising one above another, were cut out of the sloping rock. Adjoining this on the east was the Ode'um, a smaller covered theatre, built by Pericles, and so constructed as to imitate the form of Xerxes's tent. On the north-east side was the Prytane'um, where were many statues, and where citizens who had rendered service to the state were maintained at the public expense. A short distance to the north-west of the Acropolis, and separated from it only by some hollow ground, was the small eminence called Areop'agus, or Hill of Mars, at the eastern extremity of which was situated the celebrated court of Areopagus. About a quarter of a mile south-west stood the Pnyx, the place where the public assemblies of Athens were held in its palmy days, and a spot that will ever be associated with the renown of Demosthenes and other famed orators. The steps by which the speaker mounted the rostrum, and a tier of three seats for the audience, hewn in the solid rock, are still visible.

The only other monument of art to which we shall refer in this connection is the celebrated Temple of Theseus, built of marble by Cimon as a resting-place for the bones of the distinguished hero. [Footnote: Cimon conquered the island of Scy'ros, the haunt of pirates, and brought thence to Athens what were supposed to be the bones of Theseus.] It is of the Doric order, one hundred and four feet by forty-five, and surrounded by columns, of which there are six at each front and thirteen at the sides. The roof, friezes, and cornices of this temple have been but little impaired by time, and the whole is one of the most noble remains of the ancient magnificence of Athens, and the most nearly perfect, if not the most beautiful, existing specimen of Grecian architecture.

The Temple of Theseus.

Here let us pause, e'en at the vestibule Of Theseus' fame. With what stern majesty It rears its ponderous and eternal strength, Still perfect, still unchanged, as on the day When the assembled throng of multitudes With shouts proclaimed the accomplished work, and fell Prostrate upon their faces to adore Its marble splendor!

How the golden gleam Of noonday floats upon its graceful form, Tinging each grooved shaft, and storied frieze, And Doric triglyph! How the rays amid The opening columns, glanced from point to point, Stream down the gloom of the long portico!

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How the long pediment, Embrowned with shadows, frowns above, and spreads Solemnity and reverential awe!

Proud monument of old magnificence! Still thou survivest; nor has envious Time Impaired thy beauty, save that it has spread A deeper tint, and dimmed the polished glare Of thy refulgent whiteness. --HAYGARTH.

So much for some of the architectural wonders of Athens. As BULWER says, "It was the great characteristic of these works that they were entirely the creation of the people. Without the people Pericles could not have built a temple nor engaged a sculptor. The miracles of that day resulted from the enthusiasm of a population yet young--full of the first ardor for the beautiful-- dedicating to the state, as to a mistress, the trophies honorably won, or the treasures injuriously extorted, and uniting the resources of a nation with the energy of an individual, because the toil, the cost, were borne by those who succeeded to the enjoyment and arrogated the glory." TALFOURD, in his Athenian Captive, calls all that went to make up Athens in the days of her glory

An opening world, Diviner than the soul of man hath yet Been gifted to imagine--truths serene Made visible in beauty, that shall glow In everlasting freshness, unapproached By mortal passion, pure amid the blood And dust of conquests, never waxing old, But on the stream of time, from age to age, Casting bright images of heavenly youth To make the world less mournful.