nothing of telegraphs and telephones, but they knew as little of
hypocrisy and cant. Art and aesthetics sufficed.

In Corinthian and Milesian convents aesthetics were taught to girls who,
lifting their fair hands to Aphrodite, prayed that they might do nothing
that should not charm, say nothing that should not please. These studies
and rituals were supplemented in the Academe. There they learned that the
rightful path in love consisted in passing from beautiful manners to
beautiful thoughts, from beautiful thoughts to beautiful aspirations,
from beautiful aspirations to beautiful meditations, and that, in so
passing, they attained wisdom absolute which is beauty supreme.

It would be excessive to fancy that all graduates followed these precepts
and entered with them into the austere regions where Beauty, one and
indivisible, resides. It would be not only excessive but unreasonable.
Manners were proper for all, but for some revenues were better. Those of
Phryne were so ample that she offered to rebuild the walls of Thebes.
Those of Lais were such that she erected temples. But Phryne and Lais came
later, in post-Aspasian days, when Corinth, in addition to schools, had
marts in which beauty was an article of commerce and where pleasure
received the same official encouragement that stoicism had at Sparta. In
the train of Lais, Ishtar followed. It was Alexander that invoked her.

In the age of Pericles and Aspasia, Athens was too aesthetic to heed the
one, too young to know the other. Pallas alone, she who from her crystal
parapets saw and foresaw what the years would bring, could have told.
Otherwise there was then not a shadow on Athens, light only, light that
has never been excelled, light which from high porches, from tinted
peristyles, from gleaming temples, from shining statues, from white
immortals, from hill to sea, from Olympus itself, radiated, revealing in
its intense vibrations the glare of genius at its apogee.

Whatever is beautiful had its apotheosis then. Whatever was superb found
there its home. Athens had risen to her full height. Salamis had been
fought. A handful of athletes had routed Asia. Reverse the picture and the
glare could not have been. Its aurora would have swooned back into
darkness. But such was the luminousness it acquired that one ray, piercing
the mediaeval night, created the Renaissance, art's rebirth, the recall of
antique beauty.

Salamis lifted Greece to the skies. In the return was