lad in Athens,
undraped like a faun, with lyre in hand, was leading the Chorus of
Athenian youths, and singing to Athene, the tutelary goddess, a hymn
of triumph for a glorious victory--the very symbol of Greece and
Athens, springing up into a joyous second youth after invasion and
desolation, as the grass springs up after the prairie fire has
passed. But the fire had been terrible. It had burnt Athens at
least, down to the very roots. True, while Sophocles was dancing,
Xerxes, the great king of the East, foiled at Salamis, as his father
Darius had been foiled at Marathon ten years before, was fleeing back
to Persia, leaving his innumerable hosts of slaves and mercenaries to
be destroyed piecemeal, by land at Platea, by sea at Mycale. The
bold hope was over, in which the Persian, ever since the days of
Cyrus, had indulged--that he, the despot of the East, should be the
despot of the West likewise. It seemed to them as possible, though
not as easy, to subdue the Aryan Greek, as it had been to subdue the
Semite and the Turanian, the Babylonian and the Syrian; to riffle his
temples, to destroy his idols, carry off his women and children as
colonists into distant lands, as they had been doing with all the
nations of the East. And they had succeeded with isolated colonies,
isolated islands of Greeks, and the shores of Asia Minor. But when
they dared, at last, to attack the Greek in his own sacred land of
Hellas, they found they had bearded a lion in his den. Nay rather--
as those old Greeks would have said--they had dared to attack Pallas
Athene, the eldest daughter of Zeus--emblem of that serene and pure
divine wisdom, of whom Solomon sang of old: "The Lord possessed me
in the beginning of His way, before His works of old. When He
prepared the heavens, I was there, when He appointed the foundation
of the earth, then was I by him, as one brought up with Him, and I
was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him: rejoicing in the
habitable part of His earth; _and_ my _delight was with the sons of
men_"--to attack Athene and her brother Apollo, Lord of light, and
beauty, and culture, and grace, and inspiration--to attack them, not
in the name of Ormuzd, nor of any other deity, but in the name of
mere brute force and lust of conquest. The old Persian spirit was
gone out of them. They were the symbols now of nothing save
despotism and self-will, wealth and self-indulgence. They, once the
children of Ormuzd or l