ules along the stretch of Attic road to Marathon.
The magnificent hills girdling the horizon had freshly impressed
them as more sculpturesque in outline than the familiar ones about
their own Rome, and the very shape of the olive trees in a large
orchard by the roadside had seemed un-Italian and strange. They had
already become attuned to a Greek mood when the blue sea opened before
them and they reached the large plain, stretching from the foot-hills
of Pentelicon to the water's edge. The heat had stilled all life in
the neighbourhood, and Marathon seemed hushed, after all these five
hundred years, in reverence before the spirit of liberty. Their ride
home had been taken in the cool of the day, so that the hills which
rose from the sea had assumed a covering of deep purple or more
luminous amethyst. From the shore of the sea they had passed into
a wooded road, with a golden sky shining through the black branches.
Later the stars had come out in great clusters, and Messala, who now
and then betrayed a knowledge of poetry and a gravity of thought that
surprised his friends, had recited Pindar's lines:--

... Aye, undismayed
And deep the mood inspired,
A light for man to trust, a star
Of guidance sure, that shines afar.
If he that hath it can the sequel know,
How from the guilty here, forthwith below
A quittance is required.

But in sunlight undimmed by night and by day
Toil-free is the life of the good--for they
Nor vex earth's soil with the labour of hand,
Nor the waters of Ocean in that far land--
Nay, whoever in keeping of oaths were fearless
With the honoured of gods share life that is tearless.

That night-ride had come back to Horace several years ago when he
was writing his ode on Pindar, but to-day's memory seemed strangely
different. Then he had remembered what a revelation Pindar's lyric
art had been to him amid the severe and lofty beauty of Greek scenery.
Now he caught a haunting echo also of how, when he was twenty-one,
these lines of the artist had seemed to him a fitting explanation
of the mound of earth heaped over the dead at Marathon. He had long
ago learned to laugh at the fervour of youth's first grappling with
ideas, and had come to see that the part of a sensible man was to
select judiciously here and there, from all the schools, enough
reasonable tenets to enable him to preserve a straight course of
personal conduct. As for unders