and yet tender beauty of the maiden figures from the Parthenon and
its kindred temples. And these, or such as these, I thought to
myself, were the sisters of the men who fought at Marathon and
Salamis; the mothers of many a man among the ten thousand whom
Xenophon led back from Babylon to the Black Sea shore; the
ancestresses of many a man who conquered the East in Alexander's
host, and fought with Porus in the far Punjab. And were these
women mere dolls? These men mere gladiators? Were they not the
parents of philosophy, science, poetry, the plastic arts? We talk
of education now. Are we more educated than were the ancient
Greeks? Do we know anything about education, physical,
intellectual, or aesthetic, and I may say moral likewise--
religious education, of course, in our sense of the world, they
had none--but do we know anything about education of which they
have not taught us at least the rudiments? Are there not some
branches of education which they perfected, once and for ever;
leaving us northern barbarians to follow, or else not to follow,
their example? To produce health, that is, harmony and sympathy,
proportion and grace, in every faculty of mind and body--that was
their notion of education. To produce that, the text-book of
their childhood was the poetry of Homer, and not of--But I am
treading on dangerous ground. It was for this that the seafaring
Greek lad was taught to find his ideal in Ulysses; while his
sister at home found hers, it may be, in Nausicaa. It was for
this, that when perhaps the most complete and exquisite of all the
Greeks, Sophocles the good, beloved by gods and men, represented
on the Athenian stage his drama of Nausicaa, and, as usual, could
not--for he had no voice--himself take a speaking part, he was
content to do one thing in which he specially excelled; and
dressed and masked as a girl, to play at ball amid the chorus of