A youth goes by, his body quite stripped, and delicately bronzed by constant exposure to the sun. His limbs are graceful, but vigorous and straight, his chest is magnificently curved. He lifts his head modestly, yet with a proud and easy carriage. His hair is dark blonde; his profile very “Greek”—nose and forehead joining in unbroken straight line. A little crowd is following him; a more favored comrade, a stalwart, bearded man, walks at his side. No need of questioning now whence the sculptors of Athens get their inspiration. This happy youth, just out of the schoolroom, and now to be enrolled as an armed ephebus, will be the model soon for some immortal bronze or marble. Fortunate is he, if his humility is not ruined by all the admiration and flattery; if he can remember the injunctions touching “modesty,” which master and father have repeated so long; if he can remember the precept that true beauty of body can go only with true beauty of soul. Now at least is his day of hidden or conscious pride. All Athens is commending him. He is the reigning toast, like the “belle” of a later age. Not the groundlings only, but the poets, rhetoricians, philosophers, will gaze after him, seek an introduction, compliment him delicately, give themselves the pleasure of making him blush deliciously, and go back to their august problems unconsciously stimulated and refreshed by this vision of “the godlike.”[*] [*]For pertinent commentary on the effect of meeting a beautiful youth upon very grave men, see, _e.g._, Plato’s _Charmides_ (esp. 158 a) and _Lysis_ (esp. 206 d). Or better still in Xenophon’s _Symposium_ (I.9), where we hear of the beautiful youth Autolycus, “even as a bright light at night draws every eye, so by _his_ beauty drew on him the gaze of all the company [at the banquet]. Not a man was present who did not feel his emotions stirred by the sight of him.” 143. The Greek Worship of Manly Beauty.—The Greek worship of the beautiful masculine form is something which the later world will never understand. In this worship there is too often a coarseness, a sensual dross, over which a veil is wisely cast. But the great fact of this worship remains: to the vast majority of Greeks “beauty” does not imply a delicate maid clad in snowy drapery; it implies a perfectly shaped, bronzed, and developed youth, standing forth in his undraped manhood for some hard athletic battle. This ideal possesses the national life, and effects the entire Greek civilization. Not beauty in innocent weakness, but beauty in resourceful strength—before this beauty men bow down.[*] [*] Plato (_Republic_, p. 402) gives the view of enlightened Greek opinion when he states “There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man who combines the possession of _moral_ beauty in his soul, with _outward_ beauty of body, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters into both.”