Bakst did not go to Greece in order to say his “prayer upon the Acropolis”, to venerate the Attic serenity, “the sublime grace and the sweet grandeur” discovered by Winkelmann and Goethe. He visited hot Argos, and Mycenæ with its tomb of the Atrides which several years before had inspired the poet d’Annunzio with the panting dialogue of his “Dead City”; Mycenæ whose gates called forth in him something like a homesickness for Egypt. He strolled about Crete, among the remnants of the palace of Minos, dreaming about Medea the Sorceress, about the Minotaur conquered by Theseus, about the monsters, the Titans, all those brutal or mystic figures--the Gorgons, the Eurynies--who by their incessant assaults shook the pedestal where the Divine Archer defied them. The fantastic and passionate conception of the stage decorations for the Greek tragedies and ballets which were to earn such applause in Paris had its origin in these meditations of his in the occult presence of Hellas’ clear sky. But there was something else that made his heart beat fast as he strolled among the cliffs of Crete. That was the wind which blew up from the shore--a wind that was perfumed and that seemed to come from the vast Orient hidden in the fog. Who knows but that in such moments the call of the ancient Asiatic was indistinctly awakened in this Occidental Jew? Certain it is that underneath the chisel and the polishing tool of Greek culture he discovered the lavish, ardent and sensual oriental raw material. And the archaic sculptures, massive, with rigid frontlets, straightway transported him to Egypt. Then, too, his readings--Maspéro and the book by Fustel de Coulanges about the “Antique City” which had captivated him--confirmed his theories. He therefore did not hesitate to take from the Egyptians the ornaments in live colors with which he embellished the costumes for his “Oedipus”. One cannot help but wonder, when one lets “Cleopatra”, “Helen of Sparta” and “St. Sebastian” pass in review, what would have happened if this extraordinary man had not been born on the banks of the Neva and in the fullness of the nineteenth century! Would he, under the pharaohs, have added new figures to the dancers on the tombs of Sakkarah? Or earlier still, would he, as a Phœnician sailor, in his leisure moments have designed the figures on the prows of the triremes of Hamilcar? He would well have fitted into the brilliant, arid, implacable atmosphere which forms the setting for Flaubert’s “Salambô”. But enough of these digressions. What he had observed and meditated upon during these feverish weeks he intended to mass together in one single work, a decorative synthesis and at the same time a philosophical symbol: Terror antiquus, ancient terror!