Greek Lands and LettersAllinson, Anne C. E. (Anne Crosby Emery)
History
Greek Lands and Letters
Allinson, Anne C. E. (Anne Crosby Emery)
Greece -- Description and travel; Greek literature -- History and criticism
he was taken to another house of a Piræus acquaintance; and how, while
his captors were keeping guard at the peristyle door in front, he had
escaped by a back door to the house of a friend, the shipmaster, with
the appropriate name of Archenaus. So, while his less fortunate brother,
Polemarchus, is led off to Athens, thrown into prison, and “bidden by
the Thirty their usual bidding—to drink hemlock,” Lysias, by the aid of
his nautical friend, is embarked for Megara under cover of night. We
should like to have fuller details of that escape of the young Lysias,
yesterday a wealthy manufacturer, to-day a plundered fugitive but
destined to become one of the greatest of the “ten” orators and a master
architect of Attic style. Perhaps a small boat put off from some lonely
spot on Akte, perhaps from the Great Harbour itself, shooting through
the moles in the darkness and, wind and weather permitting, kept to
starboard of the Psyttaleia reef, passed up through the strait of
Salamis, on through the beautiful Bay of Eleusis, and landed the
fugitive at Megara.
Plato’s account of the visit of Socrates to the Piræus homestead carries
us back to the days of security before the reign of the Thirty. We see
old Cephalus welcoming Socrates cordially, delivering a monologue on his
own gracious old age, telling a story about Sophocles in his later
years, and finally withdrawing to supervise a sacrifice to the gods.
The introduction of a foreign divinity like Bendis of the Thracians was
not unusual. The celebration, described at the opening of the Republic,
was at least no more exotic than a St. Patrick’s day in America.
Foreigners and natives united in it as they did in the celebration of
the Mother of the Gods. The customs inspection of foreign deities was
lenient. The Greeks were free traders both in art and religion, though
the finished product imported was likely enough to be used as new
material. Into the smelting furnace of the classic period was cast the
old, the new, the foreign, and the domestic, to reappear in fairer form,
stamped with the Hellenic hall-mark. Among the various imported deities,
Cybele is well vouched for at Piræus where a number of marble votive
shrines of the Great Mother have been found. One of these archaic Cybele
reliefs, brought from Piræus to the National Museum in Athens, shows the
goddess with her lion in her lap, her cymbals in her hand. The “new
theology,” fostered by Euripides and domiciled in daily life by the “New
Comedy,” could treat these cymbals as typical of “a creed out-worn.” One
of Menander’s characters exclaims:—
“No god, my wife, saves one man through another’s help,
For if a human being can by cymbals’ clash
Deflect the god to whatsoever is desired,
Then greater than the god is he that doeth this.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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