Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875Various
Science
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
might serve popularly as the Greek's notion of the occupations of the
gods when they were not quarreling with each other; and no wonder, for
he simply peopled Olympus with exaggerated counterparts of himself and
his fellows. Life to him was nothing if it was not a fast and merry one;
and to make it so were pressed into the service not only what catered to
his sensual nature (and, truly, if Faust had been a Greek there had been
no need of Mephistopheles), but all the charms of art, all the powers of
exuberant fancy, all the keen delights of literary culture. He had
higher aspirations than mere enjoyment, even of an elevated kind:
witness Salamis and Mycale, the Pass of Thermopylae and the fields of
Marathon and Plataea. But when the serious business of life gave time,
wine, flowers and lovely women were uppermost in his thoughts. To and
from him, then, what greeting so natural as [Greek: Chaire!] ("Rejoice!"
"Be happy!")?
As we pass from the shadows of the Acropolis and the Acrocorinthus to
the crests and valleys of the Seven Hills, the tone is changed. We do
not speak of the degenerate days when, after his indignant burst of
Non possum ferre, Quirites,
Graecam Urbem,
Juvenal, in speaking of Rome itself, says,
Non est Romano cuiquam locus hic, ubi regnat
Protogenes aliquis, vel Diphilus, aut Erimarchus,
although even then the Latin speech retained forms of a nobler
antiquity. We speak rather of those times when Rome was Roman--when the
spirit which framed the speech still pervaded the commonwealth which
used the speech. To the citizen of that time the idea of the chief of
the Olympian gods was not of a rollicking despot, angry and jovial by
turns, a delighter in thunderbolts, a cloud-compeller, a reckless
adulterer: he was the awful personification of the majesty of law,
mighty to impose its decrees and mighty to avenge its disregarded
sanctions--who, brought near to the city, was worshiped as Jupiter
Capitolinus, majestic as the conservator of civil and social order. The
charms of art, the graces of song, the effeminacy of festal pleasures
were little recked of by the Roman of the Roman period--he who used his
ancestral speech in the meanings imposed upon its terms by his fathers.
Phoebus Apollo and Pallas Athene were not so much revered by him as
was Mars of the visage stern and the bloody hand, to whom he gloried in
ascribing the blood of Romulus, protected by whom he believed the
"Mavortia moenia" would stand for ever. To him the state was
everything, the citizen nothing, save in so far as he was a working
member of the state. No private pleasure, no private gain, no private
right was admitted which stood in the way of the common weal; and
whatever privileges one might have, belonged to him not as a man, but as
a Roman, reflecting in his own person the sacred being of the state. No
wonder that in spite of all reverses, and until absorption of foreign
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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