Acropolis. It is strangely simple and restrained. The goddess, clad in her helmet, leans upon her spear, with head bent down, to read the names once painted on a short pillar which is part of the relief. The severe lines of her drapery indicate the austerity of the unknown artist’s treatment of his patriotic theme. This is the speech of Pericles in stone. I have chosen also two less-known monuments from the Athenian Museum to show the Athenian view of death more clearly. The dead hero does not mourn, but his humbler friends, like the Giants and Barbarians of the friezes, may express their emotion visibly and indecently. Young men nearly always have their hounds to accompany them upon their tombstones. They are big animals, perhaps of the famed Molossian breed, akin to our pointers. Their descendants may be seen (and felt, unless the traveller knows the local artifice of sitting down and pretending not to be afraid) on any upland farm in Greece to-day. Girls are often accompanied by small pet dogs, curly and excitable. The big hounds clearly show dejection in every line.[77] Commentators tell us that the cat (_Felis domesticus_) was not kept as a pet in Greece, but that when the ancient writers talk of the “wavy-tail” who catches mice they mean the weasel. Would any one but a commentator keep a weasel for a pet? And what is that headless animal upon the shelf, if not the primeval cat imported from Egypt? The young man in this relief[78] is letting his doves go free. And, as you see, the little slave-boys may look sorry when their masters go. They are not Greeks; they may express human emotions. V THE FOURTH CENTURY But Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Throned on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity. SHELLEY. ATHENS The pre-eminence of Thucydides among Greek historians has, I venture to think, somewhat distorted the true perspective of Greek history. The absorbing interest with which we follow his account of the Peloponnesian War to its close in the downfall of Athens leads us to regard all the rest of Greek history with that slackening of interest with which we commonly regard a sequel. The truth is that Athens rose from her knees after an interval, much chastened, considerably exhausted, certainly poorer, but with as much intellectual vigour and power of artistic creation as before. The Athens that we know intimately is the Athens of the Restoration. Really we know almost nothing of fifth-century Athens but her external politics and the remains of her monuments. The restored Athens is the city of Plato, of Demosthenes, and of Praxiteles. She has still to be the mother of philosophy, ethics, oratory, political science, comedy of manners, logic, grammar, and the essay and the dialogue as forms of literature. This is the only Athens which we know at all intimately from within. [Illustration: _Anderson._ Fig. 1.--Apollo Sauroctonos. _Mansell & Co._