Pictures of Hellas: Five Tales of Ancient Greece

BY PEDER MARIAGER
TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH BY MARY J. SAFFORD
NEW YORK WILLIAM S. GOTTSBERGER, PUBLISHER 11 MURRAY STREET 1888
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1888 By WILLIAM S. GOTTSBERGER in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington
The author’s preface to “Pictures of Hellas” is so full, that the translator has nothing to add to the English version except the acknowledgment of valuable assistance rendered in “the obscure recesses of Greek literature” by Professor Andrews, Ph.D., of Madison University.
Mary J. Safford.
Nearly all the more recent romances and dramas, whose scene is laid in classic times, depict the period of the great rupture between Paganism and Christianity. This is true of “Hypatia,” “Fabiola,” “The Last Days of Pompeii,” “The Epicureans,” “The Emperor and The Galilean,” “The Last Athenian,” and many other works. The cause of this coincidence is not difficult to understand; for a period containing such strong contrasts invites æsthetic treatment.
The present tales derive their material from a different, but no less interesting epoch. They give pictures of the flowering of Hellas, the distant centuries whose marvellous culture rested solely on the purely human elements of character as developed beneath a mild and radiant sky.
Yet it required a certain degree of persistence to procure this material. When we examine the Greek writers to find descriptions of the men of those times or the special characteristics of the social life of the period, Greek literature, so rich in accounts of historical events, becomes strangely laconic, nay almost silent.
How entirely different is the situation of a person who desires to sketch a picture of the Frenchmen of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. The whole collection of memoirs is at his disposal. In these writings the author discourses familiarly with the reader, gives him lifelike portraits of the ladies and gentlemen of the court, and tells him the most minute anecdotes of the society of that day.