The first line is taken from Il. 22, 74. I do not continue the citation because the Homeric passage has not been subjected to the refining process of Mr. Murray's redactors of the Iliad.
The Bloody Angle, May 12, 1864, an unforgettable date.
Girl in the Carpathians and Scholar in Politics are titles of current publications taken at random to illustrate the personal element and its unfitness.
But our scares were not confined to scares that came from Richmond. One cavalry raid came up to our very doors, and Custer and his men were repelled by a handful of reserve artillerymen. Our home guard was summoned more than once to defend Rockfish Gap, and I remember one long summer night spent as a mounted picket on the road to Palmyra. Every battle in that "dancing ground of war" brought to the great Charlottesville hospital sad reinforcements of wounded men. Crutch-races between one-legged soldiers were organized, and there were timber-toe quadrilles and one-armed cotillions. Out of the shelter of the Blue Ridge it was easy enough to get into the range of bullets. A semblance of college life was kept up at the University of Virginia. The students were chiefly maimed soldiers and boys under military age; but when things grew hot in front, maimed soldiers would edge nearer to the hell of battle and the boys would rush off to the game of powder and ball. One little band of these college boys chose an odd time for their baptism of fire, and were put into action during the famous fight of "the bloody angle." From the night when word was brought that the Federals had occupied Alexandria to the time when I hobbled into the provost marshal's office at Charlottesville and took the oath of allegiance, the war was part of my life, and it is not altogether surprising that the memories of the Confederacy come back to me whenever I contemplate the history of the Peloponnesian war, which bulks so largely in all Greek studies. And that is all this paper really means. It belongs to the class of inartistic performances of which Aristotle speaks so slightingly. It has no unity except the accidental unity of person. A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War has no more artistic right to be than A Girl in the Carpathians or A Scholar in Politics, and yet it may serve as a document. But what will not serve as a document to the modern historian? The historian is no longer the poor creature described by Aristotle. He is no annalist, no chronicler. He is not dragged along by the mechanical sequence of events. "The master of them that know" did not know everything. He did not know that history was to become as plastic as poetry, as dramatic as a play.
V
ἁκοὑειϛ Αἱσχἱνη [akoueis Aischinê]; Dem. 18, 112. My Millwood friend was a scholar of the old times and would not have paused to consider whether the omission of ὡ [ô] was due to scorn of Æschines or dread of the hiatus.
The war was a good time for the study of the conflict between Athens and Sparta. It was a great time for reading and re-reading classical literature generally, for the South was blockaded against new books as effectively, almost, as Megara was blockaded against garlic and salt. The current literature of those three or four years was a blank to most Confederates. Few books got across the line. A vigorous effort was made to supply our soldiers with Bibles and parts of the Bible, and large consignments ran the blockade. Else little came from abroad, and few books were reprinted in the Confederacy. Of these I recall especially Bulwer's Strange Story; Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, popularly pronounced "Lee's Miserables"; and the historical novels of Louise Mühlbach, known to the Confederate soldier as "Lou Mealbag." All were eagerly read, but Cosette and Fantine and Joseph the Second would not last forever, and we fell back on the old stand-bys. Some of us exhumed neglected treasures, and I remember that I was fooled by Bulwer's commendation of Charron into reading that feebler Montaigne. The Southerner, always conservative in his tastes and no great admirer of American literature, which had become largely alien to him, went back to his English classics, his ancient classics. Old gentlemen past the military age furbished up their Latin and Greek. Some of them had never let their Latin and Greek grow rusty. When I was serving on General Gordon's staff, I met at Millwood, in Clarke County, a Virginian of the old school who declaimed with fiery emphasis, in the original, choice passages of Demosthenes' tirade against Æschines. Not Demosthenes himself could have given more effective utterance to "Hearest thou, Æschines?" I thought of my old friend again not so very long ago, when I read the account that the most brilliant of modern German classicists gives of his encounter with a French schoolmaster at Beauvais in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war, and of the heated discussion that ensued about the comparative merits of Euripides and Racine. The bookman is not always killed in a man by service in the field. True, Lachmann dropped his Propertius to take up arms for his country, but Reisig annotated his Aristophanes in camp, and everybody knows the story of Courier, the soldier Hellenist. But the tendency of life in the open air is to make the soul imbody and imbrute, and after a while one begins to think scholarship a disease, or, at any rate, a bad habit; and the Scythian nomad, or, if you choose, the Texan cowboy, seems to be the normal, healthy type. You put your Pickering Homer in your kit. It drops out by reason of some sudden change of base, and you do not mourn as you ought to do. The fact is you have not read a line for a month. But when the Confederate volunteer returned, let us say, from Jack's Shop or some such homely locality, and opened his Thucydides, the old charm came back with the studious surroundings, and the familiar first words renewed the spell.
"Thucydides of Athens wrote up the war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians." "The war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians" is a somewhat lumbering way of saying "the Peloponnesian war." But Thucydides never says "the Peloponnesian war." Why not? Perhaps his course in this matter was determined by a spirit of judicial fairness. However that may be, either he employs some phrase like the one cited, or he says "this war" as we say "the war," as if there were no other war on record. "Revolutionary war," "war of 1812," "Seminole war," "Mexican war,"—all these run glibly from our tongues, but we also lumber when we wish to be accurate. The names of wars, like the names of diseases, are generally put off on the party of the other part. We say "French and Indian war" without troubling ourselves to ask what the French and Indians called it, but "Northern war" and "Southern war" were never popular designations. "The war between the States," which a good many Southerners prefer, is both bookish and inexact. "Civil war" is an utter misnomer. It was used and is still used by courteous people, the same people who are careful to say "Federal" and "Confederate." "War of the rebellion," which begs the very question at issue, has become the official designation of the struggle, but has found no acceptance with the vanquished. To this day no Southerner uses it except by way of quotation, as in Rebellion Record, and even in the North it was only by degrees that "reb" replaced "secesh." "Secession" was not a word with which to charm the "old-line Whigs" of the South. They would fight the battles of the secessionists, but they would not bear their name. "The war of secession" is still used a good deal in foreign books, but it has no popular hold. "The war," without any further qualification, served the turn of Thucydides and Aristophanes for the Peloponnesian war. It will serve ours, let it be hoped, for some time to come.