Now, tallow dips, lard, wax tapers, terebene, pine-knots, were all represented in the Peloponnesian war by oil. Oil, one of the great staples of Attica, became scarcer as the war went on. "A bibulous wick" was a sinner against domestic economy; to trim a lamp and hasten combustion was little short of a crime. Management in the use of oil—otherwise considered the height of niggardliness—was the rule, and could be all the more readily understood by the Confederate student when he reflected that oil was the great lubricant as well; that it was the Attic butter, and to a considerable extent the Attic soap. Under the Confederacy butter mounted to the financial milky way, not to be scaled of ordinary men, and soap was also a problem. Modern chemists have denied the existence of true soap in antiquity. The soap-suds that got into the eyes of the Athenian boy on the occasion of his Saturday-night scrubbing were not real soap-suds, but a kind of lye used for desperate cases. The oil-flask was the Athenian's soapbox. No wonder, then, that oil was exceeding precious in the Peloponnesian war, and no wonder that all these little details of daily hardship come back even now to the old student when he reopens his Aristophanes. No wonder that the ever present Peloponnesian war will not suffer him to forget those four years in which the sea of trouble rose higher and higher.
NOTES
Transcriber's Note:
The 'Notes' have been moved to their respective pages.
Postscript.—The bulk of the Notes would have been greatly augmented, if I had undertaken to explain 1892 as well as 1865 to the children of 1915. In 1892 Mr. Carnegie (p. 19) was not yet the benefactor of the outworn members of my own profession, and Mr. Charles Francis Adams was declaiming against the College Fetich to which I have borne a life long allegiance. To some of my own allusions I have lost the clue and find myself in the category with which Browning has made the world familiar.
CONTEMPORANEOUS OPINIONS OF THE NORTHERN PRESS
"A poetical view of the Southern cause in the Civil War."—The Nation, January, 1892.
"An attempt on the part of Professor Gildersleeve to make the Creed of the Old South seem a little less absurd than it has for twenty years past."—Springfield Republican.
"Professor B. L. Gildersleeve states the Creed of the Old South in a way to make every Northern man respect those who took up arms like General Lee under the conviction that the State had the first claim upon their allegiance. The writer would have strengthened this sympathy, however, did he show that he had been docile to the stern teacher, experience, and had come to reject the parochial creed of state rights."—Literary World, January 2, 1892.