“I told you it had merit,” said Frank, and proceeded to the end of the chorus.
“Why, it’s better than ‘Atalanta,’ ” said David at the conclusion, despite his barbarian instinct that things like the beauties of Greek literature might perhaps be thought about, but hardly talked of. Maddox, however, had no such notions.
“Of course it is,” he said. “And some time, if you work frightfully hard, and love it all, you’ll find, as the Head told us the other day, that you simply laugh at the thought of translating it at all. You’ll know it can’t be translated, and that will be the reward of your work, for it will mean that Greek has got into your blood, that it’s part of you.”
“Do you mean the Head’s like that?” asked David. “All the same, I think I would sooner translate it like you.”
“You don’t understand, but you would if you had heard him the other day. We had a Plato lesson with him, but instead of going through a single line of it, something set him off, and he talked to us for the whole hour about Athens and the life they led there. You never heard anything so splendid. You could go up to the Acropolis in the morning, and look at the frieze Pheidias had put up in the Parthenon, a procession of horses and boys riding to the temple on Athene’s birthday. He showed us pictures of it; some were mounted,—oh Lord, they had good seats—and others were still putting their horses’ bridles on, and one horse was rubbing its foreleg with its nose, or t’other way round.”
“Pheidias?” asked David.
“Yes; biggest sculptor there’s ever been, far ahead of Michelangelo or Rodin or any one. And when you had seen that, you and your friend—you and me, that is—would sit on the wall of the Acropolis looking over the town out to the mountains, the purple crown of mountains, as they called them, Hymettus where the honey came from, and Pentelicus, where they got the marble for the Parthenon, and another one—what’s its name?—oh, Parnes. Then to the south you would look over the sea, all blue and dim, out towards Salamis which, as the Head said, was the Trafalgar of Athens, where they beat those stinking Persians; and then we should lunch off grapes and figs, and cheese wrapped up in vine-leaves, and yellow wine, and go down to the theatre just below to hear perhaps this very play by Sophocles, first performance, and no end of an excitement. Then perhaps we should see Pericles, awfully handsome chap, and the biggest Prime Minister there ever was, and a queer, ugly fellow would go by, who would be Socrates. And all the boys and young men were fearfully keen about games, quite as keen as we are, because they used to date the year by the Olympic games, same as we use a.d., or b.c. . . . Lord, I’m jawing; I wish I could tell it you as the Head did.”
“Oh, go on,” said David.
“Well, it wasn’t only games that they were so keen about. They loved sculpture and painting and writing so much, that no one ever touched them at it, before or since. It was the consummate age, so the Head said. And then, when it came to fighting, a little potty place like Attica, no bigger than a small English county, just wiped the Persians up. In everything, so the Head told us, the Athenians of the great age were the type of the perfect physical and intellectual life. Oh, David, let’s save up and go to Athens.”
“Rather! But why did the Romans walk over them?”