We have heard so much of "the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome," that we are, at times, apt to think the world is making progress backward. But let us all stand erect and lift up our hearts in thankfulness that we live in the freest country the world has ever known. Wisdom is not monopolized by a few; power is not concentrated in the hands of a tyrant; knowledge need not express itself in cipher; to work is no longer a crime or a disgrace.
We have superstition yet, but it is toothless: we can say our say without fear of losing our heads or our sleeves. We may lose a few customers, and some subscribers may cancel, but we are not in danger of banishment; and that attenuated form of ostracism which consists in neglecting to invite the offender to a four-o'clock tea has no terrors.
Bigotry is abroad, but it has no longer the power to throttle science; the empty threat of future punishment and the offer of reward are nothing to us, since we perceive they are offered by men who haven't these things to give. The idea of war and conquest is held by many, but concerning it we voice our thoughts and write our views; and the fact that we perceive and point out what we believe are fallacies, and brand the sins of idleness and extravagance, is proof that light is breaking in the East. If we can profit by the good that was in Greece and avoid the bad, we have the raw material here, if properly used, to make her glory fade into forgetfulness by comparison.
Do not ask that the days of Greece shall come again—we now know that to live by the sword is to die by the sword, and the nation that builds on conquest builds on sand. We want no splendor fashioned by slaves—no labor driven by the lash, nor lured on through superstitious threat of punishment and offer of reward: we recognize that to own slaves is to be one.
Ten men built Athens. The passion for beauty that these men had may be ours, their example may inspire us, but to live their lives—we will none of them! Our lives are better—the best time the world has ever seen is now; and a better yet is sure to be. The night is past and gone—the light is breaking in the East!
Womanhood was not held in high esteem in Greece. To be sure, barbaric Sparta made a bold stand for equality, and almost instituted a gynecocracy, but the usual idea was that a woman's opinion was not worth considering. Hence the caricaturists of the day made sly sport of the love of Pericles and Aspasia. These two were intellectual equals, comrades; and that all of Pericles' public speeches were rehearsed to her, as his enemies averred, is probably true. "Aspasia has no time for society; she is busy writing a speech for her lord," said Aristophanes. Socrates used to visit Aspasia, and he gave it out as his opinion that Aspasia wrote the sublime ode delivered by Pericles on the occasion of his eulogy on the Athenian dead. The popular mind could not possibly comprehend how a great man could defer to a woman in important matters, and she be at once his wife, counselor, comrade, friend. Socrates, who had been taught by antithesis, understood it.
The best minds of our day behold that Pericles was as sublimely great in his love-affairs as he was in his work as architect and statesman. Life is a whole, and every man works his love up into life—his life is revealed in his work, and his love is mirrored in his life. For myself I can not see why the Parthenon may not have been a monument to a great and sublime passion, and the statue of Athena, its chief ornament, be the sacred symbol of a great woman greatly loved.
So far as can be found, the term of "courtesan" applied by the mob to Aspasia came from the fact that she was not legally married to Pericles, and for no other reason. That their union was not legal was owing to the simple fact that Pericles, early in his career, had caused a law to be passed making marriage between an Athenian and an alien morganatic: very much as in England, for a time, the children of a marriage where one parent was a Catholic and the other a Protestant were declared by the State to be illegitimate. The act of Pericles in spreading a net for his rival and getting caught in it himself is a beautiful example of the truth of a bucolic maxim, "Chickens most generally come home to roost."
Thucydides says that for thirty years Pericles never dined away from home but once. He kept out of crowds, and was very seldom seen at public gatherings. The idea held by many was that a man who thus preferred his home and the society of a woman was either silly or bad, or both. Socrates, for instance, never went home as long as there was any other place to go, which reminds us of a certain American statesman who met a friend on the street, the hour being near midnight. "Where are you going, Bill?" asked the statesman. "Home," said Bill. "What!" said the statesman, "haven't you any place to go?" The Athenian men spent their spare time in the streets and marketplaces—this was to them what the daily paper is to us.