"'No,' I said; 'I do not. I mean Alexander, King of Macedon.'
"Whereupon he contemptuously said: 'I never heard of the gentleman, and if he was a king of Macedon he has made a jolly fine mess of his country—just read about the Macedonian question in to-day's Daily Telegraph.' I wanted to ask him whether he was perchance Professor of History, but other people came in, and so I left.
"On the same evening I was shown the way to a theatre, and I understood that the piece given was Arms and the Man. I enjoyed myself immensely.
"It is all very well to share the pleasures of Olympus with the gods. Yet, by all the Graces, whenever I hear or read reminiscences of my early youth, those unforgettable events and ideas of the time when I walked in the streets of Athens in the wake of my revered master Antisthenes, it gives me a thrill of pleasure,—I might almost say, a new shiver.
"Just fancy, here I was sitting in far-off Britannia, over two thousand years after my mortal existence, listening to an oration—of Antisthenes, my master, which we used to call 'Kyros.' I see very well, O Ares, you remember the famous oration directed against you, against all the glories of War, because even now you frown on me, and I must ask Venus to keep you in check. I have received too many a whipping while I was at Athens and Corinth—pray let me in peace here in our temporary Olympus.
"At present, as you well know, I have quite changed my ideas about war, and much as I may have disliked you before, at present I know that Apollo, Venus, you Ares, and Dionysus keep all mortal things agoing. But let us amuse ourselves with the contemplation of an oration of Antisthenes in modern Britannic.
"Antisthenes hated war so much that he attacked the greatest and least doubted military glory of the Athenians, their victories over the Persians. He attacked it with serious arguments, he sneered at it, he tried to reduce it to a mere sham. Did Antisthenes not say, that the victory of the Athenians over the Persians at Salamis would have been something admirable, had the Persians excelled the Athenians in point of virtue and capability? For in that case the Athenians would have proved even more virtuous and more capable. However, the Persians, Antisthenes elaborately proves, were altogether inferior. Nor did they have a true king, Xerxes being a mere sham king with a high and richly jewelled cap on his head, sitting on a golden throne, like a doll. Had Xerxes not to whip his soldiers into battle? What, then, is the glory of the Athenians? None! Salamis, like all battles, was a mere butchery, and soldiers are mere cowards, beating inferiors and running away from superiors. So far Antisthenes.
"The Britannic version of Antisthenes' sally against war, soldiers, and the whole of the military spirit, I found comical in the extreme. 'Well done' I repeatedly exclaimed within myself, when I saw the old capers of the Cynics of my mortal time brought up again for the consumption of people who had never heard of Cynics. That man Shaw out-Cynics many a Cynic. He brings upon the stage a number of persons, each of whom is, in turn, a good soul first, and then a viper; an enthusiast, and then a liar; a virtue, and then vice itself.
"Take the girl Raina. She begins by being ideal and enthusiastic; ideal, because she is pure, young, and in love with her own fiancé; enthusiastic, because she is in raptures over the military glory of her fiancé, as would be in all truth and reality a hundred out of each hundred girls in most countries of the sub-Shavian world. Not the slightest inkling or fact is indicated that she is not pure, ideal, or genuinely enthusiastic. In the next scene she is suddenly made out to be a vicious girl, a coldly calculating minx, and we are given to understand that she has had no end of general and particular adventures behind her, as she hopes to have a good many in front of her.