A modern, seated in the Stadium at Athens, has cause for meditation. Behind the gaudy hats and parasols of women, the more sombre clothing of men, or the brilliant uniforms of officials gleams Pentelic marble. Over many tens of thousands of spectators, gathered from all Greece and Europe and from beyond the Atlantic, float the flags of powerful nations: of Turkey; of the lands that look upon the northern seas; of the mighty spawn of the Anglo-Roman; and of the New Atlantis. None of these nations had emerged from barbarism when this same choir of encircling hills sang together the triumph song of Salamis. Prometheus, the incarnation of human self-assertion, rebel to the rule of Zeus, pinioned on a crag overlooking those same northern seas, is made by the Greek prophet to utter the pessimistic cry: “New gods rule Olympus.” Now, as a modern Greek remarked to an American visitor, “the old gods have migrated to a new Olympus.”
But although the gold-ivory statue of Zeus cannot reappear from the ruins of Olympia, yet “the godhead of supernal song” remains in the literature of the Greeks, interpreting and interpreted by the contributions of the archæologists. Swinburne’s words are not mere poetic license:—
“Dead the great chryselephantine god, as dew last evening shed;
Dust of earth and foam of ocean is the symbol of his head:
Earth and ocean shall be shadows when Prometheus shall be dead.”
CHAPTER XIX
MESSENIA
“A land where fruit trees blossom, myriad fountains flow
And flocks and herds are grazing in the meadows fair.
Nor wintry are the winds of winter, nor too near
The flaming Sun comes driving in his four-horse car.”