“Radiant, violet-crowned, by minstrels sung,
Bulwark of Hellas, Athens illustrious.”
But Aristides the Just might have as easily escaped ostracism as could this overworked epithet, “violet-crowned,” escape the irreverence of Aristophanes. Whenever foreign envoys, he says, wish to cheat us Athenians, they call us “violet-crowned,” and forthwith we are all attention.
Among all the native poets no one has given freer expression to his feeling for the beauty of Athens than Euripides, unhappy in his personal life and iconoclastic in his attitude towards old traditions. He breathes the air, stainless and of a more ethereal violet than the sea, and sings of the concord of Wisdom and the Heavenly Aphrodite:—
“Blest are the children of Erechtheus of the olden time, the children of the happy gods, who from a land inviolate and sacred feed on wisdom famed afar, and go upon their way forever, daintily enfolded by that bright, bright air.
“And Cypris, drawing water from Cephīsus flowing fair, breathes down upon the land the gentle breath of winds with sweetness laden and ever with her hair encompassed with blown roses’ fragrant coronals keeps sending down the Loves who have their seat by side of Wisdom, coadjutors they of Virtue manifold.”
Through the transparent candour of the philosopher’s robe the soul of the poet Plato is ever shining. But like Æschylus he is a poet militant. If he walks by the Ilissus he interprets in terms of the spiritual the physical charm of tree and water and the chirping insect; if he goes down to Phaleron, the Ægean does not bring in for him “the eternal note of sadness,” but his soul has “sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither”; and in the heaven’s vault, overarching Attica, he sees “many ways to and fro” where drive the chariots of the gods whom “he who will and can” may follow, “for from the choir divine all grudging stands aloof!” If to Plato the Athens of the fourth century seemed imperfect, if he was even embittered by the judicial murder of his master, it was with the truest patriotism that he turned to construct an ideal state. His sense of law and order was deep-rooted. It was with lofty optimism that he urged his hearers not to rest content with politics as they are, but to look to “the pattern that is laid up in heaven for him who wills to see and, seeing, so to plant his dwelling.”
CHAPTER VI
OLD GREECE IN NEW ATHENS
“Born into life!—’tis we,
And not the world, are new.”