Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars
*****
... launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.
Yes, I dreamed as I had previously dreamed in Sparta, the famed abode of Menelaus and his faithless Helen; as I had dreamed in “gold-abounding” Mycenæ, the home of Agamemnon, “King of men”; as I had dreamed when contemplating desolate Delphi, Corinth, and Olympia, their glory gone and their temples in ruins; as I had dreamed on the summit of cloud-capped Parnassus, haunt of the Muses, and on the banks of the rippling Cephisus, where Plato taught and where
Girls and boys, women and bearded men
Crowded to hear and treasure in their hearts
Matter to make their lives a happiness.
At all these places, as on the site of Troy’s citadel, I loved to recall the Greeks’ love of beauty and the marvelous mythopœic faculty of their poets, and it required no spur to fancy to imagine that I was, for the moment, in actual communion with the thoughts and feelings of the world’s masters of beauty in art and literature.
The plain of Troy [it has been said] has been a battlefield not only of heroes, but of scholars and geographers, and the works which have been written on the subject form a literature to themselves.[74]