Is it their sculpture that we question? At once the incomparable Venus of Melos makes reply; that statue found (alas! in partial ruin) on one of the islands that are scattered broadcast on this classic sea, like disentangled pearls, and hence a fitting emblem of those treasures of antiquity cast on the shores of time after a long-continued and disastrous storm.
Is it their language? It was the most perfect and elastic tongue in which men's lips have ever fashioned speech. It seems more than chance that caused it, at the birth of Christ, to be the leading literary language of the world, that it might thus receive, embody, and perpetuate the truths of the New Testament. Even now we turn to that old tongue to find exact expression for our terms of science, and in it we name all our new inventions such as heliotypes and photographs, the telegraph and the telephone.
HOMER.
Is it poetry? At once there seems to rise before us from these waters, which encircled him at birth and death, the face of Homer,—the father of poetry. To whom has he not been a joy and inspiration? Virgil was but the pupil and imitator of Homer. And the Iliad and Odyssey are still such storehouses of eloquence and beauty, that such statesmen as Gladstone and the Earl of Derby have sharpened their keen intellects in making their translations.
Is it philosophy? "Out of Plato," says Emerson, "come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought."
PLATO.