ON CONCRETE FOUNDATIONS
Big Bertha: “What a charming view over Flushing harbour! May I build a villa here?”
Pallas Athene
“Has it come to this?” Well may the Goddess ask this question. Times are indeed changed since the heroic days. Germany has still her great Greek scholars, one or two of them among the greatest living, men who know, and can feel, the spirit, as well as the letter, of the old Classics. Do they remember to-day what the relation of the Goddess of Wisdom was to the God of War, in Homer, when, to use the Latin names which are perhaps more familiar to the general reader than the Greek, Mars “indulged in lawless rage,” and Jove sent Juno and Minerva to check his “frightfulness”?
“Go! and the great Minerva be thine aid;
To tame the monster-god Minerva knows,
And oft afflicts his brutal breast with woes.”
and how the hero Diomede, with Minerva’s aid, wounded the divine bully and sent him bellowing and whimpering back, only to hear from his father the just rebuke:—
“To me, perfidious! this lamenting strain?
Of lawless force shall lawless Mars complain?