[135]. There is one famous episode in Greek history that may be thought to contradict this—the race against time of the galley sent to Mitylene to countermand the order of massacre (Thucydides, III, 49). But we observe that Thucydides gives twenty times the space to the debates at Athens that he gives to the drama of the galley-rowers pulling night and day to save life. And we are told that it was the Mitylenean ambassadors who spared no expense to make it worth the rowers’ while to win, whereupon “there arose such a zeal of rowing that....” The final comment is, strictly construing Thucydides’s own words: “Such was the magnitude of the danger that Mitylene passed by” (παρὰ τοσοῦτον μὲν ἡ[τοσοῦτον μὲν ἡ] Μυτιλήνη ἦλθε κινδύνου), a phrase which recalls forcibly what has just been said regarding the “situation-drama.”—Tr.
[136]. Besides the clock, the bell itself is a Western “symbol.” The passing-bell tolled for St. Hilda of Whitby in 680, and a century before that time bells had come into general use in Gaul both for monasteries and for parish churches. On the contrary, it was not till 865 that Constantinople possessed bells, and these were presented in that year by Venice. The presence of a belfry in a Byzantine church is accounted a proof of “Western influence”: the East used and still largely uses mere gongs and rattles for religious purposes. (British Museum “Handbook of Early Christian Antiquities)”.[Antiquities)”.]—Tr.
[137]. May we be permitted to guess that the Babylonian sun-dial and the Egyptian water-clock came into being “simultaneously,” that is, on the threshold of the third millennium before Christ? The history of clocks is inwardly inseparable from that of the calendar; it is therefore to be assumed that the Chinese and the Mexican Cultures also, with their deep sense of history, very early devised and used methods of time-measurement.
(The Mexican Culture developed the most intricate of all known systems of indicating year and day. See British Museum “Handbook of May on Antiquities.”[Antiquities.”]—Tr.)
[138]. Let the reader try to imagine what a Greek would feel when suddenly made acquainted with this custom of ours.
[139]. The Chinese ancestor-worship honoured genealogical order with strict ceremonies. And whereas here ancestor-worship by degrees came to be the centre of all piety, in the Classical world it was driven entirely into the background by the cults of present gods; in Roman times it hardly existed at all.
(Note the elaborate precautions taken in the Athenian “Anthesteria” to keep the anonymous mass of ghosts at bay. This feast was anything but an All Souls’ Day of re-communion with the departed spirits.—Tr.)
[140]. With obvious reference to the resurrection of the flesh (ἐκ νεκρῶν). But the meaning of the term “resurrection” has undergone, from about 1000 A.D., a profound—though hardly noticed—change. More and more it has tended to become identified with “immortality.” But in the resurrection from the dead, the implication is that time begins again to repeat in space, whereas in “immortality” it is time that overcomes space.
[141]. For English readers, the most conspicuous case of historic doubt is the Shakespeare-Bacon matter. But even here, it is only the work of Shakespeare that is in question, not his existence and personality, for which we have perfectly definite evidence.—Tr.
[142]. Originally a philosophical and scientific lecture-temple founded in honour of Aristotle, and later the great University of Alexandria, bore the title Μουσεῖον. Both Aristotle and the University amassed collections but they were collections of (a) books, (b) natural history specimens, living or taken from life. In the West, the collection of memorials of the past as such dates from the earliest days of the Renaissance.—Tr.