"The same as do you and all those from there. The gods now serve only as themes for artists, and if they are tolerated in old Homer, it is because he was skilled in celebrating their quarrels in graceful verse. No; I do not believe in them; they are as simple and credulous as children, but I love them because they are sane and beautiful."
"In what do you believe, then, Sónnica?"
"I do not know—in something mysterious that surrounds us and animates life; I believe in beauty and love."
She was silent a moment, standing in a pensive attitude; then she continued:
"I hate the barbarians, not because they have no treasures of art, but for the odium they cast on love, which they enchain with all manner of laws and restrictions. They are hypocritical and deformed; they make reproduction a crime, and they hate the nude, hiding the body with all kinds of rags, as if it were an abominable spectacle—when carnal love, the meeting of two bodies, is the sublime love through which we are born, and without which the fount of existence would dry up—extinguishing the world."
"That is why we are great," said Actæon with gravity. "On this account our arts fill the earth, and all bow before the moral grandeur of Greece. We are the people that has known how to honor life making a cult of its origin; we satisfy the impulses of love without hypocrisy, and because of this we understand better than others the needs of the spirit. Intelligence wings more truly when it does not feel the weight of the body tormented by pudicity. We love and study; our gods go naked, with no other adornment than the ray of immortal light upon the forehead. They do not demand blood, like those barbarian divinities enwrapped in clothing which only leaves uncovered their frowning assassin faces; they are as beautiful as human beings, they laugh like them, and their peals of merriment wafted around Olympus gladden the earth."
"Love is the most virtuous sentiment; from it emanates all greatness. Only the barbarians calumniate it, hiding it as a dishonest thing."
"I know a people," said Actæon, "among whom love, the divine fusion of bodies, is looked upon as an impurity. Israel is an amalgamation of miserable tribes, occupying an arid region surrounding a temple of barbaric construction, copied from all peoples. They are hypocrites, rapacious and cruel; on this account they abominate love. If such a people were to attain universal influence like Greece, if it should dominate the world, imposing its beliefs, the eternal light which shines on the Parthenon would go out; humanity would grope in darkness, with the heart dry and the thought dead; the world would be a necropolis, all would be moving corpses, and centuries and more centuries would pass before man would again find the road, coming back to our smiling gods, to the cult of beauty that gladdens life."
Sónnica, listening to the Greek, approached the tall rose bushes and began to pluck the flowers, smelling them with delight. She imagined herself in Athens, in the garden on the Street of Tripods, listening to her poet who had initiated her into the sweet mysteries of art and love. And she gazed sweetly at Actæon, with frank and sincere passion, with the submission of a slave, saying "I love you" with her eyes, as if only awaiting a word to fall into his arms.
The breeze lightly stirred the whole garden. Bits of purple sky inflamed by the setting sun could be seen through the foliage. A mysterious penumbra began to form beneath the trees. The sounds from the fields, the stirring of the people outside the villa in the houses of the slaves, and even the cries of the exotic birds on the terrace seemed to come from a distant world.