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human joy. These games were a chronology, a constitution, and a church to the Pan-Hellenic race. All epochs were reckoned from them; as events occurring in such or such an Olympiad. The first Olympiad was seven hundred and seventy-six years before Christ; and a large part of our present knowledge of ancient chronology depends on these festivals. They bound Greece together as by a constitution; no persons unless of genuine Hellenic blood being allowed to contend at them, and a truce being proclaimed for all Greece while they lasted.

Here at Olympia, while the games continued, all Greece came together; the poets and historians declaimed their compositions to the grand audience; opinions were interchanged, knowledge communicated, and the national life received both stimulus and unity.

And here, over all, presided the great Jupiter of Phidias, within a Doric temple, sixty-eight feet high, ninety-five wide, and two hundred and thirty long, covered with sculptures of Pentelic marble. The god was seated on his throne, made of gold, ebony, and ivory, studded with precious stones. He was so colossal that, though seated, his head nearly reached the roof, and it seemed as if he would bear it away if he rose. There sat the monarch, his head, neck, breast, and arms in massive proportions; the lower part of the body veiled in a flowing mantle; bearing in his right hand a statue of Victory, in his left a sceptre with his eagle on the top; the Hours, the Seasons, and the Graces around him; his feet on the mysterious Sphinx; and on his face that marvellous expression of blended majesty and sweetness, which we know not only by the accounts of eyewitnesses, but by the numerous imitations and copies in marble which have come down to us. cannot fail to see, even in these copies, a wonderful expression of power, wisdom, and goodness. The head, with leonine locks of hair and thickly rolling beard, expresses power; the broad brow and fixed gaze of the eyes, wisdom; while the sweet smile of the lips indicates goodness. The throne was of cedar, ornamented with gold, ivory, ebony, and precious stones. The sceptre was

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composed of every kind of metal. The statue was forty feet high, on a pedestal of twelve feet. To die without having seen this statue was regarded by the Greeks as almost as great a calamity as not to have been initiated into the mysteries.*

In like manner the poetic conception of Apollo was inferior to that of the sculptor. In the mind of the latter Phoebus is not merely an archer, not merely a prophet and a singer, but the entire manifestation of genius. He is inspiration; he radiates poetry, music, eloquence from his sublime figure. The Phidian Jupiter is lost to us, except in copies, but in the Belvedere Apollo we see how the sculptor could interpret the highest thought of the Hellenic mind. He who visits this statue by night in the Vatican Palace at Rome, seeing it by torchlight, has, perhaps, the most wonderful impression left on his imagination which art can give. After passing through the long galleries of the Vatican, where, as the torches advance, armies of statues emerge from the darkness before you, gaze on you with marble countenance, and sink back into the darkness behind, you reach at last the small circular hall which contains the Apollo. The effect of torchlight

is to make the statue seem more alive. One limb, one feature, one expression after another, is brought out as the torches move; and the wonderful form becomes at last instinct with life. Milman has described the statue in a few glowing but unexaggerated lines : —

"For mild he seemed, as in Elysian bowers,
Wasting, in careless ease, the joyous hours;
Haughty, as bards have sung, with princely sway
Curbing the fierce flame-breathing steeds of day;
Beauteous, as vision seen in dreamy sleep
By holy maid, on Delphi's haunted steep."

All, all divine; no struggling muscle glows,

Through heaving vein no mantling life-blood flows,
But, animate with Deity alone,

In deathless glory lives the breathing stone." +

In such a statue we see the human creative genius idealized. It is a magnificent representation of the mind

* Ottfried Muller, History of Greek Art, §§ 115, 347.

+ Oxford Prize Poems, Poem for 1812.

of Greece, that fountain of original thought from which came the Songs of Homer and the Dialogues of Plato, that unfailing source of history, tragedy, lyric poetry, scientific investigation. In the Belvedere Apollo we see expressed at once the genius of Homer, Aristotle, Herodotus, Eschylus, Pindar, Thales, and Plato.

With Apollo is associated his sister Artemis, or Diana, another exquisite conception of Greek thought. Not the cold and cruel Diana of the poets; not she who, in her prudish anger, turned Actæon into a stag, who slew Orion, who slew the children of Niobe, and demanded the death of Iphigenia. Very different is the beautiful Diana of the sculptors, the Artemis, or untouched one, chaste as moonlight, a wild girl, pure, free, noble; the ideal of youthful womanhood, who can share with man manly exercises and open-air sports, and add to manly strength a womanly grace. So she seems in the statue; in swift motion, the air lifting her tunic from her noble limbs, while she draws a shaft from the quiver to kill a hind. No Greek could look at such a statue, and not learn to reverence the purity and nobleness of womanhood.

Pallas-Athênê was the goddess of all the liberal arts and sciences. In battle she proves too strong for Arês or Mars, as scientific war is always too strong for that wild, furious war which Mars represented. She was the civilizer of mankind. Her name Pallas means "virgin,” and her name Athênê was supposed to be the same as the Egyptian Neith, reversed; though modern scholars deny this etymology.

The Parthenon, standing on the summit of Athens, built of white marble, was surrounded by columns 34 feet high. It was 230 feet long, 102 feet wide, and 68 high, and was perhaps the most perfect building ever raised by man. Every part of its exterior was adorned with Phidian sculpture; and within stood the statue of Athênê herself, in ivory and gold, by the same master hand. Another colossal statue of the great goddess stood on the summit of the Acropolis, and her polished brazen helmet and shield, flashing in the sun, could be seen far out at sea by vessels approaching Athens.

The Greek sculptors, in creating these wonderful ideals, were always feeling after God; but for God incarnate, God in man. They sought for and represented each divine element in human nature. They were prophets of the future development of humanity. They showed how man is a partaker of the divine nature. If they humanized Deity, they divinized humanity.

§ 6. The Gods of the Philosophers.

The problem which the Greek philosophers set themselves to solve was the origin of things. As we have found a double element of race and religion running through the history of Greece, so we find a similar dualism in its philosophy. An element of realism and another of idealism are in opposition until the time of Plato, and are first reconciled by that great master of thought. Realism appears in the Ionic nature-philosophy; idealism in Orphism, the schools of Pythagoras, and the Eleatic school of Southern Italy.

Both these classes of thinkers sought for some central unity beneath the outward phenomena. Thales the Milesian (B. C. 600) said it was water. His disciple, Anaximander, called it a chaotic matter, containing in itself a motivepower which would take the universe through successive creations and destructions. His successor, Anaximenes, concluded the infinite substance to be air. Heraclitus of Ephesus (B. C. 500) declared it to be fire; by which he meant, not physical fire, but the principle of antagonism. So, by water, Thales must have intended the fluid element in things. For that Thales was not a mere materialist appears from the sayings which have been reported as coming from him, such as this: "Of all things, the oldest is God; the most beautiful is the world; the swiftest is thought; the wisest is time." Or that other, that, Death does not differ at all from life." Thales also taught that a Divine power was in all things. The successor of Heraclitus, Anaxagoras (B. C. 494), first distinguished God from the world, mind from matter, leaving to each an independent existence.

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While the Greek colonies in Asia Minor developed thus the Asiatic form of philosophy, the colonies in Magna Græcia unfolded the Italian or ideal side. Of these, Pythagoras was the earliest and most conspicuous. Born at Samos (B. C. 584), he was a contemporary of Thales of Miletus. He taught that God was one; yet not outside of the world, but in it, wholly in every part, overseeing the beginnings of all things and their combinations.*

The head of the Italian school, known as Eleatics, was Xenophanes (born B. C. 600), who, says Zeller,† both a philosopher and a poet, taught first of all a perfect monotheism. He declared God to be the one and all, eternal, almighty, and perfect being, being all sight, feeling, and perception. He is both infinite and finite. If he were only finite, he could not be; if he were only infinite, he could not exist. He lives in eternity, and exists in time.‡

Parmenides, scholar and successor of Xenophanes at Elea, taught that God, as pure thought, pervaded all nature. Empedocles (about B. C. 460) § followed Xenophanes, though introducing a certain dualism into his physics. In theology he was a pure monotheist, declaring God to be the Absolute Being, sufficient for himself, and related to the world as unity to variety, or love to discord. We can only recognize God by the divine element in ourselves. The bad is what is separate from God, and out of harmony with him.

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After this came a sceptical movement, in which Gorgias, a disciple of Empedocles (B. c. 404) and Protagoras the Abderite, taught the doctrine of nescience. The latter said: Whether there are gods or not we cannot say, and life is too short to find out."|| Prodicus explained religion * Ο μὲν θεὸς εἰς· κοὗτος δὲ οὐκ, ὡς τινὲς ὑπονοῦσιν, ἐκτὸς τὰς διακοσμή σεας· ἀλλ ̓ ἐν αὐτῷ, ὅλος ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ κύκλῳ, ἐπίσκοπος πάσας γενέσεως καὶ κράσεως τῶν ὅλων. Clem. Alex. Cohort. ad gentes.

+ Monotheism among the Greeks, translated in the Contemporary Review, March, 1867. Victor Cousin, Fragments de Philosophie Ancienne. Quotations from Aristotle, in Rixner, I. § 75.

§ See Rixner, Zeller, and the poem of Empedocles on the Nature of Things (Tepi páccws), especially the commencement of the Third Book.

His famous doctrine, that "man is the measure of all things," meant that there is nothing true but that which appears to man to be so at any moment. He taught, as we should now say, the subjectivity of knowledge.

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