ight, had become the children of Ahriman or
darkness; and therefore it was, as I believe, that Xerxes' 1000
ships, and the two million (or, as some have it, five million) human
beings availed naught against the little fleets and little battalions
of men who believed with a living belief in Athene and Apollo, and
therefore--ponder it well, for it is true--with a living belief,
under whatsoever confusions and divisions of personality, in a God
who loved, taught, inspired men, a just God who befriended the
righteous cause, the cause of freedom and patriotism, a Deity, the
echo of whose mind and will to man was the song of Athene on Olympus,
when she

Chanted of order and right, and of foresight, and order of peoples;
Chanted of labour and craft, wealth in the port and the garner;
Chanted of valour and fame, and the man who can fall with the
foremost,
Fighting for children and wife, and the field which his father
bequeathed him.
Sweetly and cunningly sang she, and planned new lessons for mortals.
Happy who hearing obey her, the wise unsullied Athene.

Ah, that they had always obeyed her, those old Greeks. But
meanwhile, as I said, the agony had been extreme. If Athens had
sinned, she had been purged as by fire; and the fire--surely of God--
had been terrible. Northern Greece had either been laid waste with
fire and sword, or had gone over to the Persian, traitors in their
despair. Attica, almost the only loyal state, had been overrun; the
old men, women, and children had fled to the neighbouring islands, or
to the Peloponnese. Athens itself had been destroyed; and while
young Sophocles was dancing round the trophy at Salamis, the
Acropolis was still a heap of blackened ruins.

But over and above their valour, over and above their loyalty, over
and above their exquisite aesthetic faculty, these Athenians had a
resilience of self-reliant energy, like that of the French--like that
of the American people after the fire of Chicago; and Athens rose
from her ashes to be awhile, not only, as she had nobly earned by
suffering and endurance, the leading state in Greece, but a mighty
fortress, a rich commercial port, a living centre of art, poetry,
philosophy, such as this earth has never seen before or since.

On the plateau of that little crag of the Acropolis some eight
hundred feet in length, by four hundred in breadth--about the size
and shape of the Castle Rock at Edinburgh--was gathered, within forty
years of th