Empedocles presiding over
incantations in the marshes of Selinus, the austerity of Dion and
his mystic dream, the first appearance of stubborn Gylippus with
long Lacedaemonian hair in the theatre of Syracuse,--such picturesque
pieces of history we may fairly well recapture. But what were the
daily occupations of the Simaetha of Theocritus? What was the state
dress of the splendid Queen Philistis, whose name may yet be read
upon her seat, and whose face adorns the coins of Syracuse? How did
the great altar of Zeus look, when the oxen were being slaughtered
there by hundreds, in a place which must have been shambles and
meat-market and temple all in one? What scene of architectural
splendour met the eyes of the swimmers in the Piscina of Girgenti?
How were the long hours of so many days of leisure occupied by the
Greeks, who had each three pillows to his head in 'splendour-loving
Acragas'? Of what sort was the hospitality of Gellias? Questions
like these rise up to tantalise us with the hopelessness of ever
truly recovering the life of a lost race. After all the labour of
antiquary and the poet, nothing remains to be uttered but such
moralisings as Sir Thomas Browne poured forth over the urns
discovered at Old Walsingham: 'What time the persons of these
ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with
princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were
the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made
up, were a question above antiquarism; not to be resolved by man,
nor easily perhaps by spirits except we consult the provincial
guardians, or tutelary observators.' Death reigns over the peoples
of the past, and we must fain be satisfied to cry with Raleigh: 'O
eloquent, just, and mighty death! whom none could advise, thou hast
persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the
world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and
despised: thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness,
all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of men, and covered it all over
with these two narrow words, _hic jacet_.' Even so. Yet while the
cadence of this august rhetoric is yet in our ears, another voice is
heard as of the angel seated by a void and open tomb, 'Why seek ye
the living among the dead?' The spirit of Hellas is indestructible,
however much the material existence of the Greeks be lost beyond
recovery; for the life of humanity is not many but one, not