re, Or. viii
(in Wilamowitz's _Lesebuch_, ii. 338 ff.). I quote the last paragraph:

'God Himself, the father and fashioner of all that is, older than the
Sun or the Sky, greater than time and eternity and all the flow of
being, is unnameable by any lawgiver, unutterable by any voice, not to
be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to apprehend His essence, use
the help of sounds and names and pictures, of beaten gold and ivory and
silver, of plants and rivers, mountain-peaks and torrents, yearning for
the knowledge of Him, and in our weakness naming all that is beautiful
in this world after His nature--just as happens to earthly lovers. To
them the most beautiful sight will be the actual lineaments of the
beloved, but for remembrance' sake they will be happy in the sight of a
lyre, a little spear, a chair, perhaps, or a running-ground, or anything
in the world that wakens the memory of the beloved. Why should I further
examine and pass judgement about Images? Let men know what is divine
(+to theion genos+), let them know: that is all. If a Greek is stirred
to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, an Egyptian by paying
worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire--I have no
anger for their divergences; only let them know, let them love, let them
remember.'

III

THE GREAT SCHOOLS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY, B. C.

There is a passage in Xenophon describing how, one summer night, in 405
B. C., people in Athens heard a cry of wailing, an _oimoge_, making its
way up between the long walls from the Piraeus, and coming nearer and
nearer as they listened. It was the news of the final disaster of
Kynoskephalai, brought at midnight to the Piraeus by the galley Paralos.
'And that night no one slept. They wept for the dead, but far more
bitterly for themselves, when they reflected what things they had done
to the people of Melos, when taken by siege, to the people of Histiaea,
and Skione and Torone and Aegina, and many more of the Hellenes.'[79:1]

The echo of that lamentation seems to ring behind most of the literature
of the fourth century, and not the Athenian literature alone. Defeat can
on occasion leave men their self-respect or even their pride; as it did
after Chaeronea in 338 and after the Chremonidean War in 262, not to
speak of Thermopylae. But the defeat of 404 not only left Athens at the
mercy of her enemies. It stripped her of those things of which she had
been inwardly most proud; her