in:

"But I can see from your faces that this illustration does not
convince you. To you the canal is even less important than a new
facade for the well-house of Corinthian Peirene. Let me try again.
I have heard people say what a satisfaction it must be to me to play
a conspicuous part in the life of our own generation. But what is
the life of our generation--the life, I mean, in which I have any
individual share? My contribution is in art and literature, not in
politics or war. And in art and literature what are we doing, save
recalling in vague echoes the greater voices of a dead past? Even
Lucian here, who is the only original of us all in letters, even
Ptolemy, who is a master in science, will agree with me. Our greatness
is of the past.

"Look at the statues in the theatre! AEschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides surrounded by what a horde of little moderns! Menander
standing cheek by jowl with a poetaster! The Emperors have dallied
with us, wanting the gifts we bear to the Empire. The Roman Republic
saw to it that we should bring no new gifts. The trees in Aristotle's
Lyceum were cut down by Sulla to make his engines of war. When he
turned these engines on the Acropolis, Athena's golden lamp went out.

"I was consul once at Rome, but few will remember it of me, for it
was not the real I that did that work. But I was doing, I sometimes
think, a more real thing than when I try to clothe Athens again with
the glory of Pericles's age or seek in long lost quarries for my prose
style. I envied divine Hadrian his faith in a restoration. His pride
in Rome seemed really equalled by his passionate sentiment for Athens
and his determination to make her once more the nurse of the arts.
Commerce and wealth have swept by us to Egypt. Ships put in at Piraeus
merely for repairs, and no longer, as in the great past, pay a part
of their cargoes to Athens, a fee of harbourage. Learning, too, has
swept eastward. Librarians and learned men dwell at Alexandria.
Hadrian asked me to help him reawaken in Athens Apollo and his Muses.
The restorer's buildings are round about you, his library and temples,
in their new splendour typical of his hope. But wherein, after all,
lies the greatness of the greatest of them? The Temple of Zeus imposes
chiefly, I think, by its display of the world-wide power of Hadrian.
You see the statues of himself in and about it, raised by Rome and
Carthage, by Corinth and Byzantium, by Miletus and Laodicea, by ever