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with law. Not every modern story-teller is so scrupulous, in meting out justice to ethical violation. 2. So much for the song; we turn again to the Phaeacians, who are not now engaged in athletic, but in a milder sport, the dance. Youths moved their bodies in tune to the strain; still in Greece the dance and the song often go together. Then two danced alone without the song, but employed a ball, tossing it from one to the other, for the amusement of the spectators. A rhythmical movement of the body in the dance shows more internality than the athletic game, but it is less hardy, is more indicative of luxury and effeminacy. On account of these enjoyments, which have been unrolled before us in so many striking pictures, the Phaeacians have been regarded by some writers both in ancient and modern times as the mythical Sybarites devoted simply to a life of pleasure. The love of the warm bath and clean clothes, the dance and the song, above all the second lay of Demodocus have given them a bad name. Heraclides Ponticus derived their whole polity of non-intercourse, of concealment, of sending away the stranger as soon as possible out of their island, from their desire to resign themselves more completely to their luxurious habits, without foreign disturbance. Horace expresses a similar view of this people. Nitzsch in Commentary (_ad loc._) defends the Phaeacians warmly against the charge, and the view that Arete and Nausicaa cannot be products of a corrupt society holds good. An idyllic people, not by any means enervated, though pleasure-loving--so we must regard them. That lay of the bard, rightly looked into, does not tell against them as strongly as is sometimes supposed. Still Heraclides touched upon a limitation of Phaeacia in his criticism, it refused to join the family of nations, it sought to be a kind of little China and keep all to itself. It had solved, however, the problem of external war and of internal dissension; no dispute with neighboring nations about commercial privileges, no local strife which cannot be settled by Arete. The poet has as nearly as possible succeeded in eliminating the negative element out of this society. An unwarlike folk, but not effeminate, happy in peace, with a childlike delight in play, which is the starting-point of art, and remains its substrate, according to Schiller; truly idyllic it must be regarded, a land on the way between nature and civilization, where life is a perpetua
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