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