ll--Sophocles himself, a man then of middle age, did the one
thing he could do better than any there--and, dressed in women's clothes,
among the lads who represented the maidens, played at ball before the
Athenian people.

Yes: just 60 years after the representation of the _Antigone_, 10,000
Greeks, far on the plains of Babylon, cut through the whole Persian army,
as the railway train cuts through a herd of buffalo, and then losing all
their generals by treacherous warfare, fought their way north from
Babylon to Trebizond on the Black Sea, under the guidance of a young
Athenian, a pupil of Socrates, who had never served in the army before.
The retreat of Xenophon and his 10,000 will remain for ever as one of the
grandest triumphs of civilisation over brute force: but what made it
possible? That these men, and their ancestors before them, had been for
at least 100 years in _training_, physical, intellectual, and moral,
which made their bodies and their minds able to dare and suffer like
those old heroes of whom their tragedy had taught them, and whose spirits
they still believed would help the valiant Greek. And yet that feat,
which looks to us so splendid, attracted, as far as I am aware, no
special admiration at the time. So was the cultivated Greek expected to
behave whenever he came in contact with the uncultivated barbarian.

But from what had sprung in that little state, this exuberance of
splendid life, physical, aesthetic, intellectual, which made, and will
make the name of Athens and of the whole cluster of Greek republics for
ever admirable to civilised man? Had it sprung from long years of
peaceful prosperity? From infinite making of money and comfort,
according to the laws of so-called political economy, and the dictates of
enlightened selfishness? Not so. But rather out of terror and agony,
and all but utter ruin--and out of a magnificent want of economy--and the
divine daring and folly--of self-sacrifice.

In Salamis across the strait a trophy stood, and round that trophy, forty
years before, Sophocles the author of _Antigone_, then sixteen years of
age, the loveliest and most cultivated lad in Athens, undraped like a
faun, with lyre in hand, was leading the Chorus of Athenian youths, and
singing to Athene, the tutelary goddess, a hymn of triumph for a glorious
victory,--the very symbol of Greece and Athens, springing up into a
joyous second youth after invasion and desolation, as the grass springs