up after the prairie fire has passed. But the fire had been terrible.
It had burnt Athens at least, down to the very roots. True, while
Sophocles was dancing, Xerxes, the great king of the East, foiled at
Salamis, as his father Darius had been foiled at Marathon ten years
before, was fleeing back to Persia, leaving his innumerable hosts of
slaves and mercenaries to be destroyed piecemeal, by land at Platea, by
sea at Mycale. The bold hope was over, in which the Persian, ever since
the days of Cyrus, had indulged--that he, the despot of the East, should
be the despot of the West likewise. It seemed to them as possible,
though not as easy, to subdue the Aryan Greek, as it had been to subdue
the Semite and the Turanian, the Babylonian, and the Syrian; to rifle his
temples, to destroy his idols, carry off his women and children as
colonists into distant lands, as they had been doing with all the nations
of the East. And they had succeeded with isolated colonies, isolated
islands of Greeks, and the shores of Asia Minor. But when they dared, at
last, to attack the Greek in his own sacred land of Hellas, they found
they had bearded a lion in his den. Nay rather--as those old Greeks
would have said--they had dared to attack Pallas Athene, the eldest
daughter of Zeus--emblem of that serene and pure divine wisdom, of whom
Solomon sang of old: 'The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way,
before His works of old. When He prepared the heavens, I was there, when
He appointed the foundation of the earth, then was I by Him, as one
brought up with Him, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before
him: rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth; _and my delight was
with the sons of men_,'--to attack her and her brother Apollo, Lord of
light, and beauty, and culture, and grace, and inspiration,--to attack
them, not in the name of Ormuzd, nor of any other deity, but in the name
of mere brute force and lust of conquest. The old Persian spirit was
gone out of them. They were the symbols now of nothing save despotism
and self-will, wealth and self-indulgence. They, once the children of
Ormuzd or light, had become the children of Ahriman or darkness; and
therefore it was, as I believe, that Xerxes' 1,000 ships, and the two
million (or, as some have it, five million) human beings availed naught
against the little fleets and little battalions of men who believed with
a living belief in Athene and Apollo, and therefore--