CXX. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. Enough, enough is it for me to see my Pericles safe at home again. Not a word has he spoken, not a question have I asked him, about the odious war of Samos. He made in Samos, I hear, a most impressive oration, to celebrate the obsequies of these brave soldiers who fell. In Athens, where all is exultation, he has rendered the slain the most glorious and triumphant, and the fatherless the proudest, of the living. But at last how little worth is the praise of eloquence! Elpenor and Lysimachus lead councils and nations! Great Gods! surely ye must pity us when we worship you; we, who obey, and appear to reverence, the vilest of our species! I recover my step; I will not again slip into this offal. Come, and away to Xanthus. Ay, ay, Cleone! Simplicity, bravery, well-merited and well-borne dstinction! Take him, take him: we must not all be cruel.. to ourselves. CXXI. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. Aspasia ! you mistake. Grant me the presence of friendship and the memory of love! It is only in this condition that a woman can be secure from fears and other weaknesses. I may admire Xanthus; and there is pleasure in admiration. If I thought I could love him, I should begin to distrust and despise myself. I would not desccrate my heart, even were it in ruins; but I am happy, very happy; not indeed altogether as I was in early youth: perhaps it was youth itself that occasioned it. Let me think so! Indulge me in the silence and solitude of this one fancy. If there was anything else, how sacred should it ever be to me! Ah yes, there was! and sacred it is, and shall be. Laodamia saw with gladness, not with passion, a God, conductor of her sole beloved. The shade of Xeniades follows the steps of Xanthus. CXXII. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. Parties of pleasure are setting sail, every day almost, for Samos. We begin to be very brave; we women, I mean. I suspect that no few of us take an unworthy delight in the humiliation and misery of the fair Samians. Not having seen, nor intending to see them myself, I can only tell you what I have heard of their calamities. Loud outcries were raised by the popular orators against such of them as were suspected of favouring the Persian faction, and it was demanded of the judges that they should be deported and exposed for slaves. This menace, you may well imagine, caused great anxiety and alarm, even among those who appeared to be quite resigned to such a destiny while the gallant young Athenians were around the walls. But, to be sold and the Gods alone know to whom old morose men perhaps, and jealous women! Some sus pect it was at the instigation of Pericles that a much severer chastisement has befallen them. They have been condemned to wear the habiliments of Persians. Surely no refinement of cruelty can surpass the decree, by which a Greek woman is divested of that beautiful dress which alone can be called an ornament to the female form. This decree has been carried into execution; and you would pity even the betrayers of their country. Whether in ignorance of what the Persian habit is, or from spite and malice, the Samian ladies are obliged to wear sleeves of sufficient amplitude to conceal a traitor in each; and chains intersecting the forehead with their links and ornaments; and hair not divided along the whole summit of the head, but turned back about the centre, to make them resemble the heads of some poisonous snakes. Furthermore, the dresses are stripped ignominiously off the shoulders, as for some barely conceivable punishment, and fastened round the arms in such a manner that, when they attempt to reach anything, or even to move, they are constrained to shrug and writhe, like the uncleanliest persons. Beside, they are quite at the mercy of any wicked idler in the street, who, by one slight touch, or by treading on the hem, might expose them far more undisguisedly to the gazes of the multitude. This barbarian garb has already had such an effect, that two have cast themselves into the sea; and others have entreated that they may, as was first threatened, rather be sold for slaves. CXXIII. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. Odious as undoubtedly was the conduct of the Samian oligarchy and priesthood, and liable as are all excesses to a still farther exaggeration in the statement of them, you will hardly believe the effrontery of the successful demagogues. Not contented with undeniable proofs, in regard to the enormous and mismanaged wealth torn away from the priests of Bacchus, they have invented the most improbable falsehood that the malevolence of faction ever cast against the insolence of power. They pretend that certain men, some of ancient family, more of recent, had conspired to transmit the reins of government to their elder sons. Possession for life is not long enough! They are not only to pass laws, but (whenever it so pleases) to impede them! They decree that the first-born male is to be the wisest and best of the family, and shall legislate for all Samos! Democracy has just to go one step farther, and to persuade the people (ready at such times to believe anything) that the oligarchy had resolved to render their power hereditary, not only for one generation, but for seven. The nation, so long abused in its understanding, would listen to and believe the report, ignorant that arbitrary power has never been carried to such extravagance even in Persia itself, although it is reported that in India the lower orders of people were hereditarily subject to the domination of a privileged class. But this may be false; and indeed it must be, CXXIV. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. You have given me in your two last a great deal of curious information, about the discoveries that the demagogues made, or pretended to have made, in Samos. It is credible enough that the oligarchs were desirous of transmitting their authority to their children: but that they believed so implicitly in the infatuation of the citizens, or the immutability of human events, as to expect a continuation of power in the same families for seven generations, is too gross and absurd, even to mislead an insurgent and infuriated populace. He indeed must be composed of mud from the Nile, who can endure with patience this rancorous fabrication. In Egypt, we are told by Herodotus in his Erato, that, "the son of a herald is of course a herald; and, if any man hath a louder voice than he, it goes for nothing." Hereditary heralds are the proper officers of hereditary lawgivers; and both are well worthy of dignity where the deities are cats. if what is likewise told us concerning them | The people, it appears, derived no advantages from be true, which is, that they have letters among the change, and only grew more dissatisfied and them. violent; for, if those who had officiated in the temples of Juno were a little more licentious than became the ministers of a Goddess, they did not run into the streets, and through the country places, drunk and armed; nor did they seize upon the grapes because they belonged to Bacchus ; nor upon the corn because it is unwholesome to drink wine without bread; nor upon the cattle because man can not live on bread alone. These arguments you may suspect of insufficiency: what then will you think when you hear another reason of theirs, which is, that the nation has no right to take from them what belongs to the Goddess. The people cry, "How then can it belong to you?" Pushed upon this side, they argue that they should not be deprived of their salaries, because they are from land. What! reply the citizens, "Are not gold and silver the products of land also?" But long possession.. "We will remedy that too, as well as we can." The soldiers and sailors have the most reason to complain, when they see twelve priests in the enjoyment of more salary than seven thousand of the bravest combatants. The military are disbanded and deprived of pay at the instant when their services are no longer necessary; yet no part, it appears, of a superfluous and idle priesthood is to be reduced or regulated; on the contrary, it is rapacious and irreligious to take away three temples from a venerable occupant of four. Was ever soldier so impudent as to complain that rations were not allowed him in four detachments of his army? The downfall of the old faction will be of little benefit to Samos, while these insults and iniquities press upon the people. Unless those who are now entrusted with power, resolve to abolish the gross abuses of the priesthood, the wealth of which is greater and worse applied in Samos than it is even in those countries where the priests are sovrans, and venerated as deities, little imports it by whom they are governed, or what Gods they venerate. It is better to be ruled by the kings of Lacedæmon, and wiser to salute in worship the sun of Persia. Never surely will the island be pacified, until what was taken from Juno shall also be taken from Bacchus, and until the richest priest be reduced in his emoluments far below the level of a polemarc. Strange oversight! that no provision should ever have been devised, to ensure in these tutelar and truly household Gods an equal security for lineal succession ! CXXV. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. Abuses of many kinds, and of great enormity, have been detected by the Samians in their overthrown government. What exasperates the people most, and indeed the most justly, is the discovery that the ruling families have grossly abused the temples, to the high displeasure of the Gods. Sacrilege has been carried to such a pitch, that some among them have appointed a relative or dependent to the service of more than one sanctuary. You remember that anciently all the worship of this island was confined to Juno. She displeased the people, I know not upon what occa sion, and they suffered the greater part of her fanes to fall in ruins, and transferred the richest of the remainder to the priests of Bacchus. Several of those who had bent the knee before Juno, took up the thyrsus with the same devotion. The people did indeed hope that the poor and needy, and particularly such as had lost their limbs in war, or their parents or their children by shipwreck, would be succoured out of the wealth arising from the domains of the priesthood; and the rather as these domains were bequeathed by religious men, whose whole soul rested upon Juno, and whose bequest was now utterly frustrated, by taking them from the sister of Jupiter and giving them exclusively to his son. Beside, it was recollected by the elderly, that out of these vast possessions aid was afforded to the state when the state required it; and that, wherever there stood one of these temples, hunger and sickness, sorrow and despair, were comforted and assuaged. CXXVI. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. Those of your letters, my Cleone, which relate to the affairs of Samos, and especially to the priests of Juno and Bacchus, have led me into many reflections. The people of Athens are the most religious of any upon earth; but I doubt whether they are the most just, the most generous, the most kindly. There is not a friend, whatever benefit they may have received from him, whom they would not abandon or denounce, on a suspicion of irreverence to Pallas; and those in general are the most fanatical and furious whom, as Goddess of wisdom, she has least favoured. Your neighbours the Samians are more judicious in their worship of Juno. They know that, as long as Jupiter hath a morsel of ambrosia, she will share it, although he may now and then indulge in a draught of nectar to which her lips have no access. The Samians have discovered that wealth is not a requisite of worship, and that a temple needs not a thousand parasangs of land for its inclosure. If we believed that Gods could be jealous, we might fear that there would be much ill blood between Juno and Bacchus. It is more probable that they will look on calmly, and let their priests fight it out. The Persians in these matters are not quite so silly as we are. Herodotus tells that, instead of altars and temples, the verdure of the earth is chosen for their sacrifice; and music and garlands, prayers and thanksgivings, are thought as decent and acceptable as comminations and blood. It does not appear that they are less moral or less religious than those who have twenty Gods, and twenty temples for each. The wiser men in Athens tell us that the vulgar have their prejudices. Where indeed is the person who never has repeated this observation? Yet believe me, Cleone, it is utterly untrue. The vulgar have not their prejudices: they have the prejudices of those who ought to remove them if they had any. Interested men give them, not their religion, but clubs and daggers for enforcing it; taking from them, in return, their time, their labour, their benevolence, their understanding, and their wealth. And are such persons to be invested with the authority of lawgivers and the splendour of satraps? The Samians have decided that question. Priests of Bacchus, let them diffuse the liberality and joyousness, and curtail a little from the swaggering stateliness of him whom the poet calls in his dithyrambic, "The tiger-borne and mortal-mothered God." CXXVII. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. Hephæstion, whom I never have mentioned to you, and whom indeed I hardly know by name, is going to Italy, and has written this poem on the eve of his departure. It is said that his verses are deficient in tenderness and amenity. Certain it is that he by no means indulges in the display of them, whatever they may be. When Pericles had read the following, I asked him what he thought of the author. "I think," replied Pericles, "that he will never attempt to deprive me of my popularity." I am afraid he is an ill-tempered man: yet I hear he has suffered on many occasions, and particularly in regard to his fortune, very great injustice with equally great unconcern. He is never seen in the Agora, nor in the theatre, nor in the temples, nor in any assemblage of the people, nor in any society of the learned; nor has he taken the trouble to enter into a confederacy or strike a bargain, as warier men do, with any praiser; no, not even for the loan of a pair of palms in the Keramicos. I have now said all I believe you will think it requisite for me to say, on a citizen so obscure, and so indifferent a poet. Yet even he, poor man! imagines that his effusions must endure. This is the most poetical thought I can find in him; but perhaps he may have written what is better than my specimen. THE IAMBICS OF HEPHÆSTION. Speak not too ill of me, Athenian friends! I leave your confines: none whom you caress, CXXVIII. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. Aspasia! I have many things to say in reply to your last letter. Believe me, I can take little interest in any illtempered man. Hephæstion is this, you tell me, and there is nothing in his Iambics to make me doubt it. Neither do they contain, you justly remark, anything so characteristic of a poet as the confidence he expresses that he shall live. All poets, good and bad, are possessed by this confidence; because the minds of them all, however feeble, however incapacious, are carried to the uttermost pitch of enthusiasm. In this dream, they fancy they stand upon the same eminence, or nearly so, and look unto the same distance. But no poet or other writer, supposing him in his senses, could ever think seriously that his works will be eternal; for whatever had a beginning must also have an end; and in this predicament are languages. Like the fowls of | the air, they are driven from the plains and take refuge in the mountains, until at last they disappear, leaving some few traces, some sounds imperfectly caught up. Highly poetical works, or those in which eloquence is invested with the richest attributes of poetry, are the only ones that can prolong the existence of a dialect. Egypt and Phoenicia and Chaldæa, beyond doubt, contain many treatises on the arts and sciences, although unpublished, and preserved only by the priesthood, or by the descendants of the authors and discoverers. These are certainly to pass away before inventions and improvements more important. But if there is anything of genius in their hymns, fables, or histories, it will remain among them, even when their languages shall have undergone many variations: and afterward, when they are spoken no longer, it will be incorporated with others, and finally be claimed as original and indigenous by nations the most remote and dissimilar. Many streams, whose fountains are now utterly dried up, have flowed from afar to be lost in the ocean of Homer. Our early companions, the animals of good old Æsop, have spoken successively in every learned tongue. And now a few words on that gentlest and most fatherly of masters. Before we teach his fables to children, we should study them attentively ourselves. They were written for the wisest and the most powerful, whose wisdom they might increase, and whose power they might direct. There are many men, of influence and authority, apt enough to take kindly a somewhat sharp bite from a dog or monkey, and to be indignant at the slightest touch on the shoulder from a fellowcreature. It is improbable that a fable will do many of them much good, but it may do a little to one in twenty, and the amount is by no means unimportant in that number of generations. The only use of Esop to children, after the delight he gives them, is the promotion of familiarity and friendship with animals, in proportion as they appear to deserve it: and a great use indeed it is. If I were not afraid that one or other of these vigilant creatures might snap at me, I would now begin to quarrel a little with you. And yet I think I should have on my side some of the more sagacious, were I to reprehend you for letting an ill-tempered man render you supercilious and unjust. How do you know, pray, that Hephaestion may not live? and quite as long as he fancies he shall; a century, or two, or three. Even in the Iambics there is a compression and energy of thought, which the best poets sometimes want; and there is in them as much poetry as was necessary on the occasion. The poet has given us, at one stroke, the true impression of a feature in his character; which few have done, and few can do, excepting those features only which are nearly alike in the whole fraternity. Doubtless we are pleased to take our daily walk by streams that reflect the verdure and the flowers: but the waters of a gloomy cavern may be as pellucid and pure, and more congenial to our graver thoughts and bolder imaginations. For any high or any wide operation, a poet must be endued, not with passion indeed, but with power and mastery over it; with imagination, with reflection, with observation, and with discernment. There are however some things in poetry which admit few of these qualities. Comedy for instance would evaporate under too fervid a fancy and the sounds of the Ode would be dulled and deadened by being too closely overarched with the fruitage of reflection. Homer in himself is subject to none of the passions; but he sends them all forth on his errands, with as much precision and velocity as Apollo his golden arrows. The hostile Gods, the very Fates themselves, must : have wept with Priam in the tent before Achilles: Homer stands unmoved. Aspasia! there is every reason why a goodnatured person should make us good-natured, but none whatever why an ill-natured one should make us ill-natured: neither of them ought to make us unjust. You do not know Hephaestion, and you speak ill of him on the report of others, who perhaps know him as little as you do. You would shudder if I ventured to show you the position you have taken. Ill-tempered you can not be; you would not be unfair: what if, in the opinion of your friends, you should be a more shocking thing than either! what, in the name of the immortal Gods! if I should have found you, on this one occasion, a somnambulist on the verge of vulgarity! Take courage: nobody has seen it but myself. If there are bad people in the world, and may-be there are plenty, we ought never to let it be thought that we are near enough to be aware of it. Again to Hephæstion. It is better to be austere than ambitious: better to live out of society than to court the worst. How many of the powerful, even within the confines of their own household, will be remembered less affectionately and lastingly than tame sparrows and talking daws! and, among the number of those who are destined to be known hereafter, of how many will the memory be laden with contempt or with execration! To the wealthy, proud, and arrogant, the Gods have allotted no longer an existence, than to the utensils in their kitchens or the vermin in their sewers: while, to those whom such perishables would depress and vilify, the same Eternal Beings have decreed and ratified their own calm consciousness of plastic power, of immovable superiority, with a portion (immeasurably great) of their wisdom, their authority, and their duration. CXXIX. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. We have kept your birth-day, Aspasia ! On these occasions I am reluctant to write anything. Politeness, I think, and humanity, should always check the precipitancy of congratulation. Nobody is felicitated on losing. Even the loss of a bracelet or tiara is deemed no subject for merriment and alertness in our friends and followers. Surely then the marked and registered loss of an irreparable year, the loss of a limb of life, ought to excite far other sensations. So long is it, O Aspasia! since we have read any poetry together, I am quite uncertain whether you know the Ode to Asteröessa. Asteröessa! many bring The vows of verse and blooms of spring Lo, my vow too amid the rest! "Ne'er mayst thou sigh from that white breast," O lake them all away! For there are cares and there are wrongs, But come they must: and every year Cease, raven, cease! nor scare the dove Although there must be some myriads of Odes written on the same occasion, yet, among the number on which I can lay my hand, none conveys my own sentiment so completely. Sweetest Aspasia, live on! live on! but rather, live back the past! CXXX. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. The architraves of the Parthenon are chiselled by the scholars of Pheidias, who sometimes gave a portion of the design. It is reported that two of the figures bear the marks of the master's own hand: he leaves it to the conjecture of future ages which they are. Some of the young architects, Ionian and Athenian, who were standing with me, disputed not only on the relative merits of their architecture, but of their dialect. One of them, Psamiades of Ephesus, ill enduring the taunt of Brachys the Athenian, that the Ionian, from its open vowels, resembles a pretty pulpy hand which could not close itself, made an attack on the letter T usurping the place of S, and against the augments. "Is it not enough," said he, "that you lisp, but you must also stammer?" Let us have patience if any speak against us, O Cleone! when a censure is cast on the architecture of Ictinos and on the dialect of Athens. CXXXI. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. When the weather is serene and bright, I think of the young Aspasia; of her liveliness, her playfulness, her invitations to sit down on the grass; and her challenges to run, to leap, to dance, and if nobody was near, to gambol. The weather at this season is neither bright nor serene, and I think the more of my Aspasia, because I want her more. Fie upon me! And yet on the whole, Happy to me has been the day, have written, five minutes afterward. A weakly kid likes the warm milk, and likes the drawing of it from its sources; but place the same before her, cold, in a pail, and she smells at it and turns away. The Hecatompedon, which many of the citizens begin to call the Parthenon, is now completed, and waits but for the Goddess. A small temple, raised by Cimon in honour of Theseus, is the model. This until lately was the only beautiful edifice in the Athenian dominions. Pericles is resolved that Athens shall not only be the mistress, but the admiration of the world, and that her architecture shall, if possible, keep pace with her military and intellectual renown. Our countrymen, who have hitherto been better architects than the people of Attica, think it indecorous and degrading that Ionians, as the Athenians are, should follow the fashion of the Dorians, so inferior a race of mortals. Many grand designs were offered by Ictinos to the approbation and choice of the public. Those which he calls Ionian, are the gracefuller. Crateros, a young architect, perhaps to ridicule the finery and extravagance of I never was formed for poetry: I hate whatever I the Corinthians, exposed to view a gorgeous design of slender columns and top-heavy capitals, such as, if ever carried into execution, would be incapable of resisting the humidity of the seabreezes, or even the action of the open air, uninfluenced by them. These however would not be misplaced as in-door ornaments, particularly in bronze or ivory; and indeed small pillars of such a character would be suitable enough to highly ornamented apartments. I have conversed on the subject with Ictinos, who remarked to me that what we call the Doric column is in fact Egyptian, modified to the position and the worship; and that our noblest specimens are but reduced and petty imitations of those ancient and indestructible supporters, to the temples of Thebes, "The Gods confound him with his Atticisms !" of Memphis and of Tentyra. He smiled at the exclaim the sober-minded. "Is not the man ridicule cast on the Corinthians by the name contented to be a true and hearty Carian? Have designating those florid capitals, but agreed with we not roses and violets, lilies and amaranths, me that, on a smaller scale, in gold or silver, they crocuses and sowthistles? Have we not pretty would serve admirably for the receptacles of wax-girls and loving ones; have we not desperate girls lights on solemn festivals. He praised the designs and cruel ones, as abundantly as elsewhere? Do of our Ionian architects, and acknowledged that not folks grieve and die to his heart's content? their pillars alone deserve the appellation of We possess the staple; and by Castor and Pollux! Grecian, but added that, in places liable to earth- we can bleach it and comb it and twist it, as quakes, inundations, or accumulations of sand, cleverly as the sharpest of your light-fingered the solider column was in its proper situation. locust-eaters." Among the Tales lately come out here, many contain occasional poetry. In the preface to one, the scene of which lies mostly in Athens, the author says, 66 'My reader will do well to draw his pen across the verses: they are not good for him. The olive, especially the Attic, is pleasing to few the first time it is tasted." This hath raised an outcry against him; so that of the whole fraternity he is the most unpopular. |