Marcius Willson

“ Shades of the Helots! triumph o'er your foe!
Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same;
Thy glorious day is o'er, but not thy years of shame.
When riseth Lacedæmon's hardihood,
When Thebes Epaminondas rears again,
When Athens' children are with hearts endued,
When Grecian mothers shall give birth to men,
Then may'st thou be restored; but not till then.
A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;
An hour may lay it in the dust: and when
Can man, in shattered splendor renovate,
Recall its virtues back, and vanquish Time and Fate? ”

“ Grecian art, like Grecian liberty, had lost its spirit and vitality, and the spoliation of public buildings and galleries, to adorn the porticos and temples of Rome, hastened its extinction.
We have now reached the close of the history of ancient Greece. But Hellas still lives in her thousand hallowed associations of historic interest, and in the numerous ruins of ancient art and splendor which cover her soil—recalling a glorious Past, upon which we love to dwell as upon the memory of departed friends or the scenes of a happy childhood—"sweet, but mournful to the soul." ”

“ He therefore flourished at the time when the freedom of Greece, rescued from foreign enemies, was exulting in its first strength; and his writings are characteristic of the boldness and vigor of the age. In his works we find the fundamental idea of the Greek drama—retributive justice. The sterner passions alone are appealed to, and the language is replete with bold metaphor and gigantic hyperbole. Venus and her inspirations are excluded; the charms of love are unknown: but the gods—vast, majestic, in shadowy outline, and in the awful sublimity of power-pass before and awe the beholder. ”

“ We neither wail nor weep;
We will light our torches at the stars,
And work while our warriors sleep.
"We hold not the iron in our blood
Viler than strangers' gold;
The memory of our motherhood
Is not to be bought and sold.
"Shame to the traitor heart that springs
To the faint soft arms of Peace,
If the Roman eagle shook his wings
At the very gates of Greece!
"Ask not the mothers who gave you birth
To bid you turn and flee;
When Sparta is trampled from the earth
Her women can die, and be free."
Soon after the repulse at Sparta, Pyrrhus again marched against Antig'onus ”

“ We must, indeed, fly beyond the civilized world; we must pass the dominion of law and the boundaries of knowledge; we must, more especially, withdraw ourselves from this place, and the scenes and objects which here surround us, if we would separate ourselves entirely from the influence of all those memorials of herself which ancient Greece has transmitted for the admiration and the benefit of mankind. This free form of government, this popular assembly—the common council for the common good—where have we contemplated its earliest models? ”

“ Atossa, appearing with her attendants, and anxious for news of her son, first inquires in what clime are the towers of Athens— the conquest of which her son had willed—and what mighty armies, what arms, and what treasures the Athenians boast, and what mighty monarch rules over them; and is told, to her surprise, that instead of the strong bow, like the Persians, they have stout spears and massy bucklers; and although their rich earth is a copious fount of silver, yet the people, "slaves to no lord, own no kingly power." ”

“ Jupiter, angry at the theft of that which had been reserved from mortals for wise purposes, resolved to punish Prometheus, and through him all mankind, to show that it was not given to man to elude the wisdom of the gods. He therefore caused Vulcan to form an image of air and water, to give it human voice and strength, and make it assume the form of a beautiful woman, like the immortal goddesses themselves. Minerva endowed this new creation with artistic skill, Venus gave her the witchery of beauty, Mercury inspired her with an artful disposition, and the Graces added all their charms. ”

“ I wish to take occasion of the struggle of an interesting and gallant people in the cause of liberty and Christianity, to draw the attention of the House to the circumstances which have accompanied that struggle, and to the principles which appear to have governed the conduct of the great states of Europe in regard to it, and to the effects and consequences of these principles upon the independence of nations, and especially upon the institutions of free governments. What I have to say of Greece, therefore, concerns the modern, not the ancient—the living, and not the dead. ”

“ To point out genius and encourage merit;
The poet's friend, humane and good and kind;
Of manners gentle, and of generous mind.
He marks his friend, but more he marks his foe;
His hand is ever ready to bestow:
Request with reason, and he'll grant the thing,
And what be gives, he gives it like a king.
The poet then sings the praises of the king, and describes the strength, the wealth, and the magnificence of his kingdom, in the following striking lines:
Here, too, O Ptolemy, beneath thy sway
What cities glitter to the beams of day! ”

“ This practice of free debate and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind, and that popular eloquence which, if it were now here, on a subject like this, would move the stones of the Capitol—whose was the language in which all these were first exhibited? Even the edifice in which we assemble, these proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors. ”

“ Under Pausanias the Helots were ready for revolt; and the death of that conspirator checked, but did not crush, their designs of freedom. Now was the moment, when Sparta lay in ruins—now was the moment to realize their dreams. From field to field, from village to village, the news of the earthquake became the watchword of revolt. Up rose the Helots—they armed themselves, they poured on—a wild and gathering and relentless multitude resolved to slay, by the wrath of man, all whom that of nature had yet spared. The earthquake that leveled Sparta rent their chains ”

“ The ignominious retreat of Xerxes was in marked contrast to the pomp and magnificence of his advance into Greece. Death from famine and distress spread its ravages among his troops, and the remnant that returned with him to Asia was but "a wreck, or fragment, rather than a part of his huge host."
O'er Hellespont and Athos' marble head,
More than a god he came, less than a man he fled. ”

“ Here, too, is visible the mutual jealousy existing among the several tribes of the nation; but the feeling of their belonging together, the consciousness of national unity, prevail over all; and the great mass is capable of sufficient good-sense and self-denial to subordinate itself to those who, by experience, intelligence, and moral courage, attest themselves as fitted for command. And how very remarkable it is that in this mixed multitude of Greeks it is an Athenian who by his qualities towers above all the rest, and becomes the real preserver of the entire army! ”

“ The assembled multitude
Sat in the crowded theatre, and bent
To hear the voice of gorgeous Tragedy
Breathing, in solemn verse, or ode sublime,
Her noble precepts. The broad city's gates
Poured forth a mingled throng—impatient steeds
Champing their bits, and neighing for the course:
Merchants slow driving to the busy port
Their ponderous wains: Religion's holy priests
Leading her red-robed votaries to the steps
Of some vast temple: young and old, with hands
Crossed on their breasts, hastening to walks and shades
Suburban, where some moralist explained
The laws of mind and virtue. ”

“ And although the ashes of her generals, her poets, her scholars, and her artists are scattered from their urns, and her statuary and her temples are mutilated and discolored ruins, ancient Greece lives also in the song, the art, and the research of modern times. In contemplating the influence of her genius, the mind is naturally fixed upon the chief repository of her taste and talent—Athens, "the eye of Greece"—from which have sprung "all the strength, the wisdom, the freedom, and the glory of the western world." ”

“ What religion therefore forbids among us, the religion of the Greeks did not merely tolerate but enjoin. Nor was the extreme and even profane gayety of the comedy without its excuse. To unite extravagant mirth with a solemn seriousness was enjoined by law, even in the sacred festival of Ceres.
"While the philosophers, therefore, querulously maintained that man was the joke and plaything of the gods, the comic poet reversed the picture, and made the gods the playthings of men; in his hands, indeed, everything was upon the broad grin: the gods laughed, men laughed, and animals laughed. ”

“ He hath come from far Euphrates, and from Tigris' rushing tide,
To subdue the strength of Athens, to chastise the Spartan's pride;
He hath come with countless armies, gathered slowly from afar,
From the plain, and from the mountain, marshalled ranks of motley war;
From the land and from the ocean, that the burdened billows groan,
That the air is black with banners, which great Xerxes calls his own.
Soothly he hath nobly ridden o'er the fair fields, o'er the waste,
As the earth might bear the burden, with a weighty-footed haste ”

“ The existence of an assembly in which the dearest interests of all human beings were expounded and discussed in the language of truth, and with the most earnest expressions of persuasion, must have lent an irresistible charm to the investigation of the new doctrine among a people possessing the institutions and the feelings of the Greeks. Sincerity, truth, and a desire to persuade others, will soon create eloquence where numbers are gathered together. ”

“ Her power is indeed manifested at the bar, in the senate, on the field of battle, in the schools of philosophy. But these are not her glory. Wherever literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain—wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep—there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens. ”

“ They are men in full measure agitated by the unquiet spirit of the times, which had destroyed in them their affection for their native land; and yet how closely they cling to its most ancient traditions! Visions in dream and omens, sent by the gods, decide the most important resolutions, just as in the Homeric camp before Troy: most assiduously the sacrifices are lit, the pæans sung, altars erected, and games celebrated, in honor of the savior gods, when at last the aspect of the longed-for sea animates afresh their vigor and their courage. ”

“ I do not walk about the market-place gay and cheerful because the stranger has prospered, holding out my right hand and congratulating those who I think will report it yonder, and on any news of our own success shudder and groan and stoop to the earth like these impious men who rail at Athens, as if in so doing they did not rail at themselves; who look abroad, and if the foreigner thrives by the distresses of Greece, are thankful for it, and say we should keep him so thriving to all time. ”

“ The loveliness of nature on the Ionian shores, and in the isles that crown the Ægean deep, was soon embellished by the genius of art. Stately processions, hymns chanted in honor of the gods, graceful dances before the altars, statues, and shrines, assemblies for festal or solemn purposes in the open air under the soft sky of Ionia, or within the halls of princes and nobles—these fill up the moments of the new and dazzling existence which the excitable Hellenic race are invited here and now to enjoy. ”

“ It is a life of all the pleasures of mind and body, of banquet and of revel, of music and of song; a life in which solemn grandeur alternates with jest and gibe; a life of childish willfulness and of fretfulness, combined with serious, manly, and imperial cares; for the Olympus of Homer has at least this one recommendation to esteem—that it is not peopled with the merely lazy and selfish gods of Epicurus, but its inhabitants busily deliberate on the government of man, and in their debates the cause of justice wins. ”