Phormio

“ What boots it to tell that the arms and vesture of this “chryselephantine” statue are of pure gold; that the flesh portions are of gleaming ivory; that Phidias has wrought the whole so nobly together that this material, too sumptuous for common artists, becomes under his assembling the perfect substance for the manifestation of deity?
...Awestruck by the vision, though often he has seen it, Phormion stands long in reverent silence. Then at length, casting a pinch of incense upon the brazier, constantly smoking before the statue, he utters his simple prayer. ”

“ The priest assures Phormion that the entrails of the victim foretokened every possible favor in future athletic contests—and this, and his insinuating smile, win him a silver drachma to supplement his share of the lamb. Phormion readjusts the chaplet upon his own head, and turns towards the Parthenon. After the sacrifice will come the prayer.
196. The Interior of the Parthenon and the Great Image of Athena.—The whole Acropolis is the home of Athena. The other gods harbored thereon are only her inferior guests. Upon the Acropolis the dread goddess displays her many aspects. ”

“ Pursuing our analysis of the various phases in the character of Phœbus-Apollo, we find that with the first beams of his genial light, all nature awakens to renewed life, and the woods re-echo with the jubilant sound of the untaught lays, warbled by thousands of feathered choristers. Hence, by a natural inference, he is the god of music, and as, according to the belief of the ancients, the inspirations of genius were inseparably connected with the glorious light of heaven, he is also the god of poetry, and acts as the special patron of the arts and sciences. ”

“ The chorus of the Prometheus is perhaps in character and dramatic fitness the most beautiful and satisfying known to us on the Greek stage. The songs give an expression of Weltschmerz for which it would be hard to find a parallel before the present century. The whole earth is in travail as Prometheus suffers: "There is a cry in the waves of the sea as they fall together, and groaning in the deep; a wail comes up from the cavern realms of Death, and the springs of the holy rivers sob with the anguish of pity." ”

“ When the age of suffering and injustice has passed, Jupiter sinks into the abyss of eternity, with cowardly wails and supplications to Prometheus to have mercy on him. The Promethean age begins; the air becomes a sea of sweet, eternally new love melodies; the mighty, deep-toned jubilation of the Earth is heard in alternation with the Moon's enchanting song of bliss; and then the whole universe chimes in in a chorus of rejoicing unsurpassed even by that with which Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ends. ”

“ Light and sound are only modes of motion.
Lumen. You will cease to be astonished, my old friend, if you will but reflect that light and sound are nothing else than two modes of motion. In order to appreciate either one or the other of these two modes of motion, you must (and that is sufficient) be endowed with an apparatus in correspondence with them, which might be only a simple nerve. The eye and the ear are the apparatus for your terrestrial nature. In another natural organisation the optic nerve and the auditory nerve form quite different organs. ”

“ On the Earth, in this dark cavern, as Plato appropriately termed it, you vegetate in ignorance of the gigantic forces in action in the universe. The day will come when physical science will discover in light the principle of every movement and the inner reason of things. Already within the last few years spectrum analysis has demonstrated to you that by the examination of a luminous ray from the Sun, or from a Star, you can learn what substances constitute that Sun and that Star. ”

“ But if I were to ask Fromond, whether God, in order to accommodate Himself to the understanding of the multitude, ever alters His creations, or whether nature, which is God’s handmaid, and is not changeable at man’s desire, has not always observed, and does not still maintain, her usual course in respect to motion, form, and relative positions of the various parts of the universe—I am certain that he would answer, the moon has always been spherical, although for a long period the people thought she was flat ”

“ The azure vault of the firmament crowns the Earth with a dome of dazzling light. The fires of the orb of day shed their beneficent influence generally upon the world.
Yet, see! The radiance diminishes. The luminous disk of the Sun is gradually corroded. Another disk, as black as ink, creeps in front of it, and little by little invades it entirely. The atmosphere takes on a wan, sepulchral hue; astonished nature is hushed in profound silence; an immense veil of sadness spreads over the world. Night comes on suddenly, and the stars shine out in the Heavens. ”

“ But something seems to approach us. What are those pale rays of light which we can faintly see a long, long way before us—rays pale and soft, quite unlike those flaming fires we have left behind us? Surely these do not denote the presence of human activity! As we continue to advance, these pale flakes of light—resembling nothing so much in appearance as molten lead—which at first were scanty and isolated, gradually expand, and leave only narrow strips of darkness to divide them into fantastic shapes. ”

“ In the mind of the latter Phoebus is not merely an archer, not merely a prophet and a singer, but the entire manifestation of genius. He is inspiration; he radiates poetry, music, eloquence from his sublime figure. The Phidian Jupiter is lost to us, except in copies, but in the Belvedere Apollo we see how the sculptor could interpret the highest thought of the Hellenic mind. He who visits this statue by night in the Vatican Palace at Rome, seeing it by torchlight, has, perhaps, the most wonderful impression left on his imagination which art can give. ”

“ While human vanity does homage to Phœbus, divine King of the Heavens, other suns of still greater magnificence form groups of two or three splendid orbs, which roll the prodigious combinations of their double, triple, or multiple systems through space, pouring on to the worlds that accompany them a flood of changing light, now blue, now red, now violet, etc.
In the inexhaustible variety of Creation there exist Suns that are united in pairs, bound by a common destiny, cradled in the same attraction, and often colored in the most delicate and entrancing shades conceivable. ”

“ But to this nucleus, the Orphic poets added at different times and by degrees a great quantity of other myths which together formed a complete body of doctrine setting forth the origin of the world, and of man, and his life after death. First, they said, existed Chronos or Time “who grows not old,” from whom sprang Aether and the formless Chaos. From these was formed a silver egg which, bursting in due time, disclosed Eros, or Phanes the first born, a shining god, with wings upon his shoulders, at once male and female, and having within himself the seeds of all creatures. ”

“ It is less a tragedy than an ode. It does not describe a series of actions, but a succession of visions. Prometheus, chained to a rock on the verge of the world, holds parley with the original powers and oldest forms of Nature, with Strength and Violence, and Oceanus and the race of the Titans. Compared with the personages introduced in this poem, Jupiter and Mercury, and the rest of that class, appear mere modern deities; we are thrown back into the first rude chaos of Nature, where the universe itself seems to rock like the sea, and the empire of heaven was not yet fixed. ”

“ And he said to himself, “Well, the gods have shown themselves stronger than we. We can’t conquer them by fighting, that’s clear. But there are cleverer ways of winning than by fighting, as they shall see.”
So Prometheus dug up a good-sized lump of clay, more than six feet long, and nearly four feet round. And now, said he to himself, “I only want just one little spark of Heavenly Fire.”
Now the Heavenly Fire is only to be found in the sky; and Jupiter had ordered that no Titan was ever to enter the sky again. But Prometheus was much too clever to find any difficulty about that. ”

“ One might say that the fable of Prometheus's torch was the expression of a philosophic truth that the ancients had not overlooked. Without light, Nature was without life; she was inanimate and dead. A benevolent God, bringing light, diffused over the earth's surface organization, feeling, and thought. ”

“ The simplest hypothesis was for them the truth, and they believed that the sky was in reality a lofty and extended canopy bestudded with stars, and the earth a vast plain, the solid basis of the universe, on which dwelt man, sole creature that lifted his eyes and thoughts above. Two distinct regions thus appeared to compose the whole system—the upper one, or the air, in which were the moving stars, the lights of heaven, and the firmament over all; and the lower one, or earth and sea, adorned on the surface with the products of life, and below with the minerals, metals, and stones. ”

“ There will be no night, for if one side of the little moon is heavier than the other, the heavier side will always be turned toward Mars. Therefore, when the Sun does not shine on Phobos, Mars will do so, and keep her continually illuminated, except for the brief period of the regular eclipse during each revolution. And one-fourth of the entire heavens, as seen from Phobos, will be filled with the glowing orb of Mars! The great planet will exhibit to us at a near range all the configurations of his surface, his oceans and his clouds. ”

“ A considerable fragment of the Prometheus Unbound has been preserved to us in a Latin translation by Attius.
The Prometheus Bound is the representation of constancy under suffering, and that the never-ending suffering of a god. Exiled in its scene to a naked rock on the shore of the earth-encircling ocean, this drama still embraces the world, the Olympus of the gods, and the earth, the abode of mortals; all as yet scarcely reposing in security above the dread abyss of the dark primaeval powers—the Titans. ”

“ The chromosphere is, to use Miss Clerke's expression, 'a solar envelope, but not a solar atmosphere.' It surrounds the whole globe of the sun to a depth of probably from 3,000 to 4,000 miles, and has been compared to an ocean of fire, but seems rather to present the appearance of a close bristling covering of flames which rise above the surface of the visible sun like the blades of grass upon a lawn. Any one of these innumerable flames may be elevated into unusual proportions in obedience to the vast and mysterious forces which are at work beneath, and then becomes a prominence. ”

“ The limits of the world in the Homeric cosmography were surrounded by obscurity. The columns of which Atlas was the guardian were supported on unknown foundations, and disappeared in the systems subsequent to Homer. Beyond the mysterious boundary where the earth ended and the heavens began an indefinite chaos spread out—a confused medley of life and inanity, a gulf where all the elements of heaven, Tartarus, and earth and sea are mixed together, a gulf of which the gods themselves are afraid. ”

“ If your white circle was really Phobos, you have seen the freak among satellites. She is the smallest, swiftest moon ever discovered, and travels so much more swiftly than the revolution of her primary that she appears to go opposite to everything else in the Martian sky, rising where the Sun sets and crossing the heavens from west to east! ”

“ I will not then pursue this subject which I have thus merely lightly touched upon, with the end in view of thereby demonstrating how greatly you would err, did you attach any importance to difficulties born of your terrestrial sensations, and to assure you that neither you nor any man upon the Earth could form even an approximate idea of the universe. What is earthly man but a mere pigmy! Ah! if you were but acquainted with the organisms which vibrate upon Mars or upon Uranus; if it had but been granted to you, to appreciate the senses in action, upon Venus and upon a ring of Saturn ”

“ The word harmonia, 'harmony,' applied to these forms of music by Plato and Aristotle, means literally 'fitting' or 'adjustment,' hence the 'tuning' of a series of notes on any principle, the formation of a 'scale' or 'gamut.' Other ancient writers use the word tropos, whence the Latin modus and our mood or 'mode,' generally employed in this sense by English scholars. The word 'mode' is open to the objection that in modern music it has a meaning which assumes just what it is our present business to prove or disprove about the 'modes' of Greek music. ”

“ If Thou permit, I will tell how priests look on this matter."
"Of course, speak."
"Well, a very wise priest who from the summit of the temple of Amon examines celestial movements, has thought out this statement: 'The pharaoh is the sun, the heir to the throne the moon. When the moon follows the god of light from afar, we have brightness in the daytime and clearness at night. When the moon wishes to be too near the sun, it disappears itself and the nights are dark. But if the moon stands before the sun there is an eclipse, and in the world great terror '." ”

“ When on the return of day we hear the cry—
"Rise! our life, our spirit has come back, the darkness is gone, the light draws near!"
—we are carried at once to the Homeric hymn, and we hear the joyous shout of all the gods when Phoibos springs to life and light on Delos. ”