United States or French Southern Territories ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"On you, Callimachus," said the chief of the Chersonese, "on you it rests, whether Athens shall be enslaved, or whether from age to age your country, freed by your voice, shall retain in yours a name dearer to her even than those of Aristogiton and Harmodius . Never since the foundation of Athens was she placed in so imminent a peril.
Harmodius and Aristogiton are in everybody's mouth; the memory of Leonidas the Lacedæmonian and Epaminondas the Theban is as fresh as ever. Those philosophers were not acquainted with the many instances in our country to give a list of whom would take up too much time who, we see, considered death desirable as long as it was accompanied with honor.
We see among them no representative of Confucius, Chi-hoagti, and the sect of Ta-osse; no magi; no Pisistratus and Harmodius; no Socrates and Alcibiades; no patricians and plebeians; no Cæsar; no invasion or adoption of foreign mysteries; no mythical impersonation of an Ali; no Suffeeism; no Guelphs and Gibellines; nothing really on the type of Catholic religious orders; no Luther; nothing, in short, which, for good or evil, marks the presence of a life internal to the political community itself.
I will draw you the brand of the tyrannicide Harmodius, a sword in a wreath," and pulling out his pencil, he sketched in a design of swords and flowers in the sober, unadorned style he admired. And as he drew, he expounded his views of art: "A regenerated People," he declared, "must repudiate all the legacies of servitude, bad taste, bad outline, bad drawing.
His character may already be gathered from his actions: crafty in the pursuit of power, but magnanimous in its possession, we have only, with some qualification, to repeat the eulogium on him ascribed to his greater kinsman, Solon "That he was the best of tyrants, and without a vice save that of ambition." The Administration of Hippias. The Conspiracy of Harmodius and Aristogiton.
For far otherwise than as Pelopidas ventured his life for the liberty of the Thebans, and Harmodius and Aristogiton for that of the Athenians, did this philosopher encounter with a raw pourcontrel, to the end he might make human life more brutish.
He looked back on the melancholy city of Harmodius the free, and Pericles the magnificent, from the height of that distant memory, which mellowed into one hazy light all the ruder and darker shades. He had seen the land of poetry chiefly in the poetical age of early youth; and the associations of patriotism were blended with those of the flush and spring of life.
Are they not such rebels as Deborah and Judith and Joan of Arc; as Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the Gracchi and Brutus, William Tell, William Wallace, Simon de Montfort, Rienzi, Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, Shan O'Neill, William the Silent, John Hampden and Pym, the Highlanders of the Forty-five, Robert Emmet and Wolf Tone and Parnell, Bolivar, John Brown of Harper's Ferry, Kossuth, Mazzini and Garibaldi, Danton, Victor Hugo, and the Russian revolutionists?
You are not of those Greeks, I presume, who dream of a national insurrection at this time? then you are loyal to Rome. Did I believe a Leonidas could now arise, an Harmodius, a Miltiades, a Themistocles, a Pericles, an Epaminondas, I should be as ready to take the sword as another; but it is hopeless. Greece, then, makes no claim on you just now.
Ever on earth for both of you lives glory, O loved Harmodius, loved Aristogiton, For ye the tyrant slew, And back to Athens ye gave equal laws. When the song had ceased, the dancers, the musicians, the attendant slaves had withdrawn from the hall, dismissed by a whispered order from Antagoras.
Word Of The Day