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But I threw in a dexterous dose of the old Greek Cleruchioe cited by Trevanion, which set him off full trot on his hobby, till after a short excursion to Euboea and the Chersonese, he was fairly lost amidst the Ionian colonies of Asia Minor.
The cities of Sicily could not behold the contest between Athens and Sparta without being drawn into the quarrel, and the result was that the Dorian cities made war on the Ionian cities, which, of course, sympathized with Athens. As these cities were weaker than the Dorian, they solicited aid from Athens, and an expedition was sent to Sicily under Laches, B.C. 426.
It was a hard time; but I found a friend now and then among the country people, though they are dreadfully superstitious. At last I got to the shore, and induced an honest fellow to put to sea in an open boat, on the chance of something turning up. It did, in the shape of a brigantine from Elba bound for Corfu. Here I was sure to find friends, for the brotherhood are strong in the Ionian Isles.
These then, I said, must be banished; even to women who have a character to maintain they are of no use, and much less to men. Certainly. In the next place, drunkenness and softness and indolence are utterly unbecoming the character of our guardians. Utterly unbecoming. And which are the soft or drinking harmonies? The Ionian, he replied, and the Lydian; they are termed 'relaxed.
But great was my amazement, on looking out of the window during the night after my arrival, to observe the Polar star placed directly over the Ionian Sea the south, as I surely deemed it. A week has passed since then, and in spite of the map I have not quite familiarized myself with this spectacle, nor yet with that other one of the sun setting apparently due east, over Monte Pollino.
They are anything but dumb nowadays. Earth-movements, too, have tilted the coast-line up and down, and there is evidence to show that while the Tyrrhenian shore has been raised by these oscillations, the Ionian has sunk. Not long ago four columns were found in the sea at Cotrone two hundred yards from the beach; old sailors remember another group of columns visible at low tide near Caulonia.
In the course of ages if nothing unforeseen occurs meanwhile to prevent it the Alpine mud will have filled in the entire Adriatic; and the Ionian Isles will spring like isolated mountain ridges from the Adriatic plain, as the Euganean hills those 'mountains Euganean' where Shelley 'stood listening to the pæan with which the legioned rocks did hail the sun's uprise majestical' spring in our own time from the dead level of Lombardy.
Blanche Sweet is the leader of the play within a play which occupies the first reel. Here the Olympians and the Muses, with a grace that we fancy was Greek, lead a dance that traces the story of the spring, summer, and autumn of life. Finally the supple dancers turn gray and old and die, but not before they have given us a vision from the Ionian islands.
Zeuxis, Parrhasius, and Timanthes belonged to the Ionian school of painting, which flourished during the Peloponnesian war. This school was excelled by that of Sikyon, which reached its highest prosperity between the end of the Peloponnesian war and the death of Alexander the Great.
If, warmed for a moment from the gravity of the historic muse, we might conjure up the picture of this festival, we would invoke the imagination of the reader to that sacred ground decorated with the profusest triumphs of Grecian art all Greece assembled from her continent, her colonies, her isles war suspended a Sabbath of solemnity and rejoicing the Spartan no longer grave, the Athenian forgetful of the forum the highborn Thessalian, the gay Corinthian the lively gestures of the Asiatic Ionian; suffering the various events of various times to confound themselves in one recollection of the past, he may see every eye turned from the combatants to one majestic figure hear every lip murmuring a single name glorious in greater fields: Olympia itself is forgotten.
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