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"As I entered the hall," he writes, "where the most blessed goddess of beauty, our dear lady of Melos, stands on her pedestal, I well-nigh broke down, and fell at her feet sobbing piteously, so that even a heart of stone must be softened. And the goddess gazed at me compassionately, yet withal so comfortless, as who should say: 'Seest thou not that I have no arms and cannot help thee?"
All the men of military age in Melos were put to death, the women and children were sold into slavery, and the land was distributed among Athenian settlers. In the fifth year of the war, after the capitulation of Mytilene, a thousand of the inhabitants had been butchered in cold blood; and this sentence, which seems so cruel to us, was regarded by the Athenians as an act of mercy.
They call her the Venus of Milo, or Melos! It is a calumny a libel. She is no Venus, except in good looks; and if she errs at all, it is on the side of austerity.
Even in its heyday, though the parts were ever so independent of one another, the mass of tone forms a great melody, or melos, moving on a firm harmonic foundation in the lowest part.
But the case of Melos was different, for that island had never been included in the Athenian alliance, and the Melians had done nothing to provoke an attack. Thus the three names, Mytilene, Scione, and Melos, mark an ascending scale of barbarity, culminating in a massacre which, even in the eyes of Greeks, was an atrocious crime.
Nevertheless, Ruskin is right in telling us that no Italian modelled a female nude equal to the Aphrodite of Melos, or a male nude equal to the Apoxyomenos of the Braccio Nuovo.
And while the gods of the prologue were prophesying destruction at sea for the sackers of Troy, the fleet of the sackers of Mêlos, flushed with conquest and marked by a slight but unforgettable taint of sacrilege, was actually preparing to set sail for its fatal enterprise against Sicily. Not, of course, that we have in the Troädes a case of political allusion. Far from it.
They also made this public proclamation, "That they would give a talent to any one who would kill Diagoras of Melos," because it was reported of him that he laughed at their mysteries. Protagoras also, who was thought to have written somewhat that was not owned for truth by the Athenians about the gods, had been seized upon, and put to death, if he had not fled away immediately.
It is better never to have known what the high, terrible loveliness of Her of Melos is than, having seen her, to pass the rest of our days with these copies, and prostitutions, and profanations, and parodies, "which mimic humanity so abominably"! That is the worst of it. That is the sting of it.
Sailing accordingly from Malea across the open sea, the squadron touched at Melos and there fell in with ten Athenian ships, three of which they took empty and burned.
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