United States or Panama ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Any one who will take the trouble to compare an idyl of Theokritos with a modern pastoral, or the poem of Kleanthes with a modern hymn, or the Aphrodite of Melos with a modern Madonna, will realize most effectually what I mean. And, finally, the religion of the Athenians was in the main symbolized in a fluctuating mythology, and had never been hardened into dogmas.
In B.C. 416 the Athenians attacked and conquered Melos, which island and Thera were the only islands in the AEgean not subject to the Athenian supremacy. The Melians having rejected all the Athenian overtures for a voluntary submission, their capital was blockaded by sea and land, and after a siege of some months surrendered.
They were even worse off in their slow movements. Unlike Mozart, they never discovered that the continuous melody, the melos, was Haydn's grand secret; and if they had discovered it, they had not the genius and the simple deep sincerity to make use of the discovery.
The prize was bought by M. de Riviere, French ambassador at Constantinople, and presented by him to the French king, Louis XVIII. The same vessel which conveyed it to France brought some other marble fragments from Melos, including a piece of an inscribed statue- base with an artist's inscription, in characters of the second century B.C. or later.
But while most people of taste profess a devotion to her, that devotion is usually untinged by knowledge or real appreciation; for there could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the bodily forms of the Goddess of Melos and those of the women who are most admired in our days.
Her fleet descended on the island of Melos, which had remained neutral, though its inhabitants were colonists from the Spartan mainland close by. Nowhere does the dramatic nature of Thucydides' work stand more clearly revealed than in his account of this incident. He represents the Athenian and Melian leaders as arguing the merits of the case in a regular dialogue, essentially a dramatic device.
Once he brought home a plaster-of-Paris Venus the Melos one with the beautiful arch to her torso of a bow that instant after the arrow has flown. Hanscha cuffed him for the expenditure, but secretly her old heart, which since childhood had subjected her to strange, rather epileptical, sinking spells, and had induced the drinking, warmed her with pride in his choice.
The same summer, about the same time that the Athenians were detained at Melos, their fellow citizens in the thirty ships cruising round Peloponnese, after cutting off some guards in an ambush at Ellomenus in Leucadia, subsequently went against Leucas itself with a large armament, having been reinforced by the whole levy of the Acarnanians except Oeniadae, and by the Zacynthians and Cephallenians and fifteen ships from Corcyra.
But on the whole, the merit of Greek coins does not primarily depend on beauty of features, nor even, in the period of highest art, that of the statues. You make take the Venus of Melos as a standard of beauty of the central Greek type. She has tranquil, regular, and lofty features; but could not hold her own for a moment against the beauty of a simple English girl, of pure race and kind heart.
Milk-stones are used for the same purpose by Greek women in Crete and Melos at the present day; in Albania nursing mothers wear the stones in order to ensure an abundant flow of milk. Again, the Greeks believed in a stone which cured snake-bites, and hence was named the snake-stone; to test its efficacy you had only to grind the stone to powder and sprinkle the powder on the wound.
Word Of The Day