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Glaucon stood on the easternmost pinnacle of the Rock, watching the landscape. “Joy, makaira, joy,” he cried, “we possess one another. We dwell in ‘violet-crowned Athens’; for what else dare we to pray?” But Hermione pointed less pleased toward the crest of Pentelicus. “Behold it! How swiftly yonder gray cloud comes on a rushing wind! It will cover the brightness. The omen is bad.”
In token of gratitude for kind attentions bestowed by the household of Proclus, Pericles invited his family to visit the far-famed wonders of the violet-crowned city; and the eager solicitations of young Pterilaues induced the father to accept this invitation for himself and son.
When strangers from Ethiopia, Egypt, Phoenicia, and distant Taprobane, come to witness the far-famed beauty of the violet-crowned city, they will stand in mute worship before the Parthenon; and when their wonder finds utterance, they will ask what the Athenians bestowed on an artist so divine.
Then, also, if, in the nectar of Plato's speech, compassion is not an ingredient, it may be because, in his violet-crowned city, it was strewn open-handed through the beautiful streets. There, public malediction was visited on anyone that omitted to guide a stranger on his way. Israel was too strictly monotheistic to raise an altar to Pity, the rest of antiquity too cruel. In Athens there was one.
Fair and glorious is the violet-crowned city, and let us trust the gods will long preserve it so." "Thou hast well spoken, son of Aristo," replied Artaphernes: "Much as I had heard of the glory and beauty of Athens, it far surpasses my hopes.
Every morning the golden majesty of the sun rose above the wall of Hymettus, but few could lift their hands to Lord Helios and give praise for another day of light. “Each sunrise brings Xerxes nearer.” The bravest forgot not that. Yet Athens was never more truly the “Violet-Crowned City” than on these last days before the fearful advent.
She was contemporary with Alcaeus, and in her verses to him we plainly discern the feeling of unimpeached honor proper to a free-born and well-educated maiden. Alcaeus testifies that the attractions and loveliness of Sappho did not derogate from her moral worth when he calls her "violet-crowned, pure, sweetly smiling Sappho."
Four slender girls, violet-crowned, marched into the triclinium, wearing a chiton open from waist to ankle, displaying the left leg at every step, holding to their mouths the double aulos, their agile fingers playing over the holes of the instrument.
As if pitying nature had striven to appease the manes of the unburied dead, a pall of luxuriant ivy and glossy acanthus covered the bottom and sides of the quarry, one hundred feet below; but out of the dust of centuries stared the rayless eyes of corpses, and the gaunt despairing faces seemed still uplifted, now in invocation, anon in imprecation to the overarching sky, where blistering suns mocked them by day, and glittering moons and silver stars paused in their westward march through dewy night, to tell them tantalizing tales of how musically Aegean wavelets broke against the marbles at Piraeus; how loud the nightingales sang in the plane and poplar groves at home; how the white glory of the Parthenon smiled down on violet-crowned Athens, where their wives and children thronged the temples, in sacrificial rites to insure their safety.
Is it one of my morning fancies merely for fact and fancy mingle strangely at this still, mysterious hour, and are scarcely distinguishable or is it related in history that this strange thing happened when all the people of the violet-crowned city were gathered to witness a solemn tragedy, in which certain verses were spoken that had a strange meaning to their war-weary souls?
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