Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
An elderly farmer thrust himself forward, took the wreath, and poured out his rustic wisdom from the Bema. His advice was simple. The oracle said “the wooden wall” would be a bulwark, and by the wooden wall was surely meant the Acropolis which had once been protected by a palisade. Let all Attica shut itself in the citadel and endure a siege.
Tides of music's golden sea Selling toward eternity. But to-day his heart was a rock that stood motionless. The flood passed by and left him unmoved. Looking out from his place at the foot of the pillar, he saw a man standing far off in the lofty bema.
“Themistocles is right,” assented the orator, moving away from the luckless Seuthes as from a pawn no longer important in the game of life and death. “The whole of the wretched story I fear I must tell on the Bema to all Athens. I must be brief, but believe me, I can make good all I say. Since my return from the Isthmia, I have been observed to be sad.
“Who wishes to speak?” The answer was a groan from nigh every soul present. Three men ascended the Bema. They bore the olive branches and laurel garlands, suppliants at Delphi; but their cloaks were black. “The oracle is unfavourable! The gods deliver us to Xerxes!” The thrill of horror went around the Pnyx. The three stood an instant in gloomy silence.
We left the Parthenon to keep its watch over old Athens, as it had kept it for twenty-three hundred years, and went and stood outside the walls of the citadel. In the distance was the ancient, but still almost perfect Temple of Theseus, and close by, looking to the west, was the Bema, from whence Demosthenes thundered his philippics and fired the wavering patriotism of his countrymen.
The next morning he made a formal visit to the shrine of the Furies in the hill of Areopagus. “An old vow, too long deferred in payment, taken when he joined in his first contest on the Bema,” he explained to friends, when he visited this uncanny spot.
Thrice the call in vain; but at the fourth time a wave of silence swept across the Pnyx. A figure well beloved was taking the wreath and mounting the Bema. The words of Themistocles that day were to ring in his hearer’s ears till life’s end. The careless, almost sybaritic, man of the Isthmus and Eleusis seemed transfigured. For one moment he stood silent, lofty, awe-inspiring.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking