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Updated: June 26, 2025
A new colony is to be led forth from Crete, and the Cretan takes advice of the others as to the ordering of the new commonwealth. We are no longer, as in The Republic, in an ideal world, a city coming down from, or set in, the heavens. There is no longer a perfect community; nor are philosophers to be its kings. Laws more or less similar to those of Sparta fill about half the book.
My nerves calmed a little, but with my brain so aroused, I did a swift review of my whole existence aboard the Nautilus, every pleasant or unpleasant incident that had crossed my path since I went overboard from the Abraham Lincoln: the underwater hunting trip, the Torres Strait, our running aground, the savages of Papua, the coral cemetery, the Suez passageway, the island of Santorini, the Cretan diver, the Bay of Vigo, Atlantis, the Ice Bank, the South Pole, our imprisonment in the ice, the battle with the devilfish, the storm in the Gulf Stream, the Avenger, and that horrible scene of the vessel sinking with its crew . . . ! All these events passed before my eyes like backdrops unrolling upstage in a theater.
Lowell was not less patriotic, but he loved society and England; Marsh in those days of trial loved nothing but his country, and with an intensity that was ill-requited as it was immeasurable. He took a great interest in our little Russie, whom he pronounced the most remarkable child for beauty and intelligence he had ever seen, and his interest followed us in the tragedy of our Cretan life.
The Cretan artists, however, though they borrowed the process, adapted it to their own tastes. In Egypt the native faïence of the time is of strictly conventional type, with black design on blue; but the Cretan emancipated himself from these limits, and made his faïence reliefs in the polychrome style, which still persisted, though now no longer so prevalent as it had once been.
But straightway as they sped over the wide Cretan sea night scared them, that night which they name the Pall of Darkness; the stars pierced not that fatal night nor the beams of the moon, but black chaos descended from heaven, or haply some other darkness came, rising from the nethermost depths.
I have already stated to you that if any definite flower is meant by these triple groups of leaves, which take their authoritatively typical form in the crowns of the Cretan and Laciuian Hera, it is not the violet, but the purple iris; or sometimes, as in Pindar's description of the birth of Ismus, the yellow water-flag, which you know so well in spring, by the banks of your Oxford streams.
The public administration had been abandoned to the Cæsar Bardas, the brother and enemy of Theodora; but the arts of female influence persuaded Michael to hate and to fear his uncle: he was drawn from Constantinople, under the pretence of a Cretan expedition, and stabbed in the tent of audience, by the sword of the chamberlain, and in the presence of the emperor.
The Cretan women looked on her as their best friend, and always spoke of her after her death as "the Blessed " their form of canonization, for even in Athens they had been her chief care.
And when Rousseau supposes the state to have ten thousand inhabitants, and talks about the right size of its territory, who does not think of the five thousand and forty which the Athenian Stranger prescribed to Cleinias the Cretan as the exactly proper number for the perfectly formed state?
In 1834 Pashley found that 'all the now existing vestiges of the ancient metropolis of Crete are some rude masses of Roman brick-work'; and Spratt in 1851 saw very little more, mentioning only 'some scattered foundations and a few detached masses of masonry of the Roman time, though in the time of the Venetian occupation there was evidently more to be seen, as Cornaro speaks of 'a very large quantity of ruins, and in particular a wall, many paces long and very thick. But expectation still fixed on Knossos as the most probable site for any Cretan discoveries.
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