Men let themselves slide onward by degrees COVI. ANAXAGORAS TO ASPASIA. It is well that you are removed from the city, and that the enemies of Athens pay respect either to your birth-place or your wisdom, either to your celebrity or your confidence. I remember that, speaking of the human form and countenance, both as existing in life and represented in the ideal, you remarked that the perfection of beauty is what is farthest from all similitude to the brutes. Surely then, in like manner, the perfection of our moral nature is in our remoteness from all similitude to their propensities. Now the worst propensity of the worst beasts is bloodshed, for which we pursue them as nearly as we can to extermination, but which they never commit with so little urgency, or to so great an extent, as we do. Until we bring ourselves at least to an equality with them, we can hardly be said to have made much progress in wisdom. It will appear wonderful and perhaps incredible to future generations, that what are now considered the two highest gifts of man, oratory and poetry, should be employed, the one chiefly in exciting, the other in emblazoning, deeds of slaughter and devastation. If we could see, in the nature of things, a child capable of forming a live tiger, and found him exercising his power of doing it, I think we should say to him, "You might employ your time better, child!" But then, Aspasia, we must not be orators nor poets, nor hope for any estimation in the state. Beware how you divulge this odd opinion; or you may be accused, as before, of crimes against the purity of morals, against the customs of our forefathers, and against the established and due veneration of the Gods. I hardly know what I am treading on, when I make a single step toward philosophy. On sand I fear it is; and, whether the impression be shallow or profound, the eternal tide of human passions will cover and efface it. There are many who would be vexed and angry at this, and would say, in the bitterness of their hearts, that they have spent their time in vain. Aspasia! Aspasia! they have indeed, if they are angry or vext about it. CCVII. ANAXAGORAS TO ASPASIA. Did I tell you, O Aspasia, we were free and remote from the calamities of war? we were. The flute and the timbrel and the harp alone were heard along our streets; and the pavement was bestrewn with cistus and lavender and myrtle, which grow profusely on the rocks behind us. Melanthos had arrived from the Chersonese to marry Eurycleia; and his friend Sosigenes of Corinth had determined to be united on the same day with her sister Phanera. Those who have seen them say that they were the prettiest girls in the city: they were also the happiest; but less happy than their lovers, who however owed at present but a part of the happiness to either. They were sworn friends from early youth, and had not met since, but always had corresponded. Why can not men draw a line against war as against plague, and shut up the infected? Instead of which, they are proud of being like the dogs in the worst feature; rushing forth into every affray, and taking part in it instantly with equal animosity. I wish we had arrived at such a degree of docility, and had advanced so many steps in improvement, that by degrees we might hope to acquire anything better of these good creatures. We have the worst of every beast, and the best of none. This is not, O Aspasia ! my usual tone of thinking and discoursing: nor is what has happened here among the usual occurrences of my life. The generous heart needs little to be reminded what are the embraces of young and ardent friends; and the withered one could ill represent them. Eurycleia, in the silence of fondness, in the fulness of content, was holding the hand of her Melanthos. Love has few moments more sweet, Philosophy none more calm. That moment was interrupted by the entrance of Sosigenes; and composure was exchanged for rapture by the friendly soul of Melanthos. Yes, yes, Aspasia ! friendship, even in the young, may be more animated than love itself. It was not long, however. "Where is Phanera?" "I will call her," said Eurycleia, and went out. Phanera, fond of ornament, it may be, and ambitious to surpass her sister and enchant her lover, came not speedily, nor indeed did Eurycleia very soon, for it was not at first that she could find her. Conversation had begun in the meanMelanthos was a little while about the war. more vehement than the mildness of his nature, it is said, ever allowed him before, and blamed the Corinthians for inciting so many states to hostility. Often had Sosigenes been looking toward the door, expecting his Phanera, and now began to grow impatient. The words of Melanthos, who felt the cruelty of war chiefly because it would separate the two sisters and the two friends, touched the pride of Sosigenes. Unable to moderate his temper, now excited by the absence of Phanera after the sister had some time returned, he said fiercely, "It is well to blame the citizens of the noblest city upon earth, for not enduring an indignity. It is well; but in slaves alone, or viler dependents." Sosigenes! Sosigenes!" cried Melanthos, starting up and rushing toward him. At that instant the impetuous Sosigenes, believing vio lence was about to follow affront, struck him with sophy then stand aside; and behold in her place his dagger to the heart. "I could not then calm thy anger with an embrace my too unhappy friend!" while the blood gurgled through the words, sobbed forth Melanthos. CCVIII. ALCIBIADES TO PERICLES. You commanded me, O Pericles, that I should write to you, whenever I found an opportunity on land. Phormio cast anchor before Naupactos: we command the Gulf of Crissa and check the movements of the Corinthians. The business of blockading is little to my mind. Writing is almost as insufferable: it is the only thing I do not willingly undertake when my friends desire it. Beside, I have nothing in the world to write about. We have done little but sink a few vessels and burn a few villages. It is really a hard matter to find a table to write upon, so quick and so complete is the devastation. I fancied war had something in it more animating and splendid. The people of the Peloponese are brave, however. They sometimes ask for their children (if very young) but never for their lives. Why can not we think them as little worth taking as they of giving? I am heartily tired of this warfare; and Phormio has told me, in plain words, he is heartily tired of me. Upon this, I requested his permission to join without delay our army before Potidæa. I expected not only an uncivil refusal, but a sharp rebuke. "The Gods have begun to favour us!" cried Phormio. This offer is better than the luckiest Alcibiades! thou art the whitest of white birds; and thy flight, whichever wind it float upon, is worth a victory." omen. I would have been angry; but laughter sprang uppermost; so, throwing my arms round old Phormio's neck, I almost pulled him down with it. "How now, stripling!" cried he, as willing to be angry as I was, "all this buffoonery before the commander of the fleet!" CCIX. ALCIBIADES TO PERICLES. the defender of his country and the saviour of his friend. The morning after my arrival, the Potidæans burst forth with incredible bravery from their gates, overthrowing all opposition. Now was my time. The heavy-armed in general, being old soldiers, were somewhat slower; and many of the enemy were assailing me when they came up: nor indeed was it then in sufficient force. I was wounded and overthrown, and, at the beginning, stunned: but presently I fancied I heard the sound of a brisk sword on armour over me, and felt something heavy fall on my legs. I was drawn forcibly from under the last of my antagonists. Socrates raised me up, and defended me from the weapons of not a few, unwilling to retire and irresolute to renew the engagement. I write now, because I am so wounded I can do nothing else. CCX. PERICLES TO ALCIBIADES. You are courageous, my Alcibiades, to a degree which I hardly ever observed in another. This alone induces me to doubt whether you will become, so soon as we both of us wished it, an accomplished and perfect soldier. To rush against the enemy before your comrades, is not indeed quite so unseemly as to lag behind; yet it may be even more detrimental in an officer. With old troops, who know their duty, it is always so: with younger alone, who want encouragement, it may not be. Socrates deserved the first honours in the action: his modesty and his affection transferred them to the imprudent and the vanquished, whom he rescued from the shame of rashness and the wretchedness of captivity. With all my fondness for you, I could not have given you my vote; and, had I commanded against Potidæa, I must have reproved you in presence of the army. Never, O Alcibiades, inflict on me the misery of passing so severe a sentence. I praised you be fore others did; I condemn you after them. Your high spirit deserved its reward; your temerity its rebuke. I, who have been the careful guardian of your fortune, am the more anxious one of your safety and of your fame. In my former letter I gave unobstructed way to the more pleasurable emotions: and, in everyone that I shall have occasion to write to you hereafter, I am confident of the same enjoyment. Reply to me as your friend, your comrade, the partaker of your pains and pleasures, and at most the director of your studies. But here, my Alcibiades, we must be grave and serious: I must, for once, not guide, but dictate: no answer is here admissible, excepting the answer of a soldier to his general. Hardly could it have been expected that "the whitest of white birds" should have been so speedily on the wing. The day had not closed when Phormio told me, that, knowing my fickleness, he had given orders for my voyage back. Every voyage is prosperous that brings me within sight of an enemy worth seeing. Brave fellows these Potidæans! They never lose their appetite, even in the greatest want of air and exercise. You, who hear everything, must know that they eat one another rather than surrender. I have been but three days in the camp, where, to my delight, I found the brave and kindly Socrates. Do you You know that to Niconöe was awarded by disapprove of my renewing my intimacy with her judge Priapos the prize of beauty in the Philosophy in the midst of battles? Let Philo- Kallisteia. In return for this favourable decision, CCXI. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. she dedicated to him a golden ewer and a fawn- | you my singularities, remembering me a year skin. Under his image a poet, who perhaps was her admirer, and who was grateful to the arbiter, wrote this epigram. Niconöe is inclined to deck Thy ruddy shoulder and thick neck Among what herbage they have been. Who should invest thee face to face; In giving her the prize for grace. Here are some others, I believe by Erinna herself, but I find inscribed on them Address to Erinna. Ay, shun the dance and shun the grape, Hunts with him, hunts for bashful youth. CCXII. ANAXAGORAS TO ASPASIA. We are now so near winter that there may not be, after the vessel which is about to sail, any more of them bound for Athens, all the remainder of the year. And who knows what another may bring or take away? I remain in health, but feeble. Life slips from me softly and imperceptibly. I am unwilling to tire myself by blowing a fire which must soon go out, whether I blow it or not. Had I any species of curiosity to send you, were it pebble, sea-weed, or new book, I would send it; not (for it is idle to talk so) as a memorial of me. If the friend is likely to be forgotten, can we believe that any thing he has about him will repose a longer time on the memory? Thus far had I written, when my strength failed me. Stesicles and Apollodoros have told me I must prepare for a voyage. The passage is neither so broad nor so stormy as the Hellespont. I was resolved not to go until I had looked in my garden for some anemonies, which I recollected to have seen blossoming the other day. It occurred to me that usually they appear in spring: so does poetry. I will present to you a little of both; for the first time. They are of equal value; and are worth about as much as the pebble, or the sea-weed, or the new book. Where are the blooms of many dyes Whither are gone the lighter hours? These weather-worn and formless flowers. Think me happy that I am away from Athens; I, who always lose my composure in the presence of crime or calamity. If anyone should note to hence, as I trust you and Pericles will do, add to them, but not aloud, a singularity of felicity, "He neither lived nor died with the multitude.” There are however some Clazomenians who know that Anaxagoras was of Clazomenai. CCXIII. ALCIBIADES TO PERICLES. Pericles! I did wrong and rashly. The praises of the Athenians are to me as the hum of insects : they linger in my ear, but are senseless and unexciting. I swear to you I will do better; but I must see you before I go. Aspasia, whose letter you have sent me since, is even more severe than you have been; and she has neither right nor reason. She is the only woman upon earth that ever railed at rashness, the only one that could distinguish it from fortitude. But every man must be rash once: it saves him from as much inconvenience and mischief as being oftener rash would incur. Do not consider this nonsense as vindication or reply; and let it not stand in the way of your pardon. CCXIV. ASPASIA TO ALCIBIADES. Are you not ashamed, young man, to leave the aged behind you, with all their wounds, merely to show how dexterous you are become in the management of your sword? Unworthy Alcibiades ! Never expect that the Athenians, whatever be their levity and inconsiderateness, will award to you the honour of superiority in valour. Socrates well deserved it; not for saving a life which on the next occasion will be thrown away, but for giving to every one capable of profiting by it, an example of steadiness and constancy. Pericles, I hope, will not allow you to disembark, until you have acquired the rudiments of discipline, in the only art in which you ever seemed likely to excell. Have you forgotten too that the pestilence is raging in the city? O rash Alcibiades! the sight of Pericles himself, to you at least, could hardly have been worth so desperate a hazard. But Pericles will reprove you, confident boy! Let me hear no more of you until I have heard that he has granted you his forgiveness. CCXV. ASPASIA TO PERICLES. Censure not too severely, O my Pericles, your inconsiderate cousin! In these days, when so many of your adherents are fallen, some by the fever, some by war, we must be parsimonious in the treasury of friendship, at all times far from inexhaustible. A hundred men of more wisdom and more virtue than Alcibiades would prevail much less with the multitude, should anything sinister befall you. May the Gods avert it! but I always fear something; and, what certainly is more foolish, I fancy my presence could avert from you any calamity. I wish I were persuaded that the Immortals hear us: I would then so perpetually pray for you as hardly to give myself time to read your letters; and you should quarrel with the shortness of mine. But reason, which strengthens our religion, weakens our devotion. Happy are those who have retained throughout life their infantine simplicity, which nurses a tractable idol in an unsuspicious bosom, is assured it knows and heeds the voice addressing it, and shuts it up again with a throb of joy, and keeps it warm. For this, the mind must be nurtured to the last with the same milky food as in childhood; the Gods must have their tangible images, and must laugh to us out of ivy and flowers. will perceive, in the broadest Dorian, on the extraordinary death of Eschylus. Probably the unhappy poet was murdered by some enemy or some robber. He was found with his skull fractured, and, may-be, with a tortoise near him. But who in the world can believe that an eagle dropped it from above? that the quickest in sight of all animals mistook a bald head for a rock? And did ever man walk in the fields of Sicily with his head uncovered? If he did, his death might easily be accounted for, without a tortoise or eagle: a sunbeam is stronger and surer. Whenever I find a book containing this gross absurdity, I instantly throw it aside, as the effusion of an idle and silly writer, and am well assured it must be incapable of instructing or interesting me. The petulant author of the verses you will find below, is evidently a disappointed poet. Hiero and Theron could never treat Eschylus with neglect or with indifference. Little as may be our regard and our respect for royalty, we hardly can suppose any king, who knows Greek, so barbarous and stupid as to fancy in himself a nobility more exalted than in Eschylus, or gifted by the Gods with a higher office, than stewardship to the greatest of men among whom he himself is the Thinking of you, I had forgotten that I began to write in favour of Alcibiades. Lest, by taxing him with impetuosity and imprudence, you should alienate his fickle mind, I myself have written to him with quite enough severity: at least I think so you shall judge for yourself. When you have perused it, let it go to him instantly; for here we are uncertain at what point the troops will land from Potidea. I shall be grieved if anything happens to him. He has more life in him than is enough to animate a city; yet the point of an arrow may extinguish it in an instant. With richest. however long experience before us, we yet might wonder that what is so animated should ever cease at all. You men often talk of glorious death, of death met bravely for your country: I too have been warmed by the bright idea in oratory and poetry: but ah! my dear Pericles! I would rather read it on an ancient tomb than on a recent one. CCXVI. PERICLES TO ASPASIA. I had already warned Alcibiades of his imprudence and irregularity; but your letter will ensure his correction. The reply he sent me is worthy of a man formed for command. We must watch over him he will do great good or great evil. Those who are most capable of both, always end miserably; for, although they may have done many things well, yet the first or second that they do badly is their ruin. They know not whom to choose as their follower up the scaling-ladder, nor when to loosen their grasp of the pinnacle. Intractable as you may think Alcibiades, there is not a youth in Athens so easily led away by a weaker judgment than his own. He wishes to excell in everything, and succeeds: but this wish brings him into contact with too many; and he can not at present push them off far enough from him to see plainly and distinctly what they are. He will soon stand above them and know them better. I must leave off: the dying call me forth. Blessings on my Aspasia and her little Athenian! Bard of Eleusis! art thou dead A tortoise? no, not he. They who devised the fable, marr'd But placed the creature wrong. I have room enough for another short piece, which carries with it somewhat more than the dialect for a testimonial of its atticism. They who are ill-trained in the course of poetry, pu and blow, as the trainers express it, at short distances: they who are trained better, move with little difficulty and no appearance of exertion. Strength does not lie in varicose veins. This is, however, a subject which requires grace only. You like to drink water; but you like to drink it from a silver cup. TO LOVE. Where is my heart, perfidious boy? I ask no more for hours of joy ; Fond man! the heart we rashly gave CCXVII. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. The verses I shall presently write out for you, CCXVIII. CLEONE TO ASPASIA. The Athenians, my dear Aspasia, are reported at the bottom of my letter, are composed, as you to be a religious people; yet I have often wondered appears to be a proof of it; for the writer seems to have treated him not only as a child, but a child much addicted to mischief; yet never was man treated in return with more benignity. I should tremble at the manner in which the Fates are mentioned, if matters were left at their arbitration. But we know the contrary: we know positively that they can spin only what is on their distaffs, and not a thread can be turned to a new pattern. at their freedom and boldness, in depriving the at least the warmth of my affection. I am inImmortal Gods of their power on some occasions, duced to believe, O Cleone, that the Deity you and on others in accosting them with familiarity venerate so profoundly and solemnly, is far from and disrespect. It would have been satisfactory unforgiving. In the verses I now send you, there to me if you had related what befell the unhappy man who presumed to call perfidious and boy one of the most powerful. Certainly we are inspired by our holy religion to believe that Love is youthful: but Anacreon is the only poet who represents him as a child. There is an absurdity in making him appear younger than we ourselves are when we begin to be under the influence of the passion. But the graver fault is in calling him (what I tremble to write) perfidious! You will relieve my mind of some anxiety by assuring me that nothing sinister has befallen so captious and irreverential a votary. If his fault is recent, and if he is yet living, it would be wise and considerate in him to implore the blessed mother of this almighty deity, that she may be pleased to avert his anger, should he not have forgotten the offence. I say it, because the most experienced and the most pious are of opinion that he is oftener oblivious. Was not he both wiser and more pious who wrote a poem in a very different spirit, and, whether more or less attic, fuller of thought, consistency, and reflection. If you have forgotten it, let me bring it back again, and fix it as firmly as may be in your memory: Ah! what a blessed privilege it is To stand upon this insulated rock Many at labour, many at a game Than labour more laborious, wanting breath Where is the harm in this? yet they meanwhile Aspasia! I too have suffered; and Love knows it yet I dare not even tell him that he knows it. To remind him would be indelicate; to complain would be irreligious. And what could all his power do for me now? But this, believe me, is not the reason why I endure in silence, and bend in submission to the arbitrement of the Gods. Surely, too surely, whoever has breathed has sighed. When we have lost, O Aspasia, those we love, whether by impassable distance or any other dispensation of the Gods, youth is less happy than age, and age than death. CCXIX. ASPASIA TO CLEONE. Youth, like the aloe, blossoms but once, and its flower springs from the midst of thorns: but see with what strength and to what height the aloeflower rises over them: be not surpassed by it. On love, on grief, on every human thing, I would be grave, Cleone! I would indeed but really there is no harm in laughing at children and old women, Gods or not. We know they have a good deal to do in the affairs of this world, however: and it is unwise to laugh at those who are as capable of extinguishing our laughter as of exciting it. "What art thou doing with those shears?" Who notched them and who made them grate, And scowl'd at every scratch they heard, In a dark corner thus all three Imprest on three still bluer lips. Crones! by my help your shears have got "And I by thee," CCXX. ALCIBIADES TO PERICLES. Pray why did you tell Phanomachos to station some confidential one near me, who should be an eternal check on me? There is little chance that I should do anything extravagant, unless the Potideans invite me to dinner and I accept the invitation. I will not allow any man to defend me before I stand in need of defence, and before I have deserved to save my life by proving it worth something. I should quarrel with Socrates himself, much moie with another, presuming to take what belongs to me, of danger or of glory. It is not kind in you, nor open, nor prudent. Would you wish anyone to say "Pericles takes care of his own relatives!" This ought only |