Greek racial feeling to a pitch.  —­What! we could stand against huge Persia?—­then we are not unworthy of the men that fought at Ilion, our fathers; the race and spirit of anax andron Agamemnon is not dead!  Ha, we can do anything; there are no victories we may not win!  And here is the dead weight and terror of the war lifted from us; and there is no anxiety now to hold our minds.  We may go forth conquering and to conquer; we may launch our triremes on immaterial seas, and subdue unknown empires of the spirit!—­And here is Athens the quick-witted, hegemon of Greece; her ships everywhere on the wine-dark seas; her citizens everywhere; her natural genius swelled by an enormous sense of achievement; her soul, grown great under a great stress, now freed from the stress and at leisure to explore:—­in contact with opposite-minded Sparta; in contact with conservative and somewhat luxuriously-living slow Thebes;—­with a hundred other cities;—­in contact with proud Persia; with Egypt, fallen, but retaining a measure of her old profound sense of the Mysteries and the reality of the Unseen; —­from all these contacts and sources a spirit is born in Athens that is to astonish and illumine the world.  And Egypt is now in revolt from the Persian; and intercourse with her is easier than ever before in historical times; and the triremes, besides what spiritual cargoes they may be bringing in from her, are bringing in cargoes of honest material papyrus to tempt men to write down their thoughts.—­So the flowering of Greece became inevitable; the Law intended it, and brought about all the conditions.

IV—­AESCHYLUS AND HIS ATHENS

Greece holds such an eminence in history because the Crest-Wave rolled in there when it did.  She was tenant of an epochal time; whoever was great then, was to be remembered forever.  But the truth is, Greece served the future badly enough.

The sixth and fifth centuries B. C. were an age of transition, in which the world took a definite step downward.  There had been present among men a great force to keep the life of the nations sweet:  that which we call the Mysteries of Antiquity.  Whether they had been active continuously since this Fifth Root Race began, who can say?  Very possibly not; for in a million years cycles would repeat themselves, and I dare say conditions as desolate as our own have obtained.  There may have been withdrawals, and again expansions outward.  But certainly they were there at the dawn of history, and for a long time before.  What their full effect may have been, we can only guess; for when the history that we know begins, they were already declining:—­we get no definite news, except of the Iron Age.  The Mysteries were not closed at Eleusis until late in the days of the Roman Empire; and we know that such a great man as Julian did not disdain to be initiated.  But they were only a remnant then, an ever-indrawing source of inspiration; already a good century before