"I have," she said, "for we women have only room for one, and you've put yourself in my heart. I'm glad you don't think me bony, but fancy you caring for a curve of flesh so much. Men are funny things. No woman would so overprize a mere outline-your praise and his blame both show the same spirit."
"Yet desire is born of admiration," I corrected.
"My desire is born of yours," she replied. "But a woman's love is better and different: it is of the heart and soul."
"But the body gives the key," I said, "and makes intimacy divine!"
I found several unlocked for and unimaginable benefits in this mouthworship.
First of all, I could give pleasure to any extent without exhausting or even tiring myself. It thus enabled me to atone completely and make up for my steadily decreasing virility. Secondly, I discovered that by teaching me the most sensitive parts of the woman, I was able even in the ordinary way to give my mistresses more and keener pleasure than ever before. I had all the joy of coming into a new kingdom of delight with increased vigour. Moreover, as I have said, it taught me to know every woman more intimately than I had known any up to that time, and I soon found that they liked me better than even in the first flush of inexhaustible youth.
Later I learned other devices but none so important as this first discovery which showed me once for all how superior art is to nature.
The Sacred Band For I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs And the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns.
After studying in Athens for some months, I heard of a club where university professors and some students met and talked classic Greek. A mistake or even an awkwardness of expression was anathema, and out of this reverence for the language of Plato and Sophocles there grew a desire to make the modern tongue resemble the old one as nearly as possible. It was impossible to bring back into common use the elaborate syntax; the subtle, shading particles too were lost forever; but it was sought to use words in their old meaning so exactly that even today Xenophon could read the daily paper in Athens and understand it without difficulty.
This assimilation was only possible because the spoken language of the Greeks, e koine dialektos, had for many centuries existed side by side with the literary tongue. The spoken dialect had been preserved in the New Testament and in the Church services, and so it came easy for learned and enthusiastic Grecians to keep the language of the common people as like that of Plato as possible; and the race is so extraordinarily intelligent that even the peasant, who has always called a horse alogos (the brainless one), knows that ippos is a finer word for the same animal. And though the common pronunciation is not exactly that of classic times, still it is a great deal nearer the antique pronunciation than any English or even Erasmic imitation. The modern Greek does use his accents correctly, and anyone who has learned to do that by ear can appreciate the cadence of classic Greek poetry and prose far more perfectly than any scholar who only reads for the rhythm of long and short syllables.
I think it was Raikes told a story that illustrated a side of this Greek ambition for me. Professor Blackie, a well-known Scotch historian and Philhellene, came out to Athens on a visit and spoke in the Piraeus. Raikes went to hear him with a distinguished university professor who was one of the leaders of the Hellenic movement. After listening to Blackie for a while, the Greek professor turned to Raikes and said, "I had no idea that English sounded so well."
"But he's speaking modern Greek," said Raikes.
"Good God!" cried the professor, "I'd never have guessed that; I've not understood a single word of it."
One experience of this time I must relate shortly, for it had an enormous, a disproportionate influence on my whole outlook and way of reading the past.
Everyone knows that Plutarch was born at Chaeroneia, and in my wanderings on foot through Attica I stayed for some days in a peasant's house on the plain.
When Philip of Macedon and Alexander, his son, afterwards called the Great, invaded Attica, they came almost as barbarians and the city of Thebes had to bear the first shock. Plutarch tells how three hundred Theban youths of the best families came together and took a solemn oath that they would put a stop to Philip's astonishing career of conquest or die in the attempt. The forces met at Chaeroneia, and Philip's new order, the famous phalanx, carried all before it. In vain the three hundred youths dashed themselves against it; time and again they were beaten back and the phalanx drove on. In the bed of a river, the "Sacred Band," as they were called, o ieros lochos, made their supreme effort and perished to the last man; and after the battle, we are told, the noble three hundred were buried in one grave by their parents in Thebes.
The course of the river, Plutarch says, was turned aside so that they might all be interred on the very spot where their final assault had failed.
Everyone knows that in our day there was a gigantic marble lion at Chaeroneia. The Turks in their time had heard that there was money in it, so they blew it up to get the treasure, but they found nothing, and no one could understand what the lion of Chaeroneia was doing in the centre of a deserted plain, far away from any village.
At a big meeting of the Classic Greek Society, I declared my belief that the lion of Chaeroneia was an excellent specimen of antique work carved in classic times. I believed it had been erected over the barrow of the "Sacred Band," and if excavations were carried out, I felt sure that the grave of the heroes would be discovered. Greek patriotism took fire at the suggestion; a banker and friend offered to defray the expenses and we went up to Chaeroneia to begin the work. There was no river at Chaeroneia, but a shallow brook, the Thermodon, was a couple of hundred yards away from the fragments of the lion. On studying the ground closely, I was insistent that a long grass-grown depression in the ground near the lion should be laid open first, arguing always that the lion would prove to have been erected on the grave itself; and soon the barrow was discovered.
Four stone walls a foot or so broad and six feet or so in height had been built in the form of an elongated square, resting on the shingle of an old river bed, and therein like sardines we found the bodies, or rather, the skeletons of the "Sacred Band." The first thing we noticed was the terrible wounds sustained in the conflict; here, for example, was a skeleton with three ribs smashed on one side while the head of the spear that killed him was jammed between a rib and the backbone; another had his backbone broken by a vigorous spearthrust and one side of his head beaten in as well. The next thing that struck us was that the teeth in all the skeletons were excellently preserved and in almost perfect order. Clearly our inferiority in this respect must be due to our modern, cooked food.
We counted two hundred and ninety-seven skeletons, and in one corner there was a little pile of ashes, evidently of the three who had survived longest and were finally cremated. At one side of the oblong enclosure there was a solid piece of masonry some ten feet square, plainly the pedestal of the lion which was placed there couchant, looking away over the bodies of the dead towards Thebes in eternal remembrance of the heroism of the youths who had given their lives in defence of their fatherland. A "Sacred Band," indeed!
So, the poetic legend that this modern historian and that could not even take seriously was found to be strictly and exactly true, a transcript of the facts. It all helped to make the work of the writer precious to me and vivified the past for me in such a way that I began to read other books, and notably the New Testament, in a different spirit. German scholars had taught me that Jesus was a mythical figure: his teaching a mish-mash of various traditions and religions and myths. He was not an historical personage in any way, they declared; the three synoptic Gospels were all compiled from 50 to 80 years after the events, and John was certainly later still.