16.  But all these virtues mass themselves in the Greek mind into the two main ones,—­of Justice, or noble passion, and Fortitude, or noble patience; and of these, the chief powers of Athena, the Greeks have divinely written for them, and for all men after them, two mighty songs, —­one, of the Menis,* Mens, passion, or zeal, of Athena, breathed into a mortal whose name is “Ache of heart,” and whose short life is only the incarnate brooding and burst of storm; and the other is of the foresight and fortitude of Athena, maintained by her in the heart of a mortal whose name is given to him from a longer grief, Odysseus, the full of sorrow, the much enduring, and the long-suffering.

* This first word of the Iliad, Menis, afterwards passes into the Latin Mens; is the root of the Latin name for Athena, “Minerva,” and so the root of the English “mind.”

17.  The minor expressions by the Greeks in word, in symbol, and in religious service, of this faith, are so many and so beautiful, that I hope some day to gather at least a few of them into a separate body of evidence respecting the power of Athena, and of its relations to the ethical conception of the Homeric poems, or, rather, to their ethical nature; for they are not conceived didactically, but are didactic in their essence, as all good art is.  There is an increasing insensibility to this character, and even an open denial of it, among us now which is one of the most curious errors of modernism,—­the peculiar and judicial blindness of an age which, having long practised art and poetry for the sake of pleasure only, has become incapable of reading their language when they were both didactic; and also, having been itself accustomed to a professedly didactic teaching, which yet, for private interests, studiously avoids collision with every prevalent vice of its day (and especially with avarice), has become equally dead to the intensely ethical conceptions of a race which habitually divided all men into two broad classes of worthy or worthless,—­good, and good for nothing.  And even the celebrated passage of Horace about the Iliad is now misread or disbelieved, as if it were impossible that the Iliad could be instructive because it is not like a sermon.  Horce does not say that it is like a sermon, and would have been still less likely to say so if he ever had had the advantage of hearing a sermon.  “I have been reading that story of Troy again” (thus he writes to a noble youth of Rome whom he cared for), “quietly at Praeneste, while you have been busy at Rome; and truly I think that what is base and what is noble, and what useful and useless, may be better learned from that, than from all Chrysippus’ and Crantor’s talk put together."* Which is profoundly true, not of the Iliad only, but of all other great art whatsoever; for all pieces of such art are didactic in the purest way, indirectly and occultly, so that, first, you shall only be bettered by them if you are already hard at work in bettering