They are country women, and their critic is probably a purist—­somebody who has studied Greek as it is pronounced and spoken in Athens.  But the women bravely resent this interference with their rights.

GORGO.  “Indeed!  And where may this person come from?  What is it to you if we are chatterboxes?  Give orders to your own servants, sir.  Do you pretend to command the ladies of Syracuse?  If you must know, we are Corinthians by descent, like Bellerophon himself, and we speak Peloponnesian.  Dorian women may lawfully speak Doric, I presume.”

This is enough to silence the critic, but the other young woman also turns upon him, and we may suppose that he is glad to escape from their tongues.  And then everybody becomes silent, for the religious services begin.  The priestess, a comely girl, chants the psalm of Adonis, the beautiful old pagan hymn, more beautiful and more sensuous than anything uttered by the later religious poets of the West; and all listen in delighted stillness.  As the hymn ends, Gorgo bursts out in exclamation of praise: 

“Praxinoe!  The woman is cleverer than we fancied!  Happy woman to know so much!—­Thrice happy to have so sweet a voice!  Well, all the same, it is time to be making for home; Diocleides has not had his dinner, and the man is all vinegar,—­don’t venture near him when he is kept waiting for dinner.  Farewell, beloved Adonis—­may you find us glad at your next coming.”

And with this natural mingling of the sentimental and the commonplace the little composition ends.  It is as though we were looking through some window into the life of two thousand years ago.  Read the whole thing over to yourselves when you have time to find the book in the library, and see how true to human nature it is.  There is nothing in it except the wonderful hymn, which does not belong to to-day as much as to the long ago, to modern Tokyo as much as to ancient Greece.  That is what makes the immortality of any literary production—­not simply truth to the life of one time, but truth to the life of every time and place.

Not many years ago there was discovered a book by Herodas, a Greek writer of about the same period.  It is called the “Mimes,” a series of little dramatic studies picturing the life of the time.  One of these is well worthy of rank with the idyl of Theocritus above mentioned.  It is the study of a conversation between a young woman and an old woman.  The young woman has a husband, who left her to join a military expedition and has not been heard of for several years.  The old woman is a go-between, and she comes to see the young person on behalf of another young man, who admires her.  But as soon as she states the nature of her errand, the young lady becomes very angry and feigns much virtuous indignation.  There is a quarrel.  Then the two become friends, and we know that the old woman’s coming is likely to bring about the result desired.  Now the wonder of this little study also is the play of emotion which it reveals.  Such emotions are common to all ages of humanity; we feel the freshness of this reflection as we read, to such a degree that we cannot think of the matter as having happened long ago.  Yet even the city in which these episodes took place has vanished from the face of the earth.