“But beneath the cloak what is there?  What, I mean, has there been for me?  If it is true that success is to be measured by the fulfilment of desires, then through all these years I have but stood by the bank of the Danube.  You know that I am an exemplar, fit for a schoolboy’s rhetorical exercise, of the old lesson of life, that wealth and power do not bring fruition in the intimate affections and hopes.  My son, my daughter, have died.[3] The only son left to me is a daily torture to my pride.  The disciples I took into their places have died.  The statues of them which I set up at Marathon no longer comfort me.  Like Menelaus, I have learned to hate the empty hollows of their eyes where ‘Love lies dead.’

[Footnote 3:  It was after the date assumed for this dinner that Regilla, the Roman wife of Herodes Atticus, died under peculiarly tragic circumstances.  In commemoration of her he built his famous Odeum on the south slope of the Acropolis.]

“All these things you have been taught by history to discount.  Barrenness in the personal life is the price many a man has paid for public honours.  Fortune must preserve an equilibrium among us.  No man is blessed in everything.  That you know from the Horace of your own school days.  But, seldom hearing men speak the truth, you may not know that to some of us, at least, there is no return for the price we pay.  When we give up juggling with facts for the sake of performing the work of the world, we know that, instead of achievement,

  Mournful phantoms of dreams are there,
  Fancies as vain as the joys they bear,
  Vain—­for think we that good has neared,
  It slips through the hand or e’er ’t has appeared,
  And the vision has vanished on wings that keep
    Company on the paths of sleep.

“I can make you see this in my own life by an illustration which may surprise you.  Some of you have envied me my power to enrich and beautify Greece.  You imagine that I myself find some satisfaction in the white marble over the Stadion in Athens, in the water works in Olympia, where we no longer drink in fevers, in the embellishments at Delphi, in the theatre at Corinth.  You think it a great thing that I can, by turning to my money, create memorials to myself in the greater comfort of cities of Asia Minor and of Italy.  But I tell you that all these things are nothing to me because the only thing I want to do for my country is to connect the two seas at Corinth by a canal cut through the solid earth.  What is all the rest?  A playing with perishable materials, an erecting of ‘memorials’ which you and I find beautiful and serviceable, which in another hundred years may serve but to mark the transitoriness of our civilisation, and of which in five hundred years only traces will remain to be pointed out as Mycenae was pointed out to you, Alpheus, by a goatherd, driving his flocks where once was a city of gold.  My ‘success’ is of the moment.  My desire is for the conquest of nature herself, to bind