her for all time to the service of man.  The idea of a canal teased Julius Caesar, and Nero, with purple pomp, began to cut the rock; and yet the land still stands between the eastern and the western seas, limiting commerce, exhausting energies.  When Panathenaic games are no longer held in the Stadion, when Apollo speaks clearest from other oracles than Delphi, Greeks will be building ships; Asia Minor, Egypt and India will be sending their treasures to Italy; the passage from east to west will be utilised.  I should have done a thing for all time, not for ourselves.”

The speaker paused as his hot eyes swept over his guests.  Then he rushed on again: 

“But I can see from your faces that this illustration does not convince you.  To you the canal is even less important than a new facade for the well-house of Corinthian Peirene.  Let me try again.  I have heard people say what a satisfaction it must be to me to play a conspicuous part in the life of our own generation.  But what is the life of our generation—­the life, I mean, in which I have any individual share?  My contribution is in art and literature, not in politics or war.  And in art and literature what are we doing, save recalling in vague echoes the greater voices of a dead past?  Even Lucian here, who is the only original of us all in letters, even Ptolemy, who is a master in science, will agree with me.  Our greatness is of the past.

“Look at the statues in the theatre!  AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides surrounded by what a horde of little moderns!  Menander standing cheek by jowl with a poetaster!  The Emperors have dallied with us, wanting the gifts we bear to the Empire.  The Roman Republic saw to it that we should bring no new gifts.  The trees in Aristotle’s Lyceum were cut down by Sulla to make his engines of war.  When he turned these engines on the Acropolis, Athena’s golden lamp went out.

“I was consul once at Rome, but few will remember it of me, for it was not the real I that did that work.  But I was doing, I sometimes think, a more real thing than when I try to clothe Athens again with the glory of Pericles’s age or seek in long lost quarries for my prose style.  I envied divine Hadrian his faith in a restoration.  His pride in Rome seemed really equalled by his passionate sentiment for Athens and his determination to make her once more the nurse of the arts.  Commerce and wealth have swept by us to Egypt.  Ships put in at Piraeus merely for repairs, and no longer, as in the great past, pay a part of their cargoes to Athens, a fee of harbourage.  Learning, too, has swept eastward.  Librarians and learned men dwell at Alexandria.  Hadrian asked me to help him reawaken in Athens Apollo and his Muses.  The restorer’s buildings are round about you, his library and temples, in their new splendour typical of his hope.  But wherein, after all, lies the greatness of the greatest of them?  The Temple of Zeus imposes chiefly, I think, by its