display of the world-wide power of Hadrian.  You see the statues of himself in and about it, raised by Rome and Carthage, by Corinth and Byzantium, by Miletus and Laodicea, by every city of the Empire, paying homage to an emperor who by some divine grace happened to prefer to be honoured by marble in Athens rather than to have gold sent to him in Rome.  How different is the Parthenon, still, after six hundred years, the embodiment of a common impulse of a free people!  Try as Hadrian would, he could not restore the art of the past.”

Atticus looked at the Romans among the company and his voice became golden and persuasive as he continued: 

“I have come to feel, my friends, that the restoration of an art that is not the outcome of a genuine national life is a futile thing.  Rome cannot restore the glory of old Athens.  She can only learn from Greece how to create a glory of her own.  She must so govern her life, so train her sons, that out of their own impulses a new poetry, a new art will grow.  Divine influences from the past, yes, they exist.  In your own most creative times Cicero and Lucretius, Virgil and Horace, did more than restore.  Seeking aliment from Greece, they nurtured their own genius.  But you, what are you and your friends doing?  Why are you over here?  Tell me that.  Are you here to learn to be better Romans, carrying on your own national life, creating at last out of the forces of your own time an architecture and sculpture, a painting and poetry commensurate with your powers?  Sometimes I fear you make a cult of Athens, lose yourselves in remembering her as she once was.  You seem to spend your lives, as I have sometimes spent wakeful nights at Marathon, my birthplace, listening for the feet of heroes and the neighing of horses on the field where a great battle was once fought.  That may do for the night seasons, but with the sun are there not new conquests, and new shields?

“You scorn your own Romans who come over here and put up their names on old statues of Themistocles and Miltiades.  You admire Cicero who, although he loved Athens and wished that he might leave here some gift from himself, scorned to pervert an ancient statue.  And yet, I tell you, Cicero was a Roman first, a lover of Greek culture second.  All that he learned here he dedicated to the Republic.  He studied Isocrates and Demosthenes in order that by his voice he might free Rome from traitors and persuade Justice to ’walk down her broad highways as Warder.’  He read Plato that philosophy might soften the harsher temper of his own people.  He partook of our refinement that the vigour of Rome might be used in the service of humanity.

“Take warning by me.  Do not, indeed, forget our past.  Stay here as long as you will.  Touch lingeringly the hem of Athena’s peplos.  But when your minds are strengthened, when your powers are matured, go back to your own people and make them also, because you have dwelt for a time in the home of Plato, look ’to the pattern that is laid up in heaven for him who wills to see, and, seeing, so to plant his dwelling.’  Work for Rome.  Let the memory of Athens be no cup of eastern magic.  Listen, rather, for her voice as worshippers at the salt well on the Acropolis listen, when the south wind blows, for the sound of the waves of the purging sea.”