The Remaining Works of Benedict de Spinoza

Temira left for Melenki. I watched for a long time at the gate that had let through the carriage-cart in which they had taken her away; the day was dead-autumnal. I sadly returned to my little room and opened a book. An old friend... a book again, only a book remained a companion; I began to carefully re-read Greek and Roman history. Naturally, I did not set about history as a book of nations, a mirror of this and that, but again as a novel, and I read it by the same method, that is, appearing on stage myself in the acropolis and on the forum. Even more naturally, Greece and Rome, reconstructed according to Ségur original: "Ségur", were absurd, but they were alive and corresponded to the needs of that time. I did not notice the theatrical affectations of all those Curtiuses throwing themselves into non-existent abysses, of Scaevolas burning their arms to the elbow, etc., but I understood their civic virtues. In vain do people today protest against the former method of teaching ancient history to children in great detail: it is an aesthetic school of morality. The great men of Greece and Rome possess that striking, plastic, artistic beauty that is imprinted forever in the young soul. That is why these majestic shadows of Themistocles, Pericles, and Alexander accompany us through our whole life, just as they themselves were accompanied by the majestic images of Zeus and Apollo. In Greece, everything was so permeated with the elegant that its greatest men are like works of art. Do they not remind one, for example, of the bright world of Greek architecture? The same clarity, harmony, simplicity, youthfulness, blessed sky, pure childish conscience; even the facial features of Plutarch's heroes are as wonderfully elegant, open, and filled with thought as the pediments and porticos of the Parthenon. The very triad of Greek architecture has a parallel with the heroes of its three epochs; so closely was the elegant fused with their life. Are the Homeric heroes not Doric columns, solid and without artifice? Are the heroes of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars not akin to the Ionic style, just as the effeminate Alcibiades is like a thin, curly Corinthian column? Let these highly