The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

Temira left for Melenki. I watched for a long time at the gates that had let through the carriage-cart in which she was taken away; the day was dead-autumnal. Sadly, I returned to my little room and opened a book. An old friend... again a book, one book remained as a companion; I began to carefully reread Greek and Roman history. Of course, I did not set about history as I did 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 the stage myself in the acropolis and on the forum. It is even more a matter of course that the Greece and Rome reconstructed according to Ségur were absurd, but they were alive and corresponded to the needs of the time. The theatrical pretenses of all these Curtiuses throwing themselves into non-existent abysses, of Scaevolas burning their arms up to the elbows, etc., I did not notice, but I understood their civic virtues. It is in vain that people now rise up against the old method of teaching ancient history at length to children: this is an aesthetic school of morality. The great men of Greece and Rome have within themselves that striking, plastic, artistic beauty which is forever imprinted on the young soul. That is why those 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 imbued with the elegant that its greatest men are like works of art. Do they not remind one, for instance, of the bright world of Greek architecture? The same clarity, harmony, simplicity, youthfulness, bountiful sky, pure childish conscience; even the facial features of Plutarch's heroes are as wonderfully elegant, open, and full of thought as the pediments and porticos of the Parthenon. The very triple architecture of Greece has a parallel with the heroes of its three epochs; thus, the elegant was closely fused for them with their life. Are the Homeric heroes not like Doric columns, solid and unadorned? 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