The Collected Works of Benedict de Spinoza

Temira left for Melenki. I watched for a long time at the gate that let out the carriage-cart in which she was taken; the day was dead-autumnal. Sadly, I returned to my little room and opened a book. An old friend... again a book, only a book remained a companion; I began to carefully reread Greek and Roman history. Of course, I did not take up history as a book of nations, a mirror of this and that, but again as a novel, and I read it with the same method—that is, by stepping onto the stage in the Acropolis and the Forum myself. It is even more a matter of course that Greece and Rome, reconstructed according to Ségur, were absurd, yet they were alive and corresponded to the needs of that time. The theatrical exaggerations of all those Curtiuses throwing themselves into chasms that do not exist at all, or Scaevolas burning their hands up to the elbow, etc., I did not notice, but I understood their civic virtues. It is in vain that people nowadays rise up against the old method of teaching ancient history at length to children; it is an aesthetic school of morality. The great men of Greece and Rome possess that striking, plastic, artistic beauty that is imprinted forever on 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 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, 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. Even the triune architecture of Greece has a parallel with the heroes of its three epochs; so closely was the elegant fused with their lives. Are the Homeric heroes not like Doric columns, solid and artless? Are the heroes of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars not akin to the Ionian style, just as the effeminate Alcibiades is like a delicate, curly Corinthian column? Let these highly elegant statues meet the youth at his first step into the realm of consciousness, and from the height of their greatness, may they instill in him the first lessons of civic virtues.