The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

— 22 —

Temira left for Melenki. I looked for a long time at the gates that had let through the carriage in which she was taken away; the day was deathly-autumnal. Sadly, I returned to my little room and opened a book. An old friend... once again a book, only a book remained as a companion; I began to carefully re-read Greek and Roman history. Of course, I did not approach history as a book of peoples, a mirror of this and that, but again as a novel, and I read it according to the same method, that is, appearing myself on the scene 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 that time. I did not notice the theatrical pretenses of all those Curtiuses throwing themselves into non-existent abysses, or Scaevolas burning their arms to the elbows, etc., but I understood their civic virtues. Nowadays, people wrongly revolt against the old method of teaching ancient history to children at length: it is an aesthetic school of morality. The great men of Greece and Rome possess that striking, plastic, artistic beauty which is imprinted forever in a 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 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? It has the same clarity, harmony, simplicity, youthfulness, and blessed sky, a pure child-like 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 tripartite architecture of Greece has a parallel with the heroes of its three epochs; the elegant was so closely welded to 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 akin to the thin, curly Corinthian column? Let these highly