The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

Never was religious feeling so powerfully or so beautifully expressed; with language that remains, in English, a model of simplicity, clarity, and strength, and in Hebrew rings out in full organ tones of majesty; with phrases that are part of the currency of our speech (“out of the mouth of babes and sucklings,” “the apple of my eye,” “put not your trust in princes”); with passion and imagery as rich as even the Orient can give (the rising sun “is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race”). These are the finest songs ever written, and immeasurably the most influential; for two thousand years men have been moved by them as never even by songs of love; no wonder they were a solace to the Jews in suffering, and to the pioneers who made America. How like a mother’s lullaby, full of assurance and repose, is the most famous psalm of all:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they shall comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil;my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

3. EURIPIDES And now we are back in Greece, seated in the Theater of Dionysius, ready for Euripides. Row upon row of seats in stone semicircles, rising in widening sweep up the hill that bears on its peak the Parthenon. Restless on them sit thirty thousand Athenians; loose-togaed, passionate, talkative men, alive with feelings and ideas; the keenest audience that ever heard a poet or saw a play. Down toward the front, in chairs of carved and ornamented marble, are the officials of the city, and the priests of the tragic god. At the foot of the great amphitheater is a small slab-paved stage; behind it the actor’s booth, the skene or “scene.” Above it all, nothing but the sky and the unfailing sun. Far down, at the base of the hill, the blue Aegean smiles.

It is the year 415 B.C. Athens is deep in the Peloponnesian War, a war of Greek with Greek, shot through with all the ferocity of relatives. The reckless dramatist has chosen for his theme another war, the siege of Troy, and his friends (among whom is Socrates, who goes only to Euripides’ plays) have whispered that it will reverse Homer, and show the Trojan War from the viewpoint of the defeated and destroyed. Suddenly all is quiet: from the actor’s booth a figure appears, representing the God of the Sea, Poseidon; he stands uplifted by high shoes, speaks through a resounding mask, and intones the keynote of the play:

How are ye blind,

Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast

Temples to desolation, and lay waste

Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie

The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die.

(Was it this prologue that Socrates, as story goes, applauded so long that the actor consented to repeat it?)

The Greeks have killed Hector, and taken Troy; and Talthy-bius comes to take Hector’s wife Andromache, his sister the proud prophetess Cassandra, and his mother Hecuba, the white-haired Queen, to serve as slaves and mistresses to the Greeks. Hecuba beats her head in grief, and mourns:

Beat, beat the crownless head,

Rend the cheek till the tears run red!

A lying man and a pitiless

Shall be lord of me….

Oh, I will think of things gone long ago,

And weave them to a song….

O thou whose wound was deepest,

Thou that my children keepest,

Priam, Priam, O age-worn king,

Gather me where thou sleepest.

(TRANSLATION OF GILBERT MURRAY.)

Andromache tries to comfort her with the thought of suicide:

O mother, having ears, hear thou this word