The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

Old, homeless, childless, that for thee must shed

Cold tears, so young, so miserably dead.

Dear God! the pattering welcomes of thy feet,

The nursing in my lap, and oh, the sweet

Falling asleep together! All is gone.

How should a poet carve the funeral stone

To tell thy story true? “There lieth here

A babe whom the Greeks feared, and in their fear Slew him.” Aye,Greece will bless the tale it tells! …

O vain is man,

Who glorieth in his joy and hath no fears;

While to and fro the chances of the years

Dance like an idiot in the wind!

(She wraps the child in the burial garments.)

Glory of Phrygian raiment,which my thought

Kept for thy bridal day with some far-sought

Queen of the East, folds thee for evermore….

And over the scene of desolation the tones of the Chorus float in melancholy song:

Beat, beat thine head;

Beat with the wailing chime

Of hands lifted in time;

Beat and bleed for the dead,Woe is me for the dead!

Here is all the power of Shakespeare, without his range and subtlety, but with a social passion that moves us as nothing in all modern drama can, except the dying Lear. This is a man strong enough to speak out, brave enough—in the very fever of war—to show its futile bestiality; brave enough to show the Greeks, to the Greeks, as barbarians in victory, and their enemies as heroes in defeat. “Euripides the human,” denouncer of slavery, critic and understanding defender of women, doubter of all certainties and lover of all men: no wonder the youth of Greece declaimed his lines in the streets, and captive Athenians won their freedom by reciting his plays from memory. “If I were certain that the dead have consciousness,” said the dramatist Philemon, “I would hang myself to see Euripides.” He had not the classic calm and objectivity of Sophocles, nor the stern sublimity of Aeschylus; he bore the same relation to these as the emotional Dostoievski to the impeccable Turgenev and the titanic Tolstoi. But it is in Dos-toievski that we find our secret hearts revealed, and our secret longing understood, and it is in Euripides that Greek drama, tired of Olympus, came down to earth and dealt revealingly with the affairs of men. “Have all the nations of the world since his time,” asked Goethe, “produced one dramatist worthy to hand him his slippers?” Just one.

4. LUCRETIUS Four centuries pass.We are in an old Italian villa, built by a rich nonentity named Memmius, far from the noise of Rome. Back of the house is a quiet court, walled in from the world and shaded against the burning sun. Here is a pretty picture: two lads sitting on a marble bench beside the pool, and between them their teacher, all animation and affection, reading to them some majestic and sonorous poem. Let us recline on the lawn and listen, for this is Lucretius, the greatest poet as well as the greatest philosopher of Rome, and what he reads is (says Professor Shotwell) “the most marvelous performance in all antique literature”—the De Rerum Natura, a poetical essay “On the Nature of Things.” He is reciting an apostrophe to Love as the source of all life and all creation: