hear him with a distinguished university professor who was one of the leaders of the Hellenic movement. After listening to Blackie for a while, the Greek professor turned to Raikes and said, 'I had no idea that English sounded so well.'
'But he's speaking modern Greek,' said Raikes.
'Good God!' cried the professor, 'I'd never have guessed that; I've not understood a single word of it.'
One experience of this time I must relate shortly, for it had an enormous, a disproportionate influence on my whole outlook and way of reading the past.
Everyone knows that Plutarch was born at Chaeroneia, and in my wanderings on foot through Attica I stayed for some days in a peasant's house on the plain.
When Philip of Macedon and Alexander, his son, afterwards called the Great, invaded Attica, they came almost as barbarians and the city of Thebes had to bear the first shock. Plutarch tells how three hundred Theban youths of the best families came together and took a solemn oath that they would put a stop to Philip's astonishing career of conquest or die in the attempt. The forces met at Chaeroneia, and Philip's new order, the famous phalanx, carried all before it. In vain the three hundred youths dashed themselves against it; time and again they were beaten back and the phalanx drove on. In the bed of a river, the 'Sacred Band,' as they were called, o ieros lochos, made their supreme effort and perished to the last man; and after the battle, we are told, the noble three hundred were buried in one grave by their parents in Thebes.
The course of the river, Plutarch says, was turned aside so that they might all be interred on the very spot where their final assault had failed.
Everyone knows that in our day there was a gigantic marble lion at Chaeroneia. The Turks in their time had heard that there was money in it, so they blew it up to get the treasure, but they found nothing, and no one could understand what the lion of Chaeroneia was doing in the centre of a deserted plain, far away from any village.
At a big meeting of the Classic Greek Society, I declared my belief that the lion of Chaeroneia was an excellent specimen of antique work carved in classic times. I believed it had been erected over the barrow of the 'Sacred Band,' and if excavations were carried out, I felt sure that the grave of the heroes would be discovered. Greek patriotism took fire at the suggestion; a banker and friend offered to defray the expenses and we went up to Chaeroneia to begin the work. There was no river at Chaeroneia, but a shallow brook, the Thermodon, was a couple of hundred yards away from the fragments of the lion. On studying the ground closely, I was insistent that a long grass-grown depression in the ground near the lion should be laid open first, arguing always that the lion would prove to have been erected on the grave itself; and soon the barrow was discovered.
Four stone walls a foot or so broad and six feet or so in height had been built in the form of an elongated square, resting on the shingle of an old river bed, and therein like sardines we found the bodies, or rather, the skeletons of the 'Sacred Band.' The first thing we noticed was the terrible wounds sustained in the conflict; here, for example, was a skeleton with three ribs smashed on one side while the head of the spear that killed him was jammed between a rib and the backbone; another had his backbone broken by a vigorous spearthrust and one side of his head beaten in as well. The next thing that struck us was that the teeth in all the skeletons were excellently preserved and in almost perfect order. Clearly our inferiority in this respect must be due to our modern, cooked food.
We counted two hundred and ninety-seven skeletons, and in one corner there was a little pile of ashes, evidently of the three who had survived longest and were finally cremated. At one side of the oblong enclosure there was a solid piece of masonry some ten feet square, plainly the pedestal of the lion which was placed there couchant, looking away over the bodies of the dead towards Thebes in eternal remembrance of the heroism of the youths who had given their lives in defence of their fatherland. A 'Sacred Band,' indeed!
So, the poetic legend that this modern historian and that could not even take seriously was found to be strictly and exactly true, a transcript of the facts. It all helped to make the work of the writer precious to me and vivified the past for me in such a way that I began to read other books, and notably the New Testament, in a different spirit. German scholars had taught me that Jesus was a mythical figure: his teaching a mish-mash of various traditions and religions and myths. He was not an historical personage in any way, they declared; the three synoptic Gospels were all compiled from 50 to 80 years after the events, and John was certainly later still.
The story of the 'Sacred Band' led me to use my brain on the person of Jesus as I had already used it on Shakespeare; and soon I found indubitable proof that Jesus was not only an historical personage, but could be studied in his words and works and realized in his habit as he lived. Tacitus and Josephus both were witnesses to his existence, and if the passage in Josephus has been added to, that of Tacitus is untouched and absolutely convincing: 'A certain fellow called Jesus' (Quidam Jesu) did certainly live and teach in Jerusalem and was there crucified as the 'King of the Jews' and 'Son of God!'
Not God or King to me in any superhuman sense, but flesh and bone, a man among men, though a sacred guide and teacher of the highest. As I read, the scales fell from my eyes, and I saw that this Jesus was blood- brother to Shakespeare: both weak in body: Jesus could not carry His Cross and was supposed to have died in the first few hours of agony; both too, called 'gentle'; both of incomparable speed and depth of thought and sweet loving-kindness of character. Read the Arthur of King John speaking to his executioner, Are you sick, Hubert? You look pale today:
In sooth, I would you were a little sick, That I might sit all night and watch with you.
I warrant I love you more than you do me, and then recall the sacred words, 'Suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of heaven!'
Surely these two men are of the same divine spirit.
In courage Jesus was the greater and accordingly came to a more dreadful end and to a loftier fame; but Shakespeare insists on the need of repentance and absolute forgiveness just as Jesus did: 'Pardon's the word for all.' My life was enriched by finding another sacred guide, but alas! I yielded to the new influence very reluctantly, and it was many years before the knowledge of the Christ began even to modify my character. But this gradual interpenetration is the dominant impulse in the next twenty years of my life and bit by bit led me to attempt that synthesis of paganism and the spirit of Jesus, which, it seems to me, must constitute the essential elements at least of 'the religion of the future!' For what is the spirit of Jesus but the certainty that God is just goodness and must be loved by all of us mortals!
The first duty of man or woman is purely pagan: each of us should develop all his faculties of body and mind and soul as harmoniously as possible. He should, too, secure the highest enjoyment possible from his gifts; but when he has thus, so to speak, reached the zenith of his accomplishment, he should study how to give the utmost possible help to his fellow-men and make 'the new commandment' of Jesus the chief purpose of his life.
Alas! To 'love one another' is a most difficult rule, unless we can remember that it is just to love what is good and to forgive the veiling faults. The best way to this all-comprehending love, I feel, is by dint of pity- 'good pity,'
Shakespeare calls it, and 'sacred pity,' 'holy pity' even, for it leads, he knew, to pardon and forgiveness. And this pity must needs result in redressing the worst injustices of life, and, above all, in levelling up the awful inequality that gives one child everything in unimaginable superfluity and denies to another just as gifted and healthy even decent conditions of living. The handicap of the rich and great is just as poisonously bad as the handicap of the poor that stunts the frame and impoverishes the blood. It is pity and loving sympathy that may amend in time the worst diseases of society. One would think that the knowledge of natural laws and the control of natural resources, while increasing enormously the productivity of bureaus, would of necessity improve the position of the labourer. So far that has not been the case: the greater power given us by the thinker and man of science has merely increased the inequality between the possessors and the hordes of the dispossessed. If that process continues, the race is doomed; but already those of us who have reached a certain plane of thought, even though they have found riches easy or hard to acquire, are on the side of the poor.
John Stuart Mill thought the remedy lay in heavy succession duties and it may be that this is the most practical way of attack; indeed, it looks as if it were, though I prefer the nationalization of the land and public utilities, such as railways and water and gas companies. Yet the succession duties in England since the World War have remained without serious objection at something like thirty-three per cent of the great inheritances. One thing is certain, in one way or other the worst inequalities must be ended. The overgreat individual liberty in England has led to the practical enslavement and degradation of the working classes. In 1837 only ten per cent of recruits were below five feet-six in height; in 1915 seventy per cent were below that height and even fifty per cent could not pass the puny physical standard required.
