Athens stood with her marbles glistening
by the blue AEgean, and Greek girls with fillets and sandals--the
living images of those pale sculptured shapes that are the mournful
eternity of Art--Greek girls were being chosen for the secret rites in
the temple at Ephesus. The sun of Italy had not yet browned the little
children who were to become the brown fathers and mothers of the brown
soldiers of Caesar's legions; and twenty miles south of Rome, in the
sacred grove of Dodona,--where the motions of oak boughs were
auguries, and the flappings of the wings of white doves were divine
messages, and the tinkling of bells in the foliage had divine
meanings,--in this grove the virgins of Latium, as the Greek girls of
Ephesus, were once a year appointed to undergo similar rites. To the
south Pompeii, with its night laughter and song sounding far out
toward the softly lapping Mediterranean and up the slopes of its dread
volcano, drained its goblet and did not care, emptied it as often as
filled and asked for nothing more. A little distance off Herculaneum,
with its tender dreams of Greece but with its arms around the
breathing image of Italy, slept--uncovered.
"Beyond Italy to the north, on the other side of the eternal snowcaps,
lay unknown Gaul, not yet dreaming of the Caesar who was to conquer
it; and across the wild sea opposite Gaul lay the wooded isle of
Britain.
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