• TWO:"I am going to take this man with me," said Lalage as he rose. "He is known to you all, and you have marked him well. In his way he will betray us if he can. He will not go to the police, because they may ask awkward questions, and as like as not there is a warrant out for his arrest also. But he is a man of many ideas. If anything happens to me, repeat it to the Brotherhood at the headquarters. After that I would not give a week for the life of this Balmayne."The glowing enthusiasm of Plato is, however, not entirely derived from the poetic traditions of his native city; or perhaps we should rather say that he and the great writers who preceded him drew from a common fount of inspiration. Mr. Emerson, in one of the most penetrating criticisms ever written on our philosopher,129 has pointed out the existence of two distinct elements in the Platonic Dialogues��one dispersive, practical, prosaic; the other mystical, absorbing, centripetal. The American scholar is, however, as we think, quite mistaken when he attributes the second of these tendencies to Asiatic influence. It is extremely doubtful whether Plato ever travelled farther east than Egypt; it is probable that his stay in that country was not of long duration; and it is certain that he did not acquire a single metaphysical idea from its inhabitants. He liked their rigid conservatism; he liked their institution of a dominant priesthood; he liked their system of popular education, and the place which it gave to mathematics made him look with shame on the ��swinish ignorance�� of his own countrymen in that respect;130 but on the whole he classes them among the races exclusively devoted to money-making, and in aptitude for philosophy he places them far below the Greeks. Very different were the impressions brought home from his visits to Sicily and204 Southern Italy. There he became acquainted with modes of thought in which the search after hidden resemblances and analogies was a predominant passion; there the existence of a central unity underlying all phenomena was maintained, as against sense and common opinion, with the intensity of a religious creed; there alone speculation was clothed in poetic language; there first had an attempt been made to carry thought into life by associating it with a reform of manners and beliefs. There, too, the arts of dance and song had assumed a more orderly and solemn aspect; the chorus received its final constitution from a Sicilian master; and the loftiest strains of Greek lyric poetry were composed for recitation in the streets of Sicilian cities or at the courts of Sicilian kings. Then, with the rise of rhetoric, Greek prose was elaborated by Sicilian teachers into a sort of rhythmical composition, combining rich imagery with studied harmonies and contrasts of sense and sound. And as the hold of Asiatic civilisation on eastern Hellas grew weaker, the attention of her foremost spirits was more and more attracted to this new region of wonder and romance. The stream of colonisation set thither in a steady flow; the scenes of mythical adventure were rediscovered in Western waters; and it was imagined that, by grasping the resources of Sicily, an empire extending over the whole Mediterranean might be won. Perhaps, without being too fanciful, we may trace a likeness between the daring schemes of Alcibiades and the more remote but not more visionary kingdom suggested by an analogous inspiration to the idealising soul of Plato. Each had learned to practise, although for far different purposes, the royal art of Socrates��the mastery over men��s minds acquired by a close study of their interests, passions, and beliefs. But the ambition of the one defeated his own aim, to the destruction of his country and of himself; while the other drew into Athenian thought whatever of Western force and fervour was needed for the accomplishment of its205 imperial task. We may say of Plato what he has said of his own Theaet��tus, that ��he moves surely and smoothly and successfully in the path of knowledge and inquiry; always making progress like the noiseless flow of a river of oil��;131 but everywhere beside or beneath that placid lubricating flow we may trace the action of another current, where still sparkles, fresh and clear as at first, the fiery Sicilian wine.

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• TWO:

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• TWO:Yet another step remained to take. Punishment must be transferred from a man��s innocent children to the man himself in a future life. But the Olympian theology was, originally at least, powerless to effect this revolution. Its gods, being personifications of celestial phenomena, had nothing to do with the dark underworld whither men descended after death. There existed, however, side by side with the brilliant religion of courts and camps which Greek poetry has made so familiar to us, another religion more popular with simple country-folk,53 to whom war meant ruin, courts of justice a means invented by kings for exacting bribes, sea-voyages a senseless imprudence, chariot-racing a sinful waste of money, and beautiful women drones in the human hive, demons of extravagance invented by Zeus for the purpose of venting his spite against mankind. What interest could these poor people take in the resplendent guardians of their hereditary oppressors, in H��r�� and Ath��n��, Apollo and Poseid?n, Artemis and Aphrodit��? But they had other gods peculiar to themselves, whose worship was wrapped in mystery, partly that its objects need not be lured away by the attraction of richer offerings elsewhere, partly because the activity of these Chthonian deities, as they were called, was naturally associated with darkness and secresy. Presiding over birth and death, over seed-time and harvest and vintage, they personified the frost-bound sleep of vegetation in winter and its return from a dark underworld in spring. Out of their worship grew stories which told how Persephon��, the fair daughter of D��m��t��r, or Mother Earth, was carried away by Pluto to reign with him over the shades below, but after long searching was restored to her mother for eight months in every year; and how Dionysus, the wine-god, was twice born, first from67 the earth burned up and fainting under the intolerable fire of a summer sky, respectively personified as Semel�� and her lover Zeus, then from the protecting mist wrapped round him by his divine father, of whom it formed a part. Dionysus, too, was subject to alternations of depression and triumph, from the recital of which Attic drama was developed, and gained a footing in the infernal regions, whither we accompany him in the Frogs of Aristophanes. Another country god was Herm��s, who seems to have been associated with planting and possession as well as with the demarcation and exchange of property, and who was also a conductor of souls to Hades. Finally, there were the Erinyes, children of night and dwellers in subterranean darkness; they could breed pestilence and discord, but could also avert them; they could blast the produce of the soil or increase its luxuriance and fertility; when blood was spilt on the ground, they made it blossom up again in a harvest of retributive hatred; they pursued the guilty during life, and did not relax their grasp after death; all law, whether physical or moral, was under their protection; the same Erinyes who, in the Odyssey, avenge on Oedipus the suicide of his mother, in the Iliad will not allow the miraculous speaking of a horse to continue; and we have seen in the last chapter how, according to Heracleitus, it is they who also prevent the sun from transgressing his appointed limits.54 D��m��t��r and Persephon��, too, seem to have been law-giving goddesses, as their great festival, celebrated by women alone, was called the Thesmophoria, while eternal happiness was promised to those who had been initiated into their mysteries at Eleusis; and we also find that moral maxims were graven on the marble busts of Herm��s placed along every thoroughfare in Athens. We can thus understand why the mutilation of these Hermae caused such68 rage and terror, accompanied, as it was rumoured to be, by a profanation of the Eleusinian mysteries; for any attack on the deities in question would seem to prefigure an attack on the settled order of things, the popular rights which they both symbolised and protected.Matters stood so in Li��ge on the morning of August 9th, when the second day of the occupation by the Germans had not yet passed. The Belgian field army, which had bravely defended the ground under the protection of the forts, and inflicted heavy losses upon the Germans, had to retreat before their superior numbers, leaving the further defence of the Meuse to the forts. But a high price had been paid for Li��ge, for the German losses were immense, and on the ninth they were still busy burying their dead. The Germans lost many men, especially near Lixhe and the Forts Bachon and Fleron.

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