Chapter CLII: Section 2: They seated themselves upon his six-foot piazza; and Thyrsis,

who had very little sense of personality, and was altogether wrapped up in ideas, was soon in the midst of a free and easy discussion with them. It seemed ages since he had had an opportunity to exchange opinions with anyone except Corydon. With these people he roamed over the fields of literature; and as they found nothing to agree about anywhere, the conversation did not flag.

A strange experience it must have been to them, to come to a lonely shanty in the woods, and encounter a haggard boy, in a cotton-shirt and a pair of frayed trousers, who was all oblivious of their elegance, and unawed by their reputation, and who behaved like a bull in the china-shop of their orderly opinions. Mrs. Channing, it seemed, was completing her life-work, a volume which was to revolutionize current criticism, and lead the world back to artistic health; to her, modern civilization was a vast abortion, and in Greek culture was to be sought the fountain-head of health. She sang the praises of Athenian literature and art and life; there was sanity and clarity, there was balance and serenity! And to compare it with the jangled confusion and the frantic strife of modern times!

To which Thyrsis answered, “We’d best let modern times alone. For here you’ve all facts and no generalization; and in the case of the Greeks you’ve all generalization and no facts.”

And so they went at it, hot and heavy. Mrs. Channing, her Greek serenity somewhat ruffled, insisted that she had studied the facts for herself. The other proceeded to probe into her equipment, and found that she knew Homer and Sophocles, but did not know Aristophanes so well, and did not know the Greek epigrams at all. Thyrsis maintained that the dominant note in the Greek heritage was one of bewilderment and despair; in support of which alarming opinion he carried the discussion from the dreams of Greek literature to the realities of Greek life. Did Mrs. Channing know how the Greeks had persecuted all their great thinkers?

Did she know anything about the cruelties of their slave-code?

“Have you ever studied Greek politics?” he asked. “Do you realize, for instance, that it was the custom of statesmen and generals who were defeated by their political rivals, to go over to the enemy and lead an expedition against their homes?”

“Isn’t that putting it rather strongly?” asked Mrs. Channing.

“I don’t think so,” he answered. “Didn’t the conquerors of both Salamis and Platasa afterwards sell out to the Persian king? And then you talk about the noble ideal of woman which the Greeks developed! Don’t you know that it was nothing but a literary tradition?”

“I had never understood that,” said Mrs. Channing.

To which the other answered: “It was handed down from imaginary Homeric days. The Greek lady of the Periclean age was a domestic prisoner and drudge.”