the victor's form, while he obtained in him a model, usually of the
very highest type, for perfecting his idea of some divinity. The
possibility of gaining the right to a statue gave a fresh impulse to
all competitors in the public games, and through them to the
gymnastic training throughout all the states of Greece, which made
the Greeks the most physically able and graceful, as well as the most
beautiful people known to the history of the human race,--a people
who, reverencing beauty, reverenced likewise grace or acted beauty,
so utterly and honestly, that nothing was too humble for a free man
to do, if it were not done awkwardly and ill. As an instance,
Sophocles himself--over and above his poetic genius, one of the most
cultivated gentlemen, as well as one of the most exquisite musicians,
dancers, and gymnasts, and one of the most just, pious, and gentle of
all Greece--could not, by reason of the weakness of his voice, act in
his own plays, as poets were wont to do, and had to perform only the
office of stage-manager. Twice he took part in the action, once as
the blind old Thamyris playing on the harp, and once in his own lost
tragedy, the "Nausicaa." There in the scene in which the Princess,
as she does in Homer's "Odyssey," comes down to the sea-shore with
her maidens to wash the household clothes, and then to play at ball--
Sophocles himself, a man then of middle age, did the one thing he
could do better than any there--and, dressed in women's clothes,
among the lads who represented the maidens, played at ball before the
Athenian people.

Just sixty years after the representation of the "Antigone," 10,000
Greeks, far on the plains of Babylon, cut through the whole Persian
army, as the railway train cuts through a herd of buffalo, and then
losing all their generals by treacherous warfare, fought their way
north from Babylon to Trebizond on the Black Sea, under the guidance