Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/845

Rh his minority. Lucian, in his satires, describes kings as beggars or primary schoolmasters in the lower world. A comic writer is quoted as saying, "The man is either dead or teaching the alphabet." Orators and noted men accuse each other of having followed this profession. Horace's master Orbilius wrote an autobiography under the title of "The Man acquainted with Grief." The great university teachers, however, were held in high regard, and their pay was oftentimes enormous. Though Plato, the rich savant, worked for love, and gave his services to his pupils, the professor's chair in late Athenian glory often paid a twenty-thousand-dollar salary. Gorgias, the great rhetorician, is said to have received one hundred thousand dollars a year for his lectures. The philosophers did not believe in bartering their bread and salt for empty praise.

When Pericles, in his famous funeral oration, reminded his Athenian hearers that their city was a school of Greece, and that the indestructible monuments of their greatness, all over the world, would make their people the admiration not only of their generation but of all posterity, he unconsciously uttered words richer in prophecy than the oracle itself; for not only did Athens become the leader of Greece, first in literature, art, invention, and social progress, but for centuries she has led the nations of the world in all that civilization and cultivation deem greatest and best. The physical, intellectual, and moral superiority which the old Greek school could justly claim as its own, though but a few pages from the history of the nation's service to mankind, formed the basis of that university system which was not only the first in the world, but was gifted with philosophers of such power and artists of such renown that every branch of science and aesthetics, which we deem so much our own, is eagerly seeking for the mystic wand which will bring to view those arts, long lost, but not yet despaired of. The chemist searching and seeking with tireless experiment for the art of tempering copper; the economist spending time and intellect on the various monetary questions; the advocate of equal rights for equal sexes; the statesman studying trade policies and race problems; and the sculptor striving by his colored statues to get nearer Nature's self, are but working out again the problems whose solution constitutes the treasures of little Athens, queen of reason, arts, and letters, and whose influence on the civilization of the future is as yet unsearchable. The ivory palaces, bright with gold, have indeed fallen to decay, but frankincense and myrrh still exhale their everlasting perfume amid the beauteous ruins.