Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/14

x mutual defence against the Persians. When Euripides was eight years old, the common treasury of the allies was transferred from Delos to Athens, and, as some of them found it more convenient to make their contributions in money than in men and ships, the imperial city found herself with vast sums at her disposal. Her obligation to keep the fleet and army of the confederacy in efficiency discharged, she did not hesitate to apply the surplus of the revenue and of the spoils of Persia to her own strengthening and adorning, So the boy's earliest memories were of the construction of magnificent harbours and docks, of the rising of the Long Walls which linked Athens with her ports, of the new-born splendour of the temple-crowded Acropolis, of colonnades whose walls flushed bright with pictures of battles by land and sea, of gleaming statues that day by day were multiplied, till the Gods and heroes seemed to outnumber the men of the city, of spacious gymnasia, of humming law-courts, and—of more interest than all, had he known it, to himself—the vast sweep of the hewn-stone seats and the gigantic stage of the Great Theatre of Dionysus. He beheld the creation of all these; he was an eye-witness of the transformation of Athens into something that far transcended Homer's fairest visions of "goodly-builded towns."

With the growth of the city came a stir of life, a quickening of commercial enterprise, an awakening of thought, which were also new. Merchants from Egypt, from Spain, from the Black Sea, and from all islands and lands that lie between these, artificers from Tyre, artists, poets, and philosophers from wherever Greek was spoken, all these brought their wealth, their cunning, their wisdom, to the feet of Athens. As though this were not enough to stimulate the mind and to make the pulses leap, through all the years of his boyhood the Dionysiac Theatre resounded with immortal verse and rang with glorious song. He was eight years old