De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem

more inclined toward the elegant; she will not forget the sea and its spaces... But I am forgetting myself; this is what happens when one starts talking about youth.

Temira left for Melenki. I watched for a long time at the gate that let through the carriage-calash in which she was being taken; the day was dead-autumnal. I sadly returned to my little room and opened a book. An old friend... a book again, only a book remained as a companion; I began to carefully re-read Greek and Roman history. Of course, I did not approach history as a chronicle of nations, a mirror of this and that, but again as a novel, and I read it using the same method, that is, appearing on stage myself in the acropolis and on the forum. It goes without saying that Greece and Rome, reconstructed according to Ségur Philippe-Paul de Ségur, author of historical works, were absurd, yet they were alive and corresponded to the needs of that time. The theatrical posturing of all those Curtiuses throwing themselves into abysses that do not exist, or Scaevolas burning their arms to the elbows, etc., I did not notice, but I understood their civic virtues. It is in vain that today people revolt against the former method of teaching ancient history to children in such detail: it is an aesthetic school of morality. The great men of Greece and Rome possess that striking, plastic, artistic beauty that is imprinted forever on the young soul. That is why these majestic shadows of Themistocles, Pericles, Alexander accompany us through our whole life, just as they themselves were accompanied by the majestic images of Zeus and Apollo. Everything in Greece was so permeated with the elegant that even her greatest men resemble works of art. Do they not remind one, for instance, of the bright world of Greek architecture? The same clarity, harmony, simplicity, youthfulness, blissful sky, pure childlike conscience; even the facial features of Plutarch's heroes are as marvelously elegant, open, and filled with thought as the pediments and porticos of the Parthenon. The very triad of Greek architecture has a parallel with the heroes of its three epochs; so closely was the elegant fused with their life. Are the Homeric heroes not like Doric columns, solid and artless? Are the heroes of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars not akin to the Ionic style, just as the effeminate Alcibiades is like a slender, curly Corinthian column. Let these highly

original: "Темира, Меленки, Греція, Рим, Сегюр, Ѳемистокл, Перикл, Александр, Зевс, Аполлон, Парѳенон, Гомерическіе герои, Алквіад, эстетика, история, зодчество"