De Piscibus Libri V et De Cetis Liber Unus

more inclined toward the elegant; she will not forget the sea and its expanses... But I am forgetting myself; this is what happens when one begins to talk about youth.

Temira left for Melenki. I looked for a long time at the gates that had let through the carriage in which she was taken; the day was deathly autumnal. I returned sadly to my little room and opened a book. An old friend... once again a book, only a book remained as a companion; I began to carefully reread 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 myself on stage in the Acropolis and at the Forum. It goes without saying that Greece and Rome, reconstructed according to Ségur, were absurd, yet they were alive and corresponded to the needs of that time. The theatrical exaggerations of all those Curtiuses throwing themselves into abysses that did not exist at all, or Scaevolas burning their own arms to the elbow, and so on, I did not notice, but I understood their civic virtues. It is in vain that people nowadays rise up against the old method of teaching ancient history to children at length: it is an aesthetic school of morality. The great people of Greece and Rome possess that striking, plastic, artistic beauty that is imprinted forever in the young soul. That is why those majestic shadows of Themistocles, Pericles, and Alexander accompany us through our whole life, just as they themselves were accompanied by the majestic images of Zeus and Apollo. In Greece, everything was so imbued with the elegant that its greatest people resemble works of art. Do they not remind one, for instance, of the bright world of Greek architecture? The same clarity, harmony, simplicity, youthfulness, bountiful sky, pure childish conscience; even the features of the faces of Plutarch's heroes are as wonderfully elegant, open, and filled with thought as the pediments and porticos of the Parthenon. The very triple architecture of Greece has a parallel with the heroes of its three eras; thus, the elegant was tightly fused for them 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...