“Well, it wasn’t only games that they were so keen about. They loved sculpture and painting and writing so much, that no one ever touched them at it, before or since. It was the consummate age, so the Head said. And then, when it came to fighting, a little potty place like Attica, no bigger than a small English county, just wiped the Persians up. In everything, so the Head told us, the Athenians of the great age were the type of the perfect physical and intellectual life. Oh, David, let’s save up and go to Athens.”
“Rather! But why did the Romans walk over them?”
Frank got up; the bell for chapel had begun.
“Because they became corrupt and beastly.”
“What an awful pity! I say, you made me feel awfully keen with that construe, and telling me what the Head said. I haven’t thought about the twenty-two for—for ten minutes. And one’s got to try to get at it all by sapping?”
“Sounds almost worth while,” said David. “But they liked games as well. That’s a comfort.”
Frank took up his straw hat; he took up also the list that lay on the table.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to put this up on the notice-board before chapel.”
“Oh, don’t,” said David. “All the fellows will see it, and I shall turn crimson when we stand up for the psalms.”
David’s volatile mind went back to the Greek talk.
David, usually a solid sleeper, could not take his usual plunge into the dim depths that night on getting into bed, but he did not make any particular effort to do so, for it was really waste of time not to lie awake when there were so many delightful things to think about. Round and round in his head they turned, like some bright wheel, and now it was the events of the last three days (house-match, in other words) now the more immediate happenings of the evening, his promotion into the twenty-two, and the much huger honour of playing for the eleven next week that sparkled on the wheel, or again this sudden illumination with regard to the Greeks fed his contemplation. Up till now it had not been real to him that the people who wrote these tedious or difficult things which he had to learn were once as alive as himself, or that beauty had inspired them to make plays and statues, even as beauty had inspired Keats and Swinburne. Until Frank had given him the gist of the Head’s discourse, he never thought of those plays as being performed in a theatre, before an audience, who had not to look up words and learn the grammar, and consider what governed an apparently isolated genitive, or account for an irregular aorist. They were not bookworms and scholars, but men and boys who ran races and crowned the victor, and had their Trafalgar just as if they were English. . . . It was all vague, but decidedly there was a new light on matters concerning Sophocles.