AN ATHENIAN BOY

W II EN Charles Kingsley wrote the introduction to The Heroes, he said that he loved the Greeks heartily

They seem to me like brothers, though they have all been dead and gone many hundred years ago."

Vet it is clear his feeling of intimacy and love was for the Greeks of mythology. And so it is with most of us. We are all, even the most ignorant, soaked in Greek culture ; literature and art, architecture and even commerce, are full of allusions to gods and heroes, Ionian place-names. But of the life of ordinary Greek citizens from the age of Tyrants down to Alexander we remember little enough, save that the Spartans were valiant, Athenians athletic, and that dramatic art reached a glorious climax. Landor's Pericles and Aspasia may have given us one interpretation of Greek psychology. Otherwise we have only broken recollections of whatever we picked up at school beyond the ability to construe and to ascribe correct dates and biographical details to the great names in Greek history.

There can be few little books of such charm, equally attrac- tive to children and to grown-ups, as Mrs. Snedeker's Theras. Written with a smooth simplicity, it usefully fills out a picture of Greek life which is, in our minds, all too bare. She tells of a little Athenian boy who lived under Pericles : as Mr. Pocock says in his introduction to the book, it " breaks through the sense of distance and aloofness . . . When one reads it one lives again the schoolboy's life in Athens . . . one may walk the streets and visit the market-place • or climb the marble steps of the Acropolis and see in all its beauty that most lovely building in the world, the Parthenon. And Theras is as real a boy as the boy who lives next door to us."

The tale begins with the hero feeling very grown-up because he is to go to school now that he is seven. He sets out with his pedagogue, who carries his new stylus, his lyre and his tablets, and with his father, a well-to-do citizen of Athens, trying to disguise a good deal of pride in the possession of a son big enough to make his first venture in the world. Theras learns to read and write, to play the lyre and sing the poems of Homer. But he likes best the playing fields, where the boys go daily to practise running and jumping and throwing the disc :-

" The boys . . . kicked off their sandals, threw off their himations and chitons. Then they were stripped ready for the exercises. They were brown as berries, every one of them, tanned all over by the sun as most boys are tanned on neck and arms after the summer at the seashore."

In a little while Pheidon, the father of Theras, took him to see the Parthenon, from whence the child could look down and see Athens safe within its walls, and the blue sea beyond. He was delighted with all the painted statues on the Acropolis, but in the temple itself was something more wonderful, the new gold and ivory image of Athene that Pheidias was just completing ; tears ran down his father's face when he saw it then for the first time. But Theras had ideas of his own, and a few days later he played truant to revisit the Acropolis with cakes and myrrh for a little statue of Hygeia that he had noticed near the temple, with outstretched arms, but no gifts on her altar. When he got there an altar attendant spoke to him .- " ' I'll help you,' said the man kindly. He brought some cedar twigs and a lighted torch. Then he put a crown of lovely hyacinth flowers on Theras's head. He laid the twigs on Hygeia's altar and set fire to them with his torch. Now, little man,' he said, and Theras laid first the myrrh then the cakes upon the flame.

` Do you think she would like my ball, too ? ' he whispered. ' It has been so long since anybody brought her a gift.' No,' said the man gently, I think she would rather you kept the ball.'

Now the sweet smell of the myrrh filled the air. The blue smoke curled up in the sunshine and reached the very nose of the goddess . . . He stood in holy silence, lifting his hands on high and praying to Hygeia to be good to his father, mother, and little sisters.

And remember me also, Hygeia,' he prayed ; because I have brought you these gifts.' "

The next year when his-father went away with the army, Theras accompanied him to the harbour, where he saw all the Athenian soldiers :--

" A forest of twinkling lances moving along together, the helmet

crests, red, blue, and orange, were brighter than a garden of flowers; Everybody was laughing and talking."

The triremes, each with its 174 oars, danced on the water, rapidly filling with armed soldiers. There was a stir as .Pericles came. The fleet sailed away.

News came of Pheidon's death. Theras was aghast to find himself haled away from home as the adopted son of an old Spartan kinsman. Everything in Sparta vexed him ; rough accents, rough ways, no music, no fine statues or buildings. Endless drill and rough spare food made him realize that he had come to a land where endurance was everything. He was so disgusted in the end by witnessing the platanistos, or fight between two teams of boys with bare hands and feet and teeth, that he ran away. It was only after many hair- breadth escapes in the mountains, in the company of another boy and a trusty dog, that he was found, exhausted and starving, by Herodotus, who took him back to Athens and smoothed away his sorrow and weariness with a thousand delightful tales. The story ends happily with the discovery that his father, after all, was alive ; and Theras is reunited to his parents and baby sisters.

Theras is quite simple enough for even small children of six or seven, and would be delightful read aloud, for it is free from the patronizing tone Kingsley too often used in The Heroes and Madam How, when he addressed his small readers as " my little man," and tagged on the unavoidable moral. Mrs. Snedeker is vivid and stirring as Kingsley so well knew how to be, and I am sure many adults will thank her for giving them so homely, so joyous a picture of life in