In this monument, then, we have a revelation in the sphere of art, of
the temper which made the victories of Marathon and Salamis possible,
of the true spirit of Greek chivalry as displayed in the Persian war,
and in the highly ideal conception of its events, expressed in
Herodotus and approving itself minutely to the minds of the Greeks,
as a series of affairs in which the gods and heroes of old time
personally intervened, and that not as mere shadows. It was natural
that the high-pitched temper, the stress of thought and feeling,
which ended in the final conflict of Greek liberty with Asiatic
barbarism, should stimulate quite a new interest in the poetic
legends of the earlier conflict between them in the heroic age. As
the events of the Crusades and the chivalrous spirit of that period,
leading men's minds back to ponder over the deeds of [261]
Charlemagne and his paladins, gave birth to the composition of the
Song of Roland, just so this Aeginetan sculpture displays the Greeks
of a later age feeding their enthusiasm on the legend of a distant
past, and is a link between Herodotus and Homer. In those ideal
figures, pensive a little from the first, we may suppose, with the
shadowiness of a past age, we may yet see how Greeks of the time of
Themistocles really conceived of Homeric knight and squire.
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