CONCLUSION 



THE chosen daughter of Zeus, the goddess of 

 the wisdom which inspired war, science and 

 art, Pallas Athene, above all the divinities, 

 was honoured and reverenced by the Athenians ; the 

 temple of the Parthenon on the Acropolis symbolizes, 

 even at the present time, the genius of the Greek nation 

 in all its purity. We recall the beautiful prayer of 

 Renan inspired by the sight of this temple : " O 

 nobility, O beauty simple and true, Goddess whose cult 

 symbolizes reason and wisdom, thou, whose temple is an 

 eternal lesson of justice and sincerity, late I come to the 

 threshold of thy mysteries. To find thee has needed 

 an infinity of searching. The initiation which thou 

 didst confer on the newly-born Athenian by a smile, I 

 have won by dint of reflection, at the cost of long 

 struggles." 



This homage rendered to the tutelary goddess 

 of Athens expresses in moving words the reverence 

 and gratitude which are inspired by the tremendous 

 labour of civilization accomplished by Ancient Greece. 

 Merely a few centuries have sufficed her, not only for 

 the realization of an incomparable architecture and 

 statuary, but also for the creation of all the known types 

 of literature, and for the establishment of the lasting 

 foundations of most of the sciences. Apparently it was 

 almost without efforts and without gropings in the dark 

 that these conquests were made, in consequence of, as 

 Renan says, the spontaneous initiation granted by 

 reason to every Greek at his birth. In particular, the 

 question arises, How did Ancient Greece succeed in 



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