158 The Wilson Bulletin— No. 97 



in certain rooms of the National Museum in Athens, where 

 stands the sculptured grief of a past, long dead, yet not a 

 buried and forgotten past. For there many unique grave- 

 stones are exhibited. Some of these steles are large, with 

 life-size figures, in very high relief often, and not infrequently 

 with the heads carved entirely "in the round." These, in a 

 most dignified and impressive manner, did honor to memories 

 of the dead and the sorrow of surviving friends, along with 

 virginal vases for the memories of maidens : for the faithful 

 Antigones and Electras, for the young and fair Iphigenias, 

 who died unmarried. A count of the gravestones in one room 

 was made, which showed that seventeen were for men and 

 boys and twenty-four were for women. In the last named 

 class it was always a young wife or mother that was por- 

 trayed, not infrequently with a child or two at her knee. The 

 marble effigies of some of the warriors may have been erected 

 in memory of the self-same heroes eulogized by Pericles m 

 his ever-memorable funeral oration. In addition to all these 

 there were sculptured likenesses of very human little boys with 

 their pets, sometimes a dog, very often a bird, sons, perhaps 

 they were, of some Xanthippe, who scolded them overmuch 

 when they were alive, and was broken-hearted when they 

 died. In our college days we were doubly dosed with Socrates, 

 when we were given to translate both the Memorahilia of 

 Xenophon and the Phocdo of Plato, and the suspicion took 

 root that even a great philosopher may become tiresome and 

 nerve-racking, when he does little except talk of demons and 

 dialectics, therefore Xanthippe has her justifiers. 



In another room of the National Museum were to be seen 

 the articles collected by Dr. Heinrich Schliemann and his de- 

 voted wife from their excavations at Mycenae and its neigh- 

 borhood. The debt was already great that we owed to this 

 enthusiastic dreamer ^bout ancient Hellas, because of his pub- 

 lished accounts of his excavations. And now we were privi- 

 leged to see the home he built for himself in Athens, as weil 

 as this rare collection of antiquies, which help to prove that a 

 high degree of civilization existed in Greece as early as 1400 



