Sosagoras

Extract

Yesterday was my seventy-fifth birthday, and I saw the Herakles of Euripides. Where are the gods, Euclides? Euripides, they say, worships gods of his own, and strange divinities too, if stories are true; but Athens is a city of gossip. He certainly has scant respect for the gods of his fathers; and the audience, but for us few older men, who almost go back to the generation of Marathon, the audience, in the main, was with him. It was the same theatre, my old friend, where you and I, as boys, sat nearly sixty years ago and watched the Persae of Aeschylus. What a day that was! There stood Salamis, where we were taken by our mothers to live in that anxious, waiting crowd for those long weeks while the Persians sacked the city and were at last defeated on that blue strait which glittered in the sun before our eyes while the poet told its story on the stage. Then shortly afterwards you went away and found a home on the shores of the Euxine, and since then you have known Athens, you say, only by my letters. You went away before the work of restoring the Akropolis had advanced very far. I have told you of the temples built upon it in honour of the gods who saved Greece, so men said then. They rose above our heads yesterday, dazzling white against deepest blue; but what are their gods to Athens now?