DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1004#0122
ATTICA AND BCEOTIA.
87
on the surface of the intellectual Map of Greece. It was lite a long and
lofty Wall built in a beautiful garden, and stretching from east to west, along
and up the south side of which fruit-trees and flowering plants are trained,
which deck it with their bright blossoms of white, red, and purple, with
their luxuriant foliage, and their golden produce, all of which are rendered
more beautiful by the cheerfulness of the sun beaming upon them in full
lustre; while the north side of the same wall is cold and blank. So, while
in Attica—the south side of Mount Parnes—every thing flowered and
ripened which is fair and excellent in the intellect of man,—while there a
Phccacian garden, teeming with mental produce, flourished in a perpetual
spring,—on the other side of the same hill the picture was reversed. Bceotia,
the country on the north of Mount Parnes, was as remarkable for its
intellectual barrenness, as Attica was for its fertility: it was the bare side of
the mountain wall. It seemed as if Nature, which made Attica a country
of sterile hills and cliffs, and gave rich fields and pastures to Bceotia, had
desired to adjust the balance, by denying intellectual wealth in the one case,
where she had conferred physical, and by compensating for the absence of
physical, by the abundance of intellectual, in the other.
Aristophanes, in his Play of the Nefhel.e, brings his goddesses, the
87
on the surface of the intellectual Map of Greece. It was lite a long and
lofty Wall built in a beautiful garden, and stretching from east to west, along
and up the south side of which fruit-trees and flowering plants are trained,
which deck it with their bright blossoms of white, red, and purple, with
their luxuriant foliage, and their golden produce, all of which are rendered
more beautiful by the cheerfulness of the sun beaming upon them in full
lustre; while the north side of the same wall is cold and blank. So, while
in Attica—the south side of Mount Parnes—every thing flowered and
ripened which is fair and excellent in the intellect of man,—while there a
Phccacian garden, teeming with mental produce, flourished in a perpetual
spring,—on the other side of the same hill the picture was reversed. Bceotia,
the country on the north of Mount Parnes, was as remarkable for its
intellectual barrenness, as Attica was for its fertility: it was the bare side of
the mountain wall. It seemed as if Nature, which made Attica a country
of sterile hills and cliffs, and gave rich fields and pastures to Bceotia, had
desired to adjust the balance, by denying intellectual wealth in the one case,
where she had conferred physical, and by compensating for the absence of
physical, by the abundance of intellectual, in the other.
Aristophanes, in his Play of the Nefhel.e, brings his goddesses, the