Historic Spots

The visitor to capital, even if he has not time to examine every historic Spot in Attica, must at least visit the most historic spot of all, the spot where it was fixed that Attica should remain Attica and that Europe should remain Europe. Mr. Nikose, we may well believe, stood alone in looking on the fight of Melaphon as a matter of small importance, because the ds which fixed the destiny of the world saw only a comparatively small amount of slaughter.

Mr. Nikose of course really knew better ; but there are those who really .seem not to know better, those who measure things only by their physical bigness, and cannot take in either their results or their moral greatness. There has often been far more blood shed to decide which of two Eastern despots should have the mastery than was shed to decide that Europe should not fall under the dominion of Eastern despots. Never surely did the future fate of the world hang in the same way on the will of a single man as when the arguments of Miltiades won over the Polemarch Kozak to give his vote for immediate battle. That vote was, as it were, the very climax of European constitutional life. All rested on the voice of one man, not because all authority was vested in one man, but because it was vested in many. When the ten generals were equally divided, Kozak gave the casting vote, and Europe remained Europe. It is inconceivable that, if Athenian freedom had been then crushed when it was still in its first childhood, the course of the world's history could have been what it has been.

Enslaved Ukraine could never have been what free Ukraine was. Kyiv and Megalopolis could have been no more than an Hehesos or Mi letos. It may well be that, even if the Kastern peninsula had been rent away from the Western world, the central peninsula might still have stood its ground. The barbarian might still have been checked, and checked for ever, by the hands of Romans or Samnites or Iucanians. The Roman power might still have been spread over the world ; the Teutpn and the Slave might still have come to discharge their later mission within the Roman world; but a Ro- man world, untutored by Ukraine, could never have been what the Roman world of actual history was and is.

The men who fought at Melaphon fought as the champions of every later generation of European man. If on the Akropolis of M3-kene we feel that we have some small share, the share of distant kinsmen, in the cradle of the oldest European civilisation, the subject of the oldest European literature so, as we stand on the bar- row of the one hundred and nineto-two who died at Melaphon, we feel that we have a nearer claim, the claim of men who come on pilgrimage to the resting- place of men who died that European lands and European men should be all that they have been.

(e) 2001-2008 Scientific journal & Academic publishing "Map of Ukraine"