Hellas : or Ellas, originally confined to Phthia, in Thessaly, it stands for all Greece.
... succession Hardly endured delay between. Like trees the brothers, Page 468 Felled, to each side sank prone. So lifeless these strong ones of Hellas Lay on their couch of the hostile soil reunited in slumber As in their childhood they lay in Hellas watched by their mother, Three of them side by side and she dreamed for her darlings their future. But on the ranks of the Hellenes fear and amazement... Echemus son of Aëtes, one of the mighty in Hellas, Thus returns. Let Ares judge twixt the Greek and the Eastern." Fast sped the spear but Valarus held forth his shield and rebutted Shouting the deadly point that could pierce not his iron refusal. "Echemus, surely thy vaunt has reached me, but unfelt is thy spear-point. Weak are men's arms, it seems, in Hellas; a boy there Ares Aims with reeds not... summits Out of the sun and its spaces she came, pausing tranquil and fatal, And, at a distance followed by the golden herds of the sungod, Carried the burden of Light and its riddle and danger to Hellas. Even as fleets on a chariot divine through the gold streets of ether, Swiftly when Life fleets, invisibly changing the arc of the soul-drift, And, with the choice that has chanced or the fate ...
... temples to crowd in thy courts, O Athene. Go then and do my will, prepare men's tribes for their fullness." 5 It was then with the departure of Apollo from Troy and with the fall of Troy, Hellas was created under the rule of Athene, the goddess of Reason. But aware of her real role in shaping human culture to its fullness, she had replied to Zeus: "Zeus, I see and I am not deceived by thy... study human history and critical issues of today in the light of Sri Aurobindo's vision, we shall find that the line of development that began with the siege of Troy and culminated in the creation of Hellas, we shall find that the Periclean Athens was only a precursor of the Curve of Reason that re-emerged in the fifteenth Century (AD) in the Renascent Europe and which has guided and governed not only... carrying the message of Achilles, a message of peace and love and justice, the message that is sent to the leaders of Troy directly, "not as his vassal who leads, Agamemnon, the Argive, But as a ruler in Hellas, ... king of my nations." For he knows that the mighty is mightiest when he is alone, and when the strength within him is accompanied by the supreme strength of the Supreme. As Achilles declares later: ...
... wind and wave. So long as Sri Aurobindo does not lack these essentials he remains Homeric, even if he has more multiplicity within his unity than Homer and his wind blows from directions uncommon to Hellas and his wave has more complex curves than the Aegean. Ilion commences with a new day breaking over the besieged city: Dawn in her journey eternal compelling the labour of mortals, ... the sun and its spaces she came, pausing tranquil and fatal, And, at a distance followed by the golden herds of the sun-god, Carried the burden of Light and its riddle and danger to Hellas. Page 50 No doubt can be entertained about the magnificence of these lines. The Olympian measure of the ancients is once more abroad. It is not the use of Homeric locutions like "... ingenious, pervades Sri Aurobindo's hexameters widens and deepens into a mystical seerhood when he speaks of the invisible hands pressing the balance of war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The Gods of Hellas stand now in the full glory of their occult presences — occult but still concrete, held in a living poetic realisation. The passage about them equals the Dawn-prelude by an afflatus sustained through ...
... summits Out of the sun and its spaces she came, pausing tranquil and fatal, And, at a distance followed by the golden herds of the sungod, Carried the burden of Light and its riddle and danger to Hellas. The Coming of the Herald Even as fleets on a chariot divine through the gold streets of ether, Swiftly when Life fleets, invisibly changing the arc of the soul-drift, And, with the choice... substance Slowly had dimmed the faces loved and the scenes once cherished: Yet was the dream still dear to them longing for wife and for children, Longing for hearth and glebe in the far-off valleys of Hellas. Always like waves that swallow the shingles, lapsing, returning, Tide of the battle, race of the onset relentlessly thundered Over the Phrygian corn-fields. Trojan wrestled with Argive, Caria ...
... the earth with which Sri Aurobindo charged her six decades ago. And that the Greece-suffused hexameter we have quoted should prove suggestive of her is in the fitness of things for me to whom ancient Hellas is still alive despite the sweep of destructive ages over her history. To me, as to Shelley, Greece and her foundations are, Sunk beneath the tides of war, In Thought and its eternity... Aurobindo who was a master of Greek and whose Il on, next to his Savitri, is the greatest poetic work he has achieved. The Mother, born in Paris, steeped in French culture, has also a strain of Hellas, for, when someone in Sri Aurobindo's Cambridge days compared London to ancient Athens, the young Indian student of history as well as of literature and languages remonstrated that it could be compared ...
... ethical discipline which saved her in the midst of the orgies of her first imperial century, but could not itself be stoical in its practice; for to Athens and to the characteristic temperament of Hellas, this thought was a Page 99 straining to something it had not and could not have; it was the opposite of its nature and not its fulfilment. This insufficiency of the aesthetic view of... pre-eminently a revival of learning, but in its Mediterranean birth-place it was rather the efflorescence of art and poetry and the beauty of life. Much more than was possible even in the laxest times of Hellas, aesthetic culture was divorced from the ethical impulse and at times was even anti-ethical and reminiscent of the licence of imperial Rome. It had learning and curiosity, but gave very little of itself ...
... Dorian, oriental — and this brought new youth to a civilization that would have died. The mixture of races contributed to produce the variety, flexibility, and subtley of Greek thought and life. Hellas was created and the Greek culture came to shine as a brilliant flame amid a dark sea of barbarism. * * * _______ 1. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 2, p. 60 2. Actually... The story of the Iliad (consisting of over 16,000 verses) is the story of the Siege of Troy, one of the few greatest events of human history, considering how and why Hellas came to be born from that great siege and all that followed it and how the amazing Greek civilization arose. The wonder that was Greece has been expressed by Bertrand Russell in these words: "in all ...
... ancient nations, contemporaries of India, and many younger born than she are dead and only their monuments left behind them. Greece and Egypt exist only on the map and in name, for it is not the soul of Hellas or the deeper nation-soul that built Memphis which we now find at Athens or at Cairo. Rome imposed a political and a purely outward cultural unity on the Mediterranean peoples, but their living spiritual ...
... history, the siege Page 62 of Troy, the life and crucifixion of Christ, the exile of Krishna in Brindavan and the colloquy with Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra. The siege of Troy created Hellas, the exile in Brindavan 1 created devotional religion (for before there was only meditation and worship), Christ from his cross humanised Europe, the colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity ...
... problem presents itself for solution. Thus in the beginning there was the phenomenon of city states and regional peoples coexisting as disunited parts of a loose geographical and cultural unity, Italy or Hellas, and there was the problem of creating the Hellenic or Italian nation. Afterwards there came instead the phenomenon of nation-units formed or in formation coexisting as disunited parts of the loose ...
... it is these features of ancient Greek culture that proved potent to release the suppressed sensuous vitality of Europe. The mind of the time was stirred also in its own proper nature by the mind of Hellas, but the Renaissance was so drunk with life, with the glory of the senses and emotions and passions expanding themselves in an opulent freedom, that it could not easily recover the lucid orderly intellect ...
... great events in history, the siege of Troy, the life and crucifixion of Christ, the exile of Krishna in Brindavun and the colloquy with Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra. The siege of Troy created Hellas, the exile in Brindavun created devotional religion, (for before there was only meditation and worship,) Christ from his cross humanised Europe, the colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity ...
... and epic goes hand in hand with the spirit of Indian Yoga: flawless word and rhythm embody a vision packed with the light of the occult Orient yet tempered and naturalised to the atmosphere of heroic Hellas. The uniqueness shows out most in the lines where a deeper sense of the Divine is expressed than Helen-drunk Paris or even religion-intoxicated Laocoön can reach for all their instinct of powers beyond ...
... Pondicherry with all its old-world grace: It is as if the very air, the very soil retained and conveyed, in the midst of all modernisation, the chiselled lucidity that was the soul of antique Hellas, the moulded mystery that was the soul of early India .7 So the pukka Cantab English and our own Aurobindonian English meet in the glowing morning twilight of a distance-conversation. The ...
... assumed great importance in the life of mankind. The Mahabharata gave us the great spiritual teaching of the Gita which it is said will yet liberate mankind; the Iliad led to the creation of Hellas and modern western civilization. Both epics have put before us heroes who upheld the ancient warrior code of life and battle. Arjuna and his Greek counter-part, Achilles, are representative men — ...
... is ancient; they belong to the Old Regime. Egypt is old, Phoenicia is old, the Hebrews are old, all the other races of the old world are old, not merely chronologically, but psychologically. But Hellas is modern. There is a breath in the Ionian atmosphere, a breath of ozone, as it were, which wafts down to us, even into the air of today. Homer and Solon, Socrates and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato ...
... myth in the language of modern thought* - that satisfies us as drama, as poetry, and also as an imaginative presentation of the ideas of evolution and progress. Perseus, the heroic hero of ancient Hellas, is portrayed in this play as a veritable hero indeed, but one who also inaugurates a forward movement in the history of humanity as the result of participating in a monumental clash of mighty opposites ...
... to him. Page 393 PERSEUS And if perhaps He should not know you? CYDONE Then it will be night. It is day now. PERSEUS A bright philosophy, But with the tears behind. Hellas, thou livest In thy small world of radiant white perfection With eye averted from the night beyond, The night immense, unfathomed. But I have seen Snow-regions monstrous underneath the moon And ...
... the integrity of their own republican constitution, they revel at the same time in the despotic sway of unlimited power over the peoples they conquer. This is strictly true of the Pagan republics of Hellas and Rome as well as of the Christian communes and country-states of Mediaeval and Modern Europe. The ideal that has shaped the polity of Europe is always consciously or unconsciously Hellenic and not ...
... Ilion combines the spirit of Greek myth and epic with the spirit of Indian Yoga. It is a vision charged with the illumination of the occult Orient but naturalising itself to the atmosphere of heroic Hellas. Savitri knows no such tempering: its mysticism is naked to the depths, the Orient shows its true inward colour, India's Yogic antiquity lives again to fill out with enormous rhythmic suggestions ...
... wonderful centre of the intellect's search for truth and beauty and goodness, the theme of Pindar's celebrated lines: O shining white and famed in song and violet-wreathed, Fortress of Hellas, glorious Athens, city of God! Whoever I may have been, I feel it in my bones that I had very much to do with the Platonic circle around Socrates. I have heard from Nolini that Sri Aurobindo ...
... great events in history, the siege of Troy, the life and crucifixion of Christ, the exile of Krishna in Brindavan and the colloquy with Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra. The siege of Troy created Hellas, the exile in Brindavan created devotional religion, (for before there was only meditation and worship), Christ from his cross humanised Europe, the colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity ...
... These supporting pillars in female form, the Caryatids, form part of the Erechtheum, a small temple on the Acropolis (see photo pp. 136-37). "Our city is education for all Hellas." (Pericles) Page 153 The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavour to be what you desire to appear. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is a habit. ...
... -Mein Kampf, 70 Homer, 136, 197,206,219 Hugo, Victor, 197,275 -A Villequier, 275n Huma m, 16, 129-30, 163, 166, 168 Huxley, T. H., 140, 192 Hellas, 219 IDA, 219 Impressionists, 145 India, 25, 52-9, 74-5,. 90-2, 94, 98, 103-7, 119, 127, 153-7, 159-63, 168, 205, 207, 215, 217, 221-3, 229, 235, 238-43, 245, 260-2, 327 ...
... ancient nations, contemporaries of India, and many younger born than she are dead and only their monuments left behind them. Greece and Egypt exist only on the map and in name, for it is not the soul of Hellas or the deeper nation-soul that built Memphis, which we now find at Athens or at Cairo. Rome imposed a political and a purely outward cultural unity on the Mediterranean peoples, but their living spiritual ...
... force, so that the Movement could be triggered there. Country after country, we must conquer the Earth for Mother and Sri Aurobindo. A seed is enough in each country. So give this first messenger of Hellas a warm welcome. N. burst into Land's End this morning and is leaving tomorrow morning.... She is very courageous. I like it. Here, for three months now we have been in the mist! I am happy ...
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