Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

302 STANDISH O GRADY
paths and mule tracks. Before it and behind went youths
and maidens singing joyfully and playing upon flutes and
three-stringed lyres.
What was this wooden upright pillar, borne so carefully
and besung so loudly and gladly ? It was the God of
the young Nation. The young Dorian Nation was
going forth into the wide, wide world, but not by them-
selves, not unbefriended or uncared for. Apollo himself
was going with them. He was in their van and at their
head. The wooden pillar was Apollo.
Very strange, indeed, and to us all but incredible.
Nevertheless, all such primitive peoples, so taught, as it
would seem by Nature herself, had some such way of
symbolizing for themselves things that they could not
express in words. It was so universally. The religions
of Europe to-day, however, august and superior to rude
symbolism, had an humbler original than men suspect.
See Gen., c. 28, v. 22, the story of the sacred pillar
" And this stone shall be the house of
stone at Bethel :
the Lord " ; that is, the Lord's dwellinjg-place. Also,
Joshua, c. 24, V. 27, where Joshua speaks of a similar pillar
stone as hearing and bearing witness.
Young iEtolia joined the Dorians in that first Pelopon-
nesian settlement. It resulted eventually in the /Etolo-
Dorian absorption of Elis, the creation there of a new
people soon to become famous over the whole world as
the guardians and presidents of the great Pan-Hellenic
Olympian festivals of Supreme Zeus.
The greatest human-divine figure ever carved by the
hand of man was the Statue of Zeus at Olympia. It was