The Love Light of Apollo

AUTHOR’S NOTEI fell in love with Greece when I first read The Splendour of Greece by Robert Payne. When I went there, I found that this fascinating book answered so many questions and made me understand the mystery and beauty of the Ancient Gods. Delos, where Apollo was born, is just as I have described it. Some of the top Greek families are a part of my story, but the description of the Parthenon in the Erechtheion is exactly as I saw and felt it. After 2,500 years Greece is still a mystical enigma to the Western World. Just as Robert Payne puts it so clearly, The splendour of Greece still lights our skies, reaching over America and Asia and lands which the Greeks never dream existed. There would be no Christianity as we know it without the fertilising influence of the Greek Fathers of the Church, who owed their training to Greek philosophy. By a strange accident all the images of Buddha in the Far East can be traced right back to portraits of Alexander, who seemed to the Greeks to be Apollo incarnate. We owe to the Greeks the beginning of science and the beginning of thought. They built the loveliest Temples ever, carved marble with delicacy and strength and set in motion the questing mind which refuses to believe that there are any bounds to reason. That is why we journey to Greece like pilgrims to a feast.