That the ancient Greeks set the fashions of to-day is being demonstrated by the specimens of polychrome pottery, reproductions of mural paintings and pictures at the Greek Government exhibition at the Grand Central Palace. The women of this ancient race of culture and learning are commonly depicted in flowing gowns and draperies. They are represented as of such physical perfection that they did not have to bolster up their figures with modern artificialities like corsets.
It comes with something of a shock, then, to know that these beautiful, divinely fair creatures of ancient Crete at least wore corsets or something closely resembling them some 4,000 or more years ago. The dainty figures of polychrome pottery excavated from the ruins of the palace of King Minos apparently demon: strate that they did.
There are people who think of Greece only as a country of lost splendour and ruins. It is to counteract this false and general impression that the Greek Government at the instance of Premier Venizelos is holding the exhibition. It is practically the same exhibition which was held in Paris last summer while the Peace Congress was in session.
There is a generous wealth of ancient and modern pictures be seen at this exposition. They show Greece in all its splendid glory as it was known to the ancients, Greece in depicting all manners of life fro that of the peasants and shepherds in the fields to the domestic life of the towns and cities, will prove a revelation to many persons, There are representations living Greek women dancing, shepherds in the midst of the most idyllic landscape, life-like groups of old and young people in orchard and field and mountain side, busy and brimful of life in such places as Mount Olympus or Mount Parnassus or Dodona, of which one far from Greece has been accustomed to think as belonging to an imaginary fairyland, A picture of the Stymphalian Lake suggests man-eating birds with brazen claws and feathers, and Hercules, who should appear on the spot as a mighty archer ready to deliver the lake of this post. But there are no man-eating birds any longer. The lake lies tranquilly with light and accessible to all. Its waters are about to be brought by a new aqueduct to Athens to furnish a. better water supply to that growing city.
On a table are displayed reproductions of swords and daggers found in Mycenae. Some of them might have been handled by Agamemnon and Menelaus!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.