# Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14/I

THESEUS WITH DOUBLE AXE ATTACKING THE GIANT PROCRUSTES.
From a vase painted by Athenodotus.
THE STORY OF GREECE
I
THE GREEKS AND THEIR WORK IN THE WORLD
The Greeks, who called themselves Hellenes, were a race rather than a nation. Though they were the predominant people in certain parts of Europe and ​Asia, and though they gave their name to the land which still retains it, there was, in fact, no one country with a capital and seat of government which we can speak of as Hellas, as we might of France or Spain. The Balkan peninsula, indeed, and the islands of the Ægean—still called Hellas—were their principal home. But they had numerous settlements on the coast of Italy, Sicily, Thrace, and Asia Minor, and some in more distant parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. These all came to be included under the general name of Hellas, and the Hellenes, wherever they lived, recognised ties of blood, religion, and common principles of conduct.
A system of small states was a characteristic mark of this Hellenism. Each city, with a narrow territory attached, aimed at complete independence. Combinations of cities to form one state, except within limited districts such as Laconia, Argolis, or Attica, were generally short-lived; and when the inhabitants of one district forcibly subjected to their rule the people of another, as the Spartans did the Messenians, the latter were always restless and discontented, watching every opportunity for breaking away. There was indeed generally one state which exercised a commanding influence among the others, and was tacitly acknowledged as holding a kind of supremacy. But this supremacy did not imply inter- ference in ordinary domestic politics. Its nature was undefined, and it only became conspicuous when combined military operations were needed. In the period before the Persian invasions Sparta occupied this position, principally because its military organi​sation and training gave it a natural superiority in war, in which it was expected to take the first place. It occupied a similar position again for about twenty-five years after the Peloponnesian war, with somewhat higher pretensions and a wider sphere of influence. For about ten years Thebes held a like supremacy in Central Greece and a part of Peloponnese. A similar precedency in Sicily was at times attributed to Syracuse, and in Magna Graecia, that is, in the Greek cities of Italy, to Croton or Tarentum.
The nearest approach, however, to an Empire was the position held by Athens between the Persian wars and the end of the Peloponnesian war [B.C. 478–404]. The Confederacy of Delos was formed for a special purpose—to put down piracy and to exclude the Persian fleets from the Ægean, and thus secure the independence of the Greek states of Asia Minor. It was meant to be a federation of free and independent states, but did become in practice something like an Athenian Empire. Athens claimed the right of forcing members to remain in the League, to maintain a democratic form of government, to admit in certain circumstances an Athenian garrison and "resident," and to refer certain controversies to the Athenian courts. But this combination never embraced Central Greece or Peloponnese; it was almost entirely confined to islands and to towns in Thrace and Asia, and was finally dissolved by the result of the Peloponnesian war.
The universal control afterwards exercised first by the Macedonian and then by the Roman Government, so far from promoting unity, made the separation of ​the states more complete. Both powers discouraged, and the latter forbade, all combinations. So that along with a loss of real freedom the "liberty" of each separate state, or rather its isolation, became still more pronounced. It was, in fact, the passion for separate existence, rendering effective or enduring union impossible, that greatly accounts for the ease with which the subjugation of the whole race was accomplished by those two powers. It also much restricted the material influence of the Greeks on the course of the world's history. Their great achievement was to prevent the extension of the Persian power into Europe; but they can only claim a very subordinate part in the forward movement of Alexander. Yet they possessed a genius which has conquered the world. Their very passion for separatism gave birth to political science: while in philosophy, in the study of nature, in art, and literature, in nearly everything that affects our spiritual or physical well-being, the Hellenes did work of supreme excellence. In some of these things what they achieved was final, and has never been surpassed. In others, though their conclusions have been superseded by fuller knowledge and wider experience, they yet laid the foundation of a more enduring edifice. It is true that modern discoveries have shown that in many of the arts they had predecessors who lived in the same lands; yet this ancient civilisation at some unknown period met with disaster and dis- appeared. For us it was the Hellenes who took the first steps on the road which has led to the successes of modern thought and science.
ARCHAIC STATUE OF ATHENA.
Of the people who lived of old in the lands afterwards occupied by the Hellenes we have no literary record. The spade of the excavator is our only resource. Arms, ornaments, painted pottery, sculptured stone, and mason's work are thus brought to light which reveal something of the habits and skill of an ancient people and its connection with races living in other countries. We learn something of the metals which they used, of the houses or fortresses which they built, of their methods of disposing of the dead, and of what they thought of the life after death.
GALLERY AT TIRYNS.
As the most numerous examples of such things have been discovered at Mycenae and Tiryns in Argolis, it has been agreed to speak of this stage of civilisation ​in Greece as the Mycenaean Age. But the recent discoveries in Crete have pushed things still further back, and show that for many centuries before the "Mycenaeans" there were people living in Greek lands who had attained to great skill in building, in the artistic treatment of bronze, stone, and clay, as well as in the art of painting. These people also possessed a script, or written character, as well as a system of pictography or writing by pictures and symbols. Neither script nor pictography has as yet been interpreted, but the latter (with other indications) points to a connection with Egypt. But whatever remains to be learnt from them, enough has been discovered to point to a very remote antiquity for this civilisation, and to some great catastrophe which overwhelmed it. Among other things, the remains of the immense palace or labyrinth at Cnossus confirms the literary tradition that Crete was once the seat of a rich and powerful kingdom, and illustrates the statement of Thucydides that King Minos was the first to construct a great fleet, with which he put down piracy in the Ægean Sea; while the specimens of the statuary's art found there throw light upon the tradition of the cunning of Daedalus, who first "made statues walk." Nor should we forget how legend spoke of a tribute of boys and girls from Athens to Crete, from which the Athenians were only delivered by their hero Theseus, who slew the monstrous Minotaur.
ARCHAIC HEAD.
​are spoken of by various names, such as Minyæ and Leleges, but whom Herodotus and Thucydides agree in describing under a general name of Pelasgoi. This name, however, disappears as a general appellation before the dawn of written records, and Achaioi and Argeioi became the general names for the inhabitants of Greece. How this occurred we do not know. It may have been simply that these names represent branches of the Pelasgoi which became so powerful that their names prevailed over others; or it may be that the Achaioi were invaders from the North, who brought a new name to the land, as the Angli did to Britain.
It is generally held that the remains of what we have called the Mycenaean Age belong to the period of these Achæans, though some may belong to the earlier or Pelasgic stage, especially these buildings of selected and unworked stones known as Cyclopean walls. The men who produced this civilisation not only worked gold and bronze, and made vessels and ornaments of great beauty, but they had attained to a high standard of skill in representing living figures, both of men and animals, and built great palaces and fortifications. This civilisation culminated towards the end of the Bronze Age—that is, before iron had come into common use, and arms and other implements were still made of a mixture of copper and tin.
The first dawn of literature opens upon this Achaean Age. In the Iliad and Odyssey the Pelasgians are no longer the dominant people. Pelasgic Argos now means only a district in Thessaly. The Leleges and Pelasgoi are among the allies, not of the ​Greeks, but of the Trojans, and come from Larisa, near Cyme, in Asia Minor. They are, again, only one of four divisions of the inhabitants of Crete, and their name only lingers as an epithet of Zeus in the ancient oracle of Dodona. But though the Greeks are no longer Pelasgoi, neither are they as yet Hellenes. To Homer the Hellenes are only a small tribe in Thessaly. He calls the Greeks Achaioi or Argeioi or Danaoi. But when Hesiod wrote Greece was Hellas, and the Greeks Hellenes.
It would seem, then, that the Homeric poems were composed in the interval between the time when the Achaeans superseded the Pelasgians as the dominant people, and the time when the Hellenes in like manner superseded the Achaeans. Yet Homer was Hellenic in many points: in his language, which was understood throughout Greece, and remained more intelligible to a man of the age of Pericles than Chaucer to an Englishman of the eighteenth century; in the form of government which he implies, with king, council, and a rudimentary assembly which reappear in most Greek states. The Homeric Greece, on the other hand, differs widely from what we know of it under the Hellenes. The greater divisions of the country seem not to have obtained the names by which they were known in after times. There is no general name for the Peloponnese, unless it be “Argos” in the Odyssey. Thessaly, Epirus, Acarnania, Macedonia, are unknown names. Sparta and Athens occur, but not Lacedaemon or Attica. None of the Greek towns in Asia are mentioned except Miletus. Sicily is not known to the Iliad,
The Lion Gate at Mycenæ.
​and only as the semi-fabulous Thrinakia to the Odyssey. Italy has no name in either Iliad or Odyssey, though in the latter it may be referred to as a distant and unknown land in the West. Turning East and South we find the Æthiopians described as the most distant of men. Egypt, unknown to the Iliad, is familiar to the Odyssey.
SO-CALLED TOMB OF CLYTEMNESTRA, MYCENÆ.
The Phœnicians are mentioned in the Iliad as famous workers in metal; in the Odyssey principally as pirates. The great empires of Central Asia are wholly unknown. But while Homeric thus differs from Hellenic Greece, it presents certain important differences also from the Mycenæan or Achæan Greece, especially in the use of iron and the form of arms and armour, and the ​mode of disposing of the dead. In Homer, dead bodies are burnt (though burial is also mentioned), the "Mycenaean" custom apparently was to bury them.
The theology of Homer also seems to represent a period of transition. The Pelasgoi were probably monotheists. Their one god was Zeus. The Cretans from very early times claimed to show the place of his birth, and even of his tomb. In the ancient oracle of Dodona it is Zeus alone who speaks and not his prophetes Apollo. For the Hellenes as we know them not only had Olympus become peopled with other gods and goddesses, of whom Zeus was the father and chief, but their numbers had been increased by the addition of deities representing celestial bodies, and good or bad qualities—the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, the Rivers, Youth, Love, Death, Wisdom, Folly, Justice, and the Avengers of Sin. Moreover, the ranks of the immortals were continually being swelled by the addition of deified men or Heroes, whose services to their fellow-men earned this reward, and were commemorated by a special kind of worship in some Heroon in nearly every part of Greece.
In Homer this deification of men is rare, perhaps the only instance is Heracles. But his gods are brought nearer to men. Though they possess immortality and superhuman powers, they are subject to human frailties, to passion, appetite, pain, and pleasure, and like men are subordinated to overruling fate. They are eager partisans in human contests; they are influenced by jealousy, ​love, and hatred; and yet, on the whole, support the eternal laws of right and wrong. The goddess of justice is the assessor of Zeus. It is from him that kings rule and righteousness is maintained in the world. Though men sin they cannot charge God with their sins, which arise from their own blind presumption,—"to act justly is in every man's power."
The Hellenes, then learnt from Homer, from Hesiod, from a body of "hymns," which, though probably much later, were always called Homeric, thus to think of the gods. They governed and directed the world, and therefore men sought to learn their will by oracles or portents, or from the lips of those who had received the mantic art, either from the gods themselves, or from the traditions of immemorial antiquity. These gods must be propitiated also by prayer and sacrifice, by festival and song. It is possible that much of the ritual which thus arose was originally intended to avert evil rather than to express gladness or festivity. But though there lingered in the rites practised by the Hellenes many traces of this idea, yet the practical result was that the religious festivals celebrated in historical times were for the most part cheerful. There were indeed times of fasting and mourning as well as of feasting and rejoicing. Certain days were set apart to honour or propitiate the dead, as in the Anthesteria at Athens. Nevertheless the prevailing feature in Greek worship was festivity. The cult of a particular god was connected with vintage or harvest, with athletic or musical contests, or with the celebration of national ​events: the foundation of cities, the union of peoples, the establishment of liberty, or the victory over enemies. Yet it may be that these cheerful festivals were in part but one means of escaping from sad thoughts. The Greek view of life and death was not cheerful. Life was short and its pains predominated over its pleasures; the future was vague and uncertain. For a few exceptional heroes there was heaven; for a few outrageous sinners—such as Tantalus and Ixion—an eternity of pain; but for the ruck of mankind, if there was a future life at all, it was wrapt in mist and gloom. These views tended to lower the value set upon human life. Though a certain refinement of taste shrank from the brutalities of the arena, and gladiators were not butchered to make a Greek, as a Roman, holiday, yet the laws in most Greek states were extremely severe in the infliction of the death penalty, and wholesale executions of prisoners or rebels, of opponents in civil dissensions, were of frequent occurrence in various parts of Greece.
Yet the Greek refinement was very real, and in nearly everything that concerns our thoughts and tastes we owe an incalculable debt to Greek thinkers and artists. First, the number of the states that made up Hellas, and the variety in their constitutions gave rise to political science. The defects and want of permanence in these constitutions not only caused frequent experiments in practice, and the existence of professional constitution-makers, but gave rise to the formation of ideal constitutions, and to speculations in the principles of justice ​
Seated Divinities.
From the Cella Friese of the Parthenon. (Acropolis Museum.)
​and liberty, which have influenced life and thought ever since. The Greek polls and politeia showed a great advance on the Oriental monarchy, under which all power was in the hands of one man, and government was carried on by his agents. In Greece a tyrannis—the rule of one man not recognised by law — was not regarded as a form of constitution, but as the negation of constitutional government. The three forms recognised were: (1) basileia, the rule of a basileus or constitutional king, which survived in a peculiar form in Sparta till near the Roman period; (2) oligarchy, in which the right to office was confined to certain families or classes among the citizens; and (3) democracy, in which, in its most complete form, all offices were open to all citizens, and all questions were decided by their votes. The last was the popular ideal, though seldom completely attained, and the philosophers did not find it difficult to point out its weaknesses and defects. They usually urged that the right form of government was an aristocracy—that is, when the best men governed. In theory, perhaps, all democrats would say that they held the same view; where they differed was in defining the "best" men and in the plans for selecting them. At any rate these political differences and changes gave rise to political speculations, which have survived in the treatises of Xenophon, in the ideal Laws and Republic of Plato, and in the Politics of Aristotle—books which have influenced political thinkers ever since.
In literature generally they were no less original, and have exercised a no less permanent influence. ​Neither writing, nor sculpture, nor painting, nor the art of modelling in clay began in Greek lands with the Hellenic world. The discoveries in the Troad, at Mycenae and Tiryns, and in Crete, already referred to, show that these arts existed many centuries before the dwellers in Greece were the Hellenes. But literature begins with them. The author, or authors, of the Iliad and Odyssey, indeed, wrote or recited before the Greeks began to speak of themselves generally as Hellenes; but the language of the poems was that which the Hellenes always used, and they do not appear ever to have been written in any other than the Ionic alphabet, which, in part at least, was derived from the Phoenicians. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of this great body of heroic legend, of divine tradition and moral doctrine, upon the national character, emphasising its unity of origin, and holding up a common standard of conduct and religious belief. The Hellenic poems and those of Hesiod, whatever their origin or date, continued to be regarded by the Hellenes as their chief source of theology and early history. They were followed by the poems of what are called the "Cyclic" poets, because they dealt with other parts of the "cycle" of Trojan legends, supplementing and extending the tale of the Iliad and Odyssey; and adding to them another cycle of legends connected with Thebes. None of these are now extant, but they supplied the Greek dramatists with many of their plots and fables.
The first period of Greek literature independent of the Homeric Epic began about the year B.C. 700, and was for some time wholly poetical. A number of ​poets, chiefly in Lesbos and the islands, wrote songs to be sung to music, and therefore called "lyrical." Those of Sappho were mostly on the subject of love; but others, such as those of Alcaeus, were filled with political passion reflecting the unrest which about that time (between B.C. 700 and 600) fell upon the Greek cities in the East, where a wave of resistance to monarchical or oligarchic government was carrying all before it. Another school of poets, of which the chief representative was Archilochus, employed the Iambic metre as a vehicle for fierce invective and personal satire. A third class of poets consisted of the writers of Elegiac verse. This was used, like oratory in a later age, to enforce political or moral doctrines, as in the case of Solon of Athens and Theognis of Megara; or to incite young men to patriotism and gallantry in war, as did Alcman and Tyrtaeus in Sparta. Of the lyric poets, the direct descendants in the next age were the writers of choric songs, encomia, dirges, and epinikia, or songs celebrating victory in the games, the most eminent of whom were Pindar and Baccylides (about B.C. 521–442). The elegiac tradition was kept up by Simonides of Ceos, whose epigrams on fallen patriots or heroes were widely popular just after the period of the Persian wars. It is to be observed that these poets came from all parts of Greece. Athens was not yet the natural headquarters of literature, as she was from about B.C. 450 to 320; and as, after the latter date, Alexandria became, where the poetical tradition was kept up to the fourth century of the Christian era. Between B.C. 300 and 200 we have hymns ​from Callimachus, an astronomical poem from Aratus, and pastorals from Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus; and in the next century an epic from Apollonius of Rhodes. In the first century A.D. lived Babrius, the fabulist; in the next, Oppian, the writer of poems on fishing and hunting; and in the fifth century, Nonnus, the author of the huge epic called "Dionysiaca"; Quintus of Smyrna, who wrote a kind of continuation of Homer; and Musaeus, who produced some pretty verse, especially the poem on Hero and Leander. Greek poetry, therefore, which was the earliest form of literature, continued with no radical variation for more than a thousand years.
Prose composition was later in coming into use, for even some of the early philosophers, such as Xenophanes and Parmenides (about B.C. 530–495), enunciated their doctrines in verse. Prose literature began with the Ionic school of historians, Hecataeus of Miletus in the sixth century and Hellanicus in the fifth. Next to them came the first of the prose writers whose work has been preserved, Herodotus of Halicarnassus (B.C. 485–425), followed by Thucydides (B.C. 471–401) and Xenophon (B.C. 431–354), the Athenians. About contemporary with Herodotus was Hippocrates, the famous physician, whose works, or those reputed his, are still extant. Thus begun, Greek prose literature continued almost uninterruptedly till the twelfth century after Christ. In the second century B.C. the historical series is continued by Polybius of Megalopolis (B.C. 203–121), with many others whose works are lost; in the last century B.C. by Diodorus of Sicily and Dionysius of ​Halicarnassus, and in the first century after Christ by the geographer Strabo, the Jewish historians Josephus and Nicolas of Damascus, and the biographer Plutarch the Boeotian. The ecclesiastical and the Byzantine historians keep up the tradition to the end. Meanwhile the varied interests of free states had given birth to oratory, which flourished at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. We possess orations of ten Attic orators, the most famous of whom was Demosthenes (B.C. 384–322). With the loss of freedom oratory lost some of its significance, but it was taught and practised as an art in various parts of Hellas, especially in Rhodes and the Greek cities of Asia. And though we possess few specimens for the next five centuries—the orations of Dion Chrysostom in the first, and of the Emperor Julian in the third century A.D., being the most important—yet it was taken up again by the Christian Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., and thus had an unbroken tradition to the end. It was this popular use of Greek prose that produced the "common dialect," formed on the Attic use, which prevailed over the Greek world, and was adopted by writers in other departments, such as Lucian in his dialogues; Appian and Arrian in their histories, in the second century, and the romance writers in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.
The fact that Athens was the chief home of philosophy from the fourth century B.C., also determined the fact that Attic in some form or another was to be the language of philosophers. From Plato (B.C. 427–347) and Aristotle (B.C. 384–324) to the ​fifth century after Christ there is a chain of writers of philosophy or on the history of philosophy and philosophers. The early philosophers, who mostly engaged in speculations as to the physical universe, lived in various parts of Greece—Ionia, Magna Graecia, and Sicily—but in the fifth century we find that all teachers have a tendency to drift to Athens, and when about B.C. 300 and onward literature found a centre rather in Alexandria, Athens still maintained its prestige as the home of philosophy. It was there that the four great schools—Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics, and Epicureans—through all their later developments had their headquarters, and attracted the best intellects of Greece and Rome.
But the most characteristic literature in Greece is the dramatic. The exhibition of plays may have begun, as some think, in village festivals of harvest or vintage, and the story of Thespis, the first exhibitor of them in Athens, travelling round the country with his theatrical properties in a cart, may be true. But their literary shape seems certainly a development from the Comus, or revel-song, and especially from that part of it called a dithyramb, or hymn in honour of Bacchus. It was chiefly in use among Dorian peoples, and accordingly the employment of the Dorian dialect in the choric songs of later days became traditional. To this song was added a dialogue between the leader of the chorus and an "answerer" (ὑπσκρίτης), and as the plot or fable became more important and intricate a second and third actor was added to carry on the dialogues.
Theatre at Epidaurus.
​spread over Greece, in which hardly any city of importance was without a theatre. Nowhere else did it form so much a part of the life of the people; and though the composition of plays did not last so long as some other forms of literature, the Greeks in this as in other things set an example which has never ceased to exercise decisive influence. In this again Athens took the lead. There was built the first permanent theatre, and there the great masters of tragedy were born. But of the mass of such compositions that once existed, we have only plays of three tragedians and one comedian. Æschylus (B.C. 525–456) represents the religious mind of Greece in the early fifth century, Sophocles (B.C. 495–403) the age of art, and Euripides (B.C. 480–406) the unrest of awakened curiosity and inevitable scepticism. Some thirty-eight names of writers of tragedies are known, but after the first decade of the fourth century (circ. B.C. 390) there seems to have been a cessation of original dramatic writing. The old plays were acted again and again, or were supplanted by music and recitations of poetry. Some few authors of tragedies lived in Alexandria in the time of the Second Ptolemy (B.C. 285–247), but nothing survives except their names.
Along with Tragedy grew Comedy. It bore still stronger traces of its origin from village revels or festivals. Instead of dealing with human passions and crimes, and the mysteries of the divine order, its dialogue introduced every kind of ludicrous incident and personal satire, while the choric songs were either parodies of serious poetry, or wild extrava​ganzas, which spared neither gods nor men, and were accompanied by every licence of dance and gesture. The composition of such dramas began almost simultaneously in Sicily and Athens. In the former the first author is believed to be Epicharmus (about B.C. 480). In Athens about forty names of the Old Comedy are known, but all that remain to us are the eleven plays of Aristophanes (about B.C. 444–380). Towards the end of his life the poverty of the state made the furnishing of choruses difficult, and the position of politics made the old personalities dangerous. In his last plays, therefore, the choric element is quite insignificant, and the plays them- selves are comedies of manners rather than political invectives. This change of fashion was followed by a number of writers of what is called Middle Comedy, in which political allusions still occurred, though with increasing rarity. About the middle of the fourth century B.C. the change became more complete. The chorus disappeared altogether, a prologue was introduced instead, and politics disappeared entirely. The most conspicuous among such writers was the Athenian Menander (B.C. 342–291). Others came from Sicily and different parts of Greece, the last known being Posidippus of Cassandria, who was living in B.C. 289. The plays of this New Comedy are only known to us in the Latin adaptations of Plautus and Terence.
Such, in brief outline, are the departments of literature in which Greek genius has abidingly influenced the spirit and form of all modern literature.
LATE COPY OF THE ATHENA PARTHENOS OF PHEIDIAS.
​Frescoes and other works lately discovered in Crete show that perhaps more than a thousand years B.C. considerable skill had been attained both in painting and sculpture; while those found at Pompeii, which belong to the end of the classical period, have many of the excellences of a highly-developed technique. But between these two extremes there were periods of decadence and revival. In painting, indeed, of the great period, we have only that on vases and other pottery, which cannot be taken to fairly represent what could be done in delineation and the use of colours, though they vary from the most primitive ideas of drawing to the most elaborate and skilful compositions. In statuary, the remains of work before the Persian wars (B.C. 490–478) are stiff and conventional. The difficulties in representing posture, drapery, the eyes and hair, have not been overcome. It was after that period that the great artists—Pheidias, Polycleitos, Myron, and many others, whether independent artists or working under their instruction and direction—showed what could be done with stone or bronze. The men and horses on the frieze of the Parthenon live and move, their faces express life-like emotion, and their eyes see. The names of the artists mentioned belong to the fifth century B.C., but in the next century Scopas of Paros, Praxiteles of Athens, Lysippus of Sicyon, worthily maintained the tradition; and if it is true that the Aphrodite of Melos (now in the Louvre) belongs to the second century B.C., Greek art remained at the very highest point of excellence at least till that time, while some of the statues of the ​early Emperors of Rome show scarcely less skill. In this, as in literature, Athens long had the supremacy, though never the monopoly. Nearly every important Greek town contributed, and especially the islands of Ægina, Chios, and Samos, and the wealthy city of Pergamus. Two motives may be regarded as the strongest in promoting this art—religion and athleticism. The adornment of temples and the desire to express the ideal of divine personages are responsible for a large number of the finest statues that remain, while almost as many came from the study of the nude figure as seen in the contests of the Stadium. The Roman conquest transferred a great quantity of the best works of Greek art to Italy, and in many cases the artists themselves migrated thither also; for in Italy they would best find patrons and purchasers. This later, or Hellenistic, period of Greek art was, no doubt, inferior in many ways to that which had preceded it; but just as the later philosophy of Epicurus and Zeno (circ. B.C. 340–260), while owing much to the earlier speculations of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, exercised an even greater influence upon many generations, so the later Greek art—with the glory of the older still clinging about it—modified the tastes, as philosophy did the thoughts and beliefs, of that great part of Europe and Asia which was included in the Roman Empire. That influence, after long periods of darkness and degradation, has revived with full force in these later centuries. We can still conceive nothing greater in Art than the highest achievements of Greece.
SACRIFICIAL RITES.
From a mosaic in the British Museum.