WESTWARD EMPIRE;

OR,

The Great Drama of Human Progress.

BY

E.L. MAGOON,

AUTHOR OF "PROVERBS FOR THE PEOPLE," "REPUBLICAN CHRISTIANITY,"
"ORATORS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION," "LIVING ORATORS IN AMERICA," ETC., ETC.

"Westward the course of empire takes its way,
The four first acts already past;
A fifth shall close the drama with the day,
Time's noblest offspring is the last."

George Berkeley.

NEW YORK:

HARPER & BROTHERS,

329 TO 335 PEARL STREET.

1856.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1856, by

HARPER AND BROTHERS,

In the Clerk's Office for the Southern District of New York.

TO CITIZENS
WHO TRUST IN PROVIDENCE,
MEN WHO ARE TRUE TO HUMANITY,
AND PATRIOTS
ALWAYS HOPEFUL OF THE REPUBLIC,
THIS WORK
IS FRATERNALLY INSCRIBED.

INTRODUCTION.

By a natural movement, in not one of its great elements has civilization gone eastward an inch since authentic history began. To demonstrate this simple and comprehensive fact is the motive of the following work, and all the great leading events of time are the means employed. Berkeley has suggested a grand outline in his significant stanza, but neither he nor any other author has hitherto attempted to define the acts, and portray the connected scenes, which constitute the one great drama of human progress.

Artistic beauty, martial force, scientific invention, and universal amelioration, have thus far illustrated the great progressional law of successive predominance, and these, we believe, will ultimately be consummated in the supreme sway of perfect civilization. We are led to this view by taking a catholic survey of every nation that has risen above the historical horizon; in which course we observe that all are alike the subjects of Providence, each in its time and place being furnished with a part to act, and a destiny to fulfill. Considered in this light, it may be reverently said that human history is a sacred drama, of which God is the poet, each transitional age an act, humanity the hero, and the discriminating annalist a prophetical interpreter.

But this work is not so much the defense of a theory as it is the display of facts, and the deduction of a general principle consequent thereupon. The travels of men, and the trade-currents of God, move spontaneously and perpetually toward the West. The opposite direction is always "down East," while all healthful expansion and improvement is "out West." The great eastern turnpike, canal, or railway, was never built, nor has a great eastern ship yet been launched on the deep. If the unnatural name has of late been given to a colossal craft, the misnomer is indicated by the fact, that her first trip is appointed to be a western one, and to terminate in our most eastern harbor, where the most stupendous development of western commerce just begins. All great enterprises by land and by sea have ever commenced in the East, and augmented both their efficiency and worth through a continuous unfolding toward the setting sun. The latest race is evermore the best, the last half of each great age is most prolific in progressive elements, and the west end of every great town throughout Europe and America is the growing end.

An introduction ought to stimulate rational curiosity, while it justifies the labors of the author, by furnishing his reader with a succinct programme of the conditions of the subject. We consider the age of Pericles to have terminated four centuries before, and that of Augustus five centuries after, the birth of Christ. The age of Leo X. began in the fifth century, with the fall of the Western Empire, and ended in the sixteenth, soon after the final downfall of the East. The seventeenth century was the great era of colonial empire, and then began the age of Washington. It is not man but God who has thrown these clear lines of demarcation over the entire mass of humanity, as innumerable dates, names, and events, alluded to in the following work will show. Copious references to authorities are purposely omitted, as we wish to render the pages as compact as possible with unbroken thought, but the facts themselves can easily be verified by the enlightened reader, or confuted if they are incorrect.

The service we herein attempt is to portray the relations of the present to the past and future, by tracing all the mightiest elements of our civilization to their respective sources, and by indicating the antecedents of those national heroes whose names shine upon the forehead of our age, and whose accumulated productions constitute the grandest inheritance of the remotest posterity. The mighty princes of literature of all climes, "who still rule our spirits from their urns," are summoned into stately procession, followed by the great masters of art, science, philosophy, and religion, each one bearing his own distinct physiognomy, and taking precedence in historical order. It is in this natural course that we would mold numerous and diversified materials into one homogeneous whole. The work is an abbreviated nomenclature of celebrated personages and events, a bold sketch of the great historical ages, not divided according to arbitrary chronological dates, or a formal geographical plan, but embracing all authentic periods in their indissoluble continuity of development, illustrated by the multifarious monuments which it has successively produced and passed. The philosophy of history resides not in isolated events and detached facts, but flows without interruption down the lapse of ages, the accompaniment of human destiny, and the life of ennobling actions; at once penetrating all incidents, and perpetuating all progress.

In the present undertaking, the author proposes in general terms to remind the reader of the various masterpieces which the past has bequeathed, rather than minutely to describe their authors, or criticise their merits. It is not our object to pronounce a judgment upon the characters and achievements of the great actors on the stage we survey, but simply to point out the manifest unity and advancement of the great drama as it proceeds. All minute details are omitted, in order to present as distinctly as possible the main outlines. As we contemplate the vast patrimony of knowledge, whence it came, and whither it leads, we watch the twilight on eastern hills as it brightens into midday, and then goes flooding over the broad expanse of the West. The consecutive series of historical events, though they transpire wide apart, and extend through a long lapse of ages, are never absolutely separated, but in the presence of the great Father are intimately joined in a sublime association, and mutually co-operate for the highest good of the greatest number. Different currents may seem to flow from the most diverse sources, and in opposite directions, but they are all tributaries to one centralizing channel, wherein flows forward forever the accumulating aggregate of human fortunes, under the divine control. A papal decree was once obtained condemning Galileo's doctrine touching the revolution of the earth; but that did not arrest pre-ordained planetary motion, nor prevent all sublunary beings from turning with it. Fortunately the tide of improvement has already rolled onward so far, and with such increased might, that Oxford is just as impotent to stay the ameliorating progress of mankind as was the Vatican, and both must advance with a diviner momentum, or be outstripped by a younger competitor in the heavenly course.

Without an intelligent faith in the divine purpose to incite and control perpetual progress toward the perfection of mankind, history is an insoluble enigma, a huge pile of detached fragments, and the great drama of humanity must forever remain devoid of all proper results. But even Aristotle expressed a worthier view, in saying that every end is great; it is so, because it forms the beginning of something greater. In nature, nothing actually perishes. Death is birth, and the dissolution of every organization is but the development and visible advancement of a fresher type of being. Naturally every substance is conservative of all the vitality it can possibly sustain, and when any given form apparently perishes, it is but to reveal a still higher life that lay concealed behind it, awaiting the moment of its appointed succession to power. Thus decay and renewal constitute a perpetual struggle, identical life rising through multifarious death toward the supreme in freedom and power. In proportion to the graduated scale of existence, lesser or greater, lower or higher, this law applies with more palpable justness, and is best exemplified in the unpausing progress which humanity makes in its predetermined career.

In tracing the evolution of those laws which rule in the various realms of simultaneous growth, we see that, while all are connected, and always act upon each other, some one of them, for the time being, must be preponderant, in order to impart an impulse to the rest, though, in its appointed time, another may be called to succeed, and receive superior expansion. It is that which develops the most advanced nation of a given era, and constitutes the moving centre of progressive civilization. It is the connecting bond and quickening impulse of those heroes who can marshal motives as well as armies, and make the grandeur of their own nationality the introduction and nutriment of a grander nation to come. The vanguard of the human race, invested with and impelled by this indomitable energy, moves in the appointed orbit, losing neither momentum nor effulgence as it advances, but rather increasing both. If we inquire as to the area and agency of the chief progression in the domain of human history, it will be found that Japhet has been the constant leader, Europe the intermediate track, and America the manifest goal. From all the premises furnished by experience, and the fullest assurance of faith, we must infer that this continent, ruled by the Republic upon its centre, is destined to garner the selected seed from antecedent harvests, that it may sow world-wide the germs of ultimate and universal worth.

Every great epoch has its master impulse, which acts as the precursor of a yet greater one to succeed it. A multitude of hearts may throb with ardent impatience, and myriads of hands may be ready to act, but not one profitable pulsation is there, nor an effective achievement, save as the actuating soul of the age shall animate and direct. All great revolutions in the intellectual world are marked by successive steps of generalization and transitions into wider realms through more expanded truths. We advance from the obscure to the obvious, from single facts to homogeneous combinations, and from particular doctrines to an all-comprehensive system. Nothing that does not relate to the perpetual progress of the great drama of divine Providence, and illustrate it, is admitted within our plan. With the whole field of human history before us, we are first to mark the most prominent features, and then trace whatever is subordinate and auxiliary. Four mighty landmarks rise most prominently to the view, around which are concentrated all the beneficent inventions and renowned names, universally admired by the civilized world. But, though supreme, these are not separate from inferior agents. True, the chief glory of an age, or people, seems to be the work of a few leading minds, while all others are transient actors on the stage. But each epoch, and all connected therewith, is a unit, indissolubly joined to its successors, in the formation of which it has contributed all the primary elements. Every subsequent act is the legitimate evolution of its predecessor, and from prelude to sequel, there is but one symmetrical development of an infinite plan. There may be deep and dark eddies in the stream, and even long reaches, wherein the current seems to assume a retrograde course, nevertheless its progress is not for a moment arrested, nor does it ever cease from innumerable tributaries evermore to augment its force. The spring-head we may not discern, but the main channel can be clearly traced through every clime, without meeting with whirlpools completely stationary, or depths too stagnant for some lofty use.

Veritable history is but an exponent of Providence, a vivid commentary on the one great purpose of the divine mind in the work of redemption, and should be written, as it is realized, with this intent. This is the Ariadne clew which alone can guide us through the otherwise inextricable labyrinth. We need, if possible, to reproduce, in subdued outline, the comprehensive political and ecclesiastical drama which the Revelator witnessed, as in a moving panorama, reaching from the beginning of sublunary scenes to their end. Such would be the portraiture of great men, great revolutions, and great results, illuminated by the one glorious purpose of the great God. This is signalized not only in always providing and fitting instruments for each emergency that may arise, but in subordinating all agents, and the causes which exercise their worth, to the perfection of humanity, by means of salutary discipline. When the ancient muses inspired Herodotus to write, and the genius of the nation prompted him to recite before assembled Greece, it was the first epical announcement of that divine poetry which forever celebrates the destinies of our race. An immensity of facts has since been added, and innumerable scenes have further evolved the purposes of the Supreme to such an extent, that the utmost comprehensiveness of dramatic delineation is requisite to give an adequate idea of the ever enlarging orbits of development, through which humanity has already passed, together with the legitimate unfoldings which a yet sublimer future will present. This highest ideal is beyond the reach of epical representation, and is of all unities the grandest since it considers the whole human race as one, like an individual soul, having the Infinite as the beginning and end of its finite existence.

We are probably in near neighborhood to inventions and improvements soon to eclipse all foregone wonders. The greatest proficient in letters, art, or science, is merely a flugelman in the army of knowledge, and if called to proclaim the miracle of to-day, doubtless he will be further summoned to announce the reward of nocturnal marchings, by the news of a greater miracle, to-morrow. Every year finds us a new stadium in advance; but it is only at great culminating eras that civilization seems to become aware of the actual speed of its reformatory motion. Victory always remains with the new spirit, and freedom, like truth, never can become old; they are in God, and thereby the final battle and widest conquest must eventually be secured. Not one great campaign was ever lost to humanity, nor ever will be. Every historical nation bears in its bosom the germs of more prolific and ennobling fruits, which their successors will employ to subdue and adorn hardier and richer fields. The scenery changes with each act performed, but the plot goes steadily forward. Providence is making the tour of the world, and every new phase of civilization is an additional proof of a divinely identical plan. As the age to come shall lapse continuously upon the tombs of empires and generations of mankind, we believe that this era will not descend undistinguished among the centuries past. The present march of the human mind, and the exalted ends it has in view, are so remarkable, that the period of our existence will ever be distinguished in the esteem of those who will come after us. From the past and the present a glorious future must succeed. We may most reasonably hope that the age now transpiring, the age we have seen born, and which will see us buried, will transmit to our children and their remotest posterity, increasing virtues, and perpetually lessened wrongs.

Such, in fine, is the profound and joyous conviction of the author, and to elucidate which has been consecrated a considerable portion of what leisure he has been able to command during the past seven years. Herein will not be found one local allusion, or envenomed word, designed to wound any sect or section. But, with one absorbing purpose, he has pressed steadily forward, laying all available resources under contribution, to show how each advancing epoch recasts the history of the past, and foretokens the future, in contemplating it from its own point of view. Let us fondly hope that, on the side of the globe opposite to the first Ararat, shall a second be reached by the Ark of conservative civilization, whereon human reason and divine righteousness will repose in the sublimest earthly union, and thence send down a perfected race to propagate their virtues, and redeem mankind.

Elm.

New York, July 4th, 1856.

CONTENTS.

PERICLES;

OR,

THE AGE OF ARTISTIC BEAUTY.

PROLOGUE OF MOTTOES.

"Could we create so close, tender, and cordial a connection between the citizens of a state, as to induce all to consider themselves as relatives—as fathers, brothers, and sisters, then this whole state would constitute but a single family, be subjected to the most perfect regulations, and become the happiest republic that ever existed upon earth."—Plato.

"Although this great edifice of universal history, where the conclusion at least is still wanting, is in this respect incomplete, and appears but a mighty fragment of which even particular parts are less known to us than others; yet is this edifice sufficiently advanced, and many of its great wings and members are sufficiently unfolded to our view, to enable us, by a lucid arrangement of the different periods of history, to gain a clear insight into the general plan of the whole."—Frederic Von Schlegel.

"Whatever is necessary exists."—De Maistre.

"God shall enlarge Japhet, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem."—Genesis ix. 27.

PART FIRST.

PERICLES.—AGE OF ARTISTIC BEAUTY.

CHAPTER I.

LITERATURE.

Civilization is earth's central stream, and all literatures, arts, sciences, philosophies, and religions are but tributaries to swell its tide and increase its current. To indicate the successive sources, describe the multiform elements, and demonstrate the progressive aggregation and enrichment of this unity in diversity, is the object of the present work.

Much patient and critical research will be requisite at each remove, but the chief difficulty lies at the threshold of the undertaking. When and with what does authentic history, illustrated through human progress, begin? Geography, ethnology, and philology must be our chief oracles in reply.

Western Asia was doubtless the cradle of the earliest civilized communities, and the source of all authentic improvement. Mount Kylas gave the term koilon, heaven, to the Greeks, and is probably the highest eminence on earth. Moorcroft viewed it from a tableland more than seventeen thousand feet high, and describes its sides and craggy summits of still more tremendous altitude, apparently covered thickly with snow. At its base emerges the Indus, that mighty artery of western India, on the bank of which stands Attac, a name which the great civilizing race afterward applied to the fairest realm of their culture. Standing at this fountain-head, we find increased facilities for striking out the great historico-geographical outline which marks the progress of the patriarch bands of India, Egypt, and Europe. The intimate connection between the Nilitic valley, Greece, and the lands of the Indus, is rendered yet more evident by the geographical development of the colonization of eastern Europe, in which the ingenious people of Abu-Sin, Abyssinians, founded the mercantile and prosperous community of Corinthus. Cor-Indus, that is, mouth of the Indus, carried westward, became the classical Corinth. The distance from the Indian shore was not so great but that the sail which spread for Ceylon could waft to the Red Sea, where the fleets of Tyre, of Solomon and of Hiram were to be found. The ancient Institutes of Menu expressly refer to merchants who traffic beyond sea; and, moreover, that the Hindoos were westward navigators from the earliest ages, the vestiges of their religion in the Archipelago abundantly attest. From the same lofty regions descended the Parasoos, that is, warriors of the Axe, to penetrate and give name to Persia, while Colchis and Armenia became as distinctly the product and proof of Indian colonization. Down this central route came the Pilgrim Fathers of the first great civilizing nations, making the whole mass of authentic geography a venerable journal of emigration on the most gigantic scale.

Let us now briefly consider the progressive changes which have passed upon this great geographical chart of historical development, and observe their effects. Successive tribes of living beings have perished thereon, and been replaced with better and nobler races, until at last man came to be lord of earth, and to reap from it all the enjoyments increasing culture could bestow. From the beginning, progress has been maintained in and through convulsions, each succeeding tempest alternating with a sublimer calm. Relying on human traditions alone, we can acquaint ourselves with no primary people, no first seat of civilization, no original philosophy, or natural wisdom. Guided by a higher authority, it is necessary to penetrate the intervening mists of symbolical fables, and collect numerous scientific facts, in order to attain secure ground, whereon the first germ of humanity was planted, and whence it has perpetually developed itself under the control of unfaltering law. At the farthest horizon of the most venerable antiquity, several light points appear, the harbingers of civilization, radiating toward each other, and indicating a common point of union in the darkness behind. They resemble the superior lights among the stars of the firmament, whose brightness we perceive amid the eternal suns of the universe, but whose relative distances from our own planet it is impossible to ascertain. The dwelling of a divine spark in the human bosom has, even from the obscurest height of Caucasus, been recognized in the beautiful tradition of Prometheus; but the question of the first springing up of mankind can not be fully elucidated by mere antiquarian research. In the last result, that is a matter to be left to the disclosures of revelation and the exercise of faith.

The Mosaic narrative of creation is the primitive document of our race, and this commemorates the repeated convulsions and prodigious corruption of the world, previous to the Noachian flood. Of the earliest period, it says: "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Gen. i. 2. Of post-diluvian history, every thing was embraced in that last recorded fact of Noah's life, a prophecy delivered in the infancy of mankind, and which every succeeding development has only tended to illustrate and confirm. Gen. ix. 18, 19—"The sons of Noah that went forth from the ark, were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole (inhabited) earth overspread." On these three races distinct destinies were pronounced, they receiving a moral and physical nature accordant to their several allotments. The office of extension was given to Japhet, that of religion to Shem, and servitude to Ham.

Ethnology, the science of nations, in its most recent and profound deductions, differs somewhat in detail, but the great conclusion is the same. The threefold branches radiate from a common stock, and in their growth from east to west, they mark the high road of universal progress, and adorn the stage on which the entire drama of ancient history has been performed. The prediction of Noah is the record of human destiny, and has been subjected to the severest test. Material vestiges of creation, and the earliest monuments of mind, alike place the origin of man in the central East. The people of the Brahmins come down from the Hindo-Khu into the plains of the Indus and the Ganges; Assyria and Bactriana receive their inhabitants from the high lands of Armenia and Persia. Those nations advance rapidly, and, in the remotest antiquity, attained a degree of culture of which the temples and monuments of Egypt and India, together with the palaces of Nineveh, are glorious witnesses. As the basis of preliminary improvement, they rapidly developed to a degree, then movement was stayed, and thenceforth their stationary remains mark the oriental boundary of the historic race. Ethnology testifies that Ham peopled Egypt, and that the primary emigration thither from Asia may have been ante-Noachian. The native name of Egypt is Chami, the black; and this fact is symbolically represented by the name of its predestined ancestor, Cham, Shem's eldest brother, Japhet being the youngest of the three. When the comprehensive fortunes of the triple founders of our race were foretold, Shem was called the elder brother of Japhet, but not of Ham. Gen. x. 32—"By these were the nations divided after the flood." Thus the great middle country in western Asia is the central point of the general view. On the south, the race of Ham includes degenerate Egypt, and all the sombre African tribes beyond. In the north Caucasian regions, the race of Japhet spread widely; and in central Asia the race of Shem. These general positions have been proved by the ethnologists, Pritchard and Bunsen, and are confirmed by the most reliable archæologists, as well as by the leading physiologists of the world, Morton, Cuvier, and Blumenbach.

But we will pass to the third and most copious means of demonstration, philology. It is believed that a furious religious war, long anterior to the historic Shem, drove a large multitude of oriental inhabitants westward, and that these became the primary stratum of European humanity, afterward superseded by the Japhetic race, wherever the germs of true history took root. The names given by the Pelasgi to the chief mountains of Greece, as well as the name itself of that mysterious people, point to an emigration from India, whence a twofold stream of emigration seems to have flowed. We have alluded above to the one which, under the auspices of the semi-historic Shem, passed through Persia and northern Arabia into Egypt, and adjoined the unhistoric Ham. At a later period, whatever of excellence that transition realm developed passed into southern Greece. The other current, the grandest and most prolific of all, passed through Persia, along the Caspian sea, over mount Caucasus, and thence through Thrace direct to northern Greece. The productive tribes, at their first appearance on the horizon, enter upon the prospective stage with the elements of language, and with this fundamental power eliminated for their use, they were formed into the social compact of progressive humanity.

The earliest inventors of the glorious art of writing deserve the most grateful regard. The search after them, and their several stages of discovery, tends to strengthen the view held by many, that the common chronology of history embraces too limited a period; and that hoary India, at an era anterior to human record, originated the first pictorial system and communicated it to the Chinese, whose records attribute their mode of writing to a foreign source. But the yellow races of the far East are destined to remain still in the dawn: the sun of civilization has never risen sufficiently high above them to give vital growth to any product they have either invented or received. But the old emigrants of Egypt soon reduced their pictorial language to rough hieroglyphic outlines, and then to signs yet more approximating sounds, which laid the foundation for European alphabets.

Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia, have left us no specimens of their writing, aside from the dubious carvings upon the lofty rocks of Asia. But this "handwriting upon the wall," so long ago interpreted by the prophet Daniel, is now laid open to general comprehension, through Layard and Rawlinson, as a most important link in the philological chain. It was indeed strange that when the Egyptians had broken down the thin partition which separated them from phonetic language, their last monuments should exhibit no nearer approach to it than the first. The cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria render the order of progression perfect, connecting the later achievements in literary research with the previous triumphs of Young and Champollion. We discover syllables at length; and if on the banks of the Nile, we found a full grown adult, but impotent and out of the way, we meet, on the banks of the Euphrates, with a vigorous child, yet imperfect certainly, but actually advancing, and in the right path. Leaving the cumbrous and astute paraphernalia of pictorial and symbolic characters, the speaking signs passed from the arrow-points of Assyria into the flexile and immortal worth of the Phœnician alphabet. As soon as this invention had been planted in a neighboring state, the alphabetic system was appropriated by the great leader of the Hebrews, when they returned to the land of their fathers, and became neighbors to the Phœnicians. Certain modifications supervened, adapted to their political and religious institutions; but the original names of the signs which constitute the Hebrew alphabet, strikingly prove their derivation from a hieroglyphic system, and indicate clearly a pictorial origin. Moreover, the first allusion to writing in the books of Moses is to the tablets of stone, "after the manner of a signet," by which we may understand engraved writing, like that of the Assyrian cylinders, or scales.

If the Shemitic tongues exhibit undeniable proof of their being derived from the western part of central Asia, the Indo-European languages present no less evidence of the gradual extension of these races from the eastern part. The Shemitic tribes never extended into Europe, except by temporary excursions. With the exception of Armenia, they have not lost ground in Asia, and have, from the beginning, penetrated into Africa, where no traces of Japhetic origin are discernible. Of Shem, the Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew are the three great monuments. Japhet nationalized the Sanscrit, Persian, and Greek, with all their descendants, the languages of beauty, power and progress everywhere.

In early Greece, a purely Egyptian element was planted by Cecrops, a native of Säis, in the Delta, but whether he was a native Copt does not appear. He migrated B.C. about 1550, and married a daughter of the Pelasgi, so it is not likely he introduced any of his own language. The same may be said of the colonist Danaus and his family, though he, as brother of the king Sesostris, was doubtless of unmingled Egyptian race. A much stronger element must be accounted for in the Phœnician immigration of Cadmus, and the constant intercourse kept up by that people with continental Greece. Crete should be regarded as the stepping-stone on the auspicious high way, the first amalgam wherein Egyptian, Pelasgic, and Phœnician civilization mingled, and, when properly blended, was transferred to the main land. Then came the purely Japhetic element, and gave tone and character to all. That great genius of Hellas, whose name has perished like that of the inventor of the plow, but who lives enshrined in the most intellectual of all monuments, worked upon this eastern element as he did upon every other capability submitted to his inventive and intellectualizing power. He rendered the limited alphabet of Shem universal, eliminating the signs for harsh, guttural sounds, and by preserving those which were rejected, in the series of the numerals. The twenty-two letters of Shem became the twenty-four of Japhet, and thus, by their combined energies, a philosophical alphabet was produced, at once the aggregate of all Asiatic idioms, and the guaranty of all European culture. It was the receiver and transmitter of the most noble treasures ever garnered in the realms of intellect and emotion, a pure medium for the investigating faculty of the senses, as well as the mightiest weapon for the plastic and vitalizing power of imagination, the Greeks ever possessed, and which imperishable heritage they have left as the richest gift to coming generations.

During thrice ten centuries of the early world, the various oriental nations followed in their development an isolated course; and two vast peoples, the Chinese and Indians, have remained to this day in a totally sequestered state. They are in the same condition of immobility now, as at the beginning of the historical nations, that is to say, only six, or at most seven centuries before the Christian era. Still, India, with its philosophy and myths, its literature and laws, is worthy of special study, as it presents a page of the primitive annals of the world. But before the brilliant rays of the East streamed toward us from Hellenic sources, every thing seemed obscure—as to an explorer of the majestic tombs of Egypt, the farther he advances within, the more is he deserted by light. The first reliable guide we meet, is the art of writing; and this, so far from being an invention of recent times, reaches back to the most venerable antiquity. The only key to an understanding of the literature of Media and Persia, and in some respects of Greece, is furnished by the languages of India, and especially by that preserved in the hymns of the Veda, some of which ascend to the remote era of B.C. 2448. A claim to antiquity so great would appear incredible, were it not sustained beyond a doubt by the Assyrian remains recently exhumed. Like the region of its origin, Sanscrit literature is perfectly anomalous, and bears a striking resemblance to the extinct relics of that vast area over which it passed, to become the parent of all those dialects which in Europe are called classical.

Escaping from the mummified civilization of Egypt and the inflexible East, we strike more boldly into the high road of all improvement, and observe how rapidly power of every kind passes from Shem to the irresistible Japhet. The continuous stream of humanity moves clearly and with increased speed through a new and broader channel. As Shem was employed to introduce all religions on earth, so is he made to perform the most prominent part in the theological culture of mankind. But conscious speculation, elegant letters, and beautifying art all belong to the younger Japhet, whose heroes are Hellenes, and whose magnificent progeny are the myriad multitudes of the entire Indo-Germanic stock.

Thus, by the light of linguistic research, we descend from the exalted cradle of the human race to the prepared field of their first grand development. As we approximate the sphere wherein all faculties are free, and each element of excellence soars rapidly to its culminating height, a historical unity becomes manifest in language, wisdom, arts, sciences, and the most comprehensive civilization. These innumerable facts are no patch-work of incoherent fragments, no chance rivulets flowing in isolated beds, but tributaries to one uninterrupted current, correlative proofs of one and the same grand development. Language, the last struggle of the agonized age of Ham, the first triumph of the reason of Shem, was the magnificent medium perfected by Japhet, and through which, under the auspices of the Periclean age, universal man might see all his glories simultaneously revealed. Five hundred years before the Christian era, all nationalities east of Athens had perished; then and there, in consummate literature, we behold God's vanguard on earth. To the Hellenes, the beautiful of every type was revealed.

In fullness, exactness, flexibility and grace, the Greek language surpasses all other linguistic forms, and remains the first great masterpiece of the classic world. As we watch the growth of a tender exotic plant, gradually removed to a higher latitude, and at each stage of its matured beauty experience fresh joy, so the philologist watches the tender shoot of the first European tongue as it unfolds under the mild skies of Ionia, passes to the isles of the Ægean, and finally strikes its strong roots in fruitful Attica. In infancy, it was redolent with the fragrance of festive song; in maturity it scattered abroad priceless worth in every style of literature, art, science and philosophy; till at last, touched by the hand of despotism, its living beauty faded, but even in death, like Medora, is still invested with the lingering charms of youth.

Literature, as we design to use the term, embraces all those mental exertions which relate to man and his welfare; but which, in their most refined form, display intellect as embodied in written thought. The first great original was produced by the Greeks. It is true they received their alphabet and many imperfect elements from the Asiatic nations, but the perfected whole of a national literature was doubtless their own. The Shemite could even excel in the primitive strains of poetry, but the restrictive power of local attachments rendered him incapable of producing any more regular form. That vivid combination of lyric beauty and epic might, the drama, which constitutes a complete representation of national destinies, was entirely unknown to him. The "Song of Solomon," which best represents the mental character of that race, shows that however near the Hebrew mind in its zenith, might approach the higher forms of art, it could not go beyond the ode. Though the elements of all literature, art and science existed in the east, Sesostris of the old empire was obliged to borrow from Japhetic inventors, as Solomon and Hiram did.

The geographical position of Athens is worthy of notice. In the march of civilization from east to west, she stood nearly midway, and extended her open palm to receive and impart the physical and intellectual wealth of nations. Her people united the hardihood of the mountaineer with the elasticity of maritime tribes, and never had a country of such diversified physical qualities, elicited such varied excellences of mind. We look in vain for like effects among the colossal monarchies from which the colonists had been sifted, and are led in wonder to contrast the smallness of the country with the wealth of its products. Ranging from Olympus on the north, to Pænarus, her southern headland, Greece extended but two hundred and fifty miles; while two thirds of that distance would conduct the traveler from the temple of Minerva, on the eastern promontory of Sunium, to Leucadia her western extreme. But if the superfices of that area were insignificant, whereon the dragon teeth were sown, prolific of all inland fruitfulness, its coasts were rich in harbors, from one of which the Argonauts embarked on their romantic voyage, followed in succeeding ages by numerous larger expeditions in successful search after golden gains. The small but glorious land of Hellas lay within the line of beauty, by which, from the first, the uncouth barbarian was separated from the graceful Greek. Coincident with the happy period of the political history of that land, all her mental glories occupy no greater space than the three centuries which intervened between Solon and Alexander, having Pericles for the culminating point.

It is necessary that the fullness of invention should precede the refinement of art, legend before history, and poetry before criticism. A long period of traditionary wealth existed between the Trojan war and the arts of peace, upon which the plastic spirit of Greece breathed an energizing originality and independence, creating the variety, beauty, and immortality of unrivaled works. The Hellenic race, children of the beautiful, became veritably a nation, in expressing the first great idea of earth, beauty. This entered into all the elements which composed their interior life, as well as outward expressions, and stamped upon all departments a distinct physiognomy. Uncounted millions had roamed the wilds of Africa and Asia, of whom history takes no account, because they matured no idea; but the true dawn of improvement began at length to appear, and representative individuals stood forth as the aggregate of anterior worth and progenitors of prospective glories. A great age was easily read in a few resplendent proper names.

Pericles was the exactest symbol of his age, his character its product, and his career its historian. His advent marked the close of a heroic period in the sudden meridian of fascinating civilization. For forty years he was the ruling genius of that glorious city which it was the ambition of his life to adorn for exhibition, and crown for command. Each individuality fashioned by Homer, expressed some distinct quality of heroic power, and thereby represents a separate class. Grace characterizes Nereus, dignity Agamemnon, impetuosity Hector, massiveness the unswerving prowess of the greater, and velocity the lesser Ajax; perseverance Ulysses, and intrepidity Diomede; but in Achilles alone, all these emanations of energy and elegance, mingle and are combined in one splendid whole. And so the susceptible intellect of Pericles precipitated the world of beauty held in suspense at the period of his birth, and laid every element under contribution to nourish his predilections, supply his resources, and consummate the multifarious splendors which forever glorify the culmination of his power. Democratic freedom had inspired lyric melody, epic grandeur, and dramatic force: that music of painting, and sculpture of poetry. Tragedy was exclusively created by the Athenian mind, and joined all the other great masterpieces of human excellence as they gathered in the order of perfection round the Parthenon. With the epos and drama came the harbingers of philosophical history, and historical philosophy. At the feet of Minerva, on the magnificent terrace of the Acropolis, as in the Portico, Lyceum, or Garden, the Japhetic thinker sat in masterly scrutiny over the greatest mystery, the mycrocosm man, and his eternal destiny. Dignified achievements had given rise to historic literature, ethical disquisition required elaborate rhetoric, political debate in the midst of inflamed parties necessitated persuasive speech, and Pericles arose the master of every art. Like the golden lamp, which the exquisite skill of Callimachus hung in the national temple, and which was fed once a year, the great Athenian saw kindled in his age a pharos of literary splendor which will be the genial guide and model of all masters so long as time shall last. Then did thought begin to throb and glow with ardent aspirations. Indian, Egyptian, and Persian works only attest man's power over the dullness of materialism; but Greece demonstrated his sovereignty over the might of intellect. The East was grand, impressive, awful; this fair metropolis of the West as infinitely better than all that, she was beautiful. In Athens was exhibited more than power, or genius coarse and unfettered by the instincts of elegant taste; her ornaments were pure, her magnificence serene. For grace, symmetry, and loveliness, we must look for the best models amongst that wonderful people who still remain in the great past, a centre of literary glory above all competition; from whose poets we derive our best ideas of the beautiful and sublime; from whose artists we copy the eternal rules of taste; and from whose orators we catch the high passions which most thrill the human breast. Such, in general terms, was the age when Pericles ruled in the first of cities, not by the degrading arms of mercenaries, but through the magical influence of genius and talent.

From this comprehensive survey, let us descend to a more specific notice of the superior luminaries in that great constellation, as each shines in his appropriate sphere. And first of all, let us contemplate the blind old minstrel we dreamed of in our childhood, who sang on his way six and twenty centuries ago, and his songs are echoing to the nations with unrivaled enchantment still.

Homer was the encyclopædia of civilization in his time. He fertilized antiquity to such an overflowing extent, that all the parent geniuses were recognized as his children, and the richest harvests ever garnered, were accredited to the seed he had sown. The epic of his creation, mirrored traditionary history in transparent song. The minute was depicted, the grand illuminated, and all the glorious world of heroic character and romantic scenery moved past the spectator in serene dignity and poetic splendor. The highest utterance was requisite to embody the intensest conceptions, and the Ionic dialect was exactly fitted to both. Language is the individual existence of a national spirit, the external reason, as reason is the internal speech; and the purest of idioms sprang perfected from the lips of Homer, as Minerva came completely armed from the brow of Jove. The hexameter therein assumed the freest and most forcible movement possible within the limits of law, and thenceforth epic composition ever remained Ionic in language, measure, and melody. Looking back upon the succeeding age, and its grateful enthusiasm, we need not wonder that a tyrant lived in the affection, and died under the benediction of Greece, for collecting the works of Homer in a volume, and his ashes in an urn.

The epic and cyclic poets were followed by lyrical writers, and the dramatists of Athens, who flourished cotemporaneously with all that is most admirable in the kindred productions of music, painting, sculpture, architecture, philosophy, and the civil forms of democratic life. Orpheus, Linus, Musæus, and others, the earliest poets of Greece, but of whom little is known, indicate the existence of a mass of poetic material extremely antique, which began to be reduced to writing as soon as the Dorians emerged from barbarism and the ignoble pursuits of war. When they awoke to national consciousness, they found themselves surrounded by an enchanted land, teeming everywhere with the fascination of heroic deeds done by heroic men, and the Cadmean Hesiod arose to garner the rich harvest in his immortal songs. Subjected to the outer world, and attracted by all that was novel, beautiful, or sublime, the people listened to tales of deified heroes, whose devotion and wanderings filled a preceding age with renown, and their own bosoms with delight. It was thus that popular legends assumed by degrees an epic dignity, or by more flexile art were perfected into the beauty of festive airs. But into whatever mold the golden current was cast, the narrative remained clear, impassioned, varied, minute, as the taste of the age and eagerness of listening multitudes required. Thus Homer and Hesiod were as truly legislators and founders of national polity, as Moses and Zoroaster had been in their respective spheres.

The earliest patrons of literature, were the Peisistratidæ who endeavored to supply the general want of books, by inscribing the select passages on columns along the public streets. All that was most valuable and attainable, such as fragmentary laws, proverbial sentences of wise men, fables of Æsop, verses of Simonides, together with the lyric poets and tragedians of primitive times, Theognis and Solon, were collected in the library which they were the first to found. By the same conservative foresight, Homer was arranged in continuous form, and superseding the foregoing literary world, became the foundation and source of a better one already begun.

Archilochus, memorable as the inventor of Iambic verse; Terpander, celebrated for his exquisite talents as a musician; and Stersichorus, of whom a few beautiful fragments remain, bring us to the consideration of that more renowned trio, Sappho, Pindar and Anacreon. The latter was a voluptuary, whose luxurious pictures might please the sensual, but contained nothing beautiful or sublime.

Pindar was cotemporary with Æschylus, and senior to Bacchylides, Simonides of Ceos, Alcman, and Alcæus, all of whom he excelled in lyrical excellence. Corinna, his famous teacher, beat him five times in musical composition, the fair rival perhaps triumphing by personal charms, rather than through poetical superiority. But in the highest order of his art, Pindar was almost always declared supreme. He had a particular regard for Pan, and took up his abode contiguous to the temple of that deity, where he composed the hymns which were sung by the Theban virgins in honor of that mystic emblem of universal nature. This Theban eagle, whose pride of place is still undisturbed in the Grecian heavens, dedicated his chief odes to the glory of the Olympic games, when the selectest aspirants of a mighty nation joined in the competition for prizes awarded there.

Sappho, it would seem, was endowed with a soul overflowing with acute sensitiveness, that glorious but dangerous gift. Her life, as indicated by the relics of her composition, was a current of perpetual fluctuation, like a troubled billow, now tossed to the stars, and anon buried in the darkest abyss. "To such beings," is the remark of Frederick Schlegel, "the urn of destiny assigns the loftiest or most degrading fate; close as is their inward union, they are, nevertheless, entirely divided, and even in their overflow of harmony, shattered and broken into countless fragments." Few relics of her harp remain, and these are borne down to us on the stream of time, imbued with the lofty tenderness of cureless melancholy. She was of that old Greek temper that wreathed the skeleton with flowers, and to her might be applied the legend which testifies that the nightingales of sweetest song were those whose nests were built nearest to the tomb of Orpheus. The early lyrics of Greece were productions full of wonders. They glowed with the hues of that orient of their origin, and where all forms appear in purple glory; each flower beams like a morning ray fastened to earth, and eagle thoughts soar to the sun on golden wings. Each style of national poetry grew gracefully and erect, like the palm-tree, with its rich yet symmetrical crown; and while in broad day it was fairest to the eye, even in gloom it bore nocturnal charms, as glow-worms illuminated the leaves, and birds of sweetest note perched on the boughs to sing.

Passing from the fervor of youth to the reflection of maturity, the epic muse retreated before the lyric. Plants of a richer foliage and more pungent perfume sprang up in the garden of poetry. Language more compressed and intense was required, and the Æolic and Doric became the appropriate organ of the latter, as the Ionic had been of the former style. In the Attic era, the partial excellence of earlier times became fully developed under the focal effulgence of universal rays; and, as the altar of Vesta united all the citizens of the same town, the crowned champions in every department of letters gathered under "the eye of Greece," and paid tribute to the age of Pericles. Then each leading writer, called to conserve all antecedent worth, lived on the capital amassed by unskillful predecessors, and with innate facility wrought it into the continuous chain of human improvement. Not in the colossal and impracticable shapes which float in the mists of the hoary North, was this majestic style of literature produced; nor in the florid barbarism of the effete East and South, but with that profound feeling and piercing expression, elegant and forcible as an arrow from the bow of Ulysses, was it inspired with that lofty spirit of endeavor which leaps evermore towards the azure tent of the stars. If the car of the hero sometimes kindled its axle to a flame, as it neared the goal, his eye was yet undazzled, his hand faltered not on the curb, but the greater the momentum, the firmer was his grasp. So with the Greek poet, every thing was solid and refined, harmoniously fitted in the several parts, and superbly burnished as a whole. Though from the day of their becoming nationalized, the Greeks possessed vast stores of unwrought material, yet was nothing needlessly employed. They enhanced the value of their products by condensing their worth. What Corinna said to Pindar, who, in his youth, showed some inclination to extravagance, "That one must sow with the hand, not with a full sack," illustrates the national taste, and exemplifies a principle which pervades their entire literature. While always earnest, they never violate decorum, but in the greatest extremes of joy or grief, their heroes, like Polyxena, even in death, fall with dignity. It was most natural for the Greeks to symbolize imagination under the image of Pegasus, who bore reins as well as wings. The severity of their taste was yet further indicated by the legend that when borne by this power, Perseus with indecorous temerity flew too near Olympus, he was precipitated by the angry gods, though himself one of their sons.

The drama was the youngest and most perfect of Attic creations, and that great cycle of the arts which had an epic origin, naturally returned into itself by means of this. Tragedy was the purest elimination, and its progress may be easily traced. First, a whole populace assembled in some market-place the miscellaneous chorus, or dance; then the recreation was limited to men capable of bearing arms; and, finally, the people were separated into spectators and trained performers. The lyric hymn of Apollo blended with dithyrambic odes to Bacchus; the strophe was distinguished from the antistrophe, and the epode was added; the dialogue between choragoi and exarchi followed; and, finally, came the separation of the chorus into these speakers and the choreutæ, a distinction as important as the previous one into chorus and spectators. Thus were all the component parts of tragedy completed, before the Persian war, when every thing the Greeks did was great and fascinating, as if created by magic, and their dramatic compositions were the most beautiful of all.

The finest genius of a great era always turns toward the highest sphere for exercise, and thus preserves an equilibrium between popular taste and the direction of its talent. When lyrical poetry had transmigrated into choral song, and epic history merged into a dramatic plot and dialogue, the greatest of tragedians extant was appointed to consecrate the union and preserve its worth. Æschylus was born at Eleusis, B.C. 525, about the time Phrynichus elevated the Thespian romance into dramatic personation, and his advent was opportune to impress upon this department of letters a deep and enduring stamp. With an ardent temperament, early exalted by the fervid strains of Homer, he imbibed, in maturity, the ambrosial influence of the above-named precursor, in company with his senior associate, Pindar, and with him wove thoughts to the lofty music of the dithyrambic ode. Passing through this order of excellence to a still higher range, in the same year Athenian valor lighted the flames of the Persian war at the conflagration of Sardis, the son of Euphorion produced his first tragedy. Pratinas and Chœrilus were for a season his competitors; but he soon distanced them all, and won the ivy chaplet, then first bestowed, instead of the goat and ox, as the most glorious literary crown.

At this period the structural skill of the Athenians had greatly improved, and as the celebrity of their drama increased, immense theatres arose on the hill-side, and were thronged by thousands, tier above tier, open to the wonders of expanding nature, embellished by the living sun. The Ægean on one hand, and vast mountains on the other, fanned by the breeze and relieved against brilliant skies, were harmonious features which nature accumulated round the scene. The gigantic proportions of the theatre, and the mighty range of the audience, were fully equaled by the performance itself, when Themistocles felt honored in appearing as choragus, and through kindred interpreters Æschylus unfolded the mysteries of the thrilling plot. Advancing intellect demanded grand ideal personifications; and, to meet the cravings of an age which even the perfect epic could no longer satisfy, philosophy passed into poetry, and what Homer had done for more material thought, Æschylus achieved for mind. All the vague mysteries and symbolical ethics of the East were measurably purged from alloy, while their substance was melted into the tortured immortality of Prometheus, and bound to that mount of all literary beauty, the Acropolis.

As Æschylus expressed the race and period from which emerged Themistocles and Aristides, Sophocles was the correlative of Phidias, and the great Olympian who was the patron of them both. Indeed, from the majesty of his mien, and the symmetrical grandeur of his genius, he was called the Pericles of poetry. Supreme power lurked in his repose, and his thunders startled all the more because they broke upon the multitude from cloudless skies.

Of all the great originals at Athens, the drama was the most indigenous, and under the culture of Sophocles perfected its growth. Imagination had fulmined with broader and brighter flashes on the preceding generation; but the works of his hand, though equally fresh from the fountains of nature, were more imbued with reason, and the solidity of manly strength. The age of Pericles was peculiarly the age of art; and Sophocles was but one of many who, to excel in his own department, mastered every cognate secret of wisdom or beauty, and brought all into subordination to his own absorbing design. He lived at a time when the trophies of Miltiades, the ambition of Alcibiades, the extravagance of Cimon, and the taste of Pericles, not less than the science and art, erudition and enthusiasm, philosophy and eloquence, diffused through all classes of the general populace, rendered the Athenians at once the most competent to appreciate, and the most difficult to please. Recondite disquisition was a pastime, the Agora itself but a genial academe; so elevated and yet so delicate were the soul and sensibilities of the excited mass, that the wisest of their sages was justified in asserting that the common people were the most accurate judges of whatever was graceful, harmonious, or sublime.

In the growth of a flower there is continued development, visibly marked by successive mutations, but indivisibly connected from beginning to end. Simultaneous with complete maturity glows the instant of consummate bloom, the highest point of fullness, fragrance, and fascination. That splendid culmination in the progressive refinement which adorned and made fruitful the garden of Greece, was signalized by the faultless forms and transparent language left us by Sophocles. The lucid beauty of his works was the chosen mirror of Athens, to reflect internal harmony, and the greatest beauty of soul. The dazzling glories of Greece in general, and of Athens in particular, imbued the great writers with corresponding ideas of the greatness of human nature, which they endeavored to represent in its struggles with fate and the gods. In the Prometheus of Æschylus especially, the wilderness and other natural horrors are made to relieve the statuesque severity of the scene, and are employed, like the chains and wedge, as instruments by which Jupiter seeks to intimidate the benefactor of mankind. But in such delineations as Edipus at Colonus, Ajax, and Philoctetes, Sophocles, in his glorious art, showed a great advancement beyond his predecessors, by intermingling the emotions of human love, and causing the more cheerful sentiments, inspired by lovelier natural scenes, to become important elements, not merely in the imaginative adornment, but also in the dramatic plan. If the Ionic epic was a tranquil lake, mirroring a serene sky in its bosom, and transfiguring diversified charms along its smiling shores; the Attic drama became a mighty stream which calmly yet resistlessly courses within its stedfast banks, is impeded by no obstacle, diverted by no attraction, salutes with equal dignity the sunny mead and gloomy mountain shadow, and, after a majestic sweep from its far-off source, mingles its strength at last in the omnipotence of the sea. Thus the highest wealth of refined poetry was preserved in the pure casket of the richest tongue, and the Attic drama was left to man as the masterpiece of linguistic art. Sophocles, like the fabled Theban, seems to have built up his elegant fabric with the charms of music; and if Æschylus first elevated tragedy to heroic dignity, he softened its rugged strength into harmonious sweetness, and stamped upon the precious treasure the signet of immortal worth.

Euripides, like his predecessors, was a proficient in a great variety of arts, but neither sublime in conception, nor severe in style, as Æschylus and Sophocles had been. But his spirit teemed with splendid and amiable qualities, whose captivating power was highly relished by the age it came to decorate and complete. The energetic dignity of the first great master, and the chaste sweetness of his still greater rival, had passed; now appeared one who was indeed worthy of much admiration, but the least divine of the noble triad, whose natural course declined from the elevated cothurnus toward level ground.

When Euripides clothed Pentheus in female dress, and exhibited Hercules as a glutton, he showed himself to be the precursor of comedy, that first symptom of literary decline, and thus won the praise of Menander, as he deserved the lash of Aristophanes. The latter, who was his cotemporary, unceasingly castigated his effeminate prettiness, but never attacked the manly elegance of Sophocles, or the gigantic vigor of Æschylus. Agathon, with others of some note, continued for a season to write for the stage; but in Euripides the forcible and refined tragedy of Greece came to an end. As the nine Muses wept at the funeral of Achilles, so grieved the nations at that mighty fall.

There was the wisdom of a deep moral in that Athenian law, which interdicted a judge of the Areopagus from writing a comedy. Until a grosser age supervened, the Greeks were not inclined to scrutinize the ludicrous side of things. The goddess of the Iliad, who warded off the dart from her favorite, was an apt symbol of the Genius of Civilization, throned on the Acropolis, where Beauty, mother of Excellence, threw down her mantle and intercepted the arrows of every foe. Greek farce was often insolent, but never utterly vicious. While Aristophanes portrayed the foibles of town-life with a caustic hand, he ceased not to keep in view a healthful suburb of gardens in redeeming bloom. As Minerva, with precious elixir, concealed the wrinkles of Ulysses, the age of Pericles performed well its mission of investing every thing venerable and instructive with the most elaborate charms.

All the gentler shapes of fancy that, in the preparatory time, bloomed in the lyrics of Greece, were only flowers unfolding round the aspiring trunk of tragedy, attracted by its superior strength, and sheltered by the majesty of its shade. Æschylus, however triumphant in the field of martial prowess one day, was the next not less ambitious of poetic garlands at the Olympic games. And Thebes was not more gloriously embalmed in the melody of Pindar, than was Colonos through the art of Sophocles, as her melodious thrush in his verse enjoys a perpetual May.

A marked peculiarity of Greek civilization consists in the fact that literature there led all excellence, illustrated and sustained by the harmonious accompaniment of the sister arts. In the East, each work, whatever its kind, stood imperfect and independent of all beside. But in the best age of the best works in the first literary metropolis of the West, it would be nearly, if not quite, impossible to point out a single production that did not refer to the written book, thus furnishing the means of just appreciation, by a comparison with the particular myth or action it was designed to personate. What the writer expressed in words, the correlative artist chanted, painted, sculptured, or built in more material, but not less beautiful forms. The drama most impressively exemplified this fact, using words as a poet, but adding the simultaneous commentary of melody, statuesque motion, pictorial resemblance, and architectural grandeur. This was the absorption of the lyric, the personation of the epic, and the consummation of transcendant dramatic art.

Athens was the inventress of learning, and the first great foundation of republican law. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power, or like the path of lightning through murky air, at each actual advance humanity may seem to recede, but every such retrogressive movement really accumulates force to carry itself in advance. True, patriotism loves its object to such a degree, that it is ready to incur any sacrifice in favor of those it would benefit, but ceases to be a virtue when it selfishly reclines enamored of its own visage. Narcissus was not the type of national benefactors, but the great law-givers of Sparta and Athens were, when they traveled far, and at great hazards, to gather knowledge for the education of their countrymen.

The illustrious son of Eumonius was the great law-giver of the Doric race, whose institutions have excited much curiosity, but which are involved in an obscurity too dense to be easily removed. He was one of the very few great spirits of Sparta, and like his co-patriot Leonidas, passed through a dubious path from an obscure birth to everlasting fame. In the light of history, the whole life of the latter, especially, lies in a single action, and we can learn nothing authentic of him until the last few days of his career. In the annals of renown, only one proud page is dedicated to the memory of such men, and that contains nothing but an epitaph.

Solon, on the contrary, stands out clearly in the effulgence which under more auspicious influences poured on Attica. He was the second and more successful law-giver of his race, and also stood pre-eminent among the sages of his land. Success first attended him in poetry, and it was the opinion of Plato, that if he had elaborated his compositions with maturer care, they would have equaled the most celebrated productions of the ancients. But the prospective good of nations required him to apply the great endowments he possessed to moral and political purposes; and, according to Plutarch, "he cultivated chiefly that part of philosophy which treats of civil obligations." He pursued commerce, traveled widely, and, in patient research, accumulated those stores of observation and erudition which rendered him an honor to Athens, and a great benefactor to mankind.

History, properly so called, originated with the Greeks, and in natural clearness and vivacity, portraiture of diversified incidents and profound observation of man, eminent success was first by that people attained. The great coryphæus in the prosaic chorus, Herodotus, has been compared to Homer, on account of his manifold charms and transparency of narrative. The depth and comprehensiveness of his knowledge, inquiries, attainments, and commentaries on antiquities in general, excite in competent judges the profoundest astonishment. He is called the father of history, as he was the first to pass from the mere traditions which furnished themes to the poets, and gave dignity to didactic prose as an independent branch of literature.

Human reason is progressive chiefly by virtue of remembrance and language; hence were the Muses beautifully represented as being the daughters of Memory, the only power through which, in the infancy of letters, the harvests of thought could be garnered and preserved. The first national annals were cast under the patronage of the fair Nine, but the Muses of the great Dorian turned to the Ionic dialect as their most fitting vernacular. The civilization of Greece was the first that was unfolded by a natural growth, and its crowning bloom appeared only when every other portion of the wondrous plant had become perfectly matured. It awoke like a joyous infant, under the fairest heavens, and was nourished by all beautifying and ennobling influences. Its life was led apart from exhausting drudgery and effeminate ease, among fair festivals and solemn assemblies, full of healthful exhilaration, innocent curiosity, and confiding faith. Pindar preferred the Doric dialect to his native Æolic, in which many had sung. Like the other leaders of his race, he imitated his predecessors in nothing, but by inventing; he employed the form demanded by the nature of his art, and chose the language with certainty and care, which refused submission to the yoke of authority. The principle, that in each realm of art, whatever is accidental should be excluded, was thoroughly recognized in Greece, where even what fell in by accident, as the chorus of the drama, soon became entirely fused into the chief parts of the action, like an organic member of the whole. The singer of the Iliad was born under the sky of Ionia, and he molded his native dialect forever to epic poetry. The thoughtful Herodotus preferred the same language to the Doric, his native tongue, and employed the Ionic, which was just then putting forth its fairest buds of promise. Thus, the epos of history was twin-born with the epos of poetry. The wanderings of Ulysses, the Argonauts, and primitive heroes, embrace the whole extent of the then known or imagined world, the various manners, countries, and cities included. All these the great annalist works into the rich and variegated picture, which, like a moving panorama, he unfolds to the enraptured gaze. Minuteness, likeness, and strength were requisite as the medium of expression, and not in the old Doric, but in the new Ionic, were these found happily combined. Hence, in historical writing with the Greeks, as in every other department of art, we see that wonderful concord between the substance and the form, that harmony of inward and outward music, which is the first and most indispensable condition of beauty.

Up to this period, history had been composed expressly for recital at the national games, and was couched in a rhetorical transition from the preceding poetical form. The minstrel of the Homeric banquet became the eulogist of his countrymen before applauding thousands at Olympia; but now arose another master who foresaw that his work would survive the forms of society then existing, and he aimed not so much for a transient hearing, as to be perpetually read. The Attic Thucydides had listened to Herodotus in the great presence of the nation, and became inspired with an enthusiasm which bore him to the height of superior excellence. He was cotemporary with Socrates, and under Anaxagoras and Antiphon, matured that compressed eloquence which was to commemorate an age then dawning full of stirring incident. He renounced the episodic movement common to his great predecessor, and instead of supplying a pastime for the present, aspired to portray universal man, and inculcate profound lessons respecting the Providence that rules the world.

Thucydides perfected that form of historical writing which is peculiarly Greek, and was succeeded by Xenophon, whose third remove was clearly beyond the culminating point. Polybius developed the idea of universal disquisition, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, was honored as the first of historic critics; but after the fall of freedom, there was little worthy for one either to portray or appreciate.

It was in the day of Themistocles especially, the Greeks appear to have been sensible that they were instruments in the hands of destiny, and that their greatness was greatly to sway the generations of all coming time. This national consciousness, increasingly intensified in description and illustration, is strongly impressed on the sententious pages of Thucydides. The theme of Herodotus was a particular war, the Persian, and he treated it as an epical artist. But his acuter successor added philosophical composition to the densest power of combination, and was the first to attempt the analysis and portraiture of character. Thus, as in every other literary walk, the march of historical excellence became most extended and regular at the mighty heart of intelligence; on the spot where its origin was indigenous, its perfection was most splendidly evolved.

Though fortune for the moment gave the Spartan, Eurybiades, the nominal command at Salamis, genius predestined the Athenian, Themistocles, to actual pre-eminence over his age, that he might command the remotest sequences of events. Certainly he was the greatest of his own age, and was not soon surpassed. Pisistratus, Cimon, Aristides, and Pericles, were of noble birth; but Themistocles was the first, and, except Demosthenes, the greatest of those who rose from the humblest ranks, but none the less ennobled himself, while he elevated the common fortunes in his own ascent. His genius alone was the architect of all his grandeur, and drew from Diodorus the exclamation, "What other man could, in the same time, have placed Greece at the head of nations, Athens at the head of Greece, himself at the head of Athens? In the most illustrious age the most illustrious man."

But the age of warlike glory ended with the occasion for its use, and an appropriate link was required between the ostentation of Themistocles and the intellectual sovereignty of Pericles. This was supplied in Cimon, who fostered popular spectacles, and invested them with increased magnificence; built the Theseion, embellished the public buildings before extant, and originated those classic colonnades, beneath which, sheltered from sun or rain, the inquisitive citizens were accustomed to hold civil, literary, or artistic debate. The Agora, adorned with oriental planes; and the palm-groves of Academe, the immortal school of Plato, were his work. His hand formed the secluded walks, fashioned the foliaged alcoves, adorned each nook with its relevant bust or statue, and poured through the green retreats the melodious waters of the Ilissus, in sparkling fountains, or eddying pools, to rest the weary, and exhilarate the sad. Thus he more fully realized the social policy, commenced by Pisistratus, who was the first to elicit diversified talents from the recesses of private life, with the intention of causing all to merge into one animated, multifarious, and invincible public life. The works now written, and the sublime creations of art at this time multiplied, were the first foundation of culture for the futurity of the human mind. It was an age that gave to the world what can nowhere else be obtained. The priceless legacy was produced by that wonderful people during the brief period of freedom and undiminished greatness, when their literature was made to fulmine on the capacities of man, and reflect the brightest glory on the principles of democratic polity.

Pericles was not less ambitious to aggrandize Athens, than were his more martial or plebeian precursors; but he well understood the destiny of his race, and knew on what surer foundations to build than aristocratic or regal titles, which, if he had the power to possess, he always affected to despise. The wider extension of national domain was to yield to the loftier cultivation of the national mind. Obedient to his behest, and in harmony with the popular will, all superior proficients gathered round the Acropolis, a spot too sacred for human habitations, and, by their united labors, soon rendered it the central glory of "a city of the gods."

In his youth, Pericles had known Pindar and Empedocles. He had seen the prison of Miltiades, and turned from a music lesson to gaze after Aristides driven into exile. Æschylus he early loved, and exercised maturer thought with Sophocles, in debates on eloquence. By Euripides had he been instructed in ethical philosophy; and Protagorus and Democritus, Anaxagoras and Meton, did he question as to the best rules of state polity. Herodotus and Thucydides initiated him into history. Acron and Hippocrates imbued him with a beneficent philosophy; Ictinus built to his order, the Parthenon, worthy of Polygnotus to paint; while Phidias set up under the same auspices the tutelary deity of the land, in ivory and gold. Thus trained among a people susceptible and fastidious, that had itself become a Pericles, competent to appreciate, in every department the high excellence they inspired and recompensed, he was the first to mirror to themselves fully, the exalted models after which universal poetry prompted them to aspire. Themistocles had led them to deeds of daring and enterprise, but the adroit son of Xanthippus soon eclipsed every competitor, even that mighty Cimon, whose extraordinary qualities had prepared the way for his supremacy.

The grave aspect of Pericles, his composed gait, the decorous arrangement of his robe, and the subdued modulation of his voice, are dwelt upon by his eulogists, just as if his posthumous statue had been the subject of their comments. It was this close and constant attention to the inner spirit and external expression of all thought, art, and manners, that distinguished the memorable period when the grand style characterized every thing. To use the words of Plutarch: "Pericles gave to the study of philosophy the color of rhetoric. The most brilliant imagination seconded all the powers of logic. Sometimes he thundered with vehemence, and set all Greece in flames; at other times the goddess of persuasion, with all her allurements, dwelt upon his tongue, and no one could defend himself from the solidity of his argument, and the sweetness of his discourse."

This was the era of great orators, such as Lysias, Eschines, and Isocrates. Like the shout of Stentor, rousing the prowess of comrades, who, single-handed, rushed upon embattled armies, clad in iron, so awoke mighty eloquence, which shook impassioned democracies, annihilated tyrannies, and fostered all ennobling arts. But the age of criticism came after the age of invention; Aristotle after Sophocles, Longinus after Homer, the Sophists after Pericles. Demosthenes was the last great writer whose works were addressed to the Greeks as a nation. His was the genius of industry, always luminous and constantly at work; like that Indian bird which could not only enjoy the sunshine all day, but secured no ignoble resemblance at night, by hanging glow-worms on the boughs about its nest. Demosthenes was a great orator, and nothing more. He represented a period of civilization which had passed, and therefore his downfall was inevitable. So long as the democratic spirit pervaded the masses he performed prodigies in the tribune; but when the empire of beauty was about to be displaced by the empire of force, he ran away at Cherronea, and without dignity. The eloquence of a great nation, expressed in Pericles, was succeeded by the Phillipics of a great partizan, and when this was silenced, the age of its origin had closed.

Pericles was the first to commit his speeches to writing before they were delivered; and, in his pride of universal accomplishment, he signalized the zenith of his country's glory and its decline. In all the progress of Greece up to the splendor of her culmination, originality was sought and exemplified only in some one grand pursuit. The epic bard was not ambitious of rending the ivy destined to adorn the brows of lyric poets; nor did the master of tragedy, with unlaced buskin, stride carelessly over Thalia's stage, to lay irreverent hands on Homer's harp. The historian, studious in private to portray the annals of his country, came not to the Agora to contest honors with the public orator; nor did the latter, with foolish ambition, endeavor to excel the sages who, in the Portico, at the Lyceum, or under plane-trees on the banks of the Ilissus, explained the problems of the universe; but each one made some exalted endeavor the speciality of his life, on it concentrated all the rays of his intellect, and scorned no measure of time or toil requisite to insure absolute perfection in his work. Thoughts so elaborated became never setting stars, to cheer the world, and point unerringly through the cycles of a corrupt taste to ideal excellence. As each growth, minute or majestic, was equally perfect of its kind, though differenced by peculiarity of form and tints, the whole was charmingly blended in that wreath of consummate beauty, which, in the age of Pericles, Greece hung round the constitution of the state, high on the central shrine of the most magnificent temple of her gods.

CHAPTER II.

ART.

Architecture is the metaphysics of the fine arts, and should be made the basis of all researches in this department, since it is the oldest and bears the most comprehensive type. It teems with the oracular inscriptions of entombed empires, and either affords information where other testimonies are silent, or confirms the facts which more dubious history asserts. Within its ruined temples yet linger the echoes of cycles long since departed, and which symbolized on their track the mightiest impulses of emulative nations in those monuments which inventive genius, coalescing with constructive skill, stamped with the attractions of beauty and strength.

Egyptian civilization was thoroughly exclusive, and possessed no disposition to diffuse itself. On the contrary, the Indo-Germanic race rapidly assimilated surrounding nations to itself, and with that energetic spirit of propagandism which was its primary element, made the reservoir of its accumulated worth the fountain of all subsequent culture. The great Surya people of northern India are supposed to be the original Cyclopœans who reared the gloomy grandeur of Egyptian Thebes, and the magnificence of Solomon's temple, who constructed the Catabothra of Bœotia, drained the valleys of Thessaly, constructed the canals of Ceylon, and left the venerable walls of Mycenæ on their westward course.

The monuments of the East attest the unreasoning submission of thousands to despotic power, and teem with the reminiscences of gloomy superstition, but both in outline and execution, the spirit of the beautiful is wanting. Vestiges of Assyria, like an earlier Pompeii, have lately been disinterred, and we are permitted to look upon, perhaps, the identical figures on which the prophets gazed, and which so moved Aholibah, when "she saw men portrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans portrayed with vermilion, girdled with girdles upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look to, after the manner of the Babylonians of Chaldea, the land of their nativity." Ezek. xxiii. 14, 15. Persian art, judging from what has recently been brought to light, combined much of Egypt and Assyria in its manner. The types of wisdom and power, and even the Persian alphabet, were of Assyrian character.

The temple which the monarch of Israel dedicated, and his devotion enriched, owed its artistic attractions to Tyrian skill. The descriptions of these preserved in the archives of Judea, clearly vindicate the justness of Homer's representations respecting the precious metals of the East, and the progress there made in ornamental art. Even females could divide the prey: "To Sisera, a prey of colors of needle work on both sides, meet for the necks of them that take the spoil." Judg. v. 30. Of such, the treasury of Priam was replenished, and Sidonian artists were not less expert. Helen embroiders a picture of a battle between the Greeks and Trojans; Andromache transfers flowers to a transparent vail; and Penelope weaves a web of pensive beauty, honorable to the hand of filial piety, to grace the funeral of Laertes. Many evidences demonstrate that the whole of Greece, from the era of the supposed godships of Poseidon and Zeus, down to the close of the Trojan war, was Indian not only in language and religion, but in all the arts of war and peace.

The discovery and use of metals hold the first place in the history of human progress, and in the momentous origin of the murderous sword, we have the first of inventions. The fratricide Cain fled to central Asia, the cradle of ambitious conquest, and there hereditary classes, trades, and arts arose. Thence descended eastward, the nomadic tribes who still wander amid the vast remains of the primitive mining operations of the oriental world. From the more amiable Seth, the patriarchs of peace emigrated in another direction to people cities, foster science, promote writing, and transmit sacred traditions on durable monuments of stone. The struggle of contrasted races is the leading subject of all history, and its primary development lies between the passion shown by one for war, and by the other for more peaceful arts. Moab, Ammon, and Bashan, the giants of barbarism, have ever moved westward in advance of the vanguard of civilization, and been vanquished thereby.

The infancy of Greek art was the infancy of a Hercules, who strangled serpents in his cradle. However superior as to intrinsic worth, it must be acknowledged to be an offspring of Egypt. As we have seen in western literature, a kind of hereditary lineage connects it with the East, and this is attested by evidence too palpable to be denied. Native elements appear to have combined with foreign art in Assyria; but Nimroud and Karsabad prove that the style of that intermediate region, at a certain period of its development, was directly derived from the valley of the Nile. The Assyrian types of art furnished Lydia and Caria, probably, with improved elements, from whom the Asiatic Greeks obtained the means of advancing toward that high excellence which the most refined race was destined to achieve. The earliest proofs of their skill come to us on coins, and that the Lydians were the first on earth to excel in that kind of work, Homer distinctly asserts. But while an Asiatic origin must be assigned to all the arts of Greece, it should not be forgotten that the Hellenic organization alone perfected each and every department with that exquisite refinement which no other people has ever been able to attain. Their wonderful originality is indicated by the fact, that their very earliest coins, possess in their embryo state, the germs of that beauty and sublimity which afterward were realized by the greatest artists in their grandest works. In the smallest seal, as in the most colossal form, the charming simplicity and repose prevail, which forever mark the leading traits of the Attic mind. Coins made of gold in Asia, preceded the silver coinage of Athens, but even in this earliest imprint of archaic skill, we see rudely executed all that which subsequently characterized those groups of Centaurs and Amazons that enriched the metopes and pediments of the Parthenon.

When compared with Indian and Egyptian remains, the Persian column must be considered as presenting an approximation to the perfect form, and yet it lacks that purity of taste, that refined and chastened intellect, which distinguishes the works of Greece. The lotus and palm, were indeed imitated at Carnak and Persepolis, but Athens saw the acanthus and honeysuckle surmount shafts of manly strength with amarynths of beauty such as the East never knew. India excavated the cell, and Egypt quarried the column; then came Greece to perfect the entablature system, and add that crowning glory, the triangular pediment. The three orders in their succession, exhausted every realm of invention, and perfected structural types unsurpassed by human powers; and while the mechanical principles remained identified with the most unadorned Cyclopean gateway, or rudest cromlech, an exquisite system of ornament embraced every feature, and refined all into consummate dignity and elegance.

All the institutions of Greece bore the impressive signet of national character. In government, dialect, and invention, despite minor differences, there was a general uniformity which rendered them distinct, not only from Phœnicians or Egyptians, but also from the kindred inhabitants of Lydia, Italy, and Macedonia. Though at the beginning germs were derived from the East, it is not less true that at the time of ripest maturity not the least tinge of foreign influence was discernible in their literature, politics, religion or art. Grecian architecture, especially, like their poetry, was the natural expression of the national mind. It was influenced by the peculiarity of the land in which it originated, and was more than national; it was local, born under the sky of Hellas only, and in no colony did it ever attain the comprehensive beauty which signalized the city of its birth. Sparta might boast of the hard bones and muscles of well-trained athletes, but grace and beauty never entered her walls. The Athenians borrowed materials and suggestions from diverse sources, but their skill was entirely their own. They invented all the component parts of classic architecture, the proportions, characters, and distinctions, with a corresponding nomenclature by which each order and every ornament is still designated. Symmetry, proportion, and decoration; the solidity and gracefulness of nature, relieved by historical sculpture, and illuminated by chromatic splendor, with the perfection of reason interpenetrating and presiding over all, constituted that perfect model of noble simplicity which always attracts and never offends.

The Dorians produced the first pure architectural style, and carried it to the highest perfection, without any assistance from the fallen palaces of the Atreidæ. The Æschylean majesty was the highest conception of even that extraordinary people. The Parthenon was the noblest production of the noblest masters, and should be accepted as the highest exemplification of the national skill.

The order of columns at Persepolis seems to be the proto-Ionic, as certain pillars have been supposed to be proto-Dorics, but neither, in fact, deserve, in the slightest degree, that admiration which belongs legitimately to those honored names. The temple of the Ilissus was the most ancient monument of the true middle order, and was a significant prelude to those more glorious works destined to immortalize the administration of Pericles when freed from the rivalry of Cimon, the restraints of the Areopagus, and the opposing aristocrats. Within twenty years all the grandest works were executed, and then the point of culmination in that lovely land was forever passed.

Of the three orders perfected by the Greeks, the Corinthian would appear to be the most entirely original, and, at the time of its invention, the exactest symbol of their mind. The flower had fully bloomed, and decrepitude was already begun. They could no longer adequately execute the Doric order, with its integral sculpture and painting, and had ceased to be satisfied with the chaste gracefulness of Asiatic volutes. They began by raising the honeysuckle from around the necking of the Ionic capital, and extended it over a vase-form under a light abacus, intermingled with a few rosettes, but omitting altogether the volutes. To this was after ward added the Persepolitan water-leaf, and finally the crisp acanthus of Attica gave a rich variety to the order, which constitutes its crowning charm. The choragic monument of Lysicrates is the only pure type of this style; and if sculpture and painting must be banished from architecture, this is, doubtless, the most beautiful order extant.

Architecture expresses the difference among races, as language does the variety of dialects. The Dorians built in the same style that was employed by Pindar, Æschylus, and Thucydides in speech. The simplicity and elegance of the Ionians are exemplified in their temple graces, not less than in Homer's matchless verse, and the smooth rhythm of Herodotus. The Corinthians, refined to effeminacy, were the last architectural inventors in the old world, and they stamped upon their production the delicate luxuriance which characterizes the language of Isocrates. The opposing principles of Dorism and Ionism which prevailed in all the institutions of Greece, politics, literature, customs, and art, were boldly embodied in sculpture and architecture. The former came from Egypt, and the latter from Asia; but both were alike indebted to western genius for the refined symmetry which their respective orders finally assumed. The zenith of perfection was not reached until the Doric influence was impregnated by the Ionic, the material by the spiritual, and Corinthian delicacy was born to perish in the grave of its exhausted parents.

Egyptian sculpture was the archaic state of Greek sculpture, as is clearly indicated by specimens yet extant. The types of the Nile, which remained unchanged through many centuries, were no sooner transferred to the Ilissus than a wonderful improvement succeeded. The remains of the temple of Jupiter in Ægina show the metamorphosis of the uncouth East into the refinement of the West in the very act of taking place. The heads of the figures are Egyptian, according to the prescriptive sanctity of priestly rule, heavy and immobile; but the limbs are detached, and move with the natural freedom of Greek taste. The conservative East regarded innovation as destructive of the divine, while the progressive West sought for near approach to divinity in increased perfection. Hence the figure of Minerva on this edifice, the central one of the pediment, is more oriental than the rest, as if less liberty should be taken with the personal image of a being fully divine; but this hereditary scruple was soon overcome, and, in direct contrast with Egypt, Grecian deities became most celestial in form.

The progress of perfected sculpture was striking and continuous. The Herma was the first step in true statuesque art, when the Greek placed a human head on a pillar by the wayside, fashioned after the proportions of the human form. Then the resemblance of life extended to the loins, preparatory to that further realization when the bust spread vital beauty and activity throughout every speaking feature or graceful limb, rendering the statue complete. Last of all came the associated group, simultaneous with architectonic perfection, to which it added manifold charms. Then was the memorable era when the images of gods and heroes possessed not less truth and majesty than if the divinities had themselves sat for their pictured or sculptured portraits; and all this resulted because art had become the greatest national activity, and the entire nation was merely a transcendant artist. In a chronological review, the ancient monuments of Asia and Egypt must be considered before those of Greece; but the true history of art, in its continuous development, as in every other civilizing power, began alone with that sagacious people. To the last, the East retained in its sculpture those symbolical images which are utterly destructive of elegance in imitative representations; but the West soon emancipated itself, and came step by step to elicit from marble perfected human features under the attitude and aspect of divinity. Therein is most clearly traced the mysterious symbolism of the inner mind of that people. The reason and imagination of Greece were poured with profusion and power into artistic creations, and the faculties from which these works sprang are in turn most forcibly addressed. Like excites like; and if ancient sculpture shines on, through all time, with inextinguishable beams, it is simply because the original creation transpired under the transmuting and glorifying influence of impassioned thought. Supremacy in art among that people was not an accidental inspiration of a few artists, but the predominant spirit of the age and great heritage of a race. Their language was the first organ of speech thoroughly eliminated, and art, its correlative, was the highest material medium of mind. The mystery of the human form was accurately conceived by the Hellenic genius, and thus the mythological Sphinx, whose motto is Man, which had ever been inaccessible to the race of Shem, was by Japhetic intellect clearly revealed. In her most glorious days, the sumptuous temples of Athens, amid the elaborate graces of their moldings, the living foliage of their capitals, and the multiform friezes whereon Lapithæ and Centaurs exhibited the most impressive action, did yet preserve the same outline of simplicity with which the wooden hut of Pelasgus was marked.

In consequence of the excitement, surprise, joy, and glory of their first conquest over the Persians, the Greeks developed all their energies, and the brief period of their highest excellence terminated soon after the final triumph over that great foe, so inseparable is national enthusiasm from exalted perfection in art. The Parthenon and Propylæa were trophies of Marathon and Salamis, monuments of past success, and pledges of future progress. Then supreme homage was paid to superior talent; and popular admiration, as profound as it was general, gave birth to those masterly productions its paintings deserved. The same combination of boldness and gentleness which constitutes the very essence of classic literature, imparted its peculiar expression to the plastic art of Greece. Both, in their best days, were equally imbued with that lofty impulse which antique traditions excited, and the national genius was most ambitious to perpetuate. The Persians brought marble with them, intending to erect a memorial of the anticipated victory, which their conquerors appropriated, and commissioned Phidias to cut it into a statue of Nemesis. Such was the destiny of all oriental elements, and the use made of them by the valiant genius of occidental republicans. When the first great battle of opinion had been won, and the Persian, like the Mede, was overthrown, a few years of active freedom produced more of civilizing art, than had been generated under the pressure of whole centuries of despotic repose.

The art of the first Pharaohs, as well as that of the last Ptolemies, is brought down to us in well preserved relics, and by means of these, at a single glance, we can survey a boundless historic period, during which, in the first progressive land, civilization had passed from the lowest to the highest point; from the Pelasgi to the Parthenon, from the wooden works of Dædalus to the marble glories of Phidias; from the fabulous Orpheus, and mythological Amphion, to Homer and Sophocles; in a word, from Cecrops to Pericles. But on the Nile, beyond certain ignoble and arbitrary types, sculpture never advanced. Dædalus is reputed to have been the first statuary in Greece, but he was more of a mechanist than sculptor, the architect of labyrinths, carver of wood, and inventor of wings. He was the countryman and cotemporary of Theseus, equal to that hero in the adventures of his life, born of a royal race, admired for his works while living, and honored by the Egyptians with a special chapel after death. About two centuries later, appeared Dipœmus and Scyllis. They were born in Crete, under the Median empire, but worked at Sicyon, and made statues of Apollo, Diana, Minerva, and Hercules. They were the first to use the white marble of Paros, and gave to each divinity a peculiar personal appearance so entirely distinct, as to cause the offensive symbolism of preceding art to be laid aside. The slow progress of sculpture may be further traced, until a single mighty master raised his profession to a height, of which the world had entertained no previous conception. The Greeks could produce beauty without meretricious ornament, delicacy without affectation, strength without coarseness, and the highest degree of action without the slightest disturbance of equilibrium. Proud only of progressive invention, they preserved their first rude monuments side by side with their later masterpieces, and appealed to this aggregate as the true archives of nobility, their highest credentials to glory. The plastic sense, which usually disappears with the infancy of nations, was fostered to the fullness of adult perfection among this people. Whatever of beauty real objects supplied to their hands, the inspiration of fervid genius transfigured into the most beautiful idealized forms. As was said by one of their number, the higher nature of the divinities passed into the arts; and we have reason to believe that sculpture especially, did wear a celestial aspect in its representation of glorified heroes and the highest gods. The law which Plato long after prescribed to artists, seems to have been instinctively observed from the earliest era, "that they should create nothing illiberal or deformed, as well as nothing immoral and loose, but should everywhere strive to attain to the nature of the beautiful and the becoming." Latent worth doubtless lay imprisoned in the uncouth sculpture of the East, but it was only when moved westward, that the fair prisoner was set free; like Aphrodite, born without a pang, in the enfranchisement of the sea, and landed on the blooming shore of Paphos, redolent of spontaneous charms.

Homer, and the other poets, as they were the fountains of all other elements of culture, nourished also the plastic sense in the common mind. From the tragic writers, especially, emanated a world of sculpture, so that nearly all the great spirits generated in the regions of fable, were happily embodied in substantial art. Hipparchus, a few years before the birth of Phidias, formed the first public library at Athens, and placed therein the complete works of Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Anacreon, and Simonides. The public games were not less favorable in their influence on plastic art. They were great artistic congresses, wherein each department was exhibited for the special benefit of itself, and in regular succession; just like various pieces of music at a modern concert, without discord between them. Not only in the popular poetry, but in the public manners as well, was manifested that refined grace and equanimity between excessive freedom and coarse formality, which was embodied in sculpture as its highest form. The second desire of Simonides, was, that he might possess a handsome figure, and the gymnastic exercises customary in the healthful serenity of his native land, did much to realize the wish. The most eminent men in their youth, sought renown in the development of natural qualities, and thereby laid a substantial basis for the magnificence of acquired accomplishments. Each successful competitor was honored with a statue of the highest order and most perfect resemblance. Hieratic models were utterly discarded, and not only was the real portrait preserved, but also the very attitude in which the victory was gained. Even horses which had borne off prizes, were reproduced by the exactest imitative skill, and all the most natural forms were elevated to that ideal of perfection which constituted the models of excellence, and the best incentive to yet higher improvement of surpassing worth.

We have observed that Hermes were the first sculptured productions of Greece. These most abounded at Athens, where, for a long time, the word Hermoglyph was the only term in use to designate a sculptor of any kind. But soon after the Persians had despoiled that city of her ancient monuments, she acquired immense resources, by which, under the guidance of superlative taste, she soon arose to be the head of the national confederacy, and most splendid abode of art. Architects and sculptors, painters, lapidaries, and workers in precious metals vied with each other in adorning the lettered empress of earth and sea. The monuments of Ictinus, Phidias, Callicrates, and Mnesicles arose, surrounded with kindred glories, thenceforth to become masterpieces for the emulation of mankind. What was especially needed, was something that would mold all surrounding elements of beauty into one perfect and homogeneous whole, like the unity of diversified expressions in the opera, and this was gloriously realized in the perfected temple. Appropriate material was quarried from Paros and Pentelicus, which when wrought into graceful and sublime forms, stood on the terraced height in serene majesty, and glowed through the sparkling atmosphere with enhanced splendor borrowed from harmonized colors and burnished gold. In Greece, history and art from the beginning, were closely allied. The breastplates, helmets, and shields, as well as altars, temples, and tombs, were all made to glorify an honored ancestry, through the blandishments of material art. Homer and Hesiod brightened the dawn of national renown, as they sang the artistic triumphs of Vulcan, embossed on the weapons which Hercules and Achilles bore. The arcades of nature, and the canopied walks which architecture so magnificently provided, were transformed into vast galleries, all aglow with brilliantly harmonized tints; and a wanderer the most remote from the metropolis, still found the annals of his country embodied in marble, and each great personage strongly characterized by the sculptor's chisel. Every subordinate democracy had its Prytancum, Odeon, Pnyx, Gymnasium, and Theatres; and when Athens usurped pre-eminent control, her citizens were proud to erect public monuments worthy of her ambition, and whose dazzling magnificence should reconcile the other states to her supremacy. So greatly was this the passion of the people themselves, that when Pericles proposed to exonerate them from debts incurred by the immense works of his administration, if he might be permitted to inscribe them with his own name, the proposition was rejected at once, and every responsibility was cheerfully accepted as their own.

Phidias was an Athenian, the son of Charmidas, and cousin to the distinguished painter, Panænus, whose associated skill he employed on several of his works. Doubtless this fact should explain much of his grace of outline, and power of relief. He proved himself equally successful in the sublime and minute, by turning from the awful majesty of his marble Jupiter to stamp like perfection on the grasshopper or bee of bronze. This Æschylus of sculpture began with works in ivory, continued to develop his power through statues of metal, and finally attained the highest excellence in colossal marble groups. He was born under the full blaze of Grecian freedom, and carried his profession to the loftiest height of excellence, through a knowledge of all the arts and sciences that could enhance its attraction, or dignify its pursuit. He was not only a painter and poet, but was also familiar with the gorgeous fictions of mythology, and the more sober records of history, the knowledge of optics, and the severest discipline of geometric science. It is probable that Phidias planned all the works about the Parthenon, and that Callicrates and Ictinus executed the architectural portions, while Alcamenes and other pupils wrought nearly to the surface most of the sculptural forms. But as his genius outlined the general plan, so his hand imparted the finishing touch to the varied parts.

The most marked characteristic of the first half of the Periclean age was placid majesty. Jupiter sat in supreme quietude, with thunderbolts resting in his lap; Juno reposed on her own feminine dignity; and Minerva showed supreme power, less through outward impulse than by sovereign self-control, and inward intent. When the highest period of calm beauty was passed, and another cycle drew near, full of force, greater excitement is exhibited in corresponding art, and with increased harmony with the changed spirit it portrayed. Such was Niobe and her children, pursued by Apollo and Diana, Gladiators in mortal struggle, and the passionate group of Laocoon. But at the best period no Greek artist would ever introduce in sculpture grim Pluto and sad Proserpine, or the monster Cerberus. He loved every thing that was beautiful; and, instead of damaging the uniform placidity of his works with such images of terror and aversion, he represented even the Furies as bearing a serene countenance. This calmness is the prevailing charm of Greek art. Its great depth, like that of the sea, remains undisturbed, however much the tempests may rage; and so, in their artistic figures: under every billow of passion reposes a great, self-collected soul. We may often be called to contemplate the struggling of brave heroes, but they are never altogether overcome by their pangs. The strongest emotions do not repel the spectator, but attract him rather; as in the dying Gladiator, or tortured Laocoon. While the misery we contemplate pierces to the very soul, it yet inspires us with a wish that we could endure with a fortitude like that we see. Beauty was latent in Periclean Greeks, like fire in crystal, which, however brilliant when excited, habitually rests in quiet, and robs not its abode of either purity or strength. They were as full of emotion as of heroism, and, as Agamemnon, after the victory, poured tears on the funeral pyre, they were never braver than at the very time they wept. Winkleman suggests, that beauty with the ancients was the balance of expression, and, in this respect, the groups of Niobe and Laocoon are the best examples; the one in the sublime and serious, the other in the learned and ornamental style.

But the glory of Athens, as a single figure, and marking the highest culmination, was Minerva, of the Parthenon. Above all others she bore the charms of celestial youth, under the expression of severest virtue. Doubtless no more glorious contrast could be found to the stiff and conventional uncouthness of the Memnonian statues, than was produced in that fine realization of cultivated intellect invested with invincible power. The spirit of the beautiful was embodied in her whose masculine wisdom was tempered with feminine grace, the severity of dominion softened into elegance, and the sedateness of philosophy dissolved in the fervor of patriotic enthusiasm. Her majestic form of ivory rose forty feet in the dazzled air, draped in robes and ornaments of gold. At her feet lay a shield, covered with exquisite sculpture, representing, on the convex side, the Amazonian war, the Athenian leader being the portrait of Pericles, and on the concave side were giants warring against heaven. On her golden sandals were depicted the battle of the Centaurs. By special decree the Athenians forbade Phidias from inscribing his name on this, the divinest Pallas of his creation, in order that they might share equally among themselves the honor of an undertaking which the people in common had conceived and sustained.

The grandest inspiration came from Marathon, and was exemplified in that glorious art which best expressed the manliness of the Grecian race, and rose highest in the republic in its freest hour. From the battle of Salamis to Pericles, scarcely fifty years elapsed, in which brief period art had advanced from eastern archaism to the most refined western excellence, from the rude carving of Selinus to the consummate sculptures of the Parthenon. The finest group of antiquity is preserved to us from the western front of that magnificent temple. Notwithstanding the variety of the figures, there is not one which is inert, or which represents a perpendicular line. In the centre are Neptune, with the trident in his left hand, and Minerva, with the spear in her right, with their chariots and attendants. The goddess of wisdom wields the strongest hand, and the sculptor has so adroitly managed the composition, as to place Neptune in the way of his own horses, while Minerva is allowed free passage in her nobler career. This pediment, looking down upon the mighty metropolis, and the Ægean bathing its western brim, bore a record and prophecy of high significance to him who approached by land or sea.

Cimon ornamented the public squares of Athens from his private fortune; and Pericles added markets, halls, gymnasia, and temples, all of which he caused to be adorned with innumerable statues by superior masters. The crowded wonders of the Acropolis, in particular, seemed to the astonished visitor, one great offering, the aggregate of national enthusiasms expressed in transcendant art. Toward this subordinate Olympus, a gigantic flight of steps conducted through the Propylæa, which opened its fivefold gates of bronze to a world of men and gods in precious forms, peopling marble halls, and adorning brilliant shrines. Here, for the temple of Polias, Phidias erected that statue of Minerva whose brazen helmet gleamed far off to greet the mariner as he doubled the Sunian promontory; and that other Pallas, named the Lemnian beauty; and a third, the "immortal maid," and protectress of the Parthenon, to whose colossal fascinations of ivory and gold allusion has already been made. So much were that democratic people animated with the passion of Pericles, which themselves had mainly inspired, that when Phidias recommended marble as being a cheaper material than ivory for the gigantic figure required, it was for that very reason that ivory was unanimously preferred. Miracles indeed abounded on every hand, and as the great patron and perfecter of them all, stood there the incarnation of his age, each masterpiece attested the culmination of that glorious star which blazed in tranquil beauty while he lived, and paled in tempest when he died. The outward decline of Greece was strangely sudden, and left a blank which has never been filled; but the empire of her inner spirit can never perish, so long as heroism may arouse, poetry enrapture, art embellish, or wisdom instruct the nations in their predestined progress. The epitaph—Here is the heart; the spirit is everywhere—most appropriately belongs to the capital of Attica. From her gates went forth colonies of beautiful intellect throughout the civilized world; and the light of her genius, lingering around the ruins of her skill, still serves to model all the masterly productions of earth. Like the venerable Nestor's cap of sculptured gold, the material may have perished, but the power which conceived and executed it has proved itself immortal.

Proficiency in sculpture was at one time widely diffused; it rose rapidly to the highest excellence, and as rapidly descended to a corresponding depth. The great Socrates was himself a statuary. Pausanias saw, at the entrance of the Athenian Acropolis, a group of Graces draped, which was executed by the philosopher. Praxiteles, at a later period, was distinguished for delicate grace and most careful finish. When Nicomedes, of Bythinia, wished to purchase of the Cnidians the Aphrodite by this artist, with the condition of discharging the city of its oppressive debt, they preferred to endure any hardship rather than suffer such a loss. This tender solicitude for the preservation of the beautiful was utterly unlike a mere mania for museum collections, and was not limited to plastic art; it grew up in common with all Grecian culture, and is to be found in all the phenomena of exalted Hellenic life. Art was indigenous to that prolific soil, and graced the maturest fruit, as well as nourished the deepest roots, of existence. While the auspices of freedom remained, she constantly derived fresh vigor, as Antæus gained strength from contact with mother earth, borrowing radiance from Olympus, and growing in conscious companionship with heroes and gods.

Critias, Nestœlis, and Hegias succeeded each other with some distinction, but not much was added to plastic art until Polycletus was born to raise alto-relievo to perfection, and won the proud renown of being the Sophocles of sculpture. He excelled in exquisite symmetry and superlative polish. The statue he made of a Persian life-guard was so exact in its proportions, and careful in its finish, that it was called the Rule. But the highest excellence in art had passed, and Myron, and Scopas, in their works which commemorated war, the chase, or the terrors of a violent death, foretokened the tempestuous age about to break in desolation all over earth.

Having thus briefly sketched the progress and character of both architecture and sculpture, let us now glance at the painting of the Periclean age.

As we have before said, architecture was the first of the fine arts, and the pursuit of the beautiful in this paved the way for all the rest. Color, as an artistic element, was first used to define hieroglyphics, and afterward was largely employed in mural decorations. The most characteristic production of Egypt was its obelisks, and these have made the world best acquainted with the spirit of the East by being transported without mutilation to the great cities of the West. Artificial tints on these are not common, but masses of wall are still seen, with pictorial representations of great variety, almost as vivid as they were three thousand years ago. But the type and form of her mummies was all that ever belonged to the land of the Pharaohs in the history of art. Every thing which contained life, growth, and power, from the simplest wayside Herma to Jupiter Olympus on his resplendent throne, sprang exclusively from the inventive and executive genius of Greece.

There is no proof that the art of Mosaics was indigenous in Africa. That it existed in Persia as early as the age of Ahasuerus is recorded in the first chapter of Esther, where it is mentioned that in the royal palace of Shushan "the beds were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red and blue and white marble." In this and many other respects, the spoils of war taken from the Persian invaders, conveyed to their victors important lessons in the arts of peace. The excellence which this kind of art eventually attained, and the profusion of its use, is quaintly indicated by the incident referred to by Claudius Galenus as follows: "Diogenes, the cynic, having entered a mansion in which all the Olympian deities were figured in chaste Mosaics, spat in the face of the host, saying it was the least noble spot he saw." Athenæus also mentions a work, formed of many colored stones, in small fragments, which represented the whole story of the Iliad.

The Graces rocked the cradle of Greek art, Admiration taught her to speak, and painting was her most phonetic idiom. A legend not unworthy of belief tells us that a Corinthian maid, by means of a secret lamp, traced the shadow of her departing lover, and thus outlined portrait was formed. As Love made the first essay in this department of art, so he never ceased to guide the hands which beautified the age of Pericles. A wise law prohibited the choice of an ugly subject, and the popular sentiment so generally limited pictorial representation to the realm of elegance, that Pyricus, who ventured to depict apes and kitchen herbs, was surnamed Rhypographer, or "Dirt Painter."

The etymology of the word used by the Greeks to express painting was the same which they employed for writing, and this renders the affinity of method and materials certain. Their first efforts were striagrams, simple outlines of a shade; thence they advanced to the monogram, or form without light or shade; from this they arose to the monochrom, or design with a single pigment, on a waxed tablet; and in the end, by means of the pencil, then first used, they invented the polychrom, and thus raised the stained drawing to a legitimate picture, glowing through all the magic scale of rainbow tints. The progressive steps in the attainment of excellence in this art are distinctly marked by the terms employed by Quinctilian, when he says that Zeuxis discovered light and shade; Pamphilus was exquisite for subtlety of line; Protogenes, for finish; Apelles, for grace; Theon, for poetical conceptions; Polygnotus, for simplicity of color and form; Aristides, for expression; and Amphion, for composition.

When Neptune and Minerva disputed as to who should name the capital of Cecropia, the Olympian hierarchy decided that the right should be given to the one who bestowed the greatest benefit on man. Neptune smote the earth with his trident, from whence sprang a war-horse; while Minerva produced an olive-tree. Thenceforth, as the greatest glory of the age, the arts of peace prevailed, and the product and proof of the noblest fame was set forth in mighty sculpture along the western pediment of the Parthenon. This was of pure Attic origin, and worthily crowned the reminiscences of oriental skill beneath. Egypt gathered the palm and lotus, the papyrus and date-leaves together, and produced the column, that symbol of strength, fastened like a bundle of sticks, the binding together of which probably suggested elegant flutings to the Greeks. But, while mechanical execution absolutely perfect, and great exactness in copyism of ignoble types, were imported from the East, in vain do we there seek, from Moses to Ptolemy, for the least approximation to natural forms. In the land of its growth, the lotus-leaf never alters, nor do the owl and ibis borrow one truthful characteristic from the models which abounded in the valley of the Nile. According to Herodotus, a heroic mythology, that great lever of Greek art, was altogether wanting in Egypt; and for this reason, doubtless, of their individual poets, sculptors, and painters, we do not possess the slightest record. On the contrary, in the great western metropolis, infant art was progressively nourished by the refined spirit of both natural and ideal excellence; the permanent traces of which perpetually remain on the painted vases and delicate basso-relievos which in the temples of Theseus and Minerva adorned the councils of the supreme gods.

By means of polychromy, the Greeks endeavored to add elegance to their buildings, without detracting from their majesty, knowing well that this exquisite system of coloring, when applied under their pure sky, illuminated by brilliant sunshine, and encompassed by gorgeous vegetation, would bring artificial beauty into complete unison with the richness of nature. Thus colored statuary harmonized with mural historic painting, and this looked out from broad panels of beauty through tinted colonnades upon the sky, the groves, fields, and sparkling seas. By this combination, Athenian structures were rendered most worthy of admiration, because in them works which, taken separately, might move through single attractions, or approach the sublime, were so happily combined, as instantly to evoke a sentiment of perfection and delight such as no other monuments ever possessed. Colors were so graduated that the temple they vitalized was made to resemble and reflect the charming vicissitudes of a lovely Grecian day: cool in the morning, dazzling at noon, and at evening burned with all the glowing gorgeousness of the setting sun. Euphranor and Micon, to excite the emulation of compatriots, depicted the exploits of heroes in the Porticoes; Protogenes and Olbiades drew the portraits of renowned legislators in the Curia; the Odeia were decorated with the pictorial forms of poets, and with the Graces, their inseparable companions; the Gymnasia exhibited the godlike champions in the contests of Mars and the Muses; and even the Propylæa became more famous for the precious works of the painters than for the marbles out of which its structural grandeur was formed. But Phidias alone excepted, Polygnotus was perhaps the greatest public genius in the greatest artistic age. The pictures painted by him as votive offerings of the Cnidians were much admired, and the whole nation honored him for other monumental works. The Lesche, filled with the splendors of his skill, was the grand glyptothek of Athens, and first picture-gallery of the Grecian world.

In the Periclean age, art was held as a glory, not as a luxury. Private life was frugal and modest, while the public monuments were soaring in proudest display. Socrates, the cotemporary of Pericles, according to his own testimony preserved by Xenophon, occupied a house which, with all it contained, was valued at five minæ, or about ninety dollars. The dwellings of Miltiades, Aristides, Themistocles, and Cimon were contracted and devoid of all decoration. Alcibiades was the first who introduced painting as an ornament to his living apartments. But a passion for art actuated all classes, and was most prominent in the highest. Thus the beautiful Elpinice, sister of Cimon, took a pride in being a model to Polygnotus, at the same time her potent brother, at the head of the republic, triumphed over the mighty king. With kindred zeal, the populace of Croton gathered all the fairest damsels before Zeuxis, in order that from them he might select the best features with which to execute their commission to paint Helen. The astonishing progress made at that period in sculpture and painting was seen in the contrast which existed between an Indian idol, or Egyptian Isis, and the Jupiter of Phidias; between the infantile fancies of a Chinese designer, and the ineffable charms of a picture by Apelles. While Socrates employed the language of Homer as the medium of moral discourse, and Plato thence derived images and reasoning to convey the theologies of Orpheus and Pythagoras, Agatharcus invented dramatic painting, and drew for Æschylus the first scene that ever agreed with the rules of linear perspective. A picture of the battle of Marathon, representing Miltiades erect in the foreground, was solemnly guarded by the public, and deemed an adequate reward by that great captain. A pendant to this is said to have been one representing Aristides watching at night over the bloody field, in sight of the blue sea, no longer crowded by the barbarian fleet, and the white columns of the temple of Hercules, near which the Athenians had pitched their tents.

But when freedom ceased to preside over the public fortunes of Greece, grandeur and beauty withdrew from her private minds. As Philip of Macedon drew near, the propitious gods of Olympia migrated to Pella, and all the fair heritage assumed a sickly hue in the deepening shade. As rhetoric vainly mimicked the deep thunders of eloquence which had passed, and metaphysical sophistry was substituted for that lofty philosophy which had guided honorable destinies, so the grand taste which at first dictated to art the monumental style, degenerated into mere prettiness, or expanded into the heaviness of an unhealthy growth. But soon even the portion which yet retained some elegance ceased altogether, and what remained was rapidly transformed into the type of an age already gaining the ascendancy—colossal might. Phidias excelled in graphic as in plastic art. According to Pliny, his Medusa's head was a wonderful picture. Alcamenes, the Athenian, continued for a while the style of that great master, as did Agoracritus and Scopas of Paros. But the latter, like Lysippus, were transitional to Praxiteles of Cnidos, in whom great art expired. Original genius ceased to produce models of its own, and only expert imitators of mighty predecessors succeeded. Pamphilus was the Perugino, and Zeuxis, of Crotona, the Raphael, of Periclean painters. Apelles seems to have been the Titian of his age, and Protogenes, of Rhodes, a Greek Leonardo, whose picture of Temperance, his cotemporary Apelles declared, was worthy of being carried to heaven by the Graces. But with these masters pictorial art declined, and, like architectural and plastic art, was marked with the grossness of a coming age.

Cheronea was the grave of Grecian excellence, as Marathon had been the glorious scene of its birth. The principle of despotism there came into collision with that of democracy, and with fearful odds in favor of the former; but the result first demonstrated, as was afterward repeated at Thermopylæ, Salamis, and Platæa, the difference between the man who fights for another and him who contends for his own rights. From the days of Themistocles to the present hour, no writer has discussed the nature and influence of free institutions without drawing largely from this portion of Grecian heroism. It is impossible to estimate the influence of those battles on the destinies of mankind, as in all succeeding ages they have constituted the staple of patriotic appeal, the battle-cry of desperate struggles, and thrilling key-notes of triumphant songs. Thus consecrated to free government by martyred patriots, they are the universal watchwords of independence throughout the world. The calm fortitude of that invincible age was expressed in every department of art, even its melody. Music was an accomplishment in which the Greeks generally excelled. Alcibiades, however, surrendered the use of the flute, because it deranged the beauty of his features; and Themistocles, also, rejected its instruments, saying, "It is true I never learned how to tune a harp, or play upon a lute, but I know how to raise a small city to glory and greatness." Perhaps the best instance and symbol of all was Achilles. He was fed on the marrow of lions, and trained for conflict by the centaur Chiron, who was not less skillful in music than in the art of war. Resting from the chase of wild beasts in the desert, or, after the victorious fight with Trojans, sitting alone by the sea-shore, the lyre was the companion of his leisure, and, playing with its chords, he could control inward wrath by his own melody.

If architecture is the most significant and enduring portion of the history of a people, a sure index of their mental state and social progress, plastic and graphic art are also striking exponents of their national character. The beautiful marble which forms the cliffs and coasts of Greece, notwithstanding its homogeneous transformation, betrays by veins and fossils its sedimentary formation. And so Hellenism, although it may be homogeneous, nevertheless betrays its secondary origin, and the sedimentary material which constitutes its groundwork. The rudimentary vestiges bear the same impress in Assyria, Egypt, and even among savage races; but the Greeks ignored the origin of these, rose above their hieratical meanings, and stamped all creations with their own peculiar manner. Their system of polychromy was the richest in antiquity, combining the lapidary style brought by the Dorians from Egypt, and the more brilliant tints which were attained when the Ionic mind penetrated Doric matter, and transfigured it with all the glories of Asiatic color. As Homer describes only progressive actions, so his great race executed nothing but what was bounded by the delicate lines of grace. The Parthenon has generally been regarded as being exactly rectilinear; but Penrose has recently demonstrated, by careful admeasurements, that probably there is not a straight line in the building. All is embraced within mathematical curves, accurately calculated, and designed to correct the disagreeable effect produced on a practiced eye by perfectly straight lines. Taken as a whole, this work is sublimely grand, and, in its minutest details, it is perfectly wonderful. When unmutilated, it was the aggregate of all artistic worth, and yet remains, of its age, the chief emblem of intellectual majesty.

The Greek sculptor invested his work with an inexpressible serenity, as if it were a spirit without a passion, as appears in the Apollo and Antinous. Pride and scorn are strongly marked in these, yet over the whole figure is thrown a heavenly calm and placidness; there is no swelling vein, no contorted muscle, but a general smoothness and unperturbed dignity. The same subdued air and tone prevailed in the paintings of the best age. Achilles appears grieved at having slain Penthesilea; the brave beauty, bathed in her own blood so heroically shed, demands the esteem of her mightier antagonist, and elicits the exclamations of both compassion and love. The Greeks never painted a Fury, nor did extravagant rage or frightful despair degrade any of their productions. Indignant Jupiter hurled his lightnings with a serene brow; and Timanthes, in painting the sacrifice of Iphigenia, rather than over-pass the limits within which the Graces moved, when he knew that the grief of Agamemnon, the father, would spread contortions over the face of the hero, concealed the extreme of distress, and perfected at once the merit of the picture and the purity of his taste. The Philoctetes of Pythagoras of Leontini, appeared to impart his pain to the beholder; but this was telegraphed to the soul by the magnetic sympathy latent in all the work, and not by means of ugly features. Hercules in the poisoned garment, depicted by an unknown master of that age, was not the Hercules whom Sophocles described, shrieking so horridly that the rocks of Locris and headlands of Eubœa resounded therewith. What was truthful and appropriate in language, was not attempted to be adequately expressed through the distortions of inappropriate art. Zeuxis derived his inspiration from Homer, and when he had painted his Helen, he had the courage to write at her feet the renowned verses, in which the enraptured elders confess their admiration. This contest between poetry and painting was so remarkable, that the victory remained undecided, as both the poet and painter were deemed worthy of a crown. The Diana of Apelles also followed Homer closely, with the Graces mingling in the accompanying train of her Nymphs. In these instances, as with Phidias in his own loftier sphere, the imagination of the artist was fired by the exalted image of the poet, and thus became more capable of just and captivating representation.

But perhaps the grandest combination of glorious arts it is possible to conceive, was that which existed when Demosthenes addressed six thousand of his countrymen at the Pnyx. In the presence of this vast multitude, he ascended the bema, and saw beneath him the Agora, filled with statues and altars to heroes and gods. To the north lay the olive groves of wisdom, and sunny villages along the fruitful plains beneath the craggy heights of Parnes and Cithæron; while to the south sparkled the blue Ægean, whitened by many a sail. Before him was the Hill of Mars, seat of that most venerable tribunal, the Areopagus. Above him towered the Acropolis, with its temples glittering in the air; on the left, stood the lofty statue of Minerva Promachus, with helmet and spear ready to repel all who dared to invade her pride of place; and on the right, rising in supreme and stately splendor, was the marble Parthenon, glowing with chromatic legends spread behind the colonnades, and relieved with sculpture tipped with gold.

The splendid noon of Grecian greatness was succeeded by a splendid evening, divinely prolonged. Mental pre-eminence survived long after her political supremacy was overthrown; and even when trampled in the dust, she still won reverence from her brutal foe.

CHAPTER III

SCIENCE.

If we trace the march of scientific knowledge through the dense strata of departed ages to its root, it will doubtless be found in the remote East, while all prolific growth is toward the West. As often as the storms of conquest have passed over the plains of India, the arts of production continue to be practiced in the very places of their first endeavors. Hindoos of the present day, with no other auxiliaries than their hatchets and hands, can smelt iron, which they will convert into steel, equal to the best prepared in Europe. It is believed that the tools with which the Egyptians covered their obelisks and temples of porphyry and syenite with hieroglyphics, were made of Indian steel. Bailly refers the origin of the arts and sciences, astronomy, the old lunar zodiac, and the discovery of the planets, to northern Asia. Doubtless that was the source of the progressive race, of which science was the chief instrument, and Greek culture the first adequate expression.

As criticism comes naturally after poetry, so science succeeds a great exhibition of art. A close and profound analogy exists between them, and in this order. Genius spontaneously executes great, curious, and beautiful works, before scientific reason pauses to sit in judgment upon the principles according to which the artistic processes were conducted. Expert workers in brass and iron existed long before the chemistry of metals was known, as wine sparkled in crystal and golden goblets before vinous fermentation formed a chapter of science. Pyramids and cromlechs were raised into the air in cyclopian massiveness, before a theory of mechanical powers had been defined. Dyeing was early in use with the Hindoos, from whom the Egyptians learned the art, as they did that of calico printing. That was one of the many varieties of practical science which certainly came from the remote East. Paper making was first known in India, where, for a long time, it was formed of cotton and other substitutes for hemp and flax. In the Himalayas, it is still manufactured of the inner bark of trees, and in sheets of immense size. The invention of a loom, and the common mode of weaving, is alluded to in the Rig Veda, B.C. 1200 years. The Institutes of Manu, say: "Let a weaver who has received ten palas of cotton thread, give them back, increased to eleven by rice-water and the like used in weaving."

But the nurses of infant science on the banks of the Ganges, the Euphrates, and the Nile, enslaved it to their own superstitions, and forever arrested its growth at the immutable boundary of their own contracted technicalities. So little real skill did the Egyptians possess, that it was necessary for Thales to show them how to find the height of the pyramids by the length of their shadows. Osiris was a king of that mummified land, and the historical course of science was foretokened by the fabulous account respecting him. Diodorus states that he passed through Ethiopia, Arabia, India, and Asia; crossed the Hellespont into Europe, and went from Thrace to western Greece, and the nations beyond, teaching them agriculture, and the cultivation of the vine. This was unquestionably invented after the Egyptian priesthood had received much information from the Greeks, and had become ashamed of their own gods, who had always confined their beneficent acts entirely to the borders of the Nile. Nevertheless, the statement is interesting, as it indicates the natural course of improvement.

True scientific progress primarily appeared in those mathematical ideas which first escaped from theological jurisdiction, and have ever since increasingly dispersed the gloom of superstition. The East was all eyes and no sight, when reason was most requisite for practical use; like Argus, whose hundred eyes were found napping when work was to be done. The West was much more effective, because its executive skill was fully equal to its speculative; like Cyclops, whose rugged two hands, co-operative with his vigilant one eye, forged for Neptune the trident which insured him the empire of the sea. The study of natural forces increased in proportion to the necessity for their use as correlatives to manual toil. They were thus made greatly to increase the power of man, at the same time they materially economized his time. It was impossible even to the enduring energies of Hercules, unassisted to cleanse the Augean stables; but by the co-operation of a natural force, in the waters of the Alpheus, the needful end was speedily and effectually obtained. A legend describes how Arachne, proud of her proficiency in needle-work, presumed to challenge Minerva to a trial of skill. But the contest was most unequal, because the latter added science to natural handicraft, and this combination was too powerful for any one to withstand. The discomfited Arachne was degraded from her high position among mortals, and, transformed into a spider, was thenceforth compelled to spin the same web in the same way, alike in summer zephyrs and wintry blasts.

Science exists in the mind; it is nature seen by the reason, and not merely by the senses. The sciences are necessarily progressive in the outward world, because of their internal connection. When a particular fundamental principle is in the process of discovery, it is objective, that is the object contemplated; but when once eliminated it becomes subjective, a new light to act as guide and evolver of kindred principles which lie beyond it, and are of more comprehensive use. The development of man as a race is the unfolding of this inherent dependence of one science upon another, the continuous revelation of that great patrimony of knowledge which is predestined to insure progress, emancipate reason, and entail the highest improvement consistent with a mortal state. When the Greek passed from the outer world of nature in search of wisdom, and descended to the depths of human consciousness, he was no longer traditional; his thought was science, and we can see both its birth and progressiveness. Then only might the world expect that, as Plato says his master once desired, that "Nature should have interpretation according to reason." With Socrates, and the scientific thinkers of his school, philosophy advanced from the realm of nature into the realm of man, and became a moral science. But its early cultivators were copious in abstract principles rather than in practical applications. As Canning said, they were the horses of the chariot of industry, and, going in advance of systemizers, they searched for truth for its own dear sake. Science was indeed beautiful in that serene height of abstract theory it was her first aim to secure, resources so copious and elevated that they might irrigate all lands in their descending flow; as the dove that brought the olive-branch to the ark of man's hopes needed to take a higher and longer flight than the one measured by the tree whence she came.

Strange elements of civilization were gathered by the Greeks on every side, all of which were rapidly assimilated to a lofty type, and subordinated to the noblest use. Providence, with the wisest intent, did not permit them to advance far in the right track of scientific discovery. The time had not yet arrived for that, and their fine endowments were made subordinate to human happiness in more auspicious modes than through the accumulation of physical knowledge. They were fitted rather to self-scrutiny, guided by the mind alone, than to explore the grosser world of sense. To regulate and define common conceptions under the law of observation was not their forte; but they were prompt and facile to analyze and expand them through generalized reflection. The refined children of Hellas were subjective rather than objective in all their habits of thought; and the Good, the Beautiful, and the Perfect, were their favorite speculative themes. Nevertheless, the earliest waking of science was in their schools; with them the speculative faculty in physical inquiries was first unfolded. During the protracted prelude during which practical knowledge was becoming separated from metaphysical, the more sagacious of their leaders were called sophoi, or wise men. Afterward this term was changed, as we shall have occasion to note in the succeeding chapter. The physical sciences, as treated by the early Italic and Ionic schools, embraced numerous great questions, and comprehended the widest field of universal erudition that was ever attempted. But proceeding according to a method radically wrong, they were unsuccessful. Greek scholarship in science, as in every other department, at the outset aimed at universality. Untamed by toil, and undismayed by reverses, they went bravely to their task, and strove to read the entire volume of nature at one glance. To discover the origin and principle of the universe, expressed in a single word, was their vain endeavor. Thales declared water to be the original of all; and Anaximenes, air; while Heraclitus pronounced fire to be the essential principle of the universe. The poetical theogonies and cosmogonies of preceding ages gave tone to speculation in the dawn of science, and a physical cosmogony was the primary result. Preceding nations, as the Egyptians, had no cosmal theories, and felt the need of none; not so the Greeks, they were born with a craving to discover the reasons of things, and to explain somehow the mysteries which duller races had little capacity, and less desire to comprehend.

Astrology bore a high antiquity in the East, and contained within itself some rays of light, but never rose above a degraded astronomy. It prepared the way for science, by leading to the habit of grouping phenomena under the pictorial and mythological relations which were supposed to exist among the stars. Actual truths are gradually approximated, but when once really attained, they forever remain the fundamental treasure of man, and may be traced in all the superadditions of brighter days. Thus, in the dim light of speculative suggestion, the Copernican system was anticipated by Aristarchus, the resolution of the heavenly appearances into circular motions was intimated by Plato, and the numerical relations of musical intervals is to be ascribed to Pythagoras. But so completely at fault as to method were even the latest natural philosophers, that no physical doctrine as now received, can be traced so far back as Aristotle.

Astronomy is undoubtedly the most ancient and remarkable science. Chaldea and Egypt probably gave to it somewhat of a scientific form, before the age of intellectuality represented by the Greeks. The Egyptians advanced one step in the right direction, when they determined the path of the sun; and Thales, who, like Moses, was learned in all the science of that Pharaonic people, introduced what he had gleaned into his own land, and became the father of astronomy. The great advance which he made is indicated by the fact that he was the first to predict an eclipse. This science, moreover, profited by the authority with which Plato taught the supremacy of mathematical order; and the truths of harmonics which gave rise to the Pythagorean passion for numbers, were cultivated with great care in that school. But after these first impulses, in the opinion of Dr. Whewell, the sciences owed nothing to the philosophical sects; and the vast and complex accumulations and apparatus of the Stagirite, do not appear to have led to any theoretical physical truths.

As intimated before, Thales of Miletus, was the father of mathematical science, as of Grecian philosophy in general. The discoveries of that early period were of the most elementary kind, but of sufficient importance to give impulse to more dignified researches. His pupil, Pythagoras, made great advancement, and introduced music into his explanations of scientific phenomena. Democritus and Anaxagoras, the friend of Pericles, improved upon the attainments of their predecessors. The latter employed himself in his prison on the quadrature of the circle. Hippocrates, originally a merchant of Chio, became a geometer at Athens, and was the first to solve the problem of a double cube. Archylas, the teacher of Plato, and Eudoxus, one of that great man's scholars, measured cylindrical surfaces, and attained important results by means of conic sections. Thales is reputed to have introduced the sun-dial into Greece, to have observed the obliquity of the ecliptic, and taught that the earth was spherical, and in the centre of the universe. The cycle of nineteen years, called the golden number, invented for the purpose of making the solar and lunar year coincide, was the most important practical result which the astronomy of the Periclean age attained. Meton and Euctemon proposed it for the adoption of the Athenians, by whom it was adopted B.C. 433 years, and is still in use to determine movable feasts.

Pythagoras, the cotemporary of Anaxagoras, greatly improved every branch of science. He is said to have been taken prisoner by Cambyses, and thus to have become acquainted with all the mysteries of the Persian Magi. He settled at Crotona, in Italy, and founded the Italian sect. The physical sciences, particularly natural history, and the science of medicine, were created by the Greeks. The writings of Hippocrates and Galen instructed the age of Pericles in the science of anatomy, which, with geometry and numbers, enabled the greatest of the artists to determine his drawing, proportions, and motion. It was genius guided by science that enabled the master to endow his work with life, action, and sentiment.

Science in Greece, like life itself, was thoroughly republican and expansive, so long as vital growth was permitted. Their navigation extended even to the Baltic, as the voyage of Pytheas is a proof; they rather surpassed than yielded to the Phœnicians in the activity of their trade, and the wealth as well as extent of their colonies. It was in their superiority of scientific attainments that the Grecian colonists mainly excelled. Carthage, for instance, was at the same time powerful in conquest and commerce, but despite all her intellectual culture, she was inferior to smaller cities planted on the opposite coasts.

In the time of Homer, all Italy was "an unknown country." Phocean navigators discovered the Tyrrhenian sea, west of Sicily, and yet more daring adventurers from Tartessus sailed to the Pillars of Hercules. In due time, Colæus of Samos, clearing for Egypt, was driven by easterly winds (Herodotus adds significantly, "not without divine intervention,") through the straits into the ocean. Thus was the remotest border of the known world unwillingly passed, and a nearer approach made to the divinely attested Hesperides of the West.

In contemplating the sublime and immortal rank which Greece held in the designs of Providence, the relation of her commerce to science should not be overlooked. The fable respecting the flight of Dædalus from Crete, is supposed to signify that he escaped by means of a vessel with sails, the first use of which, in that primitive age, might well be regarded as a description of wings. Inland and maritime navigation, were made to contribute much to that prolific race. Ivory, ebony, indigo, the purple dye mentioned by Ctesias, and gum-resins were imported from Arabia and Africa, together with pearls and cotton from the Persian Gulf. Caravans of camels richly ladened crossed Arabia to Egypt, and the great rivers Euphrates and Tigris conveyed vast stores of raw material to western Asia and Greece. Not only were the shrines of many a deity enriched with vessels and decorations wrought out of "barbaric gold," but every department of productive art and science was kept active through the demands of a wide and untrammeled commerce. The great intelligences of the age struggled with laudable intent, to embody the conceptions, and diffuse the effulgence they possessed. As in that national game so significant of the master-passion and glorious mission of the Greeks, they threw onward the blazing torch from one to the other, until light kindled in every eye, and the flying symbol exhilarated every breast. No man then professed to teach, and was paid for teaching, who yet had nothing to communicate.

For ten centuries the Greeks marched at the head of humanity, while Athens remained the centre to which the winds and the waves bore germs of civilization from the East, and whence, by the same instrumentalities, the seeds of yet richer harvests were scattered toward a more distant West. Hesiod, in his Works and Days, gave many practical lessons on agriculture, and more prosaic, but not less useful proficients arose on every hand to impart the most valuable instruction to each aspirant. The last effort of Grecian science was to mingle and combine in one system, all that the nations of the earth up to that era had produced. Diversified ideas of every shape and degree of worth were gathered around the torch of intense national enthusiasm, were made to comprehend and modify one another, and, in their sublimated union, gave birth to the first cultivated world. Plato was nearly cotemporary with Phidias, and, considering the great influence of his philosophic theory concerning the power of the soul to mold the outward person into its own pattern of virtue or vice, we can little doubt that the artist in his studio was greatly influenced by the sage of the Academy, both as to the choice of subjects and mode of treating them. But when the age of consummate art had passed, the Greeks perfected another great legacy to their successors, by making the last generation of her national industry the successful devotees of science.

When every other department of literature and art in Athens were at their greatest splendor, the mathematics also flourished most; the former soon began to decline, but the sciences continued in power long after beauty in art had been eclipsed. Aristotle wrote nine books on animals. He may be fixed upon as representing the highest stage of knowledge and system the Greeks ever attained. Athenæus states, that Alexander gave him large sums of money, and several thousands of men, to hunt, fish, and otherwise aid in furnishing a vast collection in natural history, under the supervision of the philosopher. He was not only the first, but the only one of the ancients, who treated of separate species in the animal kingdom. But, although his system of physics accumulated numerous facts, Aristotle deduced not one general law to explain them. He knew the property of the lever as well, and many other correlative truths, but there was no correct theory of mechanical powers in the world, before Archimedes struck upon a generic principle of science. Before him, no one had arranged the facts of space, body, and motion, under the idea of mechanical cause, which is force.

The civilization of Greece is borne to us, not upon the shields of her warriors, though they were such as Epaminondas, Miltiades, or Theseus. But in her inventive skill and artistic taste, in her ships and argosies, in her industrial prowess and the freedom consequent thereupon, were the power and wealth which made her the Panopticon of the nations. Freedom of production, and freedom of barter, were the guiding commercial principles under which science and fame grew together and matured the greatest strength. Athens was indebted to the enterprise of her citizens, and not to martial conquest, for her glory. The ships that crowded the gulf of Salamis, were built of wood, purchased from Thrace and Macedonia, and choice material for the furniture of their halls and palaces, from Byzantium. Phrygia supplied them with wool, and imports from Miletus were woven in their looms. The choicest products of Pontus, Cyprus, and the Peloponnesus, did the Athenians obtain; while, for them, from Britain, overland through Gaul, the Carthagenians exported tin, and exchanged with them diversified commodities. Spain yielded them its iron, and the quarries of Hymettus and Pentelicus furnished marble for the adornment of their own lands, and for copious export. As is shown in McCullagh's "Industrial History of Free Nations," they never had an idea that population could outstrip production, or production over supply the population. "If a man were in debt, they did not confine him between stone-walls, useless to himself and his creditors: they provided that he should labor until he had paid back the amount of the debt. It was upon the seas of commercial treaty they learned their lessons of freedom; and thence, too, did those gems of art, which have since been the wonder and the worship of the world, increase and delight. The beauty of their heavens shed an influence over their soul; the tenderness of their scenes, we know, enwove themselves into even the tables, chairs, couches, and drinking vessels. The Grecian moved amid a perpetual retinue of beauties; the painting, the statue, the vase, the temple, all assumed novel forms of elegance. In all this it is not the splendor of Athens which attracts us most, it is that indefatigable genius of enterprise and industry which, from the caves of the Morea, plucked the laurel, and made the wild waves of the Ægean tributary to her wants and her valor." So prevalent was this spirit of free trade and personal enterprise, that ordinary mechanics often gained great power in the republic; as in the person of Cleon, the tanner, who became a worthy successor of Pericles. The port of the great artistic, manufacturing, and commercial emporium, was so thronged with ships from every clime, as to justify the saying of Xenophon, that the dominion of the sea secured to the Athenians the sweets of the world. Nor were their own craft insignificant in size, or any way unworthy of the great people they served. Demosthenes refers to one ship which carried three hundred men, a full cargo, numerous slaves, and the ordinary crew.

It is granted that art was the parent of science; the genial and comely mother of a daughter possessing a yet loftier and serener beauty than herself. It is equally true that Doric columns, and decorated entablatures, were perfected like the integral parts of the Attic drama, before professional critics vouchsafed to apply rules for the three unities, or canons of monumental forms. What creative spirit in their age actually did, scientific judges afterward patronized with frigid nomenclatures, and learnedly demonstrated that it might by certain rules be done.

Under the Ptolemies, neither poets nor artists were produced; but the mathematical school of Alexandria exhibited an extraordinary succession of remarkable men. Within the secluded halls and ample libraries of that central college, the exact sciences were assiduously cultivated, and for more than a thousand years immense resources of learning were stored, in due time to be dispersed over the prepared West. The works of Euclid, Apollonius, and Archimedes, contain a valuable treasure of the mathematical knowledge of antiquity; but at the early period when they lived, science was so immature, and the amount of observations so limited, they could only lay the foundation of that excellence to which posterity has since arrived. At the conclusion of the Aristotelian treatises the exploration of this realm subsided, and the human mind remained, in appearance, stationary for nearly two thousand years.

CHAPTER IV.

PHILOSOPHY.

The term philosopher, or lover of wisdom, is an appellation which was first applied by Pythagoras, of Samos. He was the originator of the Italic, as Thales, his predecessor, one of the sophoi or wise men, was of the Ionic school, about B.C. 640 years. Philosophy means a search after wisdom. When this is looked for among the things that are seen and handled, weighed and measured, it is physical philosophy. But he who seeks for an object which is not of this material kind, is called a metaphysical philosopher.

All philosophical elements are in the East, but enveloped in one another, needing a distinct and matured growth. As the roots of the modern world are in classic antiquity, so those of classic antiquity are on the coasts of Egypt, in the vales of Persia, and on the heights of Asia. The oriental world preceded Greece, but has left no legible record of her past. In the progressive West alone does authentic history begin, and this is embodied in history, as in every other branch of human improvement. The world of humanity was seen to take a step forward, when civilization descended through Asia Minor, and traversed the Mediterranean to rest on the coasts of Attica. Then all the elements of human nature came under a new condition, and soon adopted the permanent order of an independent march.

The earliest philosophy of Greece had an Asiatic origin, and was received through Ionia. Many fragments from that source were incorporated in the works of Homer and Hesiod, and others are quoted by the primitive annalists from the still more ancient oracular poetry. Sir William Jones was of the opinion that the six leading schools, whose principles are explained in the Dersana Sastra, comprise all the metaphysics of the old Academy, the Stoa, and the Lyceum. "Nor," continues he, "is it possible to read the Vedasta, or the many compositions in illustration of it, without believing that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages of India." In the mathematical sciences, the Hindoos were acquainted with the decimal notation by nine digits and zero. In algebra, Mr. Colebrooke found reason to conclude that the Greeks were far behind the Hindoos; but it is possible that the latter was obtained from the Morea at a later period through the Arabs. But on the question of philosophy, there can be no doubt that incipient notions existed in Hindoostan, compared with which the antiquity of Pythagoras is but of yesterday; and in point of daring, the boldest flights of Plato were tame and commonplace.

Grecian art, which rose to absolute perfection, ended also with itself, and presents a striking exemplification of the perishable nature of merely instinctive greatness. But the philosophy of that wonderful people was more immutably founded, and has never ceased to show that the human race, unlike an unbroken circle constantly revolving upon itself, progressively advances into the infinite, and shines unremittingly with inborn ardor to attain the highest and noblest ends. Humanity, that is, thought, art, science, philosophy, and religion, the powers which are represented in history, embraces all, profits by all, advances continually through all, and never retrogrades. A given system may perish, and this may be a misfortune to itself, but not to the general weal. If it possessed real life, that life is still realized in some higher manifestation, but perhaps so modified by co-operative elements as to appear lost. It may indeed be obscured, but can never be obliterated. Vicissitudes and revolutions may rapidly succeed, and in great confusion; but human destiny is higher and better than these, it accepts all, assimilates all, and subordinates all to its own supreme behests. Every epoch, in retiring from the stage of the world, leaves after it a long heritage of contrary interests; but these only wait for a sufficient accumulation of other like elements, that with them a homogeneous amalgam may be formed as the basis of yet worthier superadditions. The Hellenic mind invented the art of deducing truth from principles by the dialectical process, and this divinest of Japhetic discoveries has exerted the most auspicious influence on subsequent philosophy and religion. The world had already learned much when the Greek first demonstrated that reasoning might often err, but reason never. That is the only medium through which truth is conveyed, and Greek philosophy was truly precious when it became to mankind the translation of the instinctive consciousness of God into reasoning. This was first applied to fathom the depths of physical speculation; and, then, in the consecrated soul of Socrates, it labored to possess the bosom of universal humanity, that thereby it might unfold to all the highest science. Shem transformed figurative signs into simple letters, and invented the Alphabet; but that greater prophet of the human race, Japhet, did vastly more, by translating the hieroglyphics of thought into simple elements, thereby inventing dialectical philosophy. This changed myths, legends, and visions, as well as more authentic annals into the heirloom of mankind by reason, and became at once and for all time the great organon for dealing with both conception and existence of all kinds everywhere.

There was military activity enough among the Greeks to preserve them from intellectual and moral torpor, but fortunately it did not exist in sufficient force to engross the faculties of superior minds. Therefore, energies of the highest order were thrown back upon intellectual pursuits; and the masses, so led, were also inclined to like culture, especially in the direction of æsthetics and philosophy. The bold writers of the Republic shrunk not from propounding all those problems in science and morals most interesting to man; and, whatever may have been their skill in solving them, they certainly were the first to point the way to true greatness. But for the restless spirit of inquiry which was awakened by Greek philosophers, the western nations might still have been slumbering in barbarian ignorance. Ancient dialectics prepared the way for modern progress, by teaching intellect to discipline and comprehend itself, in order that it may accurately scan nature and bind her forces to the car of human welfare. Such was the idea expressed by Aristotle, when he said: "The order of the universe is like that of a family, of which each member has its part not arbitrarily or capriciously enforced, but prefixed and appointed; all in their diversified functions conspiring to the harmony of the whole."

Philosophy, like the literature, art, and science of the ancients, had its origin among the Asiatic Greeks. The same region that gave existence and character to Homer and Herodotus, produced also Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus, founders of the Ionic school. They belonged to the same region, studied under like auspices, and formed continuous links in the great chain of perpetual progress. To the same source is to be accredited those who extended the Ionic doctrines to Magna Grecia and southern Italy, such as the poet Zenophanes, and that mighty founder of the most erudite confederacy, Pythagoras.

Anaxagoras, successor of Anaximenes, was born B.C. 500 years. After giving great distinction to the Ionic school, he came to reside at Athens, where he taught Pericles and Euripides, at the same time he was opening the source from which Socrates derived his knowledge of natural philosophy.

Parmenides, Zeus, and Leucippus, natives of Elea, enhanced the reputation of the Eleatic school, founded by Zenophanes, about B.C. 500 years. Democritus, a disciple of Leucippus, increased its fame still more, but modified its doctrines extensively.

Socrates, according to Cicero, "brought down philosophy from heaven to dwell upon earth, who made her even an inmate of our habitations." His discomfiture of the Sophists, whose futile logic inflicted much injury on the Athenian mind, was a great blessing to his country, but one which cost the benefactor his life. His doctrines were never committed to writing by himself, but have been preserved in substance by his distinguished pupils Plato and Xenophon.

The Cyrenaic sect was founded by Aristippus, a disciple of Socrates. It degenerated through the varied succession of Theodorus, Hegesias, and Anniceris, to merge finally in the kindred doctrines on happiness inculcated by Epicurus.

Antisthenes was the first of the Cynics, and was succeeded by the more notorious Diogenes. This school was composed of disciplinarians, rather than doctrinists, whose whole business was the endeavor to arrange the circumstances of life, that they may produce the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain. The caustic wit of Diogenes was directed against more refined teachers, especially his great cotemporary, Plato. The latter, in terms which implied respect for the evident talents of a rival whom he had so much reason to despise, called him "a Socrates run mad."

Archelaus succeeded Diogenes, and was called, by way of eminence, "the natural philosopher." Before him, Anaxagoras had taught occasional disciples in Athens; but it is probable that Archelaus was the first to open a regular school there. He transferred the chair of philosophy from Ionia to the metropolis of Minerva 450 years before Christ.

The Megaric sect of Sophists was the last and worst. It was founded by Euclides, and produced Eubulides, Alexinus, Eleensis, Diodorus, and Stilpo. Cotemporary criticism applied to some of these such epithets as the Wrangler, or the Driveler, which, doubtless, were well deserved. Stilpo was the last gleam of philosophic worth in Greece.

Of the religious views of Socrates, we shall treat in the succeeding chapter. Under the present head, it is sufficient to say, that his moral worth illustrated the age in which he lived; and his admiring disciples branched into so many distinguished families or schools, that he is justly called the great patriarch of philosophy. Socrates was the first philosophic thinker who demanded of himself and of all others a reason for their thoughts. He roused the spirit, and rendered it fruitful by rugged husbandry. He insisted that men should understand themselves, and so express their reason as to be understood by him. Thus he produced all he desired, movement, advancement in reflection; and leaving successors to arrange systems, it was enough for him to supervise the birth and growth of living thoughts. As the Pythagoreans were the authors of mathematics and cosmology, Socrates consummated the scientific endeavor, and added psychology. Thus the dignity and importance of human personality stood revealed, the crowning light most needed to complete the age of Pericles. Around this fundamental idea created by psychology was gathered the idea of personal grandeur, in heaven as upon earth, in literature, art, science, philosophy, and religion. As soon as philosophic genius proclaimed the supreme importance of the study of human personality, the higher divinities became personal, and the representations of art no longer fell into exaggerated forms, but were definite, expressive, and refined. Moreover, as this principle prevailed and was acutely felt, legislation became liberal, and the social polity was necessarily democratic.

Plato, the great glory of Athenian philosophy, was born in Ægina, about B.C. 430 years. Descending from Codrus and Solon, his lineage was most distinguished; but his genius was much more illustrious than any ancestral fame. He learned dialectics from Euclides the Megaric; studied the Pythagorean system under Phitolaus and Archytas; and traveled into Egypt to accomplish himself in all that which the geometry and other learning of that country could impart. Returning to Greece, he became the most characteristic and renowned teacher of philosophy in the Periclean age. Demosthenes, Isocrates, and Aristotle were among his disciples, and continuators of his immense mental and moral worth. Plato also visited Italy, where he gathered the noble germs which he grafted on the doctrines of Socrates, and which are not accounted for in Xenophon. On his final return to Athens, he took possession of a modest apartment adjacent to the groves and grounds which had been bequeathed by Academus to the public, wherein he lectured to the public on sublime themes. He divided philosophy into three parts—Morals, Physics, and Dialectics. The first division included politics, and under the second, that science which afterward came to be distinguished by the name of metaphysics. In his Commonwealth, the object of Plato was to project a perfect model to which human institutions might in some remote degree approximate. He seems even at that early day to have had a presentiment of the ennobling republicanism which human progress would necessitate and attain. His writings form a mass of literary and moral wisdom, inculcated with the highest charm of thought and manner, which had ever appeared to exalt the imagination and affect the heart. He was, doubtless, the best prose writer of antiquity; in the form and force of his composition, he stands at the highest point of refinement Attic genius ever attained. He died at Athens, eighty-one years old, and was honored with a monument in the Academy, upon which his famous pupil, Aristotle, inscribed an epitaph in terms of reverence and gratitude.

The philosophy to which Plato gives his name, recalls at once all that is most profound in thought and pleasing in imagination. But no isolated genius can be correctly appreciated. His predecessors, Socrates and Anaxagoras, as well as his successors, the Neoplatonists, must be taken into joint consideration, or the great master in whom philosophic grandeur culminated will not himself be properly understood. Neither is the Sceptic school of Pyrrho, nor the Stoic school of Zeus; Democritus, of Abdera, radiant with smiles, or Heraclitus, of Ephesus, bathed in tears, to be discarded from the view, when we would sum up the aggregated worth of that philosophic age. But the hour has come when the god of philosophy, a son of Metis, or Wisdom, realized the menace put into the mouth of Prometheus by Æschylus, and Zeus with his compeers is driven into the caverns of the West to share the exile of Cronus. Who was the predestined instrument of all this?

Stagirus, the birthplace of Aristotle, was situated on the western side of the Strymonic gulf; a region which, in soil and appearance, resembles much the southern part of the bay of Naples. When seventeen years old, he came to Athens, the centre of all civilization, and the focus of every thing that was brilliant in action or thought. Plato fired his mind, and fortified that wonderful industry in his hardy pupil, which enabled him, first among men, to acquire almost encyclopædic knowledge in collecting, criticizing, and digesting the most comprehensive mass of materials. So extraordinary was the application of Aristotle, that Plato called his residence "the house of the reader."

How wonderful is Providence! While Aristotle was exiled in Mytilene, and when the auspices of human progress were most foreboding, he was invited to undertake the training of one who, in the world of action, was destined to achieve an empire which only that of his master in the world of thought could ever surpass. In the conjunction of two such spirits, according to the predetermined mode and moment, the invaluable accumulation of Periclean wealth was to be distributed westward without the slightest loss. The great transition hero needed to be trained in a way befitting his mission, and this required that he should be imbued with something better than the austerity of Leonidas, or the flattery of Lysimachus, so that his character might command respect, and his judgment preserve it. Through the influence of Aristotle on Alexander, this conservative result was attained. The rude and intemperate barbarian became ameliorated, and soon manifested that love for philosophy and elegant letters, which were the fairest traits of his life. So strong did this elevating passion become, even amid the ignoble pursuits of war, that being at the extremity of Asia, in a letter to Harpalus, he desired the works of Philestris, the historian, the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the dithyrambs of Telestis and Philoxenus, to be sent to him. Homer was his constant traveling companion; a copy of whom was often in his hands, and deposited by the side of his dagger under his nightly pillow. Thus did the beautiful age of Pericles blend with the martial force about to succeed.

When Aristotle returned to Athens to close the great era of philosophic vigor, being near the temple of Apollo Lyceus, his school was known as the Lyceum, and here every morning and evening he addressed a numerous body of scholars. Among the acute and impressible Greeks nearly all objects, however ideal in their original treatment, subsequently received a practical form. As the imaginative sublimities of their poets became embodied in glorious sculptures, so the theories of their early philosophy were wrought out politically, or gave way to cumulative mathematical demonstration. Plato, in dialogues and dissertations, philosophized with all the fervor of an artist; while the method of Aristotle was strictly scientific in the minute as well as enlarged sense of the word. To the first, philosophy was a speciality which engrossed a protracted life; but the latter treated not only of natural science, and natural history as well, but he also wrote on politics, general history, and criticism, so that it may be said truly that he epitomized the entire knowledge of the Greeks. The age of Plato was an age of ideals; but with Aristotle the realistic age had dawned. Pericles had begun to take part in public affairs one year before the birth of Socrates; Olynthus was taken by Philip of Macedon the very year in which Plato died. This intermediate period of one hundred and twenty years was all occupied with some ideal of beauty, wisdom, or freedom, in the persons of poets, architects, sculptors, painters, statesmen, who were striving to realize it, dreaming of it, or sporting with it to amaze and bewilder their fellow-men. But the name of Aristotle, as that of Philip, is a signal that concentrated organizing power has appeared in the realms of thought and action, and that the coming age requires a philosophical expounder who shall in his own career govern the old and represent the new. It was at Athens that Aristotle collected all the treasures of scientific facts the conquered nations could contribute, and wrote there the great works which were still young in their influence when the Macedonian madman had long since crumbled into dust.

To the followers of Plato in the Academy, of Aristotle in the Lyceum, the Cynics of the Cynosargus, and Stoics of the Portico, Epicurus came in the decrepid effeminacy of the age at the moment of its lowest degradation, and, amid the parterres of prettiness which, with the pittance of eighty minæ, he purchased for the purpose, established the so-called philosophy of the Garden. Such was the last expression of that Ionian school which shared somewhat of the Hindoo national character, wherein it originated, and so far resembled a hot-house seed. Opening with gorgeous colors and rich perfume, it grew rapidly, and produced precocious and abundant fruit. But the more western growth was like the oak, hardened by wind and weather, striking its roots into solid earth, and stretching its branches in free air toward both sun and stars. In the Ionic school the human soul performed but a feeble part. The Italic school, on the contrary, was mathematic and astronomic, and at the same time idealistic; it was at once the brain and heart of Grecian progress and power. The former regarded the relations of phenomena as simple modifications of the same, and founded the abstract upon the concrete; whereas, the latter neglected the phenomena themselves for their relations, founding thus the concrete upon the abstract. To the Ionic school the centre of the world's system is the earth; but the centre of the universal system, according to conscious reason in the Italic school, is the sun. Ten fundamental numbers therein formed the decadal astronomy, the harmonious kosmos, whose laws of movement around the great central luminary produced the sweet music of the spheres.

Empedocles, of Agrigentum, B.C. 455, presents the most western phase of Greek character, and the one which in the clearest manner anticipated the age to come. He noted the great changes which transpired in society, and believed he saw their counterpart in the convulsions going on within and upon the earth. The war of disorganized humanity, passions against nature, and the conflict of enraged elements among themselves, were closely considered, but doubtless with a confusion of physics and ethics in his mind. Love, hatred, friendship, treason, were all recognized mixed up in the fearful warfare of earth, air, fire, and water. Great nature was no imaginary battle-field to the mind of Empedocles; the hosts which Homer had portrayed fighting for Greeks and Trojans, were still in deadly struggle, and his vivid speculations soon after became actual history. Cotemporaries called him the enchanter; because, as a zealous student of the outer world, he could not disengage himself from the perplexities which he found within his own constitution, but followed out with fervor the greatest question of our being. He not only won at the chariot race, as his father did before him, and fought for the liberties of his native Agrigentum, that last hold of freedom in the West, but as poet, as well as philosopher, he forms a curious link between Homer, Pindar, and his Roman admirer, Lucretius.

As often as the historian and philosopher speak of heroic virtues, they will mention Lycurgus, and the influence of his legislation. But when they glance at the higher objects man was made to attain, the harmonious development and adornment of all the powers in his possession, they must look to the laws of a nobler culture in Attic climes. It was there only, that all ennobling influences were blended and subordinated to the highest use by the best minds. Plato frequented the studios of artists, to acquire correct ideas of beauty; and Aristotle, in his Politics, says, that "all were taught literature, gymnastics, and music; and many also, the art of design, as being useful and abundantly available for the purposes of life." But not one beautiful flower of intellect or art sprang in Laconian soil, to acquire thereon either healthful vigor or attractive growth. No gladdening voice of the poet has thence descended, nor were the obscurities of nature, and the depths of immortal consciousness either investigated or enlightened by any of her sons.

Thus from the sublime terrace of the Acropolis, have we cast another glance over that glorious land where Homer breathed forth those songs for six and twenty centuries unexcelled; where Phidias, like his own Jupiter, sat serene on the loftiest throne of art; where Pericles ruled with sovereign grandeur in the first of cities, not by mercenary arms, but by the magic influence of mind; where Socrates first scanned the human heart, and learned to analyze its deep and mighty workings; and whence the royal pupil of Aristotle, the last and greatest of universal victors, went forth on the mission of conquest, not designedly to plunder and destroy, but to spread the literature, arts, science, philosophy, and religion of immortal Greece throughout the civilized world.

CHAPTER V.

RELIGION.

The East is the native land of religion, whence a perpetual exodus has continually advanced toward the West. As the sun in the beginning, so truth and life first shone from the orient; and the march of civilization has ever since been in the direction of that great orb.

The Assyrians were not monotheistic, but they were far from being so polytheistic as the Egyptians, who were imbued with an African fetichism such as never debased the Asiatic race. Hence, their symbolism was much simpler and less repulsive than that of the Egyptians. The ancient Persians were less superstitious than the Assyrians, and presented their paraphrase of Te Deum first among intellectual nations without temples. They have left nothing that pertains to sacred art, not even tombs. With them God was omnipresent, fire his symbol, the firmament his throne, the sun and stars his representatives, the elements his ministers, and the most acceptable worship a holy life. But a belief in the existence and exercise of supernatural powers is older than the magism or magic, whose origin belongs to that indefinite antiquity which witnessed the feuds of Ninus and Zoroaster, when the gods instructed the Indian devotee how to subordinate them to his purposes, or when Odin discovered the Runes, which could chain the elements and awake the dead. Earlier than Assyrian Chaldeans, Israelitish Levites, or Median and Persian Magi, religious sentiments were native to man, and magician and priest were synonymous terms. Then was the arbiter of weal and woe, of blessings and curses, invested with the awful privilege of invoking the gods and performing religious services. Aided by popular credulity, the inspired seer could move mountains, stir up Leviathan, govern disease, or, like Balaam, destroy foes by imprecations.

It would be a hopeless task to trace with accuracy the theology of the earliest periods, buried as it is under a mass of allegory and fable which can not now be removed. Yet there are indications of a purer morality, and a more worthy faith, than is portrayed in the anthropomorphic mythology of the Hesiodic and Homeric poems. Inachus is supposed to have migrated from the Asian shore about the same time the Israelites entered Egypt. Then, the worship prevalent among the Nomadic tribes of Asia, according to Job, was that of one almighty Creator, typified by, and already half confounded with light, either the sun or other celestial bodies. Plato speaks vaguely of the divine unity, and Aristotle more distinctly avers, that "it was an ancient saying received by all from their ancestors, that all things exist by and through the power of God, who being one, was known by many names according to his modes of manifestation."

In the opening chapter of this work, allusion was made to the Kylas mountain in Asia, from the lofty terraces of which the ancestors of the Greeks descended, bringing with them to Hellas a memento of their origin in the word koilon, which they used to designate heaven, and illustrating their hereditary theology by going for congenial worship to the loftiest shrines. The best authority tells us that they were exceedingly religious, a fact which even their grossest errors confirm. Endowed with the most acute and active sensibilities, the Greek sought to satisfy the ardent aspirations of his devout spirit; he even yearned to be himself enrolled among the deified heroes whom his valor or imagination had exalted to the dazzling halls of Olympus. This general impulse may be illustrated by particular examples, as in the subtle Themistocles and majestic Pericles, who placidly hailed in worship traditions discarded by the historic mind as transparent fictions. So powerful and all pervading was the religiousness of the cultivated Greeks, that the same judgment which so profoundly harmonized with the severe grandeur of the Olympian Jove, enthroned by Phidias amid the marshaled columns of the national temple, bowed to the legend of Aphrodite, the foam-born queen of Love. Heroism and piety were perpetually invigorated at costly fanes; and how deeply the spirit of worship and belief in retribution, were impressed upon the most powerful intellect, is shown by the awful apostrophe of Demosthenes to the heroes who fell at Marathon, and the breathless attention which then absorbed the very soul of the Athenian.

In the land of Ham nothing was nobler than a few dull emblems of thought, sitting on a lotus leaf, immersed in the contemplation of their own divinity, or fierce warrior-deities, Molochs, Baals, or Saturns, while the classic West deified the sentiments of the human mind; and, though steeped in viciousness, yet represented as beings presiding over nature in beautiful and commanding forms. A potent spell of fascination dwelt in the mere abstractions of pagan thought embodied in a Hebe, Venus, or Minerva; and false as were the spiritual views of their authors, they exercised a charm of imagination which still speaks to more enlightened intellects, and evokes sad regrets from holier hearts. The province of Shem was faith and not philosophy. His descendants were never successful in dialectics, and the best of them under the old dispensation only stated the matter of their belief, but never undertook to prove it. When Job attempted religious argumentation, and would justify the ways of God to man by a process of theodicean philosophy, he acknowledged his failure by avowing the incomprehensibility of human destinies. And when the pious and philosophic Ecclesiastes attempted to argue on rationalistic principles, he fell into inextricable doubt, and could resist despair only by implicit submission to the word vouchsafed from heaven: "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." Such was the last dictum of Hebraism in the fifth century before Christ, at the moment when the daring speculation of Japhet had passed its culminating point. This, too, was the age of Haggai and Malachi, in whom sacred truth is announced in purely didactic and not argumentative forms. Without anticipating the designs of Providence, we think with inexpressible delight of the last and best expression of Jewish faith united to Japhetic reason, and happily blended together in the splendors of an infinitely loftier wisdom to enlighten mankind.

The functions of humanity are of a social nature; they merge in the whole species, and have religion for their foundation and centre. If absolute isolation were possible to man, it would virtually nullify his existence. Only societies act in and upon the world, with religion for their bond and protection. Among the nations which have shared in the work of progress accomplished hitherto, each has exerted an influence by some characteristic feature, some special function in the general advance. In addition to the literature, art, science, and philosophy of the Greeks, we should carefully note the great civilizing might which dwelt in their religion. This was felt by them to be an infinite and universal necessity. Without it, the social state is impossible, since the nature of man demands active progress under a moral law too exalted to emanate from human will. It must be divinely ordained, and in a way which clearly indicates the means and end of human perfection. That alone can create and proclaim the legitimate end of human activity, at the same time it becomes synonymous with religious morality.

The ideas which obtain among different nations respecting their own creation, are usually much like themselves. Scandinavians suppose that they sprang from dense forests on their hills, the Libyans from the sands of their native deserts, while the Egyptians conceived themselves to have arisen from the mud of the Nile. But the cheerful and active Greek associated his origin with the grasshopper, and went singing on his agile way. A kindred diversity exists in the choice made by nations as to the objects to be adored. The Egyptians deified water, the Phrygians earth, the Assyrians air, and the Persians fire. But the Greek, impelled by nobler instincts, went beyond grosser natures and deified himself. The mighty conclave shining round the resplendent heights of Olympus, was only the counterpart of a vast congregation worshiping below. As Amon or Osiris presides among the deities of a lower grade, Pan, with the music of his pipe, directs the chorus of the constellations, and Zeus leads the solemn procession of celestial troops in the astronomical theology of the Pythagoreans. The apotheosis of Orpheus, with his harp, in their scientific heavens, is a starry record of oriental worship sublimated by the devout intellect of Greece. The nations of antiquity believed that their ancestors dwelt closely allied to the gods, or were gods themselves. Cadmus and Cecrops were half human, half divine. The Greeks inherited many cosmogonical legends from the Hindoos, out of which was composed the theogony of Hesiod. Thebes rising to the sound of Amphion's lyre, was the world awakening at the music of the shell of Vishnou. Conflicting Centaurs and Lapithæ, Titans and giants, are supposed to represent the elemental discord out of which arose the stability and harmony of nature.

The great heroes of India became the chief gods of Greece; so that their mythology was not a pure invention, but rested on a historical basis. The introduction of the Lamaic worship into north-eastern Hellas, is distinctly preserved in the earliest religious annals. The famous moralist Pythagoras was the special devotee and professor of eastern doctrines, and, under their inspiration, established a brotherhood strictly devotional, and with observances of monastic sanctity. Grote speaks of this great preacher to the Grecian race in the following terms: "In his prominent vocation, analogous to that of Epimenides, Orpheus, or Melampus, he appears as the revealer of a mode of life calculated to raise his disciples above the level of mankind, and to recommend them to the favor of the gods; the Pythagorean life, like the Orphic life, being intended as the exclusive prerogative of the brotherhood, approached only by probation and initiatory ceremonies, which were adapted to select enthusiasts rather than to an indiscriminate crowd, and exacting active mental devotion to the master." Traditionary history commemorates a wonderful reformation produced by this stern religionist in different lands. The effect produced among the Crotoniates by the illustrious missionary of morality is indicated by the recorded fact, that two thousand persons were converted under his first discourse. The Supreme Council were so penetrated with the noble powers of the Lamaic apostle that they offered him the exalted post of their President, and placed at the head of the religious female processions his wife and daughter.

The religion of the Greeks was the deification of the faculties and affections of man. Human character and personality preponderated therein, but it was neither inert nor wanting in intellect. The passionless, immovable deities of Egypt and Persia were superseded by the active and powerful hierarchy of Olympus. Free and independent, they were presided over by the great conqueror of those blind and deaf gods of necessity, who had reigned absolutely over all the ancient East. Under this new dispensation, the various forces of nature were emancipated and endowed with the affections, and subjected to the weaknesses, of mortal beings. Fountains, rivers, trees, forests, mountains, rose into objects of adoration under the form of nymphs, goddesses, and gods. Social existence was elevated to a corresponding degree, by the removal of castes, and the sacerdotal despotisms which had so long impeded the progress of democratic principles in individual and social life. Preceding nations, of lively sensibility, had reverenced as deities single rays of the Divine Being separated from their great centre; but the polytheism which prevailed over adolescent men, appeared in Hellas invested with a purer majesty. Oriental polytheism desecrated its altars and temples with images of deformity; but the West conceived a nobler symbol of divinity, when the Greek created God in his own image, and seemed to inhale life-giving breath while he worshiped in the midst of every phenomenon that could refine his taste or stimulate his imagination. This was utterly inadequate to the attainment of the great end of spiritual existence; but one important step in paganism was gained; natural religion, which had before been absorbed in the immeasurableness of the formless infinite, became fixed to the eye under the limitations of a cognizable form, eminently human, but suggestive of the divine. Thus, religion produced ideality in art, and art fostered enthusiasm in religion. The beauty and dignity of many altar-statues appeared to have descended from a higher sphere, and commanded the reverence due to beings of celestial birth. The earthly was so blended with the heavenly, and visibly presented, that Plato looked upon the harmony as something complete, and most ennobling in its power of assimilation. In all the public enterprises and festal assemblies of the Greeks, a high religious tone was present which paid homage only to the exalted and the beautiful. They were of the earth, earthy; but it is impossible not to look back with respect upon that people whose whole civilization was imbued with a spirit of renunciation, sublime self-sacrifice, and beneficent deeds. The magical splendor which yet pours about them, in the depths of that old world, after so many centuries, is nothing else than the reflection of their purer worship and nobler stamp of character. Of all the states, Athens, in this regard, as in every other, was by far the noblest. Sparta, it is true, appreciated highly the blessings of liberty, and was not only content by a joyless existence to purchase this, but delighted even to sacrifice life for its preservation. But the refined capital of Minerva went beyond the severe law which makes a useful slave, as one would harden a growth of oak; she elicited perfume from the fairest bloom of the soul, wherein the moral man was made to unfold in the development of a higher freedom. The genius of the Greek was as profoundly devotional as it was emulative. To his sensitive imagination, the fair objects of nature became invested with a living personality; day and night presented engrossing deities, while he adored the golden-haired Phœbus, or the silvery Artemis. Actuated by a glowing fancy, material creation seemed spiritualized, and each agreeable retreat was the habitation of a god. Naiads in the fountains; Dryads in the groves; Fauns, Satyrs, and Oreads on the mountains, indissolubly associated sublunary scenes with intelligent beings, and kindled the starry heavens with the effulgence of supreme divinities.

The dawn of civilization has ever been confined to those who were intrusted with the care of sacred ceremonies, and who devoted their exclusive knowledge to the support of their religion. In the beginning all contemplation was religious; the whole universe was esteemed divine, and it was to the solving of this problem that the first efforts of mind were given. "Whence, and who am I?" are the first questions which occur to Brahma, as represented in Hindoo theology, when he awakens to conscious being amid the expanse of waters. But the early Greek sages surveyed nature with the more penetrating glance of a Lynceus, or Atlas, who saw down into the ocean depths. There was no distinct astronomy, history, philosophy, or theology; there was but one mental exercise, whose results were called "Wisdom." It was this personification that Solomon saw standing alone with God before the creation. All mythologies may in one sense claim to rank as truths, inasmuch as they in fact represent what once existed as mental conceptions. On this principle the Grecian dogmas, though in reality absurdities, are most worthy of attention, because they are expressed in the purest forms. Their conceptions of super-human beings were products of the devotional sentiment. Nature was to them a perpetually flowing fountain, whose pellucid waters mirrored earth and sky; like the stream in which Narcissus was dazzled by the reflection of his own image, and beneath whose surface he bent in sadness, and was melted into its transparent depths.

Efforts to deify the beautiful existed among the Hindoos and Hebrews, as well as among the Greeks; but in the former races, a wish to blend in one expression a great variety of theological ideas obliterated elegance, and rendered the idols of Egypt and India elaborate metaphysical enigmas, a sculptured library of symbols, instead of an attractive gallery of religious art. But in Greece, the development of sacred imagery fell into the hands of masters in whom the character of priest was subordinate to that of artist; from the servant art became the mistress, the teacher, even the institutor of the religion in whose aid she had been employed, and the works so produced were received as fresh revelations from heaven.

Poets gave a local habitation to the gods, and were the first teachers of religion. With the eye of taste, and impelled by sentimental reverence, they people the hills and groves, glens and rivers, with imaginary beings. Much of the Homeric theology is of Egyptian parentage, but in his hands all borrowed material was greatly improved. Mere personification of natural powers became moral agents; and, instead of being represented under disgusting images, they became models of human beauty, elegance, and majesty. The inspired bards, though blind without, were full of eyes within, and Acteon-like, gazed on nature's naked loveliness through the light of their illumined souls. To these poet-priests of nature, like Orpheus, or Eumolpus, was ascribed the first religious establishment, as well as the first practical compositions. The commencement of literature was not a scheme contrived to win the savage to civilization: it was the wild and spontaneous outburst of religious enthusiasm. If powerful institutions are always ascribed to distinguished men only, it is simply because that the full light of common thoughts is never condensed and vividly set forth but by that exalted order of genius which is the rarest of gifts. Minds of the finest tone express the most comprehensive doctrines, as the lyre of Orpheus, and the pipe of Silenus, sung how heaven and earth rose out of chaos. Atlas taught respecting men and beasts, tempestuous elements, and the eclipses and irregularities of the heavenly bodies. The laws of Menu, like those of Moses, begin with cosmogony; and Niebuhr has shown that the history of the Etruscans, like that of the Brahmins and Chaldeans, is contained in an astronomico-theological outline embracing the whole course of time.

Evidently the first colonizers of Greece brought with them much of the simple faith and worship recorded in the Hebrew writings. A stone, or the trunk of a tree, was set up for a memorial, and, according to the alarm that had been felt, or the deliverance experienced, on some spot thereby sanctified, worship was offered to that great Being whose rule all acknowledged, but whose name none ventured to pronounce. Doubtless the excess of awe, if no more mundane influence, generated superstition; as the vow of Jephtha had its parallel in the almost cotemporaneous sacrifice of Iphigenia, and of Polyxena. It was this barbarous race that the polished and erudite traveler, Orpheus, endeavored to civilize. Perhaps, as in later times, he imagined that hidden doctrines would best improve the higher classes; while the minds of the vulgar would be easier won by fables, and weaned from gloomy superstitions by the worship of divine benevolence, manifested in the varied products and powers of nature. The attempt, however, failed, and the grossness of depraved perceptions converted those different manifestations into separate deities, so that different localities and cities came to have their tutelary stone, or wooden idol, or marble statue. The temple was built on the spot hallowed by devotion, as at Bethel; but in a subsequent age the impulse of the original consecration was no longer felt, and its intent was forgotten. The gorgeous fane, and the fascinating image therein, became objects of degenerate worship; the source of profit to a mercenary priesthood, and of deterioration to the most intellectual and moral of mankind.

Monuments were early erected in grateful commemoration of religious events, as the hill of stones by Jacob and Laban; or to gratify secular ambition, as was exemplified in the tower of Babel. In Greece, when the pioneers were feeble, the first settlers chose some hill readily defensible, and having fortified the summit as the first space to be occupied, they proceeded to build a taphos, or temple for the divinity. Such was the origin of Athens. The inclosed city was called Cecropia, from Cecrops, it is said, who first founded the state, and his was the first place of worship for the original inhabitants. Others interpret Acropolis to mean "Height of the City," which, in this instance, was accessible only on the western side, through the Propylæa, and was crowned by that shrine of Truth and Wisdom, the Parthenon. Religious instincts have ever sought the vast solitudes of untainted nature, or the open heights of the mighty temple of the great God, whereon the pure spirit of love reigns and smiles over all. Pilgrimages were made to the oaks of Mamre, near Hebron, from the days of Abraham; and the nations surrounding the divinely favored tribes conspired to attach the idea of veneration to rivers and fountains, and were accustomed not only to dedicate trees and groves to their deities, but even to sacrifice on high mountains; customs which were practiced by the Jews themselves, previous to the building of Solomon's temple. The beginning of wisdom was in the wilds of Asia, and it was there that the God of nature implanted grand ideas in the minds of shepherds, meditating on those antique eminences, teaching them to wonder and adore. As the loftiest mountains are surmounted with the most unsullied snow, so the purest sentiments crowned their elevated souls, and forever rendered them the chief source of fertilizing streams to all lands, through every region of thought.

In Greece, there was no hereditary priesthood, as in Egypt. The right of presiding at public sacrifices pertained to the highest civil office, and probably the head of each family was also its ecclesiastic; but there was no priestly combination with secular power, and no national creed. Nestor, at home, conducts religious service, aided by his sons, and Achilles offers sacrifice to the manes of Patroclus. Pausanias informs us that early in Arcadia, the twelve gods were worshiped under the forms of rude stones; and before Dædalus, the statues had eyes nearly shut, legs close together, and the arms scarcely detached from the body; but as the correlative arts and sciences improved, sculpture, like the civilization it expressed, acquired freedom, proportion, and natural action. Altars were commonly erected in the open air, and propitiatory offerings most frequently smoked before Zeus, Poseidon, Athene, and Apollo. The first three of these are better known under their Latin designations of Jupiter, Neptune, and Minerva. The supremacy of the first over all inferior deities is decisively marked. His own declaration, according to Homer, is at the same time the most affirmative on this point, and a curious indication of the social condition of the gods. Says the supreme, "If I catch any one of you helping the Trojans or the Greeks, he shall either make his escape to Olympus disgraced and bruised, or else I will seize him, and throw him into Tartarus. Then you shall know my supremacy in power. Come, now, make the trial; hang a gold chain from heaven, and fasten yourselves at the end of it, all of you, gods and goddesses; you can not pull Zeus down, but, whenever I please, I can pull you up with the earth and the sea, wind the chain round Olympus, and there you would all dangle in the air."

According to Herodotus, the Egyptians invented twelve gods, which were imported into Greece. These were, doubtless, of the lowest order of merit, but of sufficient importance to justify the report that the worship of stone images originated in the East. Venus was first adored at Paphos under the form of an ærolite fallen from heaven. It was by such circumstances that a special sanctity was conferred upon particular localities. The artistic merit of the idols was vastly improved, but still the theology of the Greeks remained purely anthropomorphous, the human form being to them the paragon of excellence. But to his whole intellectual being this was a representative, the embodiment and very identity of divinity. All the susceptibilities of his immortal nature, full of the endless enthusiasms respecting every thing splendid, so that in the estimation of an apostle, he was "very religious," were exercised to refine this image and exalt it. Living, he did this, and dying, he looked beyond the grave but to a world of men, sublimated, indeed, but still with human passions, and capable of human enjoyments. He turned with fond desire toward the radiance of the descending sun, which with genial glories seemed wooing him to another and purer earth. The great ocean stream severed the world of debasing toil from the bright sphere of not less active but nobler pursuits, and on that western shore he anticipated fairer as well as more abundant fruits than the East might behold. The great national altar on the Acropolis was exterior to the temple, and fronted the setting sun.

Egyptian worship was so closely allied to that of India, that when the sepoys in Sir Ralph Abercrombie's expedition entered the ancient temples in the valley of the Nile, they immediately asserted that their own divinities were discovered upon the walls, and worshiped them accordingly. But no such identity ever existed with the purer forms of the West. All the gods of Hellenic Greeks, from Jupiter down to Hercules, were the ancestors of the primitive Pelasgic tribes which existed in Asia Minor, Crete, and the islands of the Archipelago, but seldom in Greece itself. At its intellectual and moral centre, Egyptian fetichism had some influence on the one hand, and Indo-Germanic metaphysics a good deal on the other; still the chief element in Greek mythology was hero-worship, made as unexceptionable as it could be by a people whose religion mainly consisted in ancestral adoration. True, their whole system was a fable and an absurdity; but the puerilities which defaced its beauty were the remnant of a more barbarous state of things upon which they improved, and we may wonder most that they so for emancipated themselves.

Orpheus is said to have come from Thrace, a region of indefinite extent in the estimation of the Greek, and one which was a chief source of the Hellenic sacred rites. Both the Orphic and Pythagorean doctrines Herodotus believed to have emanated from Egypt, which would appear to support the fact of a double current of emigration, clearly proved on other grounds. This great religionist was older than Homer, and seems to have exerted a great influence on the civilization of Greece. It is said he accompanied Jason and the other Argonauts on their piratical expedition, that he visited Egypt, and brought thence the doctrine which greatly corrupted the rude but simple theology of primitive times. Many hymns attributed to him are probably spurious; but enough was authentic to the ancients to justify the conclusion that he taught the doctrine of one self-existing God, the maker of all things, and who is present to us in all His works. But this great truth was always somewhat disguised, and grew increasingly fabulous. Cudworth preserves the following specimen: "The origin of the earth was ocean; when the water subsided, mud remained, and from both of these sprang a living creature—a dragon having the head of a lion growing from it, and in the midst, the face of God; by name Hercules, or Chronos." By him an immense egg was produced, which being split into two parts, one became the heavens the other the earth. Heaven and earth mingled, and produced Titans or giants.

The Delphic oracle occupied a high position in the political and religious government of mankind. It had a powerful influence in molding the first national confederacy, and was its presiding centre. Both Strabo and Pausanias specially refer to the Amphictyonic league, as being formed for the maintenance of harmony and union among the states which composed it. The original confederacy was greatly enlarged by the Dorian accession; oracular control was thus extended throughout the Peloponnesus, and soon embraced within its influence the entire Grecian world. By this central assimilative and directing power the mighty republic was happily consummated, and its citizens first termed Hellenes. It was by the peculiarity of its oracular system, even more than by the other traits we have noticed, that the Greek religion was distinguished from that which prevailed in Egypt, and the yet remoter East. Based as it was on delusion, it still was a great improvement upon the preceding, inasmuch as it was presented in a higher character than the mere constitution of nature. According to the Delphic teaching, the supreme Deity was a moral and personal being, actively interesting himself in human affairs, and claiming authority over human volitions. Hence, while the oriental systems displayed only a crowd of mere personifications of natural powers, without moral character or substantial being, the system of the Greeks presented a divine reality for the human mind to embrace; an actual course of Providence, and deities palpably real to religious feelings. Amidst a multitude of deformities, the most marked feature of the Greek religion stood forth in enhancing, if not with ennobling beauty. The Egyptians worshiped animals, but the Greeks never sank lower than the worship of idealized man. The former were superstitious upon physical objects, their system resting upon a physical deity; but the latter adored a moral deity, and, however disastrous superstition ever is, hero-worship was not entirely void of redeeming qualities. It held up ancient worthies for the imitation of successors, rendered their memories motives to excellence, and, by the sublimating power of oracular canonization, exerted a mighty influence in the spheres of political and moral life. Lessons of respect for antiquity, and submission to authority, were constantly inculcated, the effect of which shines clearly in the Grecian character, exemplified in all the tumultuous growth and varied grandeur of her democracy. It was a lofty hero-worship, fostered by their sacred system, which fortified the sentiments of reverence and subordination in the popular mind, and supplied at once motive and restraint in every sphere of secular and religious life. Their approximation to truth took the boldest form of superstition, and indicates the working of a higher order of mind than had yet appeared. The Greeks were a nation of poets and philosophers as acutely refined in understanding as they were tender of heart, and, since we still turn their writings to a moral account, our sympathy for the worth they attained should furnish some degree of apology for the errors which they unfortunately embraced. The reality and firmness of their belief in divination was tested, for example, at Platæa, when the Greeks sustained the charge of the Persian cavalry, and "because the victims were not favorable, there fell of them at that time very many, and far more were wounded." And whether the national fleet should risk a battle at Salamis was determined in council by the appearance of an owl. How strange that when courage and wisdom had failed to persuade, superstition saved the liberties of the world! It is painful to contemplate the human mind debased by such childish absurdities, commingled with traits so fair, and excellences so great. Still, despite all its fraud and folly, the religion of Greece contained much that was both admirable in morality and profound in speculation. Hooker remarks, "The right conceit that they had, that to perjury vengeance is due, was not without good effect, as touching the course of their lives."

The tragic genius of Æschylus was imbued with religious sentiment, and found its fittest material in the simple and sublime traditions of his forefathers. He has handed down to our days clear memorials of the still popular faith, in his noble drama of Prometheus Bound; wherein he represents Jupiter as sending to beg from the tortured prophet a revelation of the yet future decrees of destiny. This mythical benefactor, the most significant of ancient religious fables, was a Japhetite, who brought his celestial fire from the remote East to man. Prometheus indignantly refuses to gratify the curiosity of his oppressor, and utters severe invectives against the new power of Jove. He alludes to wars in which he had himself assisted him, leads us back to the first colonization of Greece, and leaves us justly to conclude that the nature-worship of Orpheus had been mixed up with hero-worship also, and that the Jupiter of the poets was little better than a Cretan pirate, who, with his associates, drove out the Asian chief already beginning to civilize the people, and banished him to the wild regions of the Caucasus. The several centuries which transpired between Prometheus and Hesiod was a period long enough in legendary times to invest heroes, or benefactors of the human race, with supernatural attributes. Æschylus set forth a yet sublimer article of Athenian belief, when he represented the two Powers, immovable destiny and human consciousness, weighing the motives of the son of Agamemnon, and, under the presiding auspices of the goddess of Wisdom, leaving the ultimate decision to the Areopagus. God-conscious reason was thus called upon to sit in judgment upon the past, and to proclaim the eternal ways of infinite justice to coming generations. Herodotus, also, in the clear light of Hellenic freedom, recapitulated lapsed centuries, and foretold future destinies, through the prophetic mirror of Nemesis, that clearest reflection of Greek religiousness; and, like his predecessor, pictured the divine drama of eternal law and retribution. Thucydides followed, and became the final prophet of the great struggle of his nation, and her influence in the developments of future time.

Sophocles, of all the dramatists, was the most religious; his whole life was said to be one continual worship, and his writings are redolent of his tender spirit. The Œdipus Colonæus was a marked consecration after death; the gods conferred that honor, to show that in the terrible example they made of him, it was not personal vengeance, but a salutary admonition designed for the whole human race. That the self-condemned criminal should at last find peace in the grove of the Furies, the very spot from which guilt would instinctively shrink with acutest horror, bears a moral of profound and tranquilizing significancy.

The moral charms of domestic affection in antiquity are depicted by Homer, in what is undoubtedly an embellished, but may have been a real, scene. The manly beauty of Hector, the feminine graces of Andromache, and the budding charms of the babe Astyanax, live before us in vivid representation. Such a blending of gentleness and strength is not often seen on earth, as was manifested by him who set aside his burnished armor lest its strange dazzling should frighten his child. Paternal affection indeed sits gracefully on the plumed helmet of this bravest hero of Troy, but not even that can dissuade him from the conscientious discharge of a most comprehensive duty. Neither the entreaties of a wife, the prayers of a father, the tears of a mother, nor his own fondest parental hopes, could divert him from his devotion to country and religion. He knows and feels that inexorable fate has declared against him, but he bows to the will of the gods with a heroism equaled only by the placid self-denial which silences both inclination and interest in his bosom.

The ancient games were moral in their purpose and influence. Of the great number of athletes who gained prizes thereat, very few became famous in warlike pursuits. Their enthusiasm flowed from a higher and purer source. The vigorous, disinterested, salutary, and heaven-appointed contest was to the Greeks a thrilling symbol of an exalted life, the struggle through an emulative career of exhausting duties, in order to attain and enjoy, at the goal of consummate glory, the reward of a blissful immortality.

All the stray sybilline leaves of ancient history and legendary faith are inscribed with indications of a moral order of the universe, and encourage the expectation of perpetual progress. Pindar believed that the beginning and end of man were divinely ordained; and while many erudite teachers held to the supremacy of fate, none were ever so foolish as to suppose that accident governed the world.

Socrates was the first to turn speculation from physical nature to man; and his celebrated "demon" announced the birth of conscience into the Grecian world. It was a divine teacher ever present, taking cognizance of the most secret movements of mind and will, and who reproved, restrained, warned him as to all things everywhere. So far from wondering at his martyrdom, in view of the purity and boldness of his teaching, Mr. Grote very reasonably wonders how such a man should have been allowed to go on teaching so long. No state, he adds, ever showed so much tolerance for differences of opinion as Athens. According to his various writings, we infer that the god of Plato was not an idea simply, but a real being, endowed with supreme intelligence, movement, and life. He was beauty without mixture, and went out of himself to produce man and the world by the effusion of his own goodness. This great pupil of Socratic wisdom was profoundly imbued with that religious sentiment which is the lofty distinction of humanity, and which neither superstition can utterly debase, nor worldliness extinguish. But a feeling alone, however refined, can never constitute safety in religion. The Republic terminates with a noble discussion on immortality, and if it has been less popular than the Phœdo, it is because the scenery of it is less startling; but for intrinsic worth, it is doubtless entitled to the greatest consideration.

Gross polytheism was the creed of the multitude, but this was much refined by the moralists. The graces and perfections of the great intelligences that rule the world, under the controlling wisdom and care of the one omnipotent, were so described in the dialogues of Plato, and by Pythagoreans, as to furnish not only models of perfect beauty to art, but also the most attractive traits of person and character to the various orders of the Grecian hierarchy.

The Greeks felt that the origin of art was divine, since it was the offspring of religion. The first rhythmical expression was a hymn, and the first creations of plastic genius were dedicated to the worship of the Godhead. Jupiter, whose awful nod shook the poles, was yet benignant in his majesty, and could smile with bewitching fascination on his daughter Venus. Beauty was universally expressed, whether in the gorgeous sanctuary of their religious worship, or the simplest implement of ordinary use; the heart-rending anguish of the priest Laocoon and his sons, or in the sculptured deity of day himself. In the opinion of Visconti, the Apollo Belvidere is the Deliverer from Evil as well as God of Light, and was made by Calamis, to be set up at Athens in memory of a plague which had desolated that city. In life, the consecrated champion was greeted with the praises of appreciative countrymen, and divine honors followed his decease.

The idea of divine omniscience seems to have profoundly actuated the Greeks in the execution of all their great religious works. It gave perfection to every part of their edifices, essential and ornamental, and impressed upon each part alike a feeling purely devotional. What escaped the human eye, the Deity beheld, and therefore every mass and molding, frieze and pediment, bas-relief and statue, should be rendered equally worthy of that immortal Being to whom the edifice was consecrated. As fine a finish was bestowed upon the hidden portions as upon the exposed, as is proved by the fragmentary masterpieces we still possess, the most elaborated features of which were never seen from below when in their original positions. The material which Athens employed to eternize her mental conceptions was happily adapted in texture and tone to the end desired. On one side lay the quarries of sparkling Phenolic and veined Carystian, and, on the other side, the pearl-like beauty of Megarean; all of which, impregnated by the creative genius of the poets, and obedient to the talismanic touch of the sculptors, came forth from the marble tomb of Attica a new-born progeny stamped with all the lineaments of their noble parent. Thus, as the thought of Homer coalesced with the executive might of Phidias and his associates, the awful gods of his country spread an invincible palladium over the patriotic citizen, and rendered their terror ever present to the eyes of treachery and guilt. If the Sphinx, the Centaur, and Satyr were sometimes demanded by the legendary element of the ancestral East yet lingering in the national faith, the effort to subjugate the grotesque to the laws of beauty was no less successful than it was difficult, and twenty centuries have admired the result. The corporate religious crafts of India and Egypt were abandoned, but the divinest element therein was still preserved, and made to cast a hallowed spell over country and home, making each father the high priest of his domestic temple, and planting household gods round every hearth. An all-pervading religious influence was stamped on every rank of character, every region of nature, every type of art, and every department of enterprise. It exalted the dauntless courage of Miltiades, and added energy to the lofty daring of Themistocles, as they were conscious that the gods from Olympus gazed upon them in the fight, and were their guardians, as of old they had been to their ancestors on the plains of Troy.

With a very few exceptional cases, the art of the Greeks is never voluptuous, even in its earthly matter and shape. Under the pious feelings of the maker, as he breathed into it the soul of a lofty enthusiasm, dead material shaped itself into a nature as elevated as the source from which its strength was derived. And this moral dignity and grace which were born from the artist in his process of creation, communicated themselves in turn to the beholder; and the consecrated feeling in which the godlike conception was developed, generated an atmosphere of sanctity around it, as manifested divinity is supposed to drive demons away. It was fitting that in the groves of Delphi, Lycurgus should conceive the idea of his laws, and from the mouth of Apollo receive their ratification. All the great and wise legislators of antiquity cultivated an intercourse with the gods, and continued to covet the privilege of their society. The excellence of great works of religious art consists in the principle, that the purity and nobleness with which they were imbued pass into their admirers; and thus the serene repose and celestial fervor in which they are conceived are perpetually reproduced so long as the original qualities endure. The earliest poetry was religious, and its spirit migrated through succeeding generations; and, even down to the most degenerate age, perpetuated a delicate moral sense in the judgment, and mostly, also, in the works of the Greek nation. The refined taste, for which they have always been extolled, was produced entirely by this. Even the wit-intoxicated muse of Aristophanes perpetually maintains a chaste demeanor, and shows on her earnest countenance the moral meaning of her gayety.

Although the system of Athenian life was deformed by many imperfections, yet never at an earlier period had so much energy, virtue, and beauty, been developed; never was blind force and obdurate will so disciplined and ennobled, as during the century which preceded the death of Socrates. If the early Pythian and Dodonean oracles tended to consolidate national union, the improved wisdom of later philosophers did much to cultivate the citizens. Many a Grecian, engarlanded with laurel, then adorned the various walks of secular and moral life. It is probable that some were self-deceived, when no unworthy fraud was intended. Vividly conscious of a calling to some great vocation, and seeking, in the depths of their own imperfect religiousness, for the means of fulfilling it, they felt what seemed to be veritable inspiration, and accepted as the voices of supernatural beings what was in fact only the promptings of their own minds. To this influence, in great part, must be accredited much of the sublimity of Homer, patriotism of Tyrtæus, enthusiasm of Pindar, terror of Æschylus, and tenderness of Sophocles. The presence of divinity was indeed so palpable and enduring, that many nations, invulnerable to Grecian arms, received her beautiful system of mythology, and crowded her temples with eagerness to listen to her sacred instruction. Lightning strikes only kindred matter, which it seeks and salutes in the vividness of its own flash; and thus do great and effulgent examples glow into genial hearts, strengthen their illuminating power as they extend, and burn with greater splendor the wider they are diffused.

The more reflecting among the ancients seem to have keenly felt that earth and time are not ample enough to admit the full unfolding of the human soul. In man, the microcosm, they recognized the universe and its Maker, but it was by a very imperfect vision. They needed a clearer light, even that of the true God, to fill the profundity within them, and to reveal eternity unto them, that they might in reality know the vastness of their spiritual being. The vital seeds which the Almighty cast with a bountiful hand into the new-made earth, and which have not yet produced all their fruits, in Attica sprang up with a wonderful profusion, but the harvest was that of beauty, and not holiness. The dew of Hermon, the eternal sunshine of Zion, the transforming and tempering breath of Jehovah, are ever requisite to develop the higher capabilities of the soul, and elicit sanctified fruit from those mighty powers which, for bliss or bane, germinate in every mortal breast, and can never die. The poetical idolatry of Greece is often invested with a magical beauty to classical enthusiasts; but the thoughtful reader of history will often stumble upon most disenchanting facts, such as, for instance, that Themistocles, the deliverer of his country, offered up three youths, to propitiate the favor of his gods. A supreme Being was nominally recognized; and, though this doctrine was practically destroyed by the admission of subordinate deities to share in the offices of praise and prayer, still it was better than absolute atheism. The pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night, clearly or dimly seen, has never ceased to lead the vanguard of advancing humanity. It was something that the voice of praise, humiliation, and prayer, was raised to some object in public worship, and thus the feelings of religion kept alive in aspiring souls. It is to be deplored that the most cultivated of ancient nations did not possess and appreciate purer religious light; and most of all is it a grief and a warning that, if in the time of Homer, social morality was bad, in the age of Pericles it was worse. When Athenian life had received the most exquisite polish, and human intellect the richest discipline, then it was that public fanes were most abandoned, and private virtue was most debased.

Nature is most perfect in her forms the higher she ascends; and man, standing at the apex of her wonders, is appointed to partake of the divine nature, through the homogeneous medium who bends from a celestial height for his relief; when so reached and renovated, the godlike part of the redeemed is molded to a whole of the purest, holiest, and, therefore, most enchanting harmony. The Greeks had their idealization of beneficence and atonement set forth in Hercules and Prometheus. The genealogy of the first was connected with Egypt and Persia. He was lineally descended from Perseus, whose mortal mother claimed connection with an Egyptian emigrant. He was the great epic subject of the poets before Homer, the model chief of those who fought at Thebes or Troy, and, at a later period, was the allegory of human effort ascending through rugged valor to the highest virtue. He was the ideal perfection of the ordinary life of the Greeks, as the higher exaggeration of heroes, invested with immortality, became gods. Every pagan nation has had such a mythical being, whose strength or weakness, victories or defeats, measurably describe the career of the sun through the seasons. A Scythian, an Etruscan, and a Lydian Hercules existed, whose legends all became tributary to those of the Greek hero. His name is supposed to mean rover and perambulator of earth, as well as hyperion of the sky, and he was the patronizing model of those famous navigators who spread his altars from coast to coast through the Mediterranean, to the extreme West, where Arkaleus built the city of Gades (Cadiz), on which perpetual fire burned at his shrine. So deep and pervading were religious sentiments in that wonderful people at the best epoch, that not only in lowland towns, and on metropolitan eminences, were temples erected to the national deities, but also on lofty promontories; near the sea, beneficent zeal provided fanes exclusively for the casual worship of the passing mariner. The notion of a suffering deity, of one who, tortured, blinded, or imprisoned, might represent the earthly speculations of his worshipers, and, as a penitent, their religious emotions, was widely spread, from India westward, and by the Greeks was fixed forever in Prometheus, the ever dying and yet deathless Titan. Ancient sages taught that the discord of stormy elements would be dissolved and reduced to peace by the power of love, and the magic of beauty in the renovated soul would eventually curb its passions with a gentle rein; but how the infinite should coalesce with the finite, God with man, and thus transform the soul by planting therein the germ of almighty blessedness, they never by uninspired wisdom could comprehend. A mediator of unearthly excellence was indeed requisite; one who would realize in his person the loftiest ideas of beauty and sublimity, whose wisdom would be competent to elevate beyond mere morality, and whose grace would forever unfold the revelation of heavenly life. Not only, like the son of Tydeus, ought that luminary to come forth, with glory blazing round it, and kindling admiration, as well as emulous delight, in the outward world, but his beauty must specially pervade within, and transfigure every secret impulse with the splendors of his imparted Godhead.

Such a divine need was generally felt, and this was the cause of that high estimation in the common mind which the devout moralists enjoyed. Homer inculcated the idea that life is a contest; and Plato directed his hearers to the search after unity as the source of truth and beauty; Æschylus to power; Euripides to the law of expiation. The contempt of life and pleasure, the superiority of the intellectual over the physical nature, are expressed by these and kindred writers in great thoughts which are almost identical with the light of faith. Heraclitus taught Hesiod, Pythagoras, Zenophanes, and Hecateus, that the sole wisdom consists in knowing the will according to which all things in the world are governed. Marsilius Ficinus says that Socrates was raised up by heaven to pacify minds; and St. John Chrysostom proposes him as an example of Christian poverty and monastic profession. St. Augustine entertained equal admiration for one who preferred eternal to temporal things, fearing to act unjustly more than death, and for conscience sake was ready to undergo labor, penury, insult, and death. In the Enthypro of Platonician wisdom, Socrates disengages ideas from words; in the Apology, he shows that the wisest are the most humble, and that we must bear our witness to truth, even at the risk of our lives; in the Laws, that the soul has need of a celestial light to be able to see; in the Crito, that the least duty is to be preferred to the greatest advantage; in the Phædo, that life should be employed in elevating the soul—that there is a future existence—and that the soul should be disengaged from the body; in the Theætetus, that, the germ of truth resides in all men, but that no individual has the full measure of truth; in the Gorgias, that it is better to suffer than to commit injustice; that it is useful to the soul to be chastised, and that he who suffers punishment is delivered from the evil of his soul; in the Euthydemus, that the science of the Sophists is empty and vain; in the second Alcibiades, that it is better to be ignorant than to have false knowledge; in the Theages, that the only true wisdom is love; in the Phædrus, that it is love, or, as Socrates defines it, the desire of something that is wanting, which gives wings to the soul, and enables it to mount to heaven; in the Meno, that virtue is the gift of God, not of nature, but an infusion by a divine influence; in the Banquet, that love leads us to contemplate the supreme beauty, the universal type, the Creator, from which vision we derive virtue and immortality. In view of such focal beamings at the heart of pagan night, we need not wonder that Thomas of Villanova should exclaim with enthusiasm, "Let philosophers know, that faith is not without wisdom; the evangelist does not Platonize, but Plato evangelized."

The mythical beings of Grecian theology display in their beautiful but ineffectual imagery the first efforts of cultivated minds to communicate with nature and her God. They resemble the flowers which fancy strewed before the youthful steps of Psyche when she first set out in pursuit of the immortal object of her love. The parable of the Syrens teems with valuable moral instruction. They dwelt in fair and lovely islands, full of beauty, and through whose leafy alcoves moved a perpetual loveliness. On the tops of tall rocks sat the enchantresses, pouring their tender and ravishing music on the ears of passing mortals, till they turned their prows thitherward, and rushed into the destruction to which the deceitful song was a fatal prelude. Two by their wisdom and piety escaped. Ulysses caused his arms to be bound to the mast, and the ears of his company to be filled with wax, with special orders to his mariners that they should not loose him even though he desired it. But Orpheus, disdaining to be so bound, with sweet melody went by, singing praises to the gods, thus outsounding the melody of the Syrens, and so escaped.

The most influential teachers among the Greeks declared the inutility of profuse legislation, and taught that "the halls should not be filled with legal tablets, but the soul with the image of righteousness." They sought less to guard the citizen by force and fear than to fortify him with a sense of his duty and its dignity. Parental authority was sustained by legislative sanction, as well as by popular customs, and even up to the first steps of public life was constantly guarded by the elders; but the principal intent was ever to kindle filial esteem into the potency of living law, to illuminate progressive youth in the path of virtue and of fame. Sound morals were recognized as the only sure foundation of republican freedom, and the general watchfulness over this constituted the spirit of ancient religion, and the origin of free states. To such an extent did parental influence and pious example, rather than arbitrary statutes and severe punishments, prevail at Athens, that the youth generally were moral and temperate; despite their national inflammability, the most authentic records affirm, that both in domestic and public life they remained sober and moral, until broken down by the interference of hostile power. Following the defeat of Cheronea, the change in the Greek character was rapid. The guiding stars of literature and art were lost in clouds; and morals, which had attained a splendid maturity, lost both strength and hue.

Sacred ceremonies at Athens were the most luminous that prevailed in Greece, and were most characteristic of the city of intelligence. In the great Panathenean rites, there was carried in solemn procession to the Acropolis a symbolical vessel covered with a vail upon which were figured the triumph of Pallas over the Titans, children of earth who undertook to scale Olympus and dethrone Jove. The conflict between physical and moral force was therein represented, that triumph above mere natural religion which exists in mental supremacy and the civilization of law. Moreover, Athenian coins preserve to us allusions to impressive rites which were performed three times a year in honor of Vulcan and Prometheus. The votaries assembled at night, and at the altar of the deity, upon which a fire continually burned, at a given signal lighted a torch and ran with the blazing symbol to the city's outer bound. If the lights of some became extinguished, the more fortunate still pursued with greater zeal, and he was most honored who first reached the goal with his torch a-light. But the religion of Greece was not characterized by ritual splendor only; on the contrary, their public worship was marked by the simplicity of devout fervor, as well as by the chasteness of fine taste and that unadorned solemnity which had been inherited from the patriarchal ages. They were much less inclined to pomp and finery connected with their devotion, than are the moderns. Rude emblems were sometimes borne at sacred solemnities, but they were in the hands of honorable women, and all offense to religious feeling was arrested in their being first hallowed by the dignity of the festival.

It was a doctrine of immemorial antiquity, that death is far better than life; that the worst mortality belongs to those who are immersed in the Lethe passions and fascinations of earth, and that the true life begins only when the soul is emancipated for its return. All initiation was but introductory to the great change at death. Many regarded water as the source and purifier of all things—efficacious to renew both body and mind, as the virginity of Juno was restored when she bathed in the fountain Parthenion. Baptism, anointing, embalming, burying, or burning, were preparatory symbols, like the initiation of Hercules before descending to the shades, pointing out the moral change which should precede the renewal of existence. The funeral ceremonies of the Greeks were in harmony with that feeling which through all antiquity paid marked respect to the dead, whose eyes were closed by relatives most nearly allied. The funeral robe was often woven by the prospective piety of filial hands, as the web of Penelope was destined to shroud her husband's father. The body, washed, anointed, and swathed, was placed with its feet toward the door, and as the train of mourners went forth, women and bards raised a funeral chant, interrupted by nearest kindred, who eulogized the departed, and bewailed their own loss. Reaching the pyre of wood, the corpse was burned and the ashes collected in a golden vase. While the body lay in state, the chief mourners supported the head. Dark garments, and long abstinence from convivial gatherings, were the outward signs of sorrow. The excessive grief of Achilles showed itself by his throwing dust on his head; torn habiliments and lacerated cheeks were the offerings made to Agamemnon; and a single lock of hair was the touching tribute to his memory by the filial affection of Orestes. The lifeless form was covered and crowned with flowers, a piece of money placed in its mouth, as a fee to Charon for being ferried over the Styx, and a cake of honeyed flour to appease Cerberus. Bust, statue, and mausoleum, grassy mound, inscribed marble, and monumental brass, attested the universal desire of sepulchral honors. The immortality of affectionate remembrances and of public renown was a profound aspiration in their breasts. If the dead were ever insulted, it was the rare instance of momentary rage toward a stubborn foe, and soon gave place to worthier emotions. Achilles dragged behind his chariot the corpse of Hector thrice round the tomb of his beloved Patroclus; but, after the first burst of passion, he ordered his own slaves to wash and anoint the mutilated remains, himself assisting to raise them to a litter, swathed in costly garments, that the eye of a broken-hearted father might bear the sight.

The statesmen of Greece, superior as they were in universality of accomplishment, were incomplete personages compared with the pure theocratic natures of antiquity, of whom Moses is the most familiar and accurate type. Many of them were not only priest and magistrate, but also philosopher, artist, engineer, and physician; such a combination for intensity, regularity, and permanence of human power, never was found elsewhere. Pericles, through the whole tenor of his administration, seemed to have had the permanent welfare of his fellow-countrymen at heart, and is said to have boasted, with the benevolence of a true patriot, that he never caused a citizen to put on mourning.

The Greek was by no means insensible to high destinies, as he majestically assumed the moral dominion on earth to which he was born; but he formed no idea of future happiness, nor of intellectual dignity vaster than his own. He girded himself for the fearful contest which was his inheritance, bravely struggling against the terrible powers of destiny and the certainty of death. Amazed at his temerity, the sun started back in his course; opposing deities, wounded by his spear, fled howling to Olympus; and the dread abodes of Tartarus yielded up the departed to his triumphant call. Concentrating in the present the intensity of immortal aspirations, he sought to link them forever to the perishable body. Earthly as was his spirit, he yet supremely coveted eternal life, and labored through transcendent genius and fortitude to unite himself immediately with the gods, and ultimately soar amid the splendid hierarchy of the upper skies.

The worship of Greece was the Beautiful, and Athens was its most magnificent Shrine. One of her latest and fairest altars was dedicated to the Unknown God. Would that the plinth of artistic beauty had also been the memento of spiritual prayer. Alas! that after all the fine imaginings and glorious achievements of the wondrous Greeks, we must still feel that their loftiest conceptions of divine worship were really as void of true consolation as the empty urn which Electra washed with her tears.

AUGUSTUS;

OR,

THE AGE OF MARTIAL FORCE.

PROLOGUE OF MOTTOES.

"Thy foot will not stumble, if thou ascribest every thing good and noble to Providence, whether it takes place among the Greeks or ourselves, for God is everywhere the author of all that is good. Some things, indeed, originate immediately with Him, as the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, others again mediately, as philosophy. And even this, he appears to have imparted immediately to the Greeks, until they were called by the Lord; for philosophy led the Greeks to Christ, as the law did the Jews."—Clemens of Alexandria.

"In the history of a war, we speak only of the generals, and those who performed actions of distinction. In like manner the battles of the human mind, if I may use the expression, have been won by a few intellectual heroes. The history of the development of art and its various forms may be therefore exhibited in the characteristic view of a number, by no means considerable, of elevated and creative minds."—Augustus William Schlegel.

"These individual lives, running like so many colored threads, through our record, may impart to it that personal interest and dramatic unity which otherwise it would lack."—Doctor Arnold.

"I saw the ram pushing westward, and northward, and southward; so that no beasts might stand before him, neither was there any that could deliver out of his hand; but he did according to his will, and became great."—Daniel, viii. 4.

PART SECOND.

AUGUSTUS.—AGE OF MARTIAL FORCE.

CHAPTER I

LITERATURE.

Civilization in Greece was beautiful, in Rome invincible. As this latter empire spread, it invaded savage races on every hand, and gave birth to a new world, still more vast, the world of commercial progress, stretching along the Mediterranean and Baltic shores into the unbounded ocean of the West. While Providence was concentrating its conservative forces in Alexander, for the execution of gracious designs, the future heiress of Greece was slumbering in her cradle on the Sicilian and Italian coasts, near where the new centre was preparing, which was to draw around it the barbarous nations of earth. That the graceful progeny of Athene should have migrated with facility from the serene clime of their native home to the stormy wilds of Etruscan Rome was not strange, since naturalists assert that birds of Paradise fly best against the wind; it drifts their gorgeous plumage behind them, which only impedes when before the gale.

The most careful consideration of ancient history leads to the belief that many of the nations which flourished in Italy, long before the Roman empire attained its height of power and splendor, were distinguished by a harmony of culture, an exuberance of being, a diversity of manifestation, and originality of genius, which Rome in her best days never exceeded. They each contained an important element of civilization, but only in an incipient degree; they were of co-operative capacity, and when the predominant quality of the new cycle arose with complete development to its culminating point, martial Rome executed the most fulminating and comprehensive of primordial missions. Had not Greece preceded them with the humanizing influences of the beautiful, the great nation would have been nothing but a remorseless slayer of men, furnishing no compensation for the thralldom which was imposed from land to land by her fiery and bloody arms. The former caused Beauty to dwell as a divinity in the midst of men; the latter erected the god of war as the national deity, and compelled all peoples to the ignoble worship.

Rome was destined, through force, to show the world, despite the greatest obstacles, what energetic will, unity, earnestness, and pertinacity of purpose, could do. She was doubtless superior to most nations in military skill, and this gave her great advantage; but her unique peculiarity consisted in the fact, that, till her co-operative work was done, she never despaired, and this attribute of fortitude alone conquered the world. Ruin as often threatened the Romans as it did other champions, and they would have fallen as others fell, had not internal resources increased, and heroical resolution been confirmed, in proportion as outward support failed them. The spectacle of physical force which they presented was the grandest of earth; but it was moral force, something grander still, which fortified the physical force, and rendered it such a mighty agent of civilization. War has numerous advantages which are overruled for good, and the misfortunes of some nations are made to supply prosperity to others. The most fruitful fields have been fertilized by wholesale carnage, that scourge and civilizer of mankind. As the sea retires in one quarter at the same time it advances in another, swallows up the productiveness of this shore to augment the territory and richness of that, so do great natural fluctuations transpire under the control of that sovereign law by which all things are changed but nothing destroyed. The invasion of Persia was virtually the creation of Greece, and the overthrow of the latter enriched the world. When the fair continent had fully emerged from the flood of Pelasgic barbarism, afar in the West, on Latian plains, the infant state of Rome was obscurely struggling into power against the neighboring confederacies in which the old Etruscan culture was rapidly sinking into decay. While the gloomy wilds of Gaul and Germany yet lay scarcely known, Gela, in the Greek colony at Syracuse, maintained the splendor of a Grecian name, and by a single defeat in Sicily the pride of Carthage was subdued. Nations, like individuals, have each a special mission on earth. Many are either co-operative only or secondary, and but a few are manifestly primordial. Thus the mission of Greece was beauty, that of Rome, force. In those special spheres they manifested the natural attributes of humanity in a fashion and to a degree never before reached by any nation. But as all secondary nations co-operated to execute the mission given to each great primordial power, so these two predominant branches of the Japhetic race co-operated, in subordination to the one leading purpose of Providence, to perpetuate progress and improve mankind.

The rude elements of the Indo-European stock were early scattered from Caucasus to the Alpine North. The Hellenic family were the first raised to a high degree of refinement, and they planted their offspring even to the extremity of the Italian peninsula. When other kindred branches, like the Oscans and Sabines, superseded these, they gave a composite character to the new language thus formed, an amalgamation of Attic flexibility with Latin strength. But the body was more ponderous than the soul; the plastic property so prominent in the Greek tongue was lost in the harder and stiffer enunciation of unpolished Rome. The former, like a lucid substance, seemed to crystallize spontaneously into the most beautiful forms; but the latter, like granite, could be rendered attractive only by artificial polish, and that of the most laborious kind. It was the language of solidity, gravity, and energy; the fit medium for expressing the dictum of imperial might, but was not adapted to convey either the sentiments of love or the products of meditation. The great orator, in his defense of the poet Archias, informs us that Greek literature was read by almost all nations of the world, while Latin was still confined within very narrow boundaries. Such was the wonderful vitality of Greek in its ancient form, and yet it lived only with such as spoke it as their vernacular in the fatherland or its provinces. Like all true and original creations of genius, it never survived the fostering care of devotees, but sank back with their decay, and again became limited within the boundaries of its first home. In the end, as in the beginning, Athens was the University of the whole classic world. On the contrary, Latin was propagated chiefly by conquest, absorbing all barbarous dialects into itself, and, like the dominion of its masters, becoming the stronger the further west it was spread. Under the auspices of the Republic, it became united with the Celtic and Iberian in Spain, and was planted by Julius Cæsar in Britain, as well as Gaul. Greek is still spoken at Athens; but Latin, when it had been engrafted on the rest of Europe, and gave birth to all modern tongues, became again grossly barbarized and died.

By what route the progenitors of the Oscans, Sabines, Itali, and Umbrians came from the original cradle of the human race, is not clearly known. They were evidently kindred to the Pelasgi of the Morea, and used the Phœnician alphabet. Their dress and national symbol, the eagle, were Lydian, and their theology, like the more refined system of the Greeks, was derived from the remotest East. The Romans were composite from the first, and in every thing. The septi-montium upon which their primitive city stood, was occupied by different tribes. If we may trust mythical tradition, a Latin tribe had their settlement on mount Palatine, and a Sabine community occupied the adjacent Quirinal and Capitoline heights. Mutual jealousy kept them a long time separate, but at length the privilege of intermarriage was conceded, and the different tribes became one people. The Etruscans were of purest Pelasgian origin, and for a long period possessed the greatest civilizing power in the West. When subdued politically, they still left the most indelible stamp on the arts and fortunes of the Roman people. These ethnical affinities are correlative to the linguistic affinities of the great martial cycle, and best indicate out of what elements its language was composed.

The ancient Latin alphabet was an offshoot from primitive Greek, and evidently came from the same source. Its later departure from the original current, and modifications of its forms, are all traceable through the means of inscriptions on funereal urns, coins, and historical monuments. The alphabets of Gaul, Germany, Etruria, and Spain, were formed from the Greek; and even the Latin letters may be termed the universal alphabet, for it was the immediate parent of all the present modes of writing. But this mother-tongue did not, like its nobler parent, proceed from a single germ, and gradually unfold by a natural growth. It merged in the bosom of foreign elements, and presented great and striking contrasts in its progress. In the Republic it was like the people, high-minded, and competent for the debate of mighty interests; under regal or imperial sway, it became the fitting medium of an extravagant court, cramped and debauched by foreign manners. At the epoch of Livius Andronicus, B.C. 240, or the first Punic war, the language was elicited from various dialects, and consolidated into the vernacular of a whole people. The Oscan, Sabine, and Etrurian, or Tuscan, were the leading native elements; but the primitive Greek, or Pelasgic, was early blended with the Latin, greatly enriching it, and imparting to it the chief basis of its forms. From the first Punic to the first civil war, B.C. 88, was a period of marked improvement. Increased intercourse with the Greeks, after the second Punic war, greatly improved their native literature, aroused and directed all their energies to practical life, and the affairs of state. Greek models were held up to the enthusiasm of those who emulated at first, and afterward imitated, the masters whom they could never hope to excel. Thus the language of the Romans did not originate in the rules of art, but in the free outflowings of national character. Hence, Quintilian compares the writings of Ennius to an ancient sacred grove of primeval trees, with their stately trunks. Something of Greek pliancy was imparted, while the tongue was becoming harmonized, by the translations of the Odyssey made by Titus Andronicus, and by Nævius from Æschylus and Euripides. The progress of improvement continued, and by the time of Augustus the Roman language was formed. Then, in distinction from the Latin, or provincial speech, it was said to be "the refined language of the city, containing nothing which could offend, nothing which could displease, nothing which could be reprehended, nothing of foreign sound or odor."

Much of the original material employed in early Roman literature was doubtless furnished by the subjugation of Etruria to her arms; but gross indigenous elements needed to be quickened into symmetrical growth, and the greater conquest of Greece itself was alone equal to that miracle. The beautiful captive wound her charms around the barbarous captor, and held him in subjection to a vassalage infinitely more glorious than all his boasted freedom and universal mastery in arms.

How wise is Providence! The south of Italy had for many centuries been peopled with colonists from Greece, who retained and cultivated the arts and literature of the mother country. When sufficient substance had been collected on the seven rugged hills, to form a basis of national literature, Tarentum was subjugated, and all that was valuable in that interesting country was removed to nourish the first literary pursuits at Rome. Two years after this arose the first Punic war, the result of which was the conquest of Sicily, that charming land whereon the flowers of Grecian poesy had blossomed with even fairer charms than on the neighboring continent. When we come to consider bucolic poetry, the most healthful and original growth of Roman letters, we should remember that this was the spot of its birth. It was in Sicily that the pastoral and comic muses prompted Stersichorus first to reduce lyrical compositions to the regular division of strophe, antistrophe, and epode. It was here that Empedocles "married to immortal verse" the "illustrious discoveries" of his "divine mind." Here Epicharmus invented comedy, which was cultivated by Philemon, Apollodorus, Carcinus, Sophron, and various others. Tragedy also found successful votaries in Empedocles, Sosicles, and Achæus. It was in Sicily, too, that the Mīme was invented, or, at least, perfected; Pindar, Æschylus, and Simonides, had resided at the court of Hiero I., and Theognis of Megara, committed his precepts to elegiacs in Sicily. The Dionysii also were authors, as well as patrons of literary men. It is, moreover, believed that when the Romans came into possession of Sicily, Theocritus was yet living. Many of the most creative minds in the conquered provinces now began to reside at Rome, bringing art and cultivation with them; and from this period literature in the metropolis assumed somewhat of a regular and connected form.

The great majority of the citizens undervalued and even despised devotion to sedentary and contemplative pursuits. They were ambitious, and lived for conquest; but it was the extension of political domination they strove for, not the enlargement of literary renown. The old Roman was charmed by the glory of his country abroad, and the wise administration of her constitution at home. Military prowess was the foundation and guarantee of both, so that beyond politics and war he felt little concern. He was susceptible to every thing that related to success in arms; but exercises of a purer mental cast, even the most exciting, such as tragedy, never captivated the feelings nor acquired an influence over the mass of the people, as was universal in Greece. Amid the dust and destruction of perpetual conflict, learning was but a sickly plant, and it required all the artificial heat of courtly patronage to bring any thing to maturity. Accius was patronized by D. Brutus; Ennius by Lucilius and the Scipios; Terence by Africanus and Lælius; Lucretius by the Memmii; Tibullus by Messala; Propertius by Ælius Gallus; Virgil and his friends by Augustus, Mæcenas, and Pollio; Martial and Quintilian by Domitian.

But, with the utmost adventitious aid, Roman literature, which never appeared greatly to deserve the epithet national, was of the rudest and most meagre description, and should be divided into three periods. The first period was dramatic; the second, prosaic; and the third, rhetorical. All the acting tragedy ever produced by Romans was limited to the first period; also the comedies of Plautus and Terence, the only works which have survived to claim admiration in modern times. It was the era of life, when all the vigorous germs of after growth were started. Epic poetry, rugged and monotonous as it was, yet then had a partial development, simultaneously with the first composition of national annals, and the foundation of accurate and thoughtful jurisprudence. It was also in that primary period that C. Gracchus became the father of Latin prose; but the language of the first great orator of western democracy under Italian skies was yet very inferior to the impassioned and noble sentiments it conveyed.

The second period was that of special refinement in prose, and of increased erudition. Cæsar and Sallust are its exponents as historians, and Cicero is its chief representative as an orator and philosopher. In a word, it was the great culmination of the Augustan age, wherein Lucretius and Catullus were the harbingers of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, and the varied treasures of all the great masters of prose and learned poetry were garnered in the lucid narrative of Livy.

As the first period was redolent of life, and the second teemed with learning, so the third is known by its excessive embellishment. It was called "the silver age," and was covered with abundance of filigree. It produced the only fabulist of Rome, Phædrus; Juvenal, the satirist; Martial, the epigrammatist; Tacitus, the historian; Quintilian, the critic; and the elegant letter-writer, Pliny. These are the best names of the later period of the Augustan age, and these decisively mark the progress of decline. Fancifulness and formalism ruled supreme, and whatever of independent thought the earlier periods had known, was now superseded by servility and decay.

The Romans inherited no legendary stories adapted to the higher order of dramatic composition. The early traditions which formed the groundwork of their history were private, and not public, property—the pedigrees and memorials of separate families, and therefore not interesting to the people at large. There were no Attic Eumolpidæ on the seven hills to preserve antique reminiscences as a national treasure, nor did they, like fragrant plants, twine themselves along the rocky base of the Roman capitol, as the thrilling traditions of ancestral Greece did round the chaste altars of that susceptible people. The Latin poets might sometimes collect withered fictions, and weave them into their rhythmical records of antiquity; but they possessed no vital beauty, no talismanic power for awakening national enthusiasm. Indeed, who could heartily enjoy allusions to the past, since old Rome had been superseded by a new race. The few veterans who yet survived the bloody wars of Greece, Africa, Gaul, and Spain, were settled in remote military colonies, and a careless disregard of every thing in the metropolis, except luxurious sustenance and shows, paved the way for a speedy downfall. Rome was peopled with step-sons only, as Scipio Æmilius designated the populace, and the tragedy most genial to their taste and ambition was that which was most replete with fulsome compliments to favorite individuals. In Greece, the poet was deemed an inspired being, and his tongue was regarded as the divinest medium for the communion of the visible with the invisible; but at Rome, poetry was nothing more than a dull recreation, and its author was no better than a parasite or a slave. At Athens, the impersonation of a tragedy was an act of worship; the theatre was a temple, and the altar of a deity was its central, point. With the Romans, the thymele existed no longer as a memorial of sacred sacrifice, and the stage deteriorated into the mere arena of disgusting amusement. Pliny, in his history, and Cicero, in eloquent regrets, have told us how the bloody combats of gladiators, the miserable captives and malefactors stretched on crosses, expiring in excruciating agonies, or mangled by wild beasts, were the real tragedies coveted by the people. The sham-fights and Naumachiæ, though only imitations, were real dramas, in which those pursuits which most deeply interested the spectators, and which constituted their highest glories, were visibly represented. Gorgeous spectacles fed personal vanity in their national greatness. The spoil of conquered nations, borne in procession across the stage, reminded them of their triumphs and their victories. The magnificent costumes of the actors who attended the model of some captured city, preceded and followed by artistic spoils, represented in mimic grandeur the ovation of a successful warrior, whose return from a distant expedition, laden with plunder, realized the highest aspirations of Rome; whilst corresponding scenery, glittering with glass, silver, and gold, intermingled and sustained by variegated pillars of foreign marbles, told ostentatiously of their mental extravagance and material wealth. To such a people there was neither attraction nor profit in the moral woes of tragedy, and one could not expect that a legitimate drama under such circumstances would be national. Hence, in the popular eye, the scenic decorations and theatrical dresses became the chief objects of regard, while the poet's office was entirely subordinate, and plays became as devoid of intellect as they were debasing to taste.

In reviewing with more detail the three periods of dramatic progress at Rome, such as it was, we have to consider the origin and character of their comedy. The Greek works of Menander, Diphilus, and Apollodorus, formed a rich store of materials for Roman adoption, and were so employed with as much success as Plautus, Cæilius Statius, and Terence could command. Their standard was worldly prudence, resting on the dangerous ground of Epicurean philosophy; and therefore Roman comedy inculcated no virtue even so salutary as Stoicism, though it sometimes encouraged the benevolent affections. Creative imagination was a rare quality in the Roman mind; therefore, literature with them was not of a spontaneous growth. For a short period, it was the recreation of a few; but with the many it was never a valued delight. Even Cicero, the truest literary spirit of his nation, could recognize but one end and object in all study, namely, those sciences which render a man useful to his country. External utility and not internal impulse, was the final cause of Roman literature. In preceding nations poetry was the original and spontaneous production; but the earliest literary effort of the Romans was history, a dry record of facts, and not ideas. The first poetical form ever attempted by them was satire, and it is characteristic of the rude and coarse people among whom it had its origin. They loved strife, both physical and mental; with them was found little or no salutary intellectual exercise, except in legal conflicts and partisan debates. They were gladiators in the forum, as in the circus, and with rustic taste took equal delight in bandying sarcastic words or struggling in a wrestling match. The Romans were a stern, not an æsthetic people; they had a natural aptitude for satire, and that was the only literary merit they possessed. Yet even in this department, as Horace confessed, Lucilius, the founder of Roman satire, was a disciple of the Greek Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes. But the cynical humor and prompt extemporaneous gibe native to the progeny of a she-wolf eminently qualified them to excel in a walk wherein they were certainly most at home.

Livius Andronicus, the first literary character at Rome, was a native of the Greek colony at Tarentum, born B.C. 240, and originally a slave. He probably came into that condition by the fortunes of war, and, like many others in the same circumstances, was employed as a tutor in the metropolis. To interest his cotemporaries in the ancient legends of Italy, he translated the Odyssey, in the old Saturnian measure, and also divers ancient hymns. By this means, the conquerors of the day were made to take a lively interest in Circe's fairy abode, within sight of a promontory of Latium, one of whose sons was Latinus, the patriarch of the Latin name.

Nævius, if not actually born at Rome, was from the earliest boyhood a resident in the capital, and was the first poet of real national worth. Like most subsequent writers, he was a servile imitator, but attained more than ordinary success in applying Greek taste to the development of Roman character. A bold republican and brave soldier, he breathed a martial enthusiasm into his poems, which in no slight measure aided the battles of his country in the first Punic war. The upright and inflexible Cato was his fast and enduring friend.

Plautus, unlike his two famous successors, had no patron but the public. Perhaps the Scipios and Lælii, and their fastidious associates, could not endure his broad humor and groveling inuendos. But his coarse fun and audacious action held the not over-critical ears of the undistinguished mass, whom, Horace says, he hurried on from scene to scene, from incident to incident, from jest to jest, so that they had no opportunity of feeling fatigue. Another cause of his popularity was, that although Greek was the fountain whence he drew his stores, his wit, mode of thought, and language, were veritably Roman; his style was not only his own, and Latin in fact, but Latin of the most effective kind.

P. Terentius Afer, born B.C. 195, was a slave in the family of P. Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator. It was customary to distinguish slaves by an ethical name, and thus Afer points to an African origin. Whether he was a native of Carthage is uncertain, but he doubtless came into Roman hands through the Carthagenian slave-market, and was destined to achieve a high renown. Under Lucanus he acquired a refined and accurate knowledge of the Latin tongue, and, it is probable, also, soon obtained his freedom. A beautiful story is recorded of his original success. Having offered his first dramatic sketch for acceptance to the Curule Ædiles, they referred him to the critical judgment or Cæcilius Statius, then at the height of his popularity. Terence, according to the record, in humble garb was introduced to the poet whilst he was at supper, and, seated on a low stool near the couch on which Cæcilius was reclining, he commenced reading. He had finished but a few lines when he was invited to sit by his critic and sup with him. Before the reading was ended he had won the unqualified admiration of his hearer. The result was that Terence was immediately sought for by the distinguished, and became a favorite guest and companion with those who could appreciate his powers. The great Roman nobility, such as the Scipiones, the Lælii, the Scavolæ, and the Metelli, had some taste for literature; and, like the Tyranni of Sicily in later ages, were accustomed to assemble around them circles of the refined, of whom the hospitable host was proud to be recognized as the nucleus and centre. If Terence was inferior to Plautus in vivacity and intrigue, as well as in the powerful delineation of national character, he was superior in elegance of language and purity of taste. He was the first to substitute delicacy of sentiment for vulgarity, and knew how to touch the heart as well as gratify the intellect.

Cæcilius Statius, the venerable and auspicious friend of Terence, referred to above, was himself an emancipated slave, born at Milan, and who rose to the head of comic poetry at Rome. Greece was the ordinary fountain to him, as to others; but he excelled most of his fellow-imitators in dignity, pathos, and the conduct of his plot. In the estimation of Cicero, Statius excelled in comedy, as Ennius did in epic poetry, and Pacuvius in tragedy.

Roman comedy possessed some claims to originality, though to no exalted degree; but Roman tragedy was derived from Athens almost entire, and had not the merit of either literal translation or clever imitation. Ennius, born B.C. 239, was the transition link between the old school and the new. Originating in the wild and mountainous Calabria, he began life in a military career, and rose to the rank of a centurion. It is said that Cato, in his voyage from Africa to Rome, visited Sardinia, and finding Ennius in that island, took him home with him. He enjoyed the esteem of the leading literary societies at Rome; and at his death, when seventy years old, he was buried in the tomb of the Scipios, at the request of the great conqueror of Hannibal, whose fame, embalmed in his verse, he transmitted to posterity. It indicates the progressive condition of literature in the metropolis, that Ennius, who was evidently a gentleman, was the first writer of the time who achieved for himself the enviable privileges of a citizen, to which Livius had not aspired, and Nævius, the freedman, could never attain. Enjoying the friendship of Cato the Censor, and Scipio Africanus the elder, when aristocratic wealth was beginning to be greatly revered, the republican poet, cleaving to his lowly hut on the Aventine, still lived the life of the Cincinnati, the Curii, and the Fabricii of the good old heroic times.

Under the auspices of Pacuvius, and simultaneously with the best comedy, tragedy reached the highest degree of excellence. He was born at Brundusium, B.C. 220, and was nearly related to the poet Ennius. Pacuvius resided at Rome till after his eightieth year, and formed one of that literary circle of which Lælius was the chief ornament. In the evening of life he retired to Tarentum, where he died ninety years old. His tragedies were chiefly adaptations of Greek originals to the Roman stage; the plots being entirely borrowed, but the treatment and language were his own.

Attius was born B.C. 170, and became somewhat distinguished while his senior and master, Pacuvius, was yet alive. They met on friendly terms to discuss the young rival's tragedy of "Atreus." Pacuvius commended its good points, but declared it to be somewhat harsh and hard. "You are right," replied Attius, "but I hope to improve. Fruits which are at first hard and sour, become soft and mellow, but those which begin by being soft, end in being rotten." Another fact equally significant of his conscious dignity is given by Valerius Maximus, who relates that in the assemblies of the poets, he refused to rise at the entrance of Julius Cæsar, because he felt that in the republic of letters he was his superior. The statement is plausible, as the great hero was then in his youth. The political state of the people was now rapidly growing worse, and real tragedies were being so violently acted that there was little room in the popular heart for fictitious woes. The sanguinary influence of the amphitheatre seemed to have brutalized the entire nation, the vast area of which was one theatre of dreadful tragic scenes. Amidst these, the voice of the dramatic muse was hushed. Native authors then had no literary quarries of their own to work into original shapes, but they could build up splendid edifices with materials derived from polished and prolific Greece. The existence of tragedy was not long at Rome; the dramatic spirit, as a mental excellence, never belonged to that people, and with Attius, even its form disappeared.

The history of literature among the Romans is without a parallel. So prosaic and practical were the people, that they remained five centuries without an eminent poet. Even when the dazzling glories of the Grecian muse fell upon them it was only the art of imitation that they cultivated. True inspiration was foreign to their cast of mind. The most original of their writers entertained no higher idea of originality than to make it consist in the importation of a new form from Greece; and, on the ground of his own practice, affected to despise those who copied for the second or third time. Indeed, the word imitation was applied only to Latin authors, it being understood that borrowing from the Greeks, or conforming to them, implied their chief excellence. Unkindled by the Grecian torch, Roman intellect was inert; and unillumined by its formative power, their productions were both uncouth and void of enduring worth.

The Mīmi were the most indigenous to the Roman mind, and have left their traces in the modern buffoonery of Pulcinello and Harlequin. It is believed that the Romans owed their first idea of dramatic composition to the Etrurians, and the effusions of a sportive humor to the Oscians; but all matured productions, of a higher order, came from the Greeks. Curtius, sacrificing every personal inclination to an absorbing love of country, was a truer exemplification of their national spirit, than any thing they achieved in elegant letters or art. They always betrayed that their first founder was not suckled at the breast of gentle humanity, but of a ferocious beast. Schlegel has well said of them, "They were the tragedians of the history of the world, who exhibited many a deep tragedy of kings led in chains, and pining in dungeons; they were the iron necessity of other nations; universal destroyers for the sake of rearing at last from the ruins, the mausoleum of their own dignity and freedom, in the midst of an obsequious world, reduced to one dull uniformity."

The style in which the Roman theatres were built, and the means resorted to for the purpose of superficial excitement, indicate that whatever dramatic taste the people may have once possessed, it had come to be greatly decayed. The edifice erected by Pompey was so huge that forty thousand spectators could be seated at once, and must have depended upon something else than the human voice to instruct or please. The relation which Pliny gives of the architectural decoration of the stage erected by Scaurus seems incredible. When magnificence could be carried no further, they endeavored to surprise by mechanical inventions; two theatres, placed on pivots, back to back, were so made that they could be wheeled round and form one vast amphitheatre, thus sinking legitimate tragedy into the lowest clap-trap of melo-dramatic show.

It was not to be expected that a people filled with such an unbounded lust for dominion would excel in the more delicate walks of literature and art. But the unscrupulous desire of the Romans to extend the power and glory of the Republic was compatible with vigorous statesmanship, and all the kindred subjects requisite to the advancement of social science. Their mother tongue was the language of command, and proficients therein could much easier produce works in prose, since these would arise from a practical view to utility only, and would require a treatment characterized by science rather than by art. But, as in poetry, so in prose, the Romans were perpetually imitative; they frequently showed talent, but rarely genius, and aimed at erudition, not invention. Those who first devoted themselves to historical research, were also eminent in the public service. Fabius Pictor belonged to an eminent patrician family, and Cincius Alimentus was of honorable birth. Such were Roman historians until the time of Sulla, whose cotemporary, L. Otacilius Pititus, was the first freedman who began to write history. The primary efforts of these authors and their associates were devoted to the transfer of poetical records into prose, the more appropriate vehicle of national annals.

M. Porcius Cato Censorius was born at Tusculum, B.C. 234. He displayed uncommon versatility of talent, and attained a place among the first orators, jurists, economists, and historians, of his day. Plautus and Terence were his cotemporaries. Cato enjoyed the advantage of a personal acquaintance with Polybius, the Greek historian, and the philosophers, Carneades, Critolaus, and Diogenes, who were compelled from Athens to lecture at Rome. At the same time Crates arrived from Pergamus, and the taste for Greek literature was so quickened, that the venerable prejudice against it in Cato was overcome, and very late in his life he sat down to learn the language of a people whom he had hated and despised. Early in life he became a soldier, served in the Hannibalian war, was under Fabius Maximus, both in Campania and Tarentum, and did the state some service in the decisive battle of the Metaurus. Stern in integrity, and rural in taste, like Carius Dentatus, and Quintius Cincinnatus, between his campaigns he employed himself in agricultural pursuits, on his Sabine farm. Valerius Flaccus invited him to his town-house at Rome, where the rustic pleader almost immediately became famous in the highest courts, and was soon sent to govern the province of Spain. This office was happily fitted to his talents, and on that western field he reaped the richest harvest of fame. The inherent love of truth and justice in Cato made him detest every demand for respect that did not rest on personal merit. Adventitious rank he despised, and was an unrelenting foe to aristocracy, as being arbitrary, conventional, and oppressive. The most amiable trait in his character was a burning indignation against wrong. He was self-educated, and perfectly original in character and genius. His learning was immense, but all his opinions were his own. Despite the imperfections of Cato, he was, intellectually and morally, the greatest man pagan Rome produced. Several inferior historians succeeded, but none worthy of note, previous to the revival-period of Cicero.

Polybius was carried captive to Rome, where he wrote his history in the language of his fallen country; and, when his learned co-patriots were permitted to return, he remained in Rome, greatly respected, and became both friend and adviser to the younger Scipio. The histories of Lucius Lucullus, Aulus Albinus, and Scipio Africanus, designed especially for the educated classes, were written in Greek. The earliest improvements in Latin were made by the epic and dramatic poets. At a later period, statesmen and orators exerted a strong popular influence in regard to prose composition, and thus the common people were gradually fortified with earnestness and practical intelligence.

Caius Julius Cæsar was born B.C. 101, and was a voluminous writer, as well as unequaled soldier. A strong man will stamp his individuality on his pages, as well as exhibit it in his acts. Such was the case with Cæsar, the first Roman whose expressions were well balanced and full of literary force. His composition at night was the fitting counterpart of his conduct by day. Whether he wielded the baton of supreme command on the battle-field, or quietly inscribed its history while the wounds of thousands were yet bleeding, his sword and pen alike went directly to the end desired, and triumph crowned every literary as well as martial attempt. He was said to know every man in his army by name, and he appears to have had an equally intimate acquaintance with the language in which he wrote. Every word, like a mailed soldier, was made to occupy its appropriate place, and his brief sentences stood in serrated strength, doing the most efficient service with least waste of time and space. Nothing could be subtracted from his brevity, or substituted for his chosen elements and positions of might. Xenophon, several of Alexander's generals, and Hannibal himself, also wrote annals of their own achievements; but the great Roman alone was the superlative martial writer, as he was the unconquered champion in war. The history of campaigns was a department of composition in which the genius of that people was best adapted to shine, and the boldest of their conquerors was also the brightest exponent of their national spirit.

Caius Crispus Sallustius, born fifteen years later than the great writer just noticed, and much inferior to him in harmony of arrangement and clearness of expression, yet had few equals among his countrymen as a writer. The beautiful historians of Greece were more easily copied than any other department of their letters, and this enabled the Romans to produce clever imitations. Thucydides was the model followed by Sallust, whose servility crippled the modicum of genius he originally possessed.

Titus Livius was born B.C. 17, at Padua, and removed to Rome, where he enjoyed the protection and regard of Augustus. The gross materialism of Epicurus was most genial to the national sense, and received at their hands a general adoption. The same gloomy impress lies upon the pages of Livy, and we close his work with the feeling that we have been conducted through "a stately gallery of gay and tragic pictures." Battles and triumphs are delineated with circumstantial vividness; but little light is thrown upon the constitution of the immortal mind, nor is the information thus communicated conducive to healthful order or energy.

Caius Cornelius Tacitus was born A.D. 57, forty-three years after the death of Augustus. His father is supposed to have been of the equestrian order, and Procurator of Belgian Gaul. Better auspices dawned when Trajan, the last of efficient Cæsars, ascended the throne, and like the sudden beauty which sometimes adorns the close of a lowering day, rivalled the greatness of old Rome. As his fitting co-operative in concluding the historic cycle of the Augustan age, Tacitus, educated under Vespasian and Titus, and who had learned to analyze his race under Domitian and Nerva, arose with Trajan to enjoy the last bright hour of his nation, and to portray the dreadfulness of the coming night. The depth of his spirit, and pungency of his expressions, are the last and best exponents of Augustan prose literature. What began with Cæsar in simple majesty, and was continued by Livy under the attractions of rhetorical extravagance, was by Tacitus garnered and uttered in the final expression of invincible victory and disdain. The historian of despotic cruelty threw the links of the world's fetters along the iron pages of his masterly Annals, while the shadows of Teutonic grandeur seem already gathering over his sad visage as he writes.

Suetonius and Cornelius Nepos need only be named in this connection, while we pass to a more particular mention of Plutarchus of Chæronea. He was, probably, a few years senior to Tacitus, and also wrote under the reign of Trajan. Plutarch is the representative of popular biography; he stands between the historian, the poet, and the romancer, to catch the beautiful lights of all. His account of Theseus resembles a legend from an old chronicle, or a chapter of magic; memoirs as depicted by his hand are exceedingly picturesque, in the presence of which reading becomes sight, as some vivid touch lights up the centre and animates the whole. For instance, the white charger of Sylla, lashed by a servant who saw his danger, carries the rider with a plunge between two falling spears. Again, Pyrrhus, wounded and faint, suddenly opens his eyes on Zopyrus in the act of waving a sword over his neck, and darts at him so fierce a look, that he springs back in terror, while his guilty hands tremble. And how startling is the aspect of Cæsar in the senate house, surrounded by conspirators, and turning his face in every direction, to meet only the murderous gleamings of steel!

The Roman prose writers excelled the poets in original worth. Their historical style, however, like their Corinthian order of art, was founded upon the Greek, but became much more florid than the original. Livy, for instance, the most perfect master of the Roman tongue as a national historian, is also the best illustration of this fault. Though excessively ornate in his emulation of the ancients, he yet retained something of their merit. Under the later Cæsars, history, that department of Augustan literature of most sterling worth, grew increasingly corrupt in matter, and deteriorated in style, until the fulsome meanness and insipidity of Velleius was reached, the lowest nadir of historic art. The advancement of the government in despotism is marked by a corresponding debasement in cotemporary writing. Seneca, for example, threw himself into the cold embrace of Stoicism, and becamed resigned as far as possible to the philosophy of endurance and the literature of despair.

Eloquence is a plant indigenous to a free soil, and was nearly a stranger to the Romans until it was nurtured in the schools of Tisias and Corax, when, on the dethronement of the tyrants, the dawn of freedom brightened upon Sicily. At length the privilege of unfettered debate which had first found a congenial home in Greece, arose in republican Rome. The plebeians, in their conflicts with the patricians, found an efficient advocate in Menenius Agrippa, who led them back from the sacred mountain with his rustic wisdom. Cases of oppression found some Icilius or Virginius armed with a panoply of burning indignation, and many a Siccius Dentatus, unskilled in pedantic terms, could appeal to his honorable wounds and scars in front received in patriotic service, and to the vestiges of torture marked by cruelty on his back. The unwritten literature of active life long preceded the office of formal history, and efficient oratory gradually arose to counteract by its antagonistic spirit the warlike fierceness of an utilitarian people. As when the great soldier, Scipio Africanus Major, was unjustly accused by a malignant opponent, the necessity of personal defense unexpectedly developed him into a consummate orator. Livy adorned the whole speech with his own rhetoric, but A. Gellius has preserved the peroration intact, which refers to the fortunate anniversary on which the defense was made: "I call to remembrance, Romans," said he, "that this is the very day on which I vanquished in a bloody battle on the plains of Africa the Carthaginian Hannibal, the most formidable enemy Rome ever encountered. I obtained for you a peace and an unlooked-for victory. Let us not, then, be ungrateful to heaven, but let us leave this knave, and at once offer our grateful thanksgivings to Jove, supremely good and great." The people obeyed his summons, the forum was deserted, and crowds followed the eloquent hero with acclamations to the Capitol.

The eloquence of Cato was mentioned, in our general notice of his versatile talents. He was equally successful as a speaker and a writer. The father of the Gracchi was distinguished among his cotemporaries for effective oratory, but no specimens have survived.

Scipio Africanus Minor was admirably qualified to be the link between the old and new style of eloquence. In his soldier-like character, the harder outlines of Roman sternness were modified by an ardent love of learning. His first campaign was in Greece, where he formed a literary friendship with leading minds, and especially with Polybius, which ripened into the closest intimacy when that great historian came as a hostage to Rome. He abhorred the degeneracy of manners, Greek and Roman, but preserving his own moral nature uncorrupted thereby, he was faithful in all the active duties of intelligent citizenship. Greek refinement had not destroyed the frankness, whilst it had humanized the boldness of the Roman; but prompted him to love the beautiful as well as the good, and to believe that elegance was by no means incompatible with strength. Lælius was his friend, and Servius Sulpicius Galba his successor in the more cultivated style of animated oratory.

But the Gracchi have the strongest claim upon the grateful remembrance of all who love democratic freedom. They paid the penalty usually connected with high destinies; but their death was the occasion of a better life to millions. Political changes which had been advancing slowly, but surely, for centuries, found in those two brothers the fitting instruments of a glorious consummation. Under their direction, the result of a long and obstinate struggle was, that the old distinction of patrician and plebeian was abolished. Plebeians held the consulship and censorship, and patricians, like the Gracchi, stood forward as plebeian tribunes and champions of popular rights. Such revolutionary periods usually produce extraordinary powers of eloquence, as in this instance. Lepidus Porcina, greatly imbued with Attic gentleness, was the model followed by Tiberius Gracchus; and Papirius Carbo, who united the gift of a delightful voice to verbal copiousness, was his ultra-liberal colleague; while Æmilius Scaurus, and Rutilius Rufus, were distinguished for opposing strength.

The Gracchi themselves were distinguished for gentle vigor, aided by a happy combination of accomplished endowments. Their father possessed an exalted character, and their mother inherited the strong mind and energetic genius of Scipio. She was well acquainted with Greek and Latin literature, with which she early imbued her aspiring sons. Tiberius was cool and sedate in speech, as in temperament; free from the storms of passion, he was self-possessed in debate, as stoical in disasters as was his philosophic creed. Caius, who was nine years younger, was morally inferior to Tiberius, but greatly his superior in intellect. He was less unswerving in purpose, but he was more susceptible of generous impulses, and had a much greater measure of creative genius. Cicero says that his imagination, lashed by the violence of his passions, required a strong curb; but for that very reason it gushed forth as from a natural fountain, and like a torrent swept all before it. On one occasion, his look, his voice, his gestures, were so inexpressibly affecting, that even his enemies were dissolved in tears. His education enabled him to rid himself of the harshness of the old school, and to gain the reputation of being the father of Roman prose.

M. Antonius entered public life under brilliant auspices, but he was greater as a judicial than as a deliberative orator. L. Licinius Crassus was four years younger than Antony, having been born B.C. 140. The last and most distinguished of the pre-Ciceronian orators, was Q. Hortensius, son of L. Hortensius, prætor of Sicily, and was born B.C. 97. When Crassus and Antony were dead, he was left the acknowledged leader of the forum until the effacing brightness of Rome's culminating star arose. In the cause of Quintius, the two great orators first came into direct conflict, when the mightier rival paid the highest possible compliment to the talents and genius of Hortensius, at the same time he clearly excelled him. As supreme as was the career of Cicero in the realm of eloquence, he was yet more influential in the department of philosophy at Rome, and we reserve a more extended notice of him for the chapter under that head.

After the battle of Actium, the spirit of faction and tumult subsided in a measure; and the love of letters, with a better sway, succeeded to that love of arms which had occupied every Roman mind for seven hundred years. The empire was at peace, and universal plunder had immensely enriched the metropolis. Gorgeous embellishment began to be admired, without producing correct taste; and, as a higher order of mind endeavored to cultivate a national literature, the language, like the capital of brick, seemed to have become marble. But never was Rome able to attain superior distinction in elegant letters, or diffuse among her citizens a general taste for refinement. An Athenian of the humblest rank could sit from morning to evening intent upon the scenes of Æschylus or Sophocles; but the Roman plebeian soon wearied of mental exhilaration, and turned to the more genial enjoyment of beast mangled by beast, and man by man. Nor was this peculiar to the lower classes. Knights and senators would hazard life in forcing their way into the amphitheatre, where they often struggled on the arena with their own slaves. Nothing beautiful was ever loved by them for its own sake, but might be haughtily patronized as an appendage to sensual delights. Throngs of poets and musicians attended at the public baths to recite or sing; and at supper, old and young bound their heads with laurel, not the amaranth of Minerva, but the gory weed of Mars. This was only an affected love of letters, and was equally gratified when entertained, at intervals, by wandering sophists, gladiators, jesters, or conjurors, as was common around the triclinium of the emperor himself. At the best epoch, a passion for literature and art was not the enthusiasm of appreciative genius, but only a transient fashion of the court.

After the death of Brutus, the world of letters shared in the universal change which transpired in the political world, so that literature under Augustus soon assumed a new and general tone entirely its own. The first five centuries of the republic formed the foundation on which the whole superstructure of the Augustan age was built. Literature was the last and least thing for that people to produce, and no indications of valuable fruit appeared until the end of the first Punic war. About two centuries later, Cicero, who became the representative of eloquence, philosophy, and sounding prose, was succeeded by Augustus, under whose auspices passed the golden age of Latin poetry. A hundred and fifty years later, classical literature died with Hadrian; chilled by the baleful influence of his tyrannical successors, the literati who had been patronized by the luxurious court sank into contempt. The only appropriate epithet which cotemporaries employed to characterize the age, was "iron," and it must have been both hard and cold. Sensual enjoyment deteriorated popular taste, and impotent revery took the place of energetic thought in the higher order of minds. Since Cicero, the flourishing period of eloquence had disappeared, and insipid daintiness of language was the only linguistic excellence admired. Seneca referred to this national degradation in literature, when he said, "Wherever you perceive that a corrupt taste pleases, be sure that the morals of the people have degenerated."

Varro, Cæsar, and Cicero contributed most to the perfection of the Roman dialect. The period of its greatest elegance extended from the reign of Augustus to that of Claudius, A.D. 54. By that time the struggle for liberty had been extinguished in those public calamities which plunged so many leading families into wretchedness, and caused the national spirit to be completely broken down. The period which embraced the lives of Cicero and Augustus constituted the best epoch of both prose and poetry. Dramatic literature, it is true, never recovered from the trance into which it fell after the days of Attius and Terence, yet Æsopus and Roscius, the great tragedian and the favorite comedian in the time of the greatest orator at Rome, amassed great wealth. But the theatrical entertainments which had now taken the place of legitimate dramas, were termed mimes, and were ludicrous imitations of popular customs or persons. The name was Greek, but the composition was entirely Roman in style and purpose. Their indecent coarseness of burlesque dialogue gratified the populace, and prepared the way for modern pantomime.

Decius Laberius, born at Puteoli, B.C. 45, under the dictatorship of Julius Cæsar, was a Mīme who became distinguished in this sort of composition, and won even the praise of Horace. Another was C. Valerius Catullus, born B.C. 86, and who was nine years younger than the great didactic poet and philosopher, Lucretius, whom we shall notice under the head of philosophy. Catullus belonged to a respectable family, residing on the Lago di Garda, near Verona. At an early age he went to Rome, became very erudite, and plunged into the licentious excesses of the capital. Catullus possessed captivating talents, but of a perverted use; satire as vindictive in spirit as it was varied in power. His poetry was such as might be expected from the tenor of his life, and a career which began in extravagant debauchery terminated in hopeless ruin.

P. Virgilius Maro, born B.C. 70, was a citizen of Mantua. Most of his early training was at Cremona, whence he removed to Milan, and afterward to Naples, where he studied Greek literature and philosophy under the direction of Parthenius. Congenial tastes recommended him to Assinius Pollio, who aided the poet in his pecuniary distress, and introduced him to the wealthiest patron of literature at Rome. By that means the favor of Octavius was reached, and bright fortunes were secured. In the maturity of his faculties, Virgil visited Greece for the purpose of giving the final polish to his great epic poem. At Athens he met Augustus, who was on his way back from Samos, and both returned together. But the beautiful spirit that yet reigned over the scenes of his recent visit evidently inspired his latest and finest writing. The favorite haunts of the muses, the time-honored contests of Olympia, the living and breathing masterpieces which he admired in that home of art, adorn the opening of the third Georgic. But Virgil had all his life borrowed so unsparingly from Grecian invention, that we may infer his intention to have been, not to produce much, if any thing, new, but skillfully to collect and smoothly repeat in his rougher tongue what long before had been much more elegantly and vividly expressed. His Æneid was artificially polished to a high degree, but can never be taken as a specimen of what great unassisted invention might effect. If from the structure of its fable, one should deduct the portions taken from the Iliad and Odyssey, together with what was appropriated from the Troades of Euripides, and the lost poem of the lesser Iliad, doubtless but little original matter would remain to glorify the best specimen of Augustan poetry in its best time.

Had Virgil given more prominence to the old heroic traditions and rural pursuits of his ancestors, he would have taken a stronger hold upon cotemporaries, and increased his influence with posterity. The enlargement of his epic scope would have added freedom to its treatment, and enhanced the value of its use. But, submitting to court artificialness, rendered more pernicious by his dependance thereon, the stiff arrangement of Virgil's greatest poem grows more and more formal as the plan proceeds. The Æneid opens with a copious use of early Greek inventions respecting the Trojan period, and the origin of the Romans. The further we leave these behind, the duller is the prospect; and when we have finished the greatest national poem of the Augustan age, really valuable as it is, we do not wonder that the author himself, in view of the nobler models he had copied, wished his own work were destroyed. Fine conceptions and careful finish Virgil doubtless possessed, but the corrupt Ovid was perhaps more of a spontaneous poet, and the careless Lucretius bore an intenser charm of nationality, impelled as he was by inspiration more truly Roman. He exhibited less art, and stalked forth with fewer airs of affected dignity; but whatever of strength and elegance he did employ, were more decidedly his own.

The specific qualities of Roman writers are clearly marked. In Livy, it is the manner of telling a story; in Sallust, personal identification with the character; in Tacitus, the analysis of the deed into its motive; and in the style of Virgil, the intimation of rank is equally plain. He who was helped up out of abject dependance, in his pride of place shrunk from all contact with poverty. In the hut of a herdsman, or seated with a shepherd in the shade, he still wears the air of dignity, relaxing with difficulty into bucolics. He accepts a maple cup from a peasant, with the patronizing mien of a courtier, who is thinking all the while of the last amphora opened by the princely Mecænas. Nevertheless Virgil had in him a true and natural love for rural purity, which was so sadly perverted by the astute formalism of the imperial court. In the healthful old times of the Republic, the noblest citizens and most illustrious authors were agriculturists by habitual pursuit, or chosen recreation. This feeling remained in Virgil to the last, glowing in the Eclogues, and especially in the Georgics most happily expressed. If he had given undivided attention to this species of literature in his riper years, he might have been to a still higher degree the poet of his nation; but, like all the rest, he was drawn near the throne of despotic rule, and both lived and died the poet of the metropolis.

But even less original than the epic was the lyrical poetry of the Augustan age, the great master of which was Horatius Flaccus, born B.C. 65. He infused little personal feeling into his writings, especially the lesser odes; in the place of nature, we have art, and instead of grand enthusiasm, a plenty of pretty imitation. Sometimes, however, he leaves the Greeks and draws wholly from himself, which effusions are the means of a permanent influence, and render their author, in his way, the best writer of Rome. Most of the poetry of that age was written to express gratitude to a patron, or court favor from a prince. As the great portion of readers were of the patrician rank, the composition was fashioned to patrician taste, and was as full of sycophancy as the sentiments expressed were undignified. Popular eloquence was no more, and, when free prose was silenced, the fulsome epoch of poetic flattery began. The profuse coffers of Octavius were opened in extravagant rewards to prostituted talents, and Virgil, Propertius, and Horace, polished their praise, and pocketed the gold. Of this talented trio, it is believed that Propertius was best qualified for the execution of an epic worthy of Rome; he, however, aspired less after fame than to enjoy the morbid sensibility of disappointed love, and has left only a few writings steeped in tenderness, but possessing very little worth.

Ovidius Naso, born B.C. 43, lived in a voluptuous age, and his works are imbued with all its grossness. To the first half of the Augustan epoch is commonly attributed the chief aggregate of genius and talent of greatest distinction, but it was only the occasion of their development, and not the period of their origin. All the really great of after renown, were the produce of republicanism, and whose youth had ardently admired the freedom from which their chief strength was derived. The most rugged of those who were drawn to the capital to adorn its imperialism with refined letters, were deteriorated by the frigid subserviency to which they submitted; while those who were actually born under Augustus, and exemplified the spirit of their time, like Ovid, were both in sentiment and style, infamously bad.

Least of all were the Romans successful in tragedy, that noblest form of literary composition, and in which the Greeks most excelled. True, those specimens which were anciently regarded as the best, such as the Medea of Ovid, and the Thyestes of Varius, are not now extant; but all that does remain is stamped with the manners of a people too frivolous and vitiated to render tragedy either dignified or interesting. Their taste and talents were fitted only to produce and relish representations of low comedy. But here, too, as in every other walk, they were radically defective as to original merit, many of their comedies being nothing better than free translations from the Greek. Plautus is infected with all the faults of Aristophanes, and is vastly inferior in the pungency of his wit; though his plots may be more natural, and his talents have a less malicious design. The minor epic poets failed still more egregiously, both as to the sentiments ascribed to their heroes, and the modes of their expression. Ovid is frequently puerile to the last degree; and Lucan labors continually after the happy turn of an epigram, but seldom with success. Claudian and Statius are habitually bombastic, but never sublime; and their successors sunk even lower the depressed level of cotemporary worth. The Augustan age, in its best period, was in some respects like a well-cultivated garden, full of choice exotics, but containing little of natural growth; an assemblage of beauties, gathered from various regions, and sometimes grouped with an approach to elegance.

In the age of Augustus, there were a moderately large number of literati, but few patrons; Mecænas stood first and alone; even the emperor himself was second. The Romans possessed the means of greatly enlarging the field of human knowledge, and the elder Pliny, artificial as he was, indicated how well those means might have been employed. But that people were utterly defective as to simplicity of life, and could not, therefore, excel in the more natural forms of literature. Theocritus, whose genius was Grecian, infused much beauty into his pastorals, and left small room for novelty to his successor, Virgil. The latter gave little attention to the real life of shepherds, and wrote eclogues, highly finished in manner, but in substance, quite unnatural. That author, like all his compeers, lived too much in an artificial world, and was too conversant with corrupt courts, and splendid dissipations, to admire unadorned beauty, and out of it to coin literary delights to nourish and exalt the sons of purity and peace. And yet it was in didactic poetry the Romans were most successful. The Georgics of Virgil, and the poetical dogmatics of Lucretius, display the opened treasures of, perhaps, the only original mine Latins ever worked.

Greeks of the later period were sometimes caustic in their criticisms on cotemporaries, but the great majority of their writers were too amiable to employ satire; and this only novelty in literature, of which they were happily ignorant, it was the equivocal honor of the Romans to invent. It was this form which comedy assumed among a people who could not appreciate the legitimate drama. Ennius was the inventor of the name, Lucilius of its substance. Persius used it for didactic purposes, and Terence and Juvenal gave increased reputation to this new form of lettered malice. But Horace alone seems to have understood the only useful end to which poetic sarcasm might be applied, by making it the vehicle of amusing narrative, and picturesque description. His sometimes elegant raillery at popular foibles, and inveterate vices, doubtless had a better effect than could have been reached by more serious discourse.

A life of literary or artistic pursuits, was never in high estimation among the Romans. This is indicated by the frequent occasions Cicero employs to apologize for occupations which, at Athens, throughout her glorious career, so far from requiring excuse, would have been esteemed the strongest claim to popular regard. Virgil, too, in some of his most exquisite lines of the sixth Æneid, hesitates not to speak slightingly of the arts, and even of oratory; and to represent no pursuit as becoming the majesty of a Roman, but to hold the sceptre, dictate laws, to spare the prostrate, and humble the proud. Horace had a true feeling for heroic greatness, and would have produced writings worthy of himself, probably, had the rare gifts of his republican youth been exercised under the same auspices in their maturity. When the commonwealth was overthrown, he may have suffered many bitter regrets. Some charitably believe that the excess of his mirth is only the mask of unavailing grief. A happier inspiration occasionally emits jets of patriotic flame, but in general all the native fires of his genius were subdued to the base office of illuminating a palace he had too much reason to despise. Inclination, not less than conviction, may have prompted him to become the defender of free speech in perpetual support of democratic progress; but policy dictated that he should write as a royalist, and glorify the empire of force. When the great Cicero was sacrificed in a fitful effort again to be free, Horace was too cowardly and recreant to indite one word in his behalf, or even to mention his name. Imperial tyrants trampled on all the germs of free thought, till nothing but a barren field remained, and then such creatures as Lucan, once a professed republican, sank into the hireling's wealth, and splendidly crouched at Nero's feet. He found nothing near and national to commend, and so he praised the superseded Cato, with other heroes yet more remote. Persius pursued the same low trade, and completed the picture of an age thoroughly corrupt.

Almost the only redeeming fact in the history of Roman literature was, that the most elevated individuals took an active part in its early culture, and co-operated with all subordinate endeavors to perfect its merit. Hence the air of majesty stamped upon their published thought, and which wears an aspect of greatness in contrast with the preceding age of beauty. Despite the servility of Roman writers, their works obtained an appearance of dignity and worth, by forming the great point of union between the ancient and the modern world. That which most atones for innumerable defects, is their one great and pervading idea of Rome itself; Rome so wonderful in her energy and laws, so colossal in her conquests and crimes. Something of this independent dignity appears in even the most slavish imitator, and relieves the otherwise ignoble traits of his character. But this stamp of grandeur was impressed on her literature only while Rome was extending her dominion over the world, impelled by an irresistible confidence in the ascendency of her victorious star. Rough, obdurate, and almost uncivilized, Rome disdained the practice and despised the advantages of commerce. The mother-country possessed no arts of refinement to export to the countries she conquered, or the colonies she planted; so far from producing an overplus to supply the destitute, she often dispossessed those who were more refined, and who were in a measure themselves enriched. When Greece submitted to Roman power, she obtained a more illustrious triumph over rustic ignorance and military force, through the influence of literature, science, and the elegant arts.

As western Asia, from the earliest times, was the great highway of culture to Greece, so the Ægean islands and the western colonies were the intermediate steps to Roman supremacy, even to the Atlantic coast. The sphere of civilization was vastly developed by the indefatigable attempts of Alexander to mix all the eastern nations; but the unity which he failed to create under the spiritual influence of Greece was infinitely extended and established through the agency of material Rome. At the same time their martial influence was rising, the greatness of their character, strictness of their laws, love of their country, and high opinion of themselves common to that nation, rose with correlative might. But these more noble characteristics changed as soon as universal conquest was reached, and their fall was as humiliating as their ascent had been sublime. The empire was quickly dissolved, because, inveterate in national vanity, Rome refused to be instructed by defeat, but construed fatal disasters into occasions for vain hope. From the accession of Augustus to Theodosius the Great, A.D. 395, every national incident was a manifestation of apparent decay; but in reality, at the same time, there was gathering underneath a deeper and purer tide of civilization, in due time to burst forth with redeeming power yet further west.

Rome was the second link between the ancient and modern world. In her career of conquest, she garnered all wealth by force; and when she fell, it was at the exact moment when her hoarded treasures would best promote the fortunes of mankind. The eagles of Rome soared with talons and pinions wet with gore, but the seeds of great institutions were thus made the more firmly to adhere, and they bore them over Apennines and the Alps. They were most signally the instruments of Providence for benefitting succeeding nations in literature and religion. By the consequences which ensued upon Roman conquests, the way was cleared for the most auspicious propagation of Christianity; and the suddenness of her fall, as clearly as the savageness of her ascendancy, proved that the wisest scheme of selfishness carries within itself the guaranty of utter dissolution. Into the richness of her ruins were cast the seeds of intellectual renovation, and posterity was made to reap rich harvests from fields plowed by chariots of war and fructified with human blood. That mighty nation was predestined to be a transporter, and not a producer, of ennobling worth; and it was wisely ordered that she should possess no native production of sufficient splendor to make her regardless of those that might come in her way, and whose superior worth she might appropriate. Cicero and Pliny, with their literary associates, were not propounders of new theories, but transmitters and commentators of the old. Thus every age has been conserved, without accumulating a burden too great; and the mighty aggregate, fused into an appropriate adaptation to future uses, has come down to us. If a thousand tributaries, from every direction, were made to pour their currents into one great central reservoir, it was with the divine intention, when the fitting epoch arrived, to empty all the mighty tide towards the western main, and by that means, at a later era, to infuse into a prolific soil all the wisdom of the ancient world.

Greece carried individual culture to the highest pitch, but never established social relations on a sufficiently solid basis. It was not her mission to combine subjugated nations into a consolidated union, as the terrible Peloponnesian war and the lamentable history of Alexander and his successors but too sadly proved. To work out the principle of association on a broad and enduring scale was a task destined for the Roman race, and sublimely was it performed. Through the protracted process of conflict between contrasted nations, and their homogeneous assimilation, the great centre of progressive culture was removed another step from the East. More skillful in the art of establishing durable political ties, Rome was soon surrounded by a social net-work which embraced all the historic races. It was a vast empire which recombined preceding epochs, and presented the spectacle of the most brilliant interlacing of universal associations the world has ever seen.

The first extensive library at Rome, was that of Paulus Æmilus, taken B.C. 167, from Perses, king of Macedon. The next, and the largest in the world, was collected by the Saracens at Cordova, in Spain. Books, like every other civilizing element, followed the sun. Before Carthage perished, Greek was widely known along the Mediterranean shores. Hannibal wrote the history of his wars in that language, and through the same luminous medium were the maritime adventures of Carthaginian navigators described. But as the conquering power of Rome stamped all nationalities with its image and superscription, so the superinduction of their language extinguished the living idioms of many tribes, or absorbed into itself all the sources of expansive and formative life which they contained. When sufficiently matured, the Latin language was spread over a much larger surface of the world than the Grecian, even before the seat of empire was removed to Byzantium. The diffusion of a tongue so strongly endowed, and imbued with such prolific means of promoting national union, tended powerfully toward making mankind human, by furnishing them with a common country. To this end, Cincinnatus lived in democratic simplicity, tilling his own soil, and yet nobler than a lord; he was as competent as he was ready for any public service, but first bound the brightest laurel to the plow. Splendors multiplied and power increased, while the elder Scipio lay in the bosom of Ennius, Lælius was flattered by the rumor of his helping Terence, and Virgil brightened the purple of Rome's great emperor. Then imperial eagles and mailed legions executed the commands of a single individual on the seven hills, and the strength which had been created by the republic enabled a tyrant like Tiberius to rivet the chains of the world. The era of exalted literary worth, imperfect at the best, continued only about one century, and thenceforth till the extinction of the language, the progress of corruption was rapid and fatal. After the reign of Trajan, all healthful development ceased. In the fourth century, such works as those of Ammianus Marcellinus, Bœthius Fronto, Lactantius, and Symmachus, proved that the utmost degradation was not yet attained, but these were the last vital utterances of the Roman tongue. A few years after, and the greater part of the language was either foreign or provincial. Pure Latin was forever dead.

It is painful to contemplate the countless battles and destructive wars which so becloud and disfigure the Augustan age. But we should recollect that the annals of past nations, with all their endless and apparently useless contests, are but motes in the sun compared with the great whole of human destiny. Amid the thickest gloom, Tacitus, with searching eye, fathomed the mission of his age, and saw that the great system of pacification which Octavius Cæsar promised to the nations was delusive, and that there were yet more desolating revolutions to transpire before heaven's highest boon of freedom could be enjoyed. The one, imperishable, ever-progressive, and all-devouring city, Rome, was to gather all oriental wealth to herself; and then, as she had taken the sword to reap with, so should the sword become the grand instrument of distribution, and the great West be sown with the spoils. The first repulse was at Numantia, in Spain, when Scipio saw Roman invincibility broken, and the hour sounded when Rome herself must take blows as well as give. Gaul cost her fifteen stubborn battles and a most costly effusion of blood, which were afterward repaid by perpetual levies made on Italian territory and wealth. At this moment, Celts are masters in her capital. Cimbri and Teutones, with wives and children, descended upon the prepared field in whole tribes, directly the time had come for salutary amalgamation in view of prospective destinies; and the knell of the Augustan age resounded from afar, when Varus was defeated by the German Arminius in his native woods.

CHAPTER II.

ART.

Roman genius was somewhat inventive, but it was exercised only in pandering to sensual gratification. There the plow, the pen, and the chisel were all in the hands of slaves. No free-souled Plato enchanted appreciative throngs in the umbrageous walks of a Latin Academy, nor was there a Demosthenes to wave the stormy democracy into a calm from some sunny hill-side. Very few artists of Roman blood possessed talents which might have been symbolized by a precious ring on their finger, such as Pliny says was worn by Pyrrhus, in which nature had produced the figure of Apollo and the nine muses. At their birth, the gods of power may have descended to offer gifts, but it is certain the gentler graces did not attend.