Note 264 — Chapter II

"Before the Persian war Athens had contributed less than many other cities, her inferiors in magnitude and in political importance, to the intellectual progress of Greece. She had produced no artists to be compared with those of Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, Ægina, Laconia, and of many cities both in the eastern and western colonies. She could boast of no poets so celebrated as those of the Ionian and Æolian Schools. But ... in the period between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars both literature and the fine arts began to tend towards Athens as their most favoured seat" (Thirlwall, vol. iii, ch. xviii, pp. 70, 71). "Never before or since has life developed so richly" (Abbott, ii, 415). Cp. Holm, Eng. tr. ii, 156, 157.