HOW ATHENS ROSE FROM ITS ASHES. 193

idle, pleasure-loving, and extravagant populace. At
the same time, that things might be kept quiet in
Athens, the discontented overflow of the people were
sent out as colonists, to build up daughter cities of
Attica in many distant lands.

Thus it was that Athens developed from the quiet
country town of the old régime into the wealthiest,
gayest, and most progressive of Grecian cities, the
capital of an empire, the centre of a great com-
merce, and the home of a busy and thronging popu-
lace, among whom the ablest artists, poets, and phi-
losophers of that age of the world were included.
Here gathered the great writers of tragedy, begin-
ning with Alschylus, whose noble works were per-
formed at the expense of the state in the great open-
air theatre of Dionysus. Here the comedians, the
chief of whom was Aristophanes, moved hosts of
spectators to inextinguishable laughter. Here the
choicest lyric poets of Greece awoke admiration
with their unequalled songs, at their head the noble
Pindar, the laureate of the Olympic and Pythian
games. Tere the sophists and philosophers argued
and lectured, and Socrates walked like a king at the
head of the aristocracy of thought. Here the sculp-
tors, headed by Phidias, filled temples, porticos, col-
onnades, and public places with the most exquisite
creations in marble, and the painters with their
marvellous reproductions of nature. Here, indeed,
seemed gathered all that was best and worthiest in
art, entertainment, and thought, and for half a cen-
tury and more Athens remained a city without a
rival in the history of the world.

lL—I on 17