ed to power. He is usually credited with a notable
systematic attempt to preserve the Works of Homer.]

[Footnote 9: Cimon died in 449 B.C. He was a son of Miltiades and
defeated the Persians on both sea and land in 466.]

Those merchants certainly had deserved that act of bounty; for all the
while their ships had been carrying forth the intellectual fame of
Athens to the Western world. Then commenced what may be called her
university existence. Pericles, who succeeded Cimon, both in the
government and in the patronage of art, is said by Plutarch to have
entertained the idea of making Athens the capital of federated Greece;
in this he failed; but his encouragement of such men as Phidias and
Anaxagoras led the way to her acquiring a far more lasting sovereignty
over a far wider empire. Little understanding the sources of her own
greatness, Athens would go to war; peace is the interest of a seat of
commerce and the arts; but to war she went: yet to her whether peace
or war mattered not. The political power of Athens waned and
disappeared; kingdoms rose and fell, centuries rolled away;--they did
but bring fresh triumphs to the city of the poet and the sage. There
at length the swarthy Moor and Spaniard were seen to meet the
blue-eyed Gaul; and the Cappadocian, late subject to Mithridates,
gazed without alarm at the haughty conquering Roman. Revolution after
revolution passed over the face of Europe, as well as of Greece, but
still she was there,--Athens, the city of the mind, as radiant, as
splendid, as delicate, as young, as ever she had been.

Many a more fruitful coast or isle is washed by the blue AEgean, many a
spot is there more beautiful or sublime to see, many a territory more
ample; but there was one charm in Attica, which in the same perfection
was nowhere else. The deep pastures of Arcadia, the plain of Argos,
the Thessalian Vale, these had not the gift; Boeotia, which lay to its
immediate north, was notorious for the very want of it. The heavy
atmosphere of that Boeotia might be good for vegetation, but it was
associated in popular belief with the dulness of the Boeotian
intellect; on the contrary, the special purity, elasticity, clearness,
and salubrity of the air of Attica, fit concomitant and emblem of its
genius, did that for it which earth did not;--it brought out every
bright line and tender shade of the landscape over which it was
spread, and would have illuminated the face even of a more barren and
r