of thought. Here the sculptors, headed by Phidias, filled
temples, porticos, colonnades, 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 century
and more Athens remained a city without a rival in the history of the
world.

_THE PLAGUE AT ATHENS._

During the period after the Persian war two great powers arose in
Greece, which were destined to come into close and virulent conflict.
These were the league of Delos, which developed into the empire of
Athens, and the Peloponnesian confederacy, under the leadership of
Sparta. The first of these was mainly an island empire, the second a
mainland league; the first a group of democratic, the second one of
aristocratic, states; the first a power with dominion over the seas, the
second a power whose strength lay in its army. Such were the two rival
confederacies into which Greece gradually divided, and between which
hostile sentiment grew stronger year after year.

It became apparent as the years went on that a struggle was coming for
supremacy in Greece. Outbreaks of active hostility between the rival
powers from time to time took place. At length the situation grew so
strained that a general conflict began, that devastating Peloponnesian
war which for nearly thirty years desolated Greece, and which ended in
the ruin of Athens, the home of poetry and art, and the supremacy of
Sparta, the native school of war. The first great conflict of the
Hellenic people, the Persian war, had made Greece powerful and
glorious. The second great conflict, the Peloponnesian war, brought
Greece to the verge of ruin, and destroyed that Athenian supremacy in
which lay the true path of progress for that fair land.

In 431 B.C. the war broke out. Sparta and her allies declared war
against Athens on the ground that that city was growing too great and
grasping, and an army marched from the Peloponnesus northward to invade
the Attic state. Meanwhile the Athenians, under the shrewd advice of
Pericles, adopted a wise policy. It was with her fleet that Athens had
defeated Persia, and her wise statesman advised that she should devote
herself to the dominion of the sea, and leave to Sparta that of the
land. Their walls would protect her people, their ships would bring them
food from afar, they were not a fair