literature fled from this field to find a new home among "those
busy Athenians, who are never at rest themselves nor are willing to let
any one else be."

[Illustration: ALONG THE COAST OF GREECE.]

The day of the epic poet had now passed and the lyric took its place,
making its first appearance, like the epic, in Ionia and the AEgean
islands, but finding its most appreciative audience and enthusiastic
support in Athens, the coming home of the muse. Song became the
prevailing literary demand, and was supplied abundantly by such choice
singers as Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Simonides, and others of the soft
and cheerful vein, the biting satires of Archilochus, the noble odes of
Pindar, the war anthems of Tyrtaeus, and the productions of many of
lesser fame.

This flourishing period of song sank away when a new form of literature,
that of the drama, suddenly came into being and attained immediate
popularity. For a century earlier it had been slowly taking form in the
rural districts of Attica, beginning in the odes addressed to Dionysus,
the god of wine, the Bacchus of Roman mythology. These odes were sung
at the public festivals of the vintage season, were accompanied by
gesture and action and in time by dialogue, and the day came when groups
of amateur actors travelled in carts from place to place to present
their rude dramatic scenes, then mainly composed of song and dance, rude
jests, and dialogues. In this way the drama slowly came into being,
comedy from the jovial by-play of the rustic actors, tragedy from their
crude efforts to reproduce the serious side of mythologic story. A great
tragic artist and poet, the far-famed AEschylus, lifted these primitive
attempts into the field of the true drama. He was quickly followed by
two other great artists in the same field, Sophocles and Euripides,
while the efforts of the earlier comedians were succeeded by the
fun-distilling productions of Aristophanes, the greatest of ancient
artists in this field.

This blossoming age of poetry and the drama came after the desperate
struggles of the Persian War, which had left Athens a heap of ruins. In
the new Athens which rose under the fostering care of Pericles, not only
literature flourished but art reached its culmination, temple and hall,
colonnade and theatre showing the artistic beauty and grandeur of the
new architecture, while such sculptors as Phidias and such painters as
Zeuxis adorned the city with the noblest products