of art. During these
busy years Athens became a marvel of beauty and art, the resort of
strangers from all quarters, the ablest workers in marble and metal,
the noblest artists, poets, and philosophers, until for more than a
century that city was the recognized centre of the loftiest products of
the human intellect.

Prose came later than poetry, but was soon flourishing as luxuriantly.
The early historians quickly yielded Herodotus, the delightful old
storyteller, with his poetic prose; Xenophon, with his lucid and flowing
narrative; and Thucydides, the greatest of ancient historians and the
first to give philosophic depth to the annals of mankind. The advent of
history was accompanied by that of oratory, which among the Greeks
developed into one of the choicest forms of literature, especially in
the case of the greatest of the world's orators, Demosthenes, whose
orations were inspired by the noblest of themes, that of a patriotic
effort to preserve the independence of Greece against the ambitious
designs of Philip of Macedon.

Philosophy, the third great form of Greek prose literature, was as
diligently cultivated, and has left as many examples for modern perusal.
The works of the earlier philosophers were in verse, while Socrates, the
first of the moral philosophers, left no writings, doing his work with
tongue instead of pen, though he forms the leading character in Plato's
philosophic dialogues. In Plato we have the most famous of the world's
philosophers, and a writer of the ablest skill, in whose works the
imagination of the poet is happily blended with the reasoning of the
philosopher, his productions constituting a form of philosophic drama,
in which the character of each speaker is closely preserved, Socrates
being usually the chief personage introduced.

Following Plato came Aristotle, his equal in fame though not in literary
merit. His name will long survive as that of one of the ablest thinkers
the world has produced, a reasoner of exceptional ability, whose scope
of research covered all fields and whose discoveries in practical
science formed the first true introduction to mankind of this great
field of human study, to-day the greatest of them all.

We have named here only the leaders in Greek literature, the whole array
being far too great to cover in brief space. Following the older form of
the drama, with its archaic character, came two later forms, the Middle
and the New Comedy, in the latter of w