[178] It is, at least, doubtful whether any change of climate expelled either lion or elephant from southeast Europe and Asia Minor; the cause of their gradual disappearance was—I think—nothing but Man, increasingly well armed for the chase. Lions lingered in the Balkan peninsula till about the fourth century B.C., if not later. Elephants had perhaps disappeared from western Asia by the eighth century B.C. The lion (much bigger than the existing form) stayed on in southern Germany till the Neolithic period. The panther inhabited Greece, southern Italy, and southern Spain likewise till the beginning of the historical period (say 1000 B.C.).—H. H. J.
[179] But a thousand years earlier the Hittites seem to have had paved high roads running across their country.
[180] But cp. Bury’s History of Greece, ch. vi., § 5.
[181] Winckler, in Helmolt’s Universal History.
[182] See in relation to this chapter, Zimmern’s Greek Commonwealth. A very handy book for the student in this section is Abbott’s Skeleton Outline of Greek History.
[183] Ancient Greek Literature, by Gilbert Murray (Heinemann, 1911).
[184] Plutarch.
[185] For an account of his views, see Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers is also a good book for this section.
[186] “But it was not only against the lives, properties, and liberties of Athenian citizens that the Thirty made war. They were not less solicitous to extinguish the intellectual force and education of the city, a project so perfectly in harmony both with the sentiment and practice of Sparta, that they counted on the support of their foreign allies. Among the ordinances which they promulgated was one, expressly forbidding any one ‘to teach the art of words.’ The edict of the Thirty was, in fact, a general suppression of the higher class of teachers or professors, above the rank of the elementary (teacher of letters or) grammatist. If such an edict could have been maintained in force for a generation, combined with the other mandates of the Thirty—the city out of which Sophocles and Euripides had just died, and in which Plato and Isocrates were in vigorous age, would have been degraded to the intellectual level of the meanest community in Greece. It was not uncommon for a Grecian despot to suppress all those assemblies wherein youths came together for the purpose of common training, either intellectual or gymnastic, as well as the public banquets and clubs or associations, as being dangerous to his authority, tending to elevation of courage, and to a consciousness of political rights among the citizens.”—Grote’s History of Greece.
[187] A very good and useful account of this great literature for the reader who is not a classical student is Norwood’s Greek Tragedy.