[262] The mines of Laurium, though anciently worked by the "Pelasgi," do not figure in Athenian history till the beginning of the fifth century B.C. Ardaillon, pp. 126-27.
[263] As to the enormous cost in labour and money of such buildings as the Propylæa and the Parthenon, cp. Mahaffy, Survey of Greek Civilisation, p. 143, and M'Cullagh, Industrial History of the Free Nations, 1846, i, 166, 167.
[264] "Before the Persian war Athens had contributed less than many other cities, her inferiors in magnitude and in political importance, to the intellectual progress of Greece. She had produced no artists to be compared with those of Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, Ægina, Laconia, and of many cities both in the eastern and western colonies. She could boast of no poets so celebrated as those of the Ionian and Æolian Schools. But ... in the period between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars both literature and the fine arts began to tend towards Athens as their most favoured seat" (Thirlwall, vol. iii, ch. xviii, pp. 70, 71). "Never before or since has life developed so richly" (Abbott, ii, 415). Cp. Holm, Eng. tr. ii, 156, 157.
[265] This view appears to be substantially at one with the reasoning of Dr. Cunningham (Western Civilisation, pp. 112-23). I must dissent, however, from his apparent position (pp. 119-21) that it was the mode of the expenditure that was wrong, and that Athens might have employed her ill-gotten capital "productively" in the modern economic sense. The cases of Miletus and Tyre, cited by him, seem to be beside the argument.
[266] Plutarch, Pericles, c. 11.
[267] Cp. Thirlwall, small ed. iii, 67.
[268] On the Revenues.
[269] As cited, bk. iv, ch. xxi.
[270] Boeckh's arguments, denounced by Lewis, need not be adhered to; but the whole theorem is so fantastic that Lewis's general vindication of it is puzzling (Trans. pref. xv, note).
[271] See Hertzberg, Geschichte Griechenlands unter der Herrschaft der Römer, Theil ii, Kap. 2, p. 200, as to the vast estates now acquired by a few.