Thus the second period is marked alike by changes in politics and society, and by a revolution in the spirit of literature. The old Homeric monarchies are broken up. Oligarchies and tyrannies take their place. To the anarchy and unrest of transition succeeds the demand for constitutional order. The colonies are founded, and contain the very pith of Hellas at this epoch: of all the great names we have mentioned, only Solon and Theognis belong to Central Greece. The Homeric epos has become obsolete. In its stead we have the greatest possible variety of literary forms. The elegiac poetry of morality and war and love; the lyrical poetry of personal feeling and of public ceremonial; the philosophical poetry of metaphysics and mysticism; the iambic, with its satire; prose, in its adaptation to new science and a more accurate historical investigation—are all built up upon the ruins of the epic. What is most prominent in the spirit of this second period is the emergence of private interests and individual activities. No dreams of a golden past now occupy the minds of men. No gods or heroes fill the canvas of the poet. Man, his daily life, his most crying necessities, his deepest problems, his loves and sorrows, his friendships, his social relations, his civic duties—these are the theme of poetry. Now for the first time in Europe a man tells his own hopes and fears, and expects the world to listen. Sappho simply sings her love; Archilochus, his hatred; Theognis, his wrongs; Mimnermus, his ennui; Alcæus, his misfortunes; Anacreon, his pleasure of the hour; and their songs find an echo in all hearts. The individual and the present have triumphed over the ideal and the past. Finally, it should be added that the chief contributions to the culture of the fine arts in this period are architecture, which is carried to perfection; music, which receives elaborate form in the lyric of the Dorian order; and sculpture, which appears as yet but rudimentary upon the pediments of the temples of Ægina and Selinus.
Our third period embraces the supremacy of Athens from the end of the Persian to the end of the Peloponnesian war. It was the struggle with Xerxes which developed all the latent energies of the Greeks, which intensified their national existence, and which secured for Athens, as the central power on which the scattered forces of the race converged, the intellectual dictatorship of Hellas. No contest equals for interest and for importance this contest of the Greeks with the Persians. It was a struggle of spiritual energy against brute force, of liberty against oppression, of intellectual freedom against superstitious ignorance, of civilization against barbarism. The whole fate of humanity hung trembling in the scales at Marathon, at Salamis, at Platæa. On the one side were ranged the hordes of Asia—tribe after tribe, legion upon legion, myriad by myriad—under their generals and princes. On the other side stood forth a band of athletes, of Greek citizens, each one himself a prince and general. The countless masses of the herd-like Persian host were opposed to a handful of resolute men in whom the force of the spirit of the world was concentrated. The triumph of the Greeks was the triumph of the spirit, of the intellect of man, of light-dispersing darkness, of energy repelling a dead weight of matter. Other nations have shown a temper as heroic as the Greeks. The Dutch, for instance, in their resistance against Philip, or the Swiss in their antagonism to Burgundy and Austria. But in no other single instance has heroism been exerted on so large a scale, in such a fateful contest for the benefit of mankind at large. Had the Dutch, for example, been quelled by Spain, or the Swiss been crushed by the House of Hapsburg, the world could have survived the loss of these athletic nations. There were other mighty peoples who held the torch of liberty and of the spirit, and who were ready to carry it onward in the race. But if Persia had overwhelmed the Greeks upon the plains of Marathon or in the straits of Salamis, that torch of spiritual liberty would have been extinguished. There was no runner in the race to catch it up from the dying hands of Hellas, and to bear it forward for the future age. No; this contest of the Greeks with Persia was the one supreme battle of history; and to the triumph of the Greeks we owe whatever is most great and glorious in the subsequent achievements of the human race.
Athens rose to her full height in this duel. She bore the brunt of Marathon alone. Her generals decided the sea-fight of Salamis. For the Spartans it remained to defeat Mardonius at Platæa. Consequently the olive-wreath of this more than Olympian victory crowned Athens. Athens was recognized as Saviour and Queen of Hellas. And Athens, who had fought the battle of the spirit—by spirit we mean the greatness of the soul, liberty, intelligence, civilization, culture—everything which raises men above brutes and slaves, and makes them free beneath the arch of heaven—Athens, who had fought and won this battle of the spirit, became immediately the recognized impersonation of the spirit itself. Whatever was superb in human nature found its natural home and sphere in Athens. We hear no more of the colonies. All great works of art and literature now are produced in Athens. It is to Athens that the sages come to teach and to be taught. Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, the three masters of philosophy in this third period, are Athenians. It is, however, noticeable and significant that Anaxagoras, who forms a link between the philosophy of the second and third period, is a native of Clazomenæ, though the thirty years of his active life are spent at Athens. These thinkers introduce into speculation a new element. Instead of inquiries into the factors of the physical world or of ontological theorizing, they approach all problems which involve the activities of the human soul—the presence in the universe of a controlling spirit. Anaxagoras issues the famous apophthegm: νοῦς πάντων κρατεῖ, "intelligence disposes all things in the world." Socrates founds his ethical investigation upon the Delphian precept: γνῶθι σεαυτόν; or, "the proper study of mankind is man." Plato, who belongs chronologically to the fourth period, but who may here be mentioned in connection with the great men of the third, as synthesizing all the previous speculations of the Greeks, ascends to the conception of an ideal existence which unites truth, beauty, and goodness in one scheme of universal order.
At the same time Greek art rises to its height of full maturity. Ictinus designs the Parthenon, and Mnesicles the Propylæa; Pheidias completes the development of sculpture in his statue of Athene, his pediment and friezes of the Parthenon, his chryselephantine image of Zeus at Olympia, his marble Nemesis upon the plain of Marathon. These were the ultimate, consummate achievements of the sculptor's skill; the absolute standards of what the statuary in Greece could do. Nothing remained to be added. Subsequent progression—for a progression there was in the work of Praxiteles—was a deflection from the pure and perfect type.
Poetry, in the same way, receives incomparable treatment at the hands of the great dramatists. As the epic of Homer contained implicitly all forms of poetry, so did the Athenian drama consciously unite them in one supreme work of art. The energies aroused by the Persian war had made action and the delineation of action of prime importance to the Greeks. We no longer find the poets giving expression to merely personal feeling, or uttering wise saws and moral precepts, as in the second period. Human emotion is indeed their theme; but it is the phases of passion in living, acting, and conflicting personalities which the drama undertakes to depict. Ethical philosophy is more than ever substantive in verse; but its lessons are set forth by example and not by precept—they animate the conduct of whole trilogies. The awakened activity of Hellas at this period produced the first great drama of Europe, as the Reformation in England produced the second. The Greek drama being essentially religious, the tragedians ascended to mythology for their materials. Homer is dismembered, and his episodes or allusions, together with the substance of the Cyclic poems, supply the dramatist with plots. But notice the difference between Homer and Æschylus, the epic and the drama. In the latter we find no merely external delineation of mythical history. The legends are used as outlines to be filled in with living and eternally important details. The heroes are not interesting merely as heroes, but as the types and patterns of human nature; as representatives on a gigantic scale of that humanity which is common to all men in all ages, and as subject to the destinies which control all human affairs. Mythology has thus become the text-book of life, interpreted by the philosophical consciousness. With the names of Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, must be coupled that of Aristophanes. His comedy is a peculiarly Athenian product—the strongest mixture of paradox and irony and broad buffoonery and splendid poetry, designed to serve a serious aim, the world has ever seen. Here the many-sided, flashing genius of the Ionian race appears in all its subtlety, variety, suppleness, and strength. The free spirit of Athens runs riot and proclaims its liberty by license in the prodigious saturnalia of the wit of Aristophanes.
It remains to be added that to this period belong the histories of Herodotus, the Halicarnassean by birth, who went to Thurii as colonist from Athens, and of Thucydides, the Athenian general; the lyrics of Pindar the Theban, who was made the public guest of Athens; the eloquence of Pericles, and the wit of Aspasia. This brief enumeration suffices to show that in the third period of Greek literature was contained whatever is most splendid in the achievements of the genius of the Greeks, and that all these triumphs converged and were centred upon Athens.
The public events of this period are summed up in the struggle for supremacy between Athens and Sparta. The race which had shown itself capable of united action against the common foe now develops within itself two antagonistic and mutually exclusive principles. The age of the despots is past. The flowering-time of the colonies is over. The stone of Tantalus in Persia has been removed from Hellas. But it remains for Sparta and Athens to fight out the duel of Dorian against Ionian prejudices, of oligarchy against democracy. Both states have received their definite stamp, or permanent ἦθος—Sparta from semi-mythical Lycurgus; Athens from Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles. Their war is the warfare of the powers of the sea with the powers of the land, of Conservatives with Liberals, of the rigid principle of established order with the expansive spirit of intellectual and artistic freedom. What is called the Peloponnesian war—that internecine struggle of the Greeks—is the historical outcome of this deep-seated antagonism. And the greatest historical narrative in the world—that of Thucydides—is its record. To dwell upon the events of this war would be superfluous. Athens uniformly exhibits herself as a dazzling, brilliant, impatient power, led astray by the desire of novelty, and the intoxicating sense of force in freedom. Sparta proceeds slowly, coldly, cautiously; secures her steps; acts on the defensive; spends no strength in vain; is timid, tentative, and economical of energy; but at the decisive moment she steps in and crushes her antagonist. Deluded by the wandering fire of the inspiration of Alcibiades, the Athenians venture to abandon the policy of Pericles and to contemplate the conquest of Syracuse. A dream of gigantic empire, in harmony with their expansive spirit, but inconsistent with the very conditions of vitality in a Greek state, floated before their imaginations. In attempting to execute it, they overreached themselves and fell a prey to Sparta. With the fall of Athens faded the real beauty and grandeur of Greece. Athens had incarnated that ideal of loveliness and sublimity. During her days of prosperity she had expressed it in superb works of art and literature, and in the splendid life of a free people governed solely by their own intelligence. Sparta was strong to destroy this life, to extinguish this light of culture. But to do more she had no strength. Stiffened in her narrow rules of discipline, she was utterly unable to sustain the spiritual vitality of Hellas, or to carry its still vigorous energy into new spheres. It remained for aliens to accomplish this.