The first great impulse was given to architecture. The Pelasgi had erected Cyclopean structures fifteen hundred years before Christ. The Dorians built temples on the severest principles of beauty, and the Doric column arose, massive and elegant. Long before the Persian wars the temples were numerous and grand, yet simple and harmonious. The temple of Here, at Samos, was begun in the eighth century, B.C., and built in the Doric style, and, soon after, beautiful structures ornamented Athens.
Sculpture.
Sculpture rapidly followed architecture, and passed from the stiffness of ancient times to that beauty which afterward distinguished Phidias and Polynotus. Schools of art, in the sixth century, flourished in all the Grecian cities. We can not enter upon the details, from the use of wood to brass and marble. The temples were filled with groups from celebrated masters, and their deep recesses were peopled with colossal forms. Gold, silver, and ivory were used as well as marble and brass. The statues of heroes adorned every public place. Art, before the Persian wars, did not indeed reach the refinement which it subsequently boasted, but a great progress was made in it, in all its forms. Engraving was also known, and imperfect pictures were painted. But this art, and indeed any of the arts, did not culminate until after the Persian wars.
Literature.
Literature made equal if not greater progress in the early ages of Grecian history. Hesiod lived B.C. 735; and lyric poetry flourished in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, especially the elegiac form, or songs for the dead. Epic poetry was of still earlier date, as seen in the Homeric poems. The Æolian and Ionic Greeks of Asia were early noted for celebrated poets. Alcæus and Sappho lived on the Isle of Lesbos, and were surrounded with admirers. Anacreon of Teos was courted by the rulers of Athens.
Philosophy.
Even philosophy was cultivated at this early age. Thales [pg 204] of Miletus flourished in the middle of the seventh century, and Anaximander, born B.C. 610—one of the great original mathematicians of the world, speculated like Thales, on the origin of things. Pythagoras, born in Samos, B.C. 580—a still greater name, grave and majestic, taught the harmony of the spheres long before the Ionian revolt.
But neither art, nor literature, nor philosophy reached their full development till a later era. It is enough for our purpose to say that, before the Persian wars, civilization was by no means contemptible, in all those departments which subsequently made Greece the teacher and the glory of the world.