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 begun, though a century is still to elapse before Philip of Macedon shall overthrow the liberties of Greece at Chaeronea.

The interval between the Persian war and the Peloponnesian war—the space which we call the Age of Pericles—is a space of comparative peace and rest, during which all the faculties of the Hellenic nature attain their most complete development in the civic community of Athens. Yet this interval is the only period in Athenian history of which we have no full or continuous record from a contemporary source. Herodotus leaves us at the end of the Persian invasion. Thucydides becomes our guide only at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. It is true that in the opening of his work he glances rapidly at the intervening years. But his hints serve rather to stimulate than to appease our curiosity. We learn from him little more than a few external facts which, taken by themselves, tell us little. With regard to the inner life of Athens in the age of Pericles—the social and the intellectual life—he is silent. Among the names which are nowhere mentioned by him are those of the poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes; the philosopher Anaxagoras; the sculptor Pheidias; the architect Ictinus. He incidentally notices the Parthenon, but only as a treasury; he notices the Propylaea,—but only as a work which had reduced the balance in the treasury. This silence, however tantalising it may be for us, admits of a simple explanation. His chosen subject, as he conceived it, was a purely