Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/107

Rh the powerful state which excavations have proved her once to have been, and the constant quarrels between the independent cities of the island were rapidly making it a byword for lawlessness and misery. The Greek cities of Asia had attained to considerable prosperity, and it was in them and the adjacent islands, as we have seen, that the earliest post-Homeric literature flourished. But this progress was checked by the loss of political independence, without which nothing ever seemed to flourish among Greeks. How this came about will be the subject of the next chapter. In the fifth century B.C. the real life of Greece was in Europe, and it was there that she entered upon her glorious inheritance of genius.