Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/160

132 about the same time Aristides died. A new age was beginning with new men. Greece for about a hundred years was freed from foreign interference, and free to develop in her own way in various parts of the world.

For it was not only Greece proper to which relief from danger had come at this time. In the West a like deliverance had been wrought by Gelo of Syracuse, who, about the same time as the battle of Salamis (Sept. B.C. 480), won a great victory over the Carthaginians at Himera; and in B.C. 474 his successor Hiero conquered the Etruscans at Cumae, the rivals of the Carthaginians for naval supremacy in the Western Mediterranean. It was in this Western or Italian Hellas that, up to this time, the new intellectual movement in Greece had been most prominent. Pythagoras of Samos (fl. B.C. 530–510) had spent most of his later life at Croton, where he founded a school; Xenophanes of Colophon in Sicily and Italy was teaching purer doctrines as to the gods; and a school of philosophers arose at Elea or Velia in Italy, beginning with Parmenides (fl. B.C. 495) and Empedocles (fl. B.C. 455), whose speculations on nature, reason, and ethics had an abiding effect on Greek thought.

But the centre of the intellectual as well as the political life of Hellas was not to be in these outlying parts; for the next hundred years it was to be in Central Greece, and, above all, in Athens. The achievements and heroes of the Persian wars were already finding worthy record in the songs and epigrams of Simonides (d. about B.C. 459), while