Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/116

 J8 HISTORY OF GREECE. genius,- Anakreon, Ibykus, Pindar, Bacchylides, Simonides, and the dramatists of Athens, continue the line of eminent poets without intermission. After the Persian war, the requirements of public speaking created a class of rhetorical te.'ichers, while the gradual spread of physical philosophy widened the range of instruction; so that prose composition, for speech or for writing, occupied a larger and larger share of the attention of men, and was gradually wrought up to high perfection, such as we see for the first time in Herodotus. But before it became thus improved, and acquired that style which was the condition of wide-spread popularity, we may be sure that it had been silently used as a means of recording information ; and that neither the large mass of geographical matter contained in t.he Periegesis of Hekataeus, nor the map first prepared by his contemporary, Anaximander, could have been presented to the world, without the previous labors of unpretending prose writers, who set down the mere results of their own experience. The acquisition of prose-writing, commencing as it does about the age of Peisistratus, is not less remarkable as an evidence of past, than as a means of future, progress. Of that splendid genius in sculpture and architecture, which shone forth in Greece after the Persian invasion, the first linea- ments only are discoverable between GOO-560 B. c., in Corinth, ^gina, Samos, Chios, Ephesus, etc., enough, however, to give evidence of improvement and progress. Glaukus of Chios i? said to have discovered the art of welding iron, and Rhoekus, 01 his son Theodoras of Samos, the art of casting copper or brass in a mould : both these discoveries, as far as can be made out, ap- pear to date a little before 600 B.C.' The primitive memorial, 1 See O. Miiller, Archaologie der Knnst, sect. 61 ; Sillig, Catalogus Artificium, under Theodoras and Telekles. Thiersch (Epochen der Bildenden Kunst, pp. 182-190, 2d edit.) places Rhcekus near the beginning of the recorded Olympiads ; and supposes twc artists named Theodoras, one the grandson of the other ; but this seems tc me not sustained by any adequate authority (for the loose chronology of Pliny about the Samain school of artists is not more trustworthy thai: about the Chian school, compare xxxv, 12, and xxxvi, 3), and, moreover, intrinsically improbable. Herodotus (i, 51) speaks of "the Samian Theo- dora"," and seems to have known only one person so called : Diodorus