Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/298

276 form, when Athens, raised as well by her political power and other external circumstances as by the mental qualities of her citizens, acquired the rank of a capital of Greece, with respect to literature and art. Not only was her copious native literature received with admiration by all the Greeks, but her judgment and taste were predominant in all things relating to language and the arts, and decided what should be generally recognised as the classical literature of Greece, long before the Alexandrine critics had prepared their canons. There is no more important epoch in the history of the Greek intellect than the time when Athens obtained this pre-eminence over her sister states.

The character of the Athenians peculiarly fitted them to take this lead. The Athenians were Ionians; and, when their brethren separated from them in order to found the twelve cities on the coast of Asia Minor, the foundations of the peculiar character of Ionic civilization had already been laid. The dialect of the Ionians was distinguished from that of the Dorians and Æolians by clear and broad marks: the worship of the gods, which had a peculiarly joyful and serene cast among the Ionians, had been moulded into fixed national festivals : and some steps towards the development of republican feeling had already been taken, before this separation occurred. The boundless resources and mobility of the Ionian spirit are shown by the astonishing productions of the Ionians in Asia and the islands in the two centuries previous to the Peisian war; viz., the iambic and elegiac poetry, and the germs of philosophic inquiry and historical composition; not to mention the epic poetry, which belongs to an earlier and different period. The literary works produced during that time by the Ionians who remained behind in Attica, seem poor and meagre, as compared with the luxuriant outburst of literature in Asia Minor: nor did it appear, till a later period, that the progress of the Athenian intellect was the more sound and lasting. The advance of the literature of the Ionians in Asia Minor (which reminds us of the premature growth of a plant taken from a cold climate and barren soil, and carried to a warmer and more fertile region), as compared with that of the Athenians, corresponds with the natural circumstances of the two countries. Ionia had, according to Herodotus, the softest and mildest climate in Greece; and, although he does not assign it the first rank in fertility, yet the valleys of this region (especially that of the Mæander) were of remarkable productiveness. Attica, on the other hand, was rocky, and its soil was shallow ; though not barren, it required more skill and care in cultivation than most other parts of Greece: hence, according to the sagacious remark