Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/198

174 objects, and there was no obvious opening for the accumulation of a vast capital in the hands of an individual. The spirit of moderation, the inheritance of Solon's reasonableness, so far as we can see, survived in Athens for at least two centuries.

The truth is that the surplus public wealth — I leave aside for the moment the sources from which it was drawn — was spent on the intellectual and æsthetic education of the whole Athenian people. It was not spent only on the powerful navy which secured to Athens her commanding influence in Greece, or even on the splendid religious festivals which called on every Athenian at stated times to come out and feast and enjoy himself, or on the gymnasia which were to develop the bodily beauty and strength of boy and man alike. It was spent on the erection of those magnificent buildings on the Acropolis, of which the ruins still stand; on those inimitable sculptures which still serve to educate the imperfect artistic feeling of our modern world; on the exhibition, open to every citizen, however poor, of the tragic and comic dramas, in some of which the most perfect of languages lives still in its most perfect form. To put it briefly, it was spent in raising the whole level of the of Athens, — of the ways of thinking and feeling in which every citizen grew up. It may