Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/199

VI be that the ordinary Athenian did not see the policy in this light ; that he thought of it as tending rather to increase his comfort than his culture. But between comfort and culture Pericles himself can have drawn no real distinction; in his view, if Thucydides reports him rightly, the well-being of the citizen would naturally enable him to develop his individual faculties for the good and the glory of the State.

And we have sufficient evidence that he succeeded in great measure. In no other age or State has so small a population produced so many men of genius, whose rare taste and ability were not wasted or misdirected, but stimulated and called into healthy action by the very circumstances of the everyday life they lived. I do need but mention such names as Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Lysias, Pheidias, Socrates, and Pericles himself, and others whose gifts enabled them "to do some good to their city," to show that individual genius found free play at Athens, and was spent on gaining for her not only a transient glory, but an immortal one. All these poets, artists, and statesmen, and many others of more ordinary fame, found Athens in need of them. What their individual talents could supply was exactly that which was called for by the daily life as well as by the loftier aspirations of the people. To use a modern phrase, they were in harmony with their environment; there was no friction in this golden age between the man of genius and the world he lived in. Truly it cannot be said that