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No pleasant picture. But it is to these events that the world owes the sculptures of Scopas and Praxiteles.

Accepting, as we do, the dictum of Pericles, “Athens is the school of Hellas,” we have no hesitation in turning to her social and political history for an explanation of the essential difference between the sculpture of Greece in the fifth and the fourth century. The term “Athenian” cannot be used at will for “Hellenic.” Every city and state in Greece contributed something to the Hellenic genius. Each added its quota to the fund of intellectual and emotional experience upon which the great Greek artists drew. In these 150 city-states all types of political institutions and social customs flourished. Some developed their citizens in one direction, others in another. Men of all types were created. But Athens alone absorbed and utilized all the artistic energies generated in the Ægean peninsula. In the Athenian character alone do we find those traits which, for want of a better name, we may term Pan-Hellenic.