I have said that the dissolution of empire began in the same generation which had reared that empire to its extreme height. Brevis in perfecto mora is the text of a tragedy in which nations are actors. A number of various confluent forces crystallise into a civilisation; and no sooner is the organic unit perfected than its undoing begins, its elements fly off into new combinations. The unmaking of Athens begins the making of the Hellenistic civilisation.

The spiritual dissolution of the Periclean Age is present no doubt in germ from very early in its formation. But it was late before the worm of rationalism became active in the mass. Greece had been inoculated against scepticism by the religious counter-reformation of beliefs, which we see exemplified in Pindar and Aeschylus. The general conscience of Athens was satisfied with its religion as expressed by the finer spirits. The solvent voices of Anaxagoras, Euripides, Socrates were still only making disciples in the conventicle. And Athens rejected Anaxagoras in spite of Pericles' favour, as she rejected the antinational influence of Aspasia; Euripides could only get his sceptic cup accepted by copiously sweetening the lip with ironical flattery; Socrates was perhaps only known to his fellow townsmen as a crank and a bore during the time

that he was breeding, in an Alcibiades and a Critias, the revolutions of the future.

The national idea, then, of the day was an active, harmonious enjoyment of the faculties of life. Body and soul were trained pari passu in education; citizen and individual-each was at his highest power. The true Periclean is too busy fighting, voting, judging, administering, imbibing daily education from Plastic, Music, Rhetoric, Poetry, enjoying the recollections of glory still fresh, the exercise of capacities of self-realisation not yet staled, to trouble himself while he works at his trade (the trade of citizen added to his individual vocation enjoined by the Solonian law), as to whether this glorious new-perfected instrument of language is not in truth a garment for inconsistency and self-delusion, or the Pantheon in which every phase of his life and thought is ideally symbolised, in truth a degrading and obsolescent fiction.

War favours religious, as Peace favours philosophical, superstition. Perhaps the very war which began the material downfall, helped in its earlier stage to brace and maintain the framework of life which we call the Periclean civilisation. Till the imminent shadow of disaster darkened the bright confidence in herself which had radiated into such a complete circle of

energies, stress and danger made her more resolutely vindicate herself-evince herself, her national soul and mind in the typical life which had been found to express it.

Sophocles was born amid the origins of the Athenian greatness: Marathon was a child's dream to him; the evacuation and destruction of Athens, the victory of Salamis a boy's memory illuminated by his own selection to take a leading part in the thanksgiving festival which followed. And his death falls within a few months of the battle which decided the

doom of Athenian supremacy. So his life coincides with the fifth century.

We have none of the works of his youth preserved.

It is a curious fact that of none of the Three Tragedians have we any early work, unless the Cyclops of Euripides: perhaps an evidence to the long apprenticeship required in tragic art before even a master genius could produce a masterpiece. Ars longa.

Of what survives, the most (and the best) belongs to the period of incipient disintegration in that National Idea which we figure him as symbolising. But he symbolises none the less. truly. It has been said that a man's character becomes set when he is between thirty and forty; by then he has digested the conscious and

unconscious influences of his breeding and his studies, and after that his mind is rigid, more apt to react than to receive. But the middle years of Sophocles' life were such years as might well prolong the period of elastic receptivity. He was not yet forty when the fall of Aegina commenced the career of Athens as a great power in Greece proper; he was sixty-five when the Peloponnesian War began. Within this space lies the period he represents. Yet, though he write twenty years later still, he is none the less a true witness to the ideas of the dominant date. Subsequent changes reveal to him objectively the shape of the perfect time they begin to impair. He gives us the spirit of the Periclean world, with something of the analytic judgment of one who sees his ideal all the more clearly by comparison with the new times into which he has outlived. Tennyson to the day of his death is still the man of the fifties, appreciating, judging, partially assimilatingbut not incarnating the nineties.

Riches and success contribute not a little perhaps to the making of such a typical person. The struggling, discontented contemporary is thrown forward to anticipate. Sophocles and Euripides are well-nigh coevals, but the unsuccessful 'greengrocer's son is intellectually and spiritually generations ahead of

the rich, leisured son of Sophillus the merchant, who liked his times and was liked by them. Perhaps no one but a man of the rich, cultivated mercantile class was so fit to be the literary voice of the commercial aristocracy, which made the earlier party of Pericles, and which he used to enfranchise the full democracy that succeeded it. It is the same class to which Herodotus belongs in Ionia; the same which afterwards produced Lysias (most Philistine of Classics) and Plato. Easy circumstances allowed the development of the artistic instincts natural in the race; and travel, confined in those days to the purposes of war or commerce, brought an enormous influence into the thought of the time. There is a vivid passage in De Quincey's Essay on Style (p. 174) which depicts the importance of the travelling philosopher in filling the hungry mind of his generation: philosopher, I call him, not as being one who tries to fit all experience into the four corners of a system, but in the Greek sense of one who indulges a methodical curiosity. The acquaintance between Sophocles and Herodotus is attested; and were it not, the resemblances of doctrine and diction are too signal to be dismissed as accident.

When Aristophanes recalls regretfully the