cuse, under Dionysius or Gelon? or were the Spartans enslaved at the time when they banished Timotheus? and was it not from a free republic that Plato proposed to exclude both Homer and Phidias? But there are other causes, concerning the power of which there can be less matter of dispute. The abundance and the beauty of the fruits of the earth are the reward of the labours and the wisdom of the cultivator, and the very same rule holds concerning the productions of genius.
5. It is an ancient maxim, written in every page of the history of the world, that honours are the food of the arts. But honours, properly so called, that is, recompenses accorded to artists, are far from being of themselves sufficient to conduct the arts to perfection. The arts require subjects of exertion capable of inspiring noble ideas, and a sane inflexible theory, which the general taste has sanctioned and protects, and which is above being altered or impaired by the fluctuation of individual opinion. In order to appreciate the causes of their progress and of their decline, and most of all those of their absence, in climates the most favourable—in the midst of riches, of intelligence, and even of liberty itself—we must principally examine whether, in the countries under our present observation, they were so honoured and protected, or altogether abandoned to their own exertions; whether they were enslaved or left at liberty; whether they were reduced to flatter the tastes of private frivolity, or directed by the government itself to the public utility, and the glory of the state. These causes are more powerful than climate, or riches, or peace, or liberty; but these causes are dependent on the will of legislatures. It becomes then matter of the highest interest, to examine by what motives certain legislatures of Greece were induced to make the arts the subject of their most anxious solicitude, while among so many of their neighbours they were altogether neglected or proscribed.
In the first place, the Greeks are not more celebrated for the masterpieces of art, than for the unequalled series of their political dissensions. That spirit of rivalship, which had so long agitated their petty hordes in the first ages of their history, lost nothing of its energy in the midst of those numerous states which had succeeded them. Their legislators had wished to make use of this dangerous principle of emulation—none of them seems even to have endeavoured to destroy it. The laws of the different states were different. Their characters, determined by those laws, were, in many instances, little similar, except in the jealousy and hatred with which they were mutually agitated against each other. But this very spirit of rivalship, which entailed upon them so many calamities, gave birth at the same time to those prodigies of genius and art with which the world has so long been astonished. Every thing had a definite character—every thing was great in a little space—because every human faculty was developed by the contending passions of the Greeks. We see wars by land and wars by see—armies and fleets rapidly destroyed and incessantly renewed—victories at which we cannot too much wonder—and historians still more wonderful It seems to us, in reading the history of Attica, Bœotia, and the Peloponnesus, that we are occupied with that of some immense territory, or rather of the whole world.
One great line of distinction among the Greeks was that, never altogether forgotten, of their various origination. The Dorians and the Ionians never ceased to regard each other as different people. The one were proud of their ancient conquest—the other of their yet more ancient liberty and civilization. Sparta was the patroness of the Doric states, and of oligarchy; Athens of the Ionians, and democracy. These unhappy divisions, fomented by internal ambition and external violence—by Persia in the first instance, next by Macedon, and last of all by the treacherous policy and the overwhelming force of Rome—seemed to increase in strength as Greece advanced in her decline, and never terminated but in her ruin. It is evident, that in this constant opposition of spirits and of interests, the arts could by no means be every where appreciated in the same manner. Aristotle reckons up no less than one hundred and fifty-eight various forms of government, which had existed, or which still existed, in Greece in his own days. It is evident, that the arts, not being equally neces-
