Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/119

NATIONALIZING EFFECTS OF ART. 101 as acting on the Grecian mind. It proceeds from the stimulus applied to all the common feelings in religion, art, and recrea- tion. from the gradual formation of national festivals, appeal- ing in various ways to tastes and sentiments which animated every Hellenic bosom, from the inspirations of men of genius, poets, musicians, sculptors, architects, who supplied more or less in every Grecian city, education for the youth, training for tli-3 chorus, and ornament for the locality, from the gradual expan- sion of science, philosophy, and rhetoric, during the coming period of this history, which rendered one city the intellectual capital of Greece, and brought to Isokrates and Plato pupils from the most distant parts of the Grecian world. It was this fund of common tastes, tendencies, and aptitudes, which caused the social atoms of Hellas to gravitate towards each other, and which enabled the Greeks to become something better and greater than an aggregate of petty disunited communities like the Thracians or Phrygians. And the creation of such common, extra-political Hellenism, is the most interesting phenomenon which the historian has to point out in the early period now under our notice. He is called upon to dwell upon it the more forcibly, because the modern reader has generally no idea of national union without political union, an association foreign to the Greek mind. Strange as it may seem to find a song- writer put forward as an active instrument of union among his fellow-Hellens, it is not the less true, that those poets, whom we have briefly passed in review, by enriching the common lan- guage, and by circulating from town to town either in person or in their compositions, contributed to fan the flame of Pan-Hel- lenic patriotism at a time when there were few circumsfar.ees to oooperate with them, and when the causes tending to p< . Actuate isolation seemed in the ascendant. LISPARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORM RIVERSIDE