There is perhaps no more awful page in the book of human history than that which pictures the scene in the Piræus after Ægospotami, when the last Athenian fleet was destroyed by Lysander in 405 B.C. “That night not a man slept.” Every Athenian remembered the fate of Demosthenes and Nicias at the hands of the revengeful Syracusans. He called to mind the living death of his 7000 countrymen condemned to a slavery in the stone quarries of Achradina. Now that the final catastrophe had come, his memory must have carried him back to his vote in 428 B.C., when the Assembly ordered the execution of the whole adult male population of Mytilene and Lesbos. He recalled the sentence passed upon the inhabitants of the rebellious Melos, which ended in the death of every man of military age. As these thoughts crowded in, each man must have asked if the gods would save him as they had saved the men of Mytilene, or whether his fate would be the death he had meted out to the soldiers of Melos and that of his wife and children the slavery that had befallen the rest of the islanders. 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. The first effect of the shattering of the imperial dream was to scatter Athenian culture broadcast over the Hellenic world. The store-house of Athenian genius was opened to all. The typical Greek of the new era was the cosmopolitan Xenophon. The ideal of Pericles, “my state right, or my state wrong, but _my_ state, right or wrong,” was sadly out of date. Phidias was an Athenian, born and bred. His life-work was for Athens, and the one thing that Athens shared with Greece—the worship of Zeus. But Scopas was a Parian by birth and an Athenian only by adoption. He worked everywhere and for anybody—as a young man in Tegea; as an old man in Asia Minor upon the great mausoleum erected by the Ephesian Artemisia to her Carian husband. [Illustration: THE MAUSOLEUM CHARIOTEER British Museum]