Nominally, every citizen in the federation over the age of thirty could exercise his suffrage. Practically, the distance from the seat of government caused the Common Assembly to become more and more a constitutional fiction. The real power passed into the hands of the few who held positions upon the executive. Patriotism naturally lost much of its old force. Certainly it was no longer the one goad to artistic production as had been the case in the age of Pericles. Nor was this all. With the decay of the virile life in the city, the exquisite sense of form and the power of imaginative generalization which sculpture had derived from continual discussion in the market-place and the law courts, began to weaken. The changed social and political circumstances necessitated an art with fresh methods and fresh ideals. Passing in review the numberless sculptures of Greece produced after 300 B.C., with a view to finding the intellectual and emotional atmosphere which shaped them, we continually meet with a certain romantic subjectivity which is essentially modern. It is this fact which makes much Hellenistic sculpture peculiarly akin to the art of our own day. Hellenic sculpture implied a type of character and a body of ideas of which the twentieth-century man can have no first-hand experience. The Western European of to-day is a member of a community numbering between forty million and eighty million people. He pays his rates and taxes—under protest. There, unless a system of universal military service prevails, his civic duties end. Any very active sympathy with the member of a microscopic city-state is impossible. The typical modern cannot be expected to realize clearly how a political or social event struck one whose chief joy was that he, as an individual, played a very real part in every national action. During the Hellenistic age, however, all this was changed. An essentially twentieth-century individualism prevailed—an individualism which rejected the narrowing limits set by the love of a single city. With the broadening of the individual sympathies, a certain subjectivity replaced the marked objectivity of fourth- and fifth-century Greek thought. With it went much of the earlier depth of passion, much of the old artistic initiative, precisely as it has gone from the “universe-loving” art of to-day. In the new philosophy the individual played a far larger _rôle_. His own thoughts and feelings, as opposed to the thoughts and feelings of his fellow citizens, became predominant. Private life and the interests arising from the family began to suggest a great majority of the themes of the sculpture by which the Hellenistic Greek expressed himself.