There can be little doubt that, as a rule, the Hellenistic age could not stand the intensity of emotion aroused by such a work as the “Venus of Milo.” The “golden age” of Greece had passed away when every Greek knew that it was good to be alive. During Hellenistic times Greek citizenship became a doubtful blessing. It chiefly served to remind its possessors of the lost glories of an earlier age. Can we be surprised that men looked to art to redress the balance, and called for the works which would wean them for a few moments from the dreary truths of existence? No single formula will explain all the facts, but some connection between the degree of strenuousness in the political and social life of a state and the degree of strenuousness reached in its art, is certain. Consider the case of Homer—the direct outcome of the victorious struggle which the Greeks waged with the barbarians upon the shores of the Eastern Ægean. In the Athenian artists, Phidias, Polygnotus and Sophocles, we find the alliance of restful calm with the deepest thought and emotion which we should expect during a period of relative peace and prosperity, following an intense though victorious struggle. But how, it may be asked, did the long fight with Sparta during the Peloponnesian war affect Athenian art? The old emotional depth became unbearable. Comedy arose. In sculpture, Praxiteles replaced Phidias. Coming to our own artistic history, we find an English audience answering to the deep emotional appeal of _Macbeth_ or _Lear_ in the years which followed the glorious victory over the Armada. The period after the severe self-repression of the puritanical era naturally enough produced such a comedy as Congreve’s _Way of the World_. But this antipathy to too strenuous an art is not the only factor which led to a great increase in the range of subjects open to the Greek sculptor, and presented a host of lighter themes to his chisel. The “Rape of the Lock” was the outcome of the boudoir experience upon which the fancy of Pope was nourished. The eighteenth century could not furnish the mental and emotional stimulus needful for the production of _Othello_. But it could and did suggest a perfectly charming poem to the “unwhipt, unblanketed, unkicked, unslain carcase” we call Alexander Pope. May this not have been the case in Hellenistic Greece? Previously “Greek life had been too full to put frills on its thoughts,” as De Quincey once said. But the Hellenistic age revelled in the very “frills” which the men of the fourth and fifth centuries had rejected. Allegory replaced natural symbolism. Instead of Aphrodite—Cupid. For Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, and Eros, the personification of the desire which makes powerless the limbs of men—Cupid, the smiling embodiment of the love which flits from fancy to fancy. [Illustration: BOY STRANGLING A GOOSE Louvre, Paris] [Illustration: CHILD WITH LANTERN Terme Museum, Rome]