There is no other instance in Browning of such a survival. In his other poems on Greek subjects it is Browning bringing Greek life to our ken with wonderful distinctness, but doing it according to his own accustomed poetical methods, or, as in "Ixion," a Greek story has been used as a symbol for the inculcating of a philosophy which is largely Browning's own. In spite of the fact that he has turned to Greece so seldom for inspiration, his Greek poems range from such stirring pictures of Greek life and feeling as one gets in the splendid dramatic idyl "Pheidippides," based on a historical incident, through the imaginary "Cleon," in which is found the sublimated essence of Greek philosophical thought at the time of Christ--thought, weary of law and beauty, longing for a fresh inspiration, knowing not what, and unable to perceive it in the new ideal of love being taught by the Christians--to "Aristophanes' Apology," in which the Athens of his day, with its literary and political factions, is presented with a force and analysis which place it second only to "The Ring and the Book." This poem taken, with Balaustion, gives the reader not only a comprehensive view of the historical atmosphere of the time but indirectly shows the poet's own attitude toward the literary war between Euripides and Aristophanes. So different are Browning's Greek poems from all other poems upon classical subjects that it will be interesting to dwell upon the most important of them at greater length than has been deemed necessary in the case of the more widely known and read of the poems. "Cleon" links itself with the nineteenth century, because of its dealing with the problem of immortality, a problem which has been ever present in the mind of the century. Cleon has, beside that type of synthetic mind which belongs to a ripe phase of civilization. Though he is a Greek and a pagan, he stretches hands across the centuries to men of the type of Morris or Matthew Arnold. He is the latest child of his own time, the heir of all the ages during which Greece had developed its æsthetic perfection, discovered the inadequacy of its established religion, come through its philosophers and poets to a perception of the immortality of the soul, and sunk again to a skepticism which had no vision of personal immortality at least, though among the stoics there were some who believed in an absorption into divine being. Cleon would fain believe in personal immortality but cannot, and, like Matthew Arnold, believes in facing death imperturbably.