Furthermore, what we have just said of vase manufacturers places them in a popular class whose members did not shine by education. Merchants of free status, metics, freedmen or slaves could not form a society comparable to the one in which lived a Polygnotos or a Phidias. Isocrates says scornfully: “Who would dare compare Phidias to a maker of terracottas, or Zeuxis and Parrhasios to a painter of votive offerings?” He would undoubtedly have said the same of vase painters. We affirm, in fact, that many of these workers were quite illiterate; some were content simply to trace sham letters or letters in juxtaposition, without any meaning, in the place of the usual inscription. Many made gross mistakes, or mixed the dialect of their own country with that of Athens. Some did not even know how to spell the name of the potter for whom they were working, but wrote it in three or four different ways. These little facts help to illustrate the inferior condition of this society. To look here for great artists, philosophers or thinkers, rivals of Pindar and Æschylus, of Phidias and Polygnotos, would be contrary to all likelihood. If Euphronios, Douris or Brygos had genius, it was entirely in their province as skilled draughtsmen, guided and influenced by beautiful models, besides being business men and prudent merchants. The idea of raising such men to the height of creators and inventors would certainly have greatly astonished the Athenians. To sum up, Nature and living truth--the works of great masters and the teachings of the past--these form the double source from which all artists, at all times, have drawn. It would seem difficult to exclude from one or the other the painters of Greek vases. On the contrary, in studying them we feel, although their social position is humble, and their private education mediocre, that they are peculiarly great, inasmuch as their artistic sense is always alert, always emulous of competitors or works of art about them, and, finally, great in that dominant quality which the Greek carries within him--a keen sensitiveness to all that is beautiful in life. As artisans, craftsmen, merchants and metics, they move in a lower sphere in their city; but nothing shows more clearly the power of the environment than seeing in Athens, which had become the spiritual centre of Greece, the working man’s world raising itself without effort from its dead level to the intellectual life of the higher classes: a phenomenon all the more remarkable as it occurred in an ancient society, that is to say, in an era when the social barriers were inflexibly rigid. May modern democracies be inspired by this example and understand that the education of the masses comes from the highly-gifted, and the masses will never be high-minded when those whom fortune has placed above them are worthless. CHAPTER III THE WORKSHOP AND TOOLS OF DOURIS We must regard Douris from two points of view: the craftsman and the artist.