(C) _The Literature of the Decadence._--The period of decadence in Greek literature begins with the extinction of free political life in the Greek cities. So long as the Greek commonwealths were independent and vigorous, Greek life rested on the identity of the man with the citizen. The city state was the highest unit of social organization; the whole training and character of the man were viewed relatively to his membership of the city. The market-place, the assembly, the theatre were places of frequent meeting, where the sense of citizenship was quickened, where common standards of opinion or feeling were formed. Poetry, music, sculpture, literature, art, in all their forms, were matters of public interest. Every citizen had some degree of acquaintance with them, and was in some measure capable of judging them. The poet and the musician, the historian and the sculptor, did not live a life of studious seclusion or engrossing professional work. They were, as a rule, in full sympathy with the practical interests of their time. Their art, whatever its form might be, was the concentrated and ennobled expression of their political existence. Aeschylus breathed into tragedy the inspiration of one who had himself fought the great fight of national liberation. Sophocles was the colleague of Pericles in a high military command. Thucydides describes the operations of the Peloponnesian War with the practical knowledge of one who had been in charge of a fleet. Ictinus and Pheidias gave shape in stone, not to mere visions of the studio, but to the more glorious, because more real and vivid, perceptions which had been quickened in them by a living communion with the Athenian spirit, by a daily contemplation of Athenian greatness, in the theatre where tragic poets idealized the legends of the past, in the ecclesia where every citizen had his vote on the policy of the state, or in that free and gracious society, full of beauty, yet exempt from vexatious constraint, which belonged to the age of Pericles. The tribunal which judged these works of literature or art was such as was best fitted to preserve the favourable conditions under which they arose. Criticism was not in the hands of a literary clique or of a social caste. The influence of jealousy or malevolence, and the more fatal influence of affectation, had little power to affect the verdict. The verdict was pronounced by the whole body of the citizens. The success or failure of a tragedy was decided, not by the minor circumstance that it gained the first or second prize, but by the collective opinion of the citizens assembled in the theatre of Dionysus. A work of architecture or sculpture was approved or condemned, not by the sentence of a few whom the multitude blindly followed, but by the general judgment of some twenty thousand persons, each of whom was in some degree qualified by education and by habit to form an independent estimate. The artist worked for all his fellow-citizens, and knew that