This constant presence of the martial spirit is visible in all that remains to us of their art and literature. Upon the silver ware of Mycenæ we see the Minoans fighting naked, crouching with bow and arrow behind their shields. The statues from Ægina are all of men arrayed for battle with lance, shield, and sword. Even Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom and the household arts, is usually represented wearing the panoply of war, and the decorations of her temple are mostly pictures of battle or of preparation for the fray, the combats between Centaurs and Lapithæ and the marshalling of the mounted soldiers for her solemn procession. Painters, like sculptors, found their chief subjects in war, either in the ancient combats of the epic lays or in the actual life of the parade-ground and the guard-room. The Attic vases of the sixth and fifth centuries, the best example we possess of truly popular art, repeat the warrior motif almost to satiety, and they did so because the potter knew that of this subject at least his clients would never be weary. It is the same in Greek literature, from first to last. In the Homeric poems fighting is the normal business of man. There are fairy-lands, the poet can imagine, where fighting is not the common rule of life, the land of the lotus-eaters, the orchards of the Phæacians, the island realms of Circe and Calypso: but these are all uncanny magic places where decent everyday rules do not hold good. In Homer it is a man’s function to fight, by sea and land, in a chariot or on foot, to use spear and sword, to attack and plunder, or to defend himself from the enemy’s raids. So also with the lyric poets of the next era, from Archilochus downwards; they are men of battle first and men of letters afterwards, squires of the War god, as Archilochus cries: ‘My spear is bread, white kneaded bread, My spear’s Ismarian wine, My spear is food and drink and bed, With it the world is mine.’ We get the same refrain in Hybrias the Cretan, the verses known to English musicians by Campbell’s translation: ‘My wealth’s a burly spear and brand And a right good shield of hides untanned Which on my arm I buckle. With these I plough, I reap, I sow, With these I make the sweet vintage flow And all around me truckle. But your wights that take no pride to wield A massy spear and well made shield, Nor joy to draw the sword, Oh I bring those heartless hapless drones Down in a trice on their marrow bones To call me king and lord.’ ‘King and lord’--they are the only words that the lyrists have for the soldier, and the elegiac poets repeat the idea in the more serious fashion appropriate to their poetical form. Tyrtæus, for example, the lame schoolmaster lent by Athens to Sparta, in those poems which the Spartans regarded as one of the chief causes of their military success, emphasizes the supreme importance of martial valour: