In arts and letters Megara’s achievements were slight, although tradition assigned to her the creation of comedy. Only one of her poets, Theognis, belongs to our canon of Greek literature. A contemporary of Solon, he exhibited the same tendency to use poetry as a medium of political discussion, but he was totally opposed to the democratic influences which in his city, as elsewhere, were making headway against the aristocracy. Oligarchy and tyranny had been succeeded by this larger struggle. Although Theognis was in the thick of the fight, his wide influence in later centuries was due rather to his sententious utterances on ethics, which classed him with the “gnomic poets.” Xenophon called the poetry of Theognis “a comprehensive treatment concerning men,” and as such it was used with the works of Homer and Hesiod in the educational system of fourth-century Athens. Moderns will find in the extant fragments little of the power which saves a poet’s politics and ethics from becoming in a later age either outworn or commonplace. But in the public square of the village, the old hillside market-place, we acquire a sympathy for his personal life and his love of home. Here he stood and looked down upon the fields of his confiscated estates, wasted in the riotous living of new masters. The shrill cry of a bird, announcing the autumnal harvests, reminded him that no longer for him were mules drawing the curved plough through the furrows. The sea, lying at the door of Megara, bore him into exile, and with Alcæus and Plato (and their Roman and modern imitators) he likened the State to a ship in danger, sailed by an evil crew, threatened by leaping waves. In the Persian wars Megara made a brave show, sinking all animosity toward Athens in the great need of Hellas. But fifty years later a bitter quarrel with Athens became one of the precipitating causes of the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians had passed a decree excluding the Megarians from their markets and from all the harbours in their dominions. The Spartans demanded its revocation, and the Athenians, influenced by Pericles, refused. Opinions differed as to his disinterestedness. In the judgment of Thucydides he was moved solely by reasons of state. The more popular opinion that he was involved by Aspasia in a scandalous affair affecting both cities appears in Aristophanes, who also does not fail to see the comic side of a situation which forced the impoverished Megarians to work their way secretly into the Athenian markets bringing cucumbers and sucking pigs and garlic under their cloaks. The later comic poets made a butt of the Megarians, and the Megarian’s sneer about the Athenian figs and Propylæa was doubtless only one of many retorts.