In this chapter, however, we have to do directly only with the Athens of the fifth or fourth centuries. If the physical remains from this period are fragmentary, the literature, although itself but fragments of the whole, is the great bulk of existing classic Greek literature outside of the epic, the earlier philosophers, and the lyric. And this _corpus_ of literature was in large part native Attic. At the same time the talent from without gravitated also to Athens. Herodotus from the Dorian Halicarnassus not only wrote in Ionic, but adopted the Athenian attitude so largely as to vitiate in part his value as an independent historian. Hippocrates, the great Ionian physician, visited Athens. The Sophists, though coming from the North, the West, or the islands, found in Athens the appropriate environment for a “circuit” faculty of an unarticulated federal university. Prose, seasoned and adorned, became henceforth an asset of the Athenian intellect and was made ready for the use of historian, orator, and philosopher. Athens, mistress of the seas, and herself producer of art and literature, needed no protective tariff against intellectual imports. This very wealth of fifth and fourth century literature imposes limitations, more rigid than our uncertainty about this, that, or the other site, upon the effort to interpret the external Athens from the more enduring monuments of her thinkers. Nor is it true that the nexus between Athens and her literature may be made clear only by definite localization. We do not wish the conditions reversed. Although, for example, the courtrooms and the Lyceum have disappeared, we may, as we wander about Athens to-day, come much nearer the Greeks of the classic age than if, while the buildings had remained intact, the words of the orators and of the great Peripatetic could no longer reach our ears. The so-called “Theseum,” largely perfect as it is and invaluable for architectural and artistic suggestion, leaves us cold in the lack of literary association as compared with the Propylæa where many an old-time Athenian rubs elbows with us as we pass in and out between its stately columns. But in a wider sense we may “localize,” here on this Attic plain around the Acropolis and here under this Attic sky, the poetry and prose of the fifth and fourth centuries. A brief summary of this poetry and prose will perhaps suggest more clearly the larger pattern from which, almost arbitrarily, selections may be made.