In the fifth century, lyric was brought to its perfection by singers not of Athens. But Ceos, the birthplace of two of them, was moored close to Attica. Simonides, the poet-laureate of the Persian wars, was much in Athens, and his nephew Bacchylides took the Attic Theseus for the theme of two of his extant poems, wrote one of his epinician odes in honour of an Athenian victor, and composed another poem expressly in laudation of Athens. Pindar himself studied in Athens, and afterwards, to his own townspeople’s disgust, praised her in no grudging terms. The Athenian drama itself, in the chorals of tragedy and of Aristophanes, contributed much of the greatest lyric extant in Greek literature. Tragedy in the fifth century grew from infancy to maturity at Athens. When Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had completed their work it had received its final form for the Greeks, and was so transmitted to the great actors and the lesser playwrights of the fourth century. Comedy likewise culminated with Aristophanes in the fifth century. More flexible than tragedy, however, it could humour successfully the changing moods of the body politic and retain its vigour through the whole of the fourth century. Even under Macedon, Menander in the New Comedy could recast much that Euripides had tried, with varying success, to embody within the canonized limits of orthodox tragedy. History was the gift of the fifth century. Herodotus after the Persian wars bridged with his epic prose the Ægean, and we reach _terra firma_ in Thucydides’s history in the latter part of the century. In the first part of the fourth century we have Xenophon, the historian, biographer, essay-writer, and historical novelist. These were precursors of a line of historians appearing sporadically even down through Byzantine times.