Theophrastus, the friend of Epicurus and of Menander, gives us in his “Characters,” at the close of this period, vivid portraits of Athenian life which supplement the fragments of Menander and the other writers of the New Comedy, and also, as pupil and successor of Aristotle, carried on his master’s teachings in the Lyceum. Thus one pupil busied himself in transmitting through his intellectual heirs the esoteric thought of his master, while Alexander, another pupil, had constructed on lines that paralleled the intellectual imperialism of his teacher a material _organon_ of Empire (utterly at variance with his master’s conception of the ideal state) that no successor could wield alone until Rome reached forth and grasped it in her iron hand. But to understand at all the meaning of the literature, it is also necessary to remind ourselves of some of the more striking features of the history of these two centuries. They are crowded with conspicuous figures and with events significant to the philosophic student of political institutions. In general the fifth century exhibits the rise and downfall of the imperialistic policy, the fourth century the rehabilitation of a chastened democracy, with sporadic echoes of a federalizing ideal. But no one policy can be predicated of the fifth century. It varied with the great leaders, Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, and others—the old in conflict with the new; conservative, aristocratic democracy against imperialism; democracy against oligarchy; ochlocracy against democracy. When the Persian peril was thrust back, the irrepressible conflict between Sparta and Athens emerged. The struggle for the hegemony between them, or between varying combinations of the Greek states, was to continue at intervals until the time when all the old powers of Greece were to succumb to Macedon.