To Zenobia the victor behaved with a generous clemency such as the conquering emperors of Rome rarely indulged in. He presented her with an elegant villa at Tibur, or Tivoli, about twenty miles from the imperial city; and here, surrounded by luxury, she who had played so imperial a _role_ in history sank into the humbler state of a Roman matron. Her daughters married into noble families, and the descendants of the once Queen of the East were still known in Rome in the fifth century of the Christian era. _THE LITERARY GLORY OF GREECE._ Shall we now leave the domain of historic events, of which the land of Greece presents so large and varied a store, and consider that other feature of national life and development which has made Greece the most notable of lands--the intellectual growth of its people, the splendor of art and literature which gave it a glory that glows unfading still? In the whole history of mankind there is nothing elsewhere to compare with the achievements of the Greek intellect during the few centuries in which freedom and thought flourished on that rocky peninsula, and the names and works handed down to us are among the noblest in the grand republic of thought. Just when this remarkable era of literature began we do not know. So far as any remains of it are concerned, it began as the sun begins its daily career in the heavens, with a lustre not surpassed in any part of its course. For the oldest of Greek writings which we possess are among the most brilliant, comprising the poems of Homer, the model of all later works in the epic field, and which light up and illustrate a broad period of human history as no works in different vein could do. They shine out in a realm of darkness, and show us what men were doing and thinking and how they were living and striving at a time which but for them would be buried in impenetrable darkness. This was the epoch of the wandering minstrel, when the bard sang his stirring lays of warlike scenes and heroic deeds in castle and court. But the mind of Greece was then awakening in other fields, and it is of great interest to find that Homer was quickly followed by an epic writer of markedly different vein, Hesiod, the poet of peace and rural labors, of the home and the field. While Homer paints for us the warlike life of his day, Hesiod paints the peaceful labors of the husbandman, the holiness of domestic life, the duty of economy, the education of youth, and the details of commerce and politics. He also collects the flying threads of mythological legend and lays down for us the story of the gods in a work of great value as the earliest exposition of this picturesque phase of religious belief. The veil is lifted from the face of youthful Greece by these two famous writers, and we are shown the land and its people in full detail at a period of whose conditions we otherwise would be in total ignorance.