This blossoming age of poetry and the drama came after the desperate struggles of the Persian War, which had left Athens a heap of ruins. In the new Athens which rose under the fostering care of Pericles, not only literature flourished but art reached its culmination, temple and hall, colonnade and theatre showing the artistic beauty and grandeur of the new architecture, while such sculptors as Phidias and such painters as Zeuxis adorned the city with the noblest products of art. During these busy years Athens became a marvel of beauty and art, the resort of strangers from all quarters, the ablest workers in marble and metal, the noblest artists, poets, and philosophers, until for more than a century that city was the recognized centre of the loftiest products of the human intellect. Prose came later than poetry, but was soon flourishing as luxuriantly. The early historians quickly yielded Herodotus, the delightful old storyteller, with his poetic prose; Xenophon, with his lucid and flowing narrative; and Thucydides, the greatest of ancient historians and the first to give philosophic depth to the annals of mankind. The advent of history was accompanied by that of oratory, which among the Greeks developed into one of the choicest forms of literature, especially in the case of the greatest of the world's orators, Demosthenes, whose orations were inspired by the noblest of themes, that of a patriotic effort to preserve the independence of Greece against the ambitious designs of Philip of Macedon. Philosophy, the third great form of Greek prose literature, was as diligently cultivated, and has left as many examples for modern perusal. The works of the earlier philosophers were in verse, while Socrates, the first of the moral philosophers, left no writings, doing his work with tongue instead of pen, though he forms the leading character in Plato's philosophic dialogues. In Plato we have the most famous of the world's philosophers, and a writer of the ablest skill, in whose works the imagination of the poet is happily blended with the reasoning of the philosopher, his productions constituting a form of philosophic drama, in which the character of each speaker is closely preserved, Socrates being usually the chief personage introduced. Following Plato came Aristotle, his equal in fame though not in literary merit. His name will long survive as that of one of the ablest thinkers the world has produced, a reasoner of exceptional ability, whose scope of research covered all fields and whose discoveries in practical science formed the first true introduction to mankind of this great field of human study, to-day the greatest of them all.