Both voices spoke impressively to Greece, and her literature echoes their tones. So long as Greece was free and the spirit of freedom animated the Greeks, so long their literature was creative and genius marked it. When liberty perished, literature declined. The field of Chæronea was fatal alike to the political liberty and to the literature of Greece. The love of liberty was indeed pushed even to an extreme in Greece; and this also was due to the physical configuration of the country. Mountains, it has been said, divide; seas unite. The rise and the long continuance in so small a country of so many cities, having their own laws, constitution, separate history, and independent existence, can only be explained by the fact that in their early growth they were protected, each by the mountains which surrounded it, so effectually, and the love of liberty in this time was developed to such an extent, that no single city was able to establish its dominion over the others. … Everyone of the numerous states, whose separate political existence was guaranteed by the mountains, was actually or potentially a separate centre of civilisation and of literature. In some one of these states each kind of literature could find the conditions appropriate or necessary to its development. Even a state which produced no men of literary genius itself might become the centre at which poets collected and encouraged the literature it could not produce, as was the case with Sparta, to which Greece owed the development of choral lyric. … The eastern basin of the Mediterranean has deserved well of literature, for it brought Greece into communication with her colonies on the islands and on the surrounding coasts, and enabled the numerous Greek cities to co-operate in the production of a rich and varied literature, instead of being confined each to a one-sided and incomplete development. The process of communication began in the earliest times, as is shown by the spread of epic literature. Originating in Ionia, it was taken up in Cyprus, where the epic called the Cypria was composed, and, at the beginning of the sixth century it was on the coast of Africa in the colony of Cyrene. The rapid spread of elegiac poetry is even more strikingly illustrated, for we find Solon in Athens quoting from his contemporary Mimnermus of Colophon. Choral lyric, which originated in Asia Minor, was conveyed to Sparta by Alcman, and by Simonides of Ceos all over the Greek world. But although in early times we find as much interchange and reaction in the colonies amongst themselves as between the colonies and the mother-country, with the advance of time we find the centripetal tendency becoming dominant. {1638} The mother-country becomes more and more the centre to which all literature and art gravitates. At the beginning of the