But it was in Attica, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. that the Hellenic culture reached its finest flower. We use the word _Attic_[7] to describe a peculiarly finished work of art or an exquisite literary style. No wonder. In the city state of Athens, for the first time among the Aryans, there began to grow up something which an educated man of to-day would be willing to recognize as a civilization. In that clear air of a marvellous political freedom—a social atmosphere which could have condensed from none but Aryan moral ideas—the matured, age-old wisdom of Egypt and the East was absorbed by these youngsters and transformed in a few hundred years into a science, an art, and a philosophy of their own which have never been wholly surpassed. Consequently, the names of many things which we regard as the very hall-marks of a cultured society can be traced back to the Attic dialect of this period, and no farther. _Academy_, _school_, _history_, _philosophy_, _logic_, _grammar_, _poetry_, _rhythm_, _harmony_, _melody_, _music_, are all from Greek words which were in common use in Athens, and the lasting influence of her sublime dramatic tradition is indicated by the great words, _chorus_, _comedy_, _drama_, _theatre_, and _tragedy_, and the lesser _catastrophe_, _episode_, _prologue_, and _protagonist_, all of which draw their meanings from the originality and inspiration of the great Athenian dramatists. Meanwhile another branch of the Aryan family had found its way into Italy, and there, in the eighth century before our era, had founded the city of Rome. It is noticeable that the pitch darkness in which the early doings of all the Aryans are lost often seems to flash into a spark of myth or legend at those moments when they come into contact with other races. It is just such a spark which, in the famous story of the rape of the Sabine women, lights up for us one of the early shocks of encounter between these Italiot Aryans and the older inhabitants of Italy.