The immense development of Grecian art subsequently, and the great perfection of Grecian artists, are facts of great importance in the history of the human race. And in regard to the Greeks themselves, they not only acted powerfully on the taste of the people, but were also valuable indirectly as the common boast of Hellenism, and as supplying one bond of fraternal sympathy as well as of mutual pride, among its widely-dispersed sections. It is the paucity and weakness of these bonds which renders the history of Greece, prior to 560 B. C., little better than a series of parallel, but isolated threads, each attached to a separate city; and that increased range of joint Hellenic feeling and action, upon which we shall presently enter, though arising doubtless in great measure from new and common dangers threatening many cities at once,—also springs in part from those other causes which have been enumerated in this chapter as acting on the Grecian mind. It proceeds from the stimulus applied to all the common feelings in religion, art, and recreation,—from the gradual formation of national festivals, appealing in various ways to tastes and sentiments which animated every Hellenic bosom,—from the inspirations of men of genius, poets, musicians, sculptors, architects, who supplied more or less in every Grecian city, education for the youth, training for the chorus, and ornament for the locality,—from the gradual expansion of science, philosophy, and rhetoric, during the coming period of this history, which rendered one city the intellectual capital of Greece, and brought to Isokratês and Plato pupils from the most distant parts of the Grecian world. It was this fund of common tastes, tendencies, and aptitudes, which caused the social atoms of Hellas to gravitate towards each other, and which enabled the Greeks to become something better and greater than an aggregate of petty disunited communities like the Thracians or Phrygians. And the creation of such common, extra-political Hellenism, is the most interesting phenomenon which the historian has to point out in the early period now under our notice. He is called upon to dwell upon it the more forcibly, because the modern reader has generally no idea of national union without political union,—an association foreign to the Greek mind. Strange as it may seem to find a song-writer put forward as an active instrument of union among his fellow-Hellens, it is not the less true, that those poets, whom we have briefly passed in review, by enriching the common language, and by circulating from town to town either in person or in their compositions, contributed to fan the flame of Pan-Hellenic patriotism at a time when there were few circumstances to coöperate with them, and when the causes tending to perpetuate isolation seemed in the ascendant. CHAPTER XXX. GRECIAN AFFAIRS DURING THE GOVERNMENT OF PEISISTRATUS AND HIS SONS AT ATHENS.