The opulence and security, with the resulting consciousness of power, and the love of elegance, which followed the defeat of the Barbarians, proved especially propitious to the arts of sculpture and architecture. If in the former any doubt be entertained, what the difference of improvement was between the artists who preceded and those who followed the age of Xerxes, we have only to recall the fortunes of the drama during the same heart-stirring period. In the last of the 74th Olympiad, A. C. 489, or one year after the battle of Marathon, Æschylus placed the first wreath upon the solemn brow of Tragedy. Not twenty years afterwards, the warrior bard was vanquished by his youthful rival. Between the Prometheus of Æschylus, then, and the [OE]dipus of Sophocles, we find as wide an interval as is necessary to suppose between the sculptures contemporary with the former, and the productions of Polycletus or Myron. CHAPTER III. THE age of Pericles seemed marked out by fortune as a distinguished epoch in the history of his country. The fine talents, also, and popular qualities of this accomplished statesman, were admirably adapted to turn to the best account the propitious circumstances of the period. To the further progress of the fine arts, and of sculpture in particular, preceding events, and their present consequences, almost necessarily contributed; while the condition of the art itself was just fitted to receive the perfecting impulse. The energies of sculpture, likewise, were now to be more directly concentrated in one parent school; which, while it especially adorned one seat, preserved yet the stirring rivalry of honorable emulation, as being the common seminary of free and independent states. The noble stand she had made, her superior sacrifices and sufferings in the cause of freedom, directed to Athens the sympathy and deference of Greece. The prosperity, too, of her political situation, was suitable to the support of this moral pre-eminence. Provided with means of defence and of commerce, on a scale which seemed to contemplate future empire, she was left by Themistocles with ample resources--a noble field of fame and recompense for the artist. He himself, satisfied with the useful, had cared less about the ornamental; but, among the little he did add, were the lions, now at Venice, originally placed on the entrance to the Piræus, in which fidelity of detail, and grandeur of conception, have furnished to us existing evidence of the skill of this age. Great as they were, the mind of Phidias proved equal to these external advantages. Possessing that rarest and highest of all genius which is at once creative and regular--learned, yet original, he caught the inspiration of art in the most elevated range of the past, bringing in his own attainments a sublimity and truth yet unequalled by all that has followed.