Once in their history fate provided the Greeks with a great cause; that was in the fifth century, when the gigantic Juggernaut of Persia came rolling down upon them. King Xerxes assembled his barbarian hordes, his tribes of wild horsemen and his phalanxes of slaves, his war elephants and his chariots. Compared with these invaders, the Greeks were modern civilized men; free men, holding in their minds all the treasures of the future. They forgot their state jealousies and civic factions, and rallied and saved their culture. From that national impulse came practically everything that is worth while in the “classics.” It was here that the Greek spirit achieved self-consciousness; it was here that Greek patriotism and Greek religion found their justification, their validity as propaganda for great art. Among the Athenian captains who fought at Marathon was one by the name of Æschylus. He returned, full of the pride of his race, and wrote a tragedy, “The Persians,” around the story of the king whom he had helped to defeat; the climax of the drama being the battle in which the poet had been a leader. It was Greek patriotic and religious propaganda without any thought of disguise; its purpose being to portray the downfall of despotism. The play was a popular success, and made Æschylus the national poet, not merely of Athens, but of all the Greeks. He wrote other plays of the same religious and patriotic sort, and he never feared to put in whatever moral teachings he thought his audience needed. “Obedience is the mother of success, bringing safety,” summed up his political creed; so, needless to say, he belonged to the conservative party. So little was he afraid of “propaganda” that in “The Seven Against Thebes” he praised by name the statesman Aristides, who was present in the audience. This kind of topical illusion “brought down the house” in ancient Athens, precisely as it would in New York today. The sculptors and architects and other artists of Greece felt the same patriotic and religious thrill, the same consciousness of a sublime destiny; they labored with burning faith to glorify the gods and demigods, the ancestors and rulers who had made them masters of the land. As a memorial to the victory of Marathon the Greeks instituted national games, which took place every four years, and were a means of uniting the various tribes in worship of their gods. There was the keenest rivalry, and the ambition of Greek gentlemen was to win the crowns and laurel wreaths. When they had won, they wanted the fact to be known; so they paid poets who could sing their achievements in glorious verses. The poet Pindar became a high-class publicity man for these aristocratic sportsmen; also he sang the praises of whatever tyrants held power in the Greek cities, making them splendid and heroic, regardless of how unprincipled and cruel they might be.