In their tombs have been found gold-work, jewels, manuscripts, vases: all of which tell their stories of the way men lived, how they worked, what they sought; all of which show us that man then was the same as man is now--if you pricked him he bled, if you tickled him he laughed. We are apt to think that the Past was ignorant, brutal, savage. Have we, boastful as we are, made porcelain better than the Chinese? Have we made vases more beautiful than the Greeks? Poetry more musical? In the far past man was savage, brutal, ignorant; and there is in man still the latent tiger. In the civilization of which we boast, there exist in all great cities, side by side with luxury and splendor, poverty, wretchedness, squalor, brutality. In the days of Pericles, in those days when the Amphora and the Temple reached their most perfect development, the influences of Art and Poetry were most potent upon that small democratic oligarchy which possessed Athens and tyrannized over Greece. Then the tiger lay down in the midst of a wonderful wealth of architecture, sculpture, poetry, eloquence, painting (we suppose), and pottery. Then a whole district of the city to the northwest of the Acropolis and the Areopagus was occupied by the shops of the potter and the painter, and was known as the CERAMICUS, or _Keramicus_, as it now is often spelled. From that centre went out into all the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea thousands upon thousands of those vases and pots which were made and decorated there, and from whose pictures we have drawn much of our knowledge of Greek life, art, manners, and dress. [Illustration: FIG. 29.--_Egyptian Vase._] In this high time of ART lay the seeds of corruption and death. The Athenian Greek became critical, refined, weak, luxurious, corrupt, base; and then he went to decay. In some tombs (Fig. 30) opened in Italy, the body is found lying at length in the middle, and about it stand perfect vases, love-offerings of friends: were they once filled with perfumes upon which the spirit of the dead was wafted away? We place flowers in the graves of our lovely ones, and, beautiful as they are, they vanish with the dead. But the Greek vase remains to us after the lapse of two thousand years. [Illustration: FIG. 30.--_Tomb found in the Environs of Naples._]