against the Spartans, or by the Greeks against the Gauls, or by the Achaeans against the Romans. And when he has recorded the final catastrophe, the conquest of Greece by Rome, he remarks as with a sigh that the nation had now reached its lowest depth of weakness, and that when Nero afterwards liberated it the boon came too late—the Greeks had forgotten what it was to be free. [Sidenote: His preference for religious over profane art.] The preference which Pausanias exhibits for the art of the best period is not more marked than his preference for sacred over profane or merely decorative art, for buildings consecrated to religion over buildings devoted to the purposes of civic or private life. Rarely does he offer any general remarks on the aspect and architectural style of the cities he describes. At Tanagra he praises the complete separation of the houses of the people from the sanctuaries of the gods. Amphissa, he tells us, was handsomely built, and Lebadea could compare with the most flourishing cities of Greece in style and splendour. On the other hand he viewed with unconcealed disdain the squalor and decay of the Phocian city of Panopeus, “if city it can be called that has no government offices, no gymnasium, no theatre, no market-place, no water conducted to a fountain, and where the people live in hovels, just like highland shanties, perched on the edge of a ravine.” In the cities he visited he does indeed notice market-places, colonnades, courts of justice, government offices, fountains, baths, and the houses and statues of famous men, but the number of such buildings and monuments in his pages is small compared to the number of temples and precincts, images and votive offerings that he describes, and such notice as he takes of them seldom amounts to more than a bare mention. The civic buildings that he deigns to describe in any detail are very few. Amongst them we may note the Painted Colonnade at Athens with its famous pictures, the spacious and splendid Persian Colonnade at Sparta with its columns of white marble carved in the shape of Persian captives, the market-place at Elis, and the Phocian parliament-house with its double row of columns running down the whole length of the hall and its seats rising in tiers from the columns up to the walls behind. [Sidenote: His descriptions of religious monuments.]