It was impossible, even for Greeks, while thus impressing their civilization on the whole earth, to go on increasing in the beauty of their life and art at home. Some of the greatest names in art, philosophy, and literature still belong to this fourth period. The chief of all is Aristotle, _il maestro di color che sanno_, the absorber of all previous and contemporary knowledge into one coherent system, the legislator for the human intellect through eighteen centuries after his death. It is worth observing that Aristotle, unlike Socrates and Plato, is not a citizen of Athens, but of the small Thracian town Stageira. Thus, at the moment when philosophy lost its essentially Hellenic character and became cosmopolitan in Aristotle, the mantle devolved upon an alien. Again Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander. The two greatest men of the fourth period are thus brought into the closest relations. In pure literature the most eminent productions of this period are the orations of Æschines, Demosthenes, Isocrates, and the comedies of Menander. It is not a little significant that we should have retained no authentic fragment of the speeches of Pericles--except in so far as we may trust Thucydides--while the studied rhetoric of these politically far less important orators should have been so copiously preserved. The reign of mere talk was imminent. Oratory was coming to be studied as an art, and practised, not as a potent instrument in politics, but as an end in itself. Men were beginning to think more of how they spoke than of what they might achieve by speaking. Besides, the whole Athenian nation, as dikasts and as ecclesiasts, were interested in rhetoric. The first masters of eloquence considered as a fine art were therefore idolized. Demosthenes, Æschines, Isocrates, combined the fire of vehement partisans and impassioned politicians with the consummate skill of professional speech-makers. After their days rhetoric in Greece became a matter of frigid display--an #agônisma es to parachrêma#. In the comedies of Menander, as far as we may judge of them from fragments and critiques, and from their Latin copies, a very noticeable change in the spirit of literature is apparent. The so-called New Comedy, of which he was the representative, is the product of a meditative and inactive age. The great concerns of the world, and of human life seen in its profoundest depth, which formed the staple of Aristophanes, have been abandoned. We are brought close to domesticities: the events of common life occupy the stage of Menander. The audience of Aristophanes listened with avidity to comedies of which politics upon the grandest scale were the substance. Menander invited his Athenians to the intrigues of young men, slaves, and hetairai, at warfare with niggardly parents. Athens has ceased to be an empress. She has become a garrulous housewife. She contents herself with studious analysis and refined