Then came the intellectual age of Greece. Already in B.C. 450 Protagoras the Sophist, of the Cyrenaic school, had made ‘man the measure of all things.’ The individual becomes a duality; as Aristotle expresses it, the animal life is one of sensation, the divine life of intelligence. And this change of view gradually extinguished the holy fire of art. The Hellenes, even in their best times, did not pay that attention to the use of arms which was a daily practice with the more practical Romans. They had no gladiatorial shows, the finest _salles d’armes_ in the world. The ὁπλοδιδακταὶ (ὁπλοδιδασκολοὶ) or army _maîtres d’armes_, and professors of the noble arts of offence and defence, were not required by law in Lacedæmon. They practised the Sword, as we learn from Demosthenes; he compared the Athenians ‘with rustics in a fencing school, who after a blow always guard the hit part and not before.’[842] Yet they preferred the pentathlum, the pancration, and military dancing; the fencing-room was a secondary consideration. Indeed, Plato objected to the useless art of Sword-exercise, because neither masters nor disciples ever became great soldiers—a stupendous Platonic fallacy![843] Nor did Hellas greatly prize herself upon mere arms. The soldier at Athens and amongst all the Ionian and kindred races occupied, it is true, an honourable position; in the four castes[844] he followed the priestly, and he preceded the peasants and the mechanics. But the Hellene was essentially a citizen—a politician. He chose his magistrates and pontiffs, and he could aspire to become one himself. He spent his life in the Agora, canvassing laws and constitutions, treaties and alliances. His minor delight was gossip, euphuistically expressed by ‘hearing new things.’ Hellas soon learned that her _forte_ lay in literature, poetry, oratory, and philosophy, in engineering, and in the fine arts. She excelled the world in the exquisite rules of proportion; in the breadth of idea, and in the clearness and perfection of the literary form: these arts she bequeathed as a heritage to mankind, who have nowhere and never surpassed her. While the grand old Kemites built for eternity, and subjected even size[845] to solidity, Hellas elaborated the principle of Beauty and carried it to its very acme. Her spoilt children were avid of novelty: they constructed every possible system of cosmogony, of astronomy, of geology (except the right one); and they ‘paraded their knowledge,’ as Bacon says, ‘with fifes and drums.’ Hence their teachers of the Nile Valley told them ‘they were ever children’; and hence they excelled their teachers.