It is to be remembered that in later Greece, from about the time of Apelles, all free children were taught to draw (Pliny, _Hist. Nat._ xxxv, 36, 15); and long before, the same authority tells us, art was taken up by men of rank. The introduction of painting into the schools at Sicyon took place about 350 B.C., and thence the practice spread all over Hellas. Aristotle, too (_Politics_, v [viii], 3), commends the teaching of drawing to children, noting that it enables men to judge of the arts and avoid blunders in picture-buying--though he puts this as an inferior and incidental gain. Thus the educated Greeks were in a fairly good sense all dilettanti and amateurs. On the whole subject see K.J. Freeman, _Schools of Hellas_, 1908, pp. 114-17. § 2 In literature Greek development is as clearly consequent as in art. The Homeric poems are the outcome of a social state in which a class of bards could find a living by chanting heroic tales to aristocratic households. Lyric genius is indeed something specially incalculable; and it is startling to realise that about the time of the rude rule of Peisistratos at Athens, Sappho in Lesbos was not merely producing the perfect lyrics which to this day men reckon unmatched, but was the centre of a kind of school of song. But Lesbos was really the home of an ancient culture--"the earliest of all the Æolic settlements, anterior even to Kymê"[330]--and Sappho followed closely upon the lyrists Pittakos and Alkaios. So that here too there is intelligible causation in environment as well as genius. In other directions it is patent. The drama, tragic and comic alike, was unquestionably the outcome of the public worship of the Gods, first provided for by the community, later often exacted by it from rich aspirants to political power. Greek drama is a clear evolution, on the tragic side, from the primitive ritual of Dionysos, Beer-God or Wine-God; individual genius and communal fostering combining to develop a primitive rite into a literary florescence.[331] For all such developments special genius is as a matter of course required, but potential genius occurs in all communities in given forms at a given culture stage; and what happened in Athens was that the special genius for drama was specially appealed to, evoked, and maintained. Æschylus in Egypt and Aristophanes in Persia must have died with all their drama in them. Further, as Grote has so luminously shown,[332] the juridical life of Athens, with its perpetual play of special pleading in the dikasteries, was signally propitious to the spirit of drama. The constant clashing and contrast of ethical points of view, the daily play of eristic thought, was in itself a real drama which educated both dramatists and audience, and which inevitably affected the handling of moral problems on the stage. Athens may thus be said to have cultivated discussion as Sparta cultivated "Laconism"; and