The city of Rhodes, which recovered its independence at the death of Alexander, and maintained its self-government down till the Roman period, was, in point of fact, latterly distinguished for its art (Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 334-38), thus illustrating afresh the value of free life as an art stimulus; but its pre-eminently commercial activity, as in the case of Corinth, and as later in the case of Venice, kept it relatively undistinguished in literature. Rich merchants commissioned pictures and statues, but not philosophies or books. Holm (Eng. trans. iv, 492) calls Rhodes a _seat_ of philosophy, etc., naming Theophrastus and Eudemus. But they both studied and settled at Athens. From the whole history there emerges the demonstration of what might reasonably be put _a priori_--that for a whole community, once self-governing, to acquiesce in an all-embracing foreign despotism meant the settling of lethargy on half of its mental life.[361] What the thinkers left in Greece _could_ do was to lend philosophic ideas and method to the jurists at work on the problem of adapting Roman law to the needs of a world-empire, and this was done to good purpose; but it was the last genuine task that the circumstances permitted of. To discuss vitally the problems of politics would have meant challenging the despotism. There remained, it is true, philosophy and the arts; and these were still cultivated; but they finally subsisted at the level of the spirit of a community which felt itself degenerate from its past, and so grew soon hopelessly imitative. No important work, broadly speaking, can ever be done save by men who, like the most gifted Greeks of the palmy days (innovating in drama and improving on the science of the foreigner), feel themselves capable of equalling or transcending the past;[362] and that feeling seems to have become impossible alike for the students and the sculptors of Greece soon after the Macedonian conquest, or at least after the Roman. Plato and Pheidias, Aristotle and Praxiteles, Æschylus and Epicurus, figured as heights of irrecoverable achievement; and the pupillary generations brooded dreamily over Plato or drew serenity from Epicurus as their bent lay, and produced statues of alien rulers, or of the deities of alien temples, where their ancestors had portrayed heroes for the cities and Gods for the shrines of Greece. Beneath the decadence of spirit there doubtless lay, not physiological decay, as is sometimes loosely assumed, but a certain arrest of psychological development--an arrest which, as above suggested, may be held to have set in when the life and culture of the "family women" in the Greek cities began decisively to conform to the Asiatic standard, the men cultivating the mind, while the women were concerned only with the passive life of the body. In this one matter of the equal treatment of the sexes Sparta transcended the practice of