Athens, her narrow intellectual life being at least the same for both; and to this element of equilibrium was probably due her long maintenance of vigour at the level of her ideal. [As, however, the Spartan women, whatever their training, could not finally live the martial life of the men, the results of their chiefly animal training were not exemplary. See the question vivaciously discussed by De Pauw, _Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs_, 1787, ptie. iv, sect. x, § 1--a work which contains many acute observations, as well as a good many absurdities. The Spartan women, it appears, were in a special degree carried away by the Bacchic frenzy. Aelian, _Var. Hist._ iii, 42. Cp. Aristotle, _Politics_, ii, 9 (and other testimonies cited by Hermann, _Manual of the Political Antiquities of Greece_, § 27, 12), as to their general licence.] The arrested psychological development, it need hardly be added, would tend to mean not merely unoriginal thinking among those who did think, but finally a shrinkage of the small number of those who cared greatly for thinking. Even in the independent period, the mental life of Greece drew perforce from a relatively small class--chiefly the leisured middle class and the exceptional artificers or slaves who, in a democratic community, could win culture by proving their fitness for it. Under the Roman rule the endowed scholars (sophists) and artists alike would tend to minister to Roman taste, and as _that_ deteriorated its ministers would. Rome, it is easy to see, went the downward intellectual way in the imperial age with fatal certainty; and her subject States necessarily did likewise at their relative distance. Finally, when Christianity became the religion of the Empire, all the sciences and all the fine arts save architecture and metal-work were rapidly stupefied, the Emperor vetoing free discussion in the fifth century, and the Church laying the dead hand of convention on all such art as it tolerated, even as the priesthood of Egypt had done in their day. It is positively startling to trace the decline of the fine arts after the second century. On the arch of Constantine, at Rome, all the best sculpture is an appropriation from the older arch of Trajan: under the first Christian emperor there are no artists capable of decently embellishing his monument in the ancient metropolis. All the forms of higher faculty seem to have declined together; and as the decay proceeded the official hostility to all forms of free thought strengthened.