III. (_a_) The case of Venice has to be explained in respect of its special conditions. Venice was from the first partly aloof from ordinary Italian life by reason of its situation and its long Byzantine connections. It was further an aristocratic republic of the old Roman type, its patrician class developing as a caste of commanders and administrators; and its foreign possessions, added to in every century, reinforced this tendency.[584] The early usage of civic trading, carried on by means of fleets owned by the State, was habitually turned to the gain of the ruling minority. The use of the fleets was generally granted to monopoly companies, who paid no duties, while private persons did; the middle classes in general being allowed to trade only under burdensome restrictions.[585] Here were conditions contrary in effect to those of the progressive days of Greece. Contrasted with Florence, the Italian Athens, Venice has even been likened to Sparta by a modern Italian.[586] It has been more justly compared, however,[587] with Rhodes, which, unlike Sparta, was primarily a commercial and a maritime power; and where, as in Venice, the rich merchants patronised the arts rather than letters. From the first Venice achieved its wealth by an energetically prosecuted trade, with no basis of landed property to set up a leisured class. In such a city the necessarily high standards of living,[588] as well as the prevailing habit and tradition, would keep men of the middle class away from literature;[589] and only men of the middle class like Dante, or leisured officials like Poggio and Boccaccio and Machiavelli, are found to do important literary work even in Florence. Hence the small share of Venice in the structure of Italian literature. The same explanation partly holds good of art. Venice, however, at length gave the needed economic furtherance; and men of other communities could there find a market, as did Greek sculptors in imperial Rome. Obviously a despot could not have evoked artists of Venetian birth any more than did the Republic, save by driving men out of commerce. But it is in Venice, where wealth and the republican form lasted longest, that we find almost the last of the great artists--Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese. After these the Caracci, Guido, and many others gravitate to Rome, where the reorganised Church regains some riches with power. We are to remember, too, that the aristocratic rulers saw to the food supply of the whole Republic by a special promotion of agriculture in its possessions, particularly in Candia; besides carefully making treaties which secured its access to the grain markets of Sicily, Egypt, and North Africa.[590] Here again we have to recognise a form of civic self-preserving resource special in origin to republics, though afterwards exploited by autocracies, as earlier in the case of imperial Rome.