The conditions of life in Greece underwent a great change in the generations which succeeded the death of Alexander. Athens, which had for so long been the intellectual headquarters of the world, was now only a station of secondary importance. Alexandria, founded by the king himself, became under the divine auspices of the Ptolemies not only the great mart of the world but the greatest centre of learning; Pergamus in the course of time rivalled Alexandria, at any rate in literary resources; while Antioch and Tarsus also became prominent in the history of learning. From early times men of genius born elsewhere in Greece, in the Ionian cities and in Magna Graecia, had turned to Athens for appreciation of their powers. It is easy to see at a glance how much Athens owed to these aliens for her intellectual advancement—Gorgias of Leontini, Protagoras of Abdera, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon. Her dramatic poets were her own, and so were her great orators, with the exception of Lysias; but this is partly due to the fact that the constitution of her laws gave little opportunity for aliens to win distinction on the platform or the stage. Of her great historians, one was not of Athenian birth and even wrote in a foreign dialect; in philosophy no true-born Athenian before Plato won real distinction. In the Macedonian era a distinguished stranger had more prospect not only of appreciation but of material advancement in one of the royal cities than in a city-state which had become little better than a minor satrapy in one of the great empires, and traded only on the fading memories of its former magnificence. Life in the great cities was very different, too, from life in democratic Athens. From the time of Pericles to that of Demosthenes, all citizens had at least a strong corporate feeling; all citizens knew each other. The sculptor fought side by side with the tanner, the Alcmaeonid met the lamp-seller in debate; there were many common grounds in which all could meet under conditions of equality. In the law-courts the orator must satisfy not only the learned few but the unlettered many; in the theatre the poet and his actors appealed to all classes, from the high-priest who must not be allowed to slumber on his central throne to the people who ate sweetmeats in the back rows, and, if dissatisfied, with true Athenian spirit, threw these harmless missiles at the performers.[491] Moreover, all spoke the same language. The diction of tragedy gradually put off its artificiality, and the orators approached nearer and nearer to the idiom of common speech.