With him we thus find Philosophy in Greece proper, where so far there had been none, and coming, indeed, as far as Athens; hitherto either Asia Minor or Italy had been the seat of Philosophy, though, when the inhabitants of Asia Minor fell under Persian rule, with their loss of freedom, it expired amongst them. Anaxagoras, himself a native of Asia Minor, lived in the important period between the war of the Medes and the age of Pericles, principally in Athens, which had now reached the zenith of its greatness, for it was both the head of Grecian power, and the seat and centre of the arts and sciences. Athens, after the Persian wars, brought the greater part of the Greek islands into subjection, as also a number of maritime towns in Thrace, and even further into the Black Sea. As the greatest artists collected in Athens, so also did the most noted philosophers and sophists live there—a circle of luminaries in the arts and sciences such as we have in Æschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Diogenes of Apollonia, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and others from Asia Minor. Pericles then ruled the State, and raised it to that height of splendour which may be called the golden age in Athenian life; Anaxagoras, although living in the most flourishing time of Athenian life, touches on its decay, or rather reaches the first threatening of that decay, which ended in a total extermination of this beautiful life. What is of special interest at this time is the opposition between Athens and Lacedæmon, the two Greek nations which contended with one another for the foremost place in Greece; here we must therefore allude to the principles of these celebrated States. While the Lacedæmonians had no arts or sciences, Athens had to thank the character of its constitution, and of its whole spirit, for the fact that it was the seat of the sciences and fine arts. But the constitution of Lacedæmon is also worthy of high esteem, for it regulated and restrained the high Doric spirit, and its principal feature was that all personal peculiarity was subordinated, or rather sacrificed, to the general aim of the life of the State, and the individual had the consciousness of his honour and sufficiency only in the consciousness of working for the State. A people of such genuine unity, in whom the will of the individual had, properly speaking, quite disappeared, were united by an indestructible bond, and Lacedæmon was hence placed at the head of Greece, and obtained the leadership, which, we find, it held among the Argives in the days of Troy. This is a great principle which must exist in every true State, but which with the Lacedæmonians retained its one-sided character; this one-sidedness was avoided by the Athenians, and by that means they became the greater. In Lacedæmon personality proper was so much disregarded that the individual could not have free development or expression; individuality was not recognized, and