Nevertheless, though it is only decent to exercise some reserve in this matter, it certainly is necessary to point to a curious fact in regard to Greek Art in general, and that is, that, with the exception of some of its archaic examples, it has been revered with ever-increasing fervour by strangers, from the second century before Christ to the present day,--when I say strangers, I mean people whose thought and aspirations were not necessarily the outcome of Hellenic values,--and that this general appreciation of Greek Art by foreigners implies that there is some quality in it which is only too common to everybody and to anybody, irrespective of nationality and education. If it were asked what this common factor was, I should reply, it is Nature herself, to which Greek Art, in its so-called best period, is undeniably in close and intimate relationship. In examining the works of the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries before Christ, it is well to bear in mind the peculiar state of the country in which they appeared, its division into states, and its mixed population. It is well to think of the many ideals that dominated these people, and of the fact that the citizen of one city was often regarded as an alien, without any political rights whatever, if he ventured to transfer his abode to another city but a few miles distant from his own; and allowances should be made for the rivalry and competition this state of affairs conduced to bring about. It is also well to remember the individual lives the colonists lived, and the altered outlook on life to which their independent positions were bound to lead, and which, when they returned to their mother city, as many of them used to do, must have shed a new and strange light upon what they saw. Although a certain uniformity can be traced in the political history of most Greek states, no one would dare to maintain that the Greeks, at any time in their history, were a perfectly united people observing the same values; whilst even in the history of each separate state, changes occurred so constantly that a stable political type is a rare and practically negligible fact. In spite of the many heroes and geniuses which arose from time to time, there never seems to have been that power, either human or superhuman, which might have welded these peoples indissolubly together, or which, taking its root in one of the contending races, could have made that race completely absorb and digest the others. Even the games of Greece, which, it might be argued, tended to unite the various peoples, cannot be said to have gone very far in this respect, since the very fact that the Hellenic nation enforced a sacred armistice during the month of the games, between states that were at war, shows that the most this institution could achieve was a suspension of arms.