and spare the abject. Still she caught, to some extent, the æsthetic manners of her captive. Consequently, long after the complete political ascendancy of Rome was an established fact, and geographical Greece had become an insignificant province, the Hellenic spirit led the world. And some of its latest products are still dazzling in beauty, marvellous in ingenuity, Titanic in force. A few names selected from the list of Græco-Roman authors will be more impressive than description. Plutarch of Charonea, in the first century, the author of the great biographies; Lucian, the Syrian, in the second century, the master of irony and graceful dialogue and delicate description; Epictetus, the Phrygian slave, in the second century, who taught the latest form of Stoicism to the Romans, and had for his successor Marcus Aurelius; Philostratus of Lemnos, the rhetorician and author of the life of Apollonius; Plotinus, Porphyrius, and Proclus, the revivers of Platonic philosophy under a new form of mysticism at Alexandria during the third and fourth centuries; Longinus, the critic, who adorned Palmyra in the third century; Heliodorus of Emesa, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Musæus, the erotic novelists and poets of the fourth and fifth centuries; these, not to mention the Christian fathers, are a few of the great men whom Greece produced in this last period. But now notice how miscellaneous in nationality and in pursuit they are. One only is a Greek of the old stock-Plutarch, the Boeotian. One is a slave from Phrygia. Another is a Roman Emperor. A fourth is the native of the desert city of Tadmor. Two are Syrians. One is a Greek of the Ægean. Another is an Egyptian. From this we may see how the genius of the Greeks had been spread abroad to embrace all lands. No fact better illustrates the complete leavening of the world by their spirit.

But considering that this fifth period may be said to cover six centuries, from the death of Alexander to about 300 after

Christ, for why should we continue our computation into the dreary regions of Byzantine dulness ?—it must be confessed that it is sterile in productiveness and inferior in the quality of its crop to any of the previous periods. Subtle and beautiful is the genius of Hellas still, because it is Greek; strong and stern it is in part, because it has been grafted on the Roman character; its fascinations and compulsions are powerful enough to bend the metaphysics of the Christian faith. Yet, after all, it is but a shadow of its own self.

After the end of the fourth century the iconoclastic zeal and piety of the Christians put an end practically to Greek art and literature. Christianity was at that time the superior force in the world; and though Clement of Alexandria contended for an amicable treaty of peace between Greek culture and the new creed, though the two Gregories and Basil were, to use the words of Gibbon, "distinguished above all their contemporaries by the rare union of profane eloquence and orthodox piety," though the Bishops of the Church were selected from the ranks of scholars trained by Libanius and other Greek Sophists, yet the spirit of Christianity proved fatal to the spirit of Greek art. Early in the fifth century the Christian rabble at Alexandria, under the inspiration of their ferocious despot Cyril, tore in pieces Hypatia, the last incarnation of the dying beauty of the Greeks. She had turned her eye backwards to Homer and to Plato, dreaming that haply even yet the gods of Hellas might assert their power and resume the government of the world, and that the wisdom of Athens might supplant the folly of Jerusalem. But it was a vain and idle dream. The genius of Greece was effete. Christianity was pregnant with the medieval and the modern world. In violence and bloodshed the Gospel triumphed. This rending in pieces of the past, this breaking down of temples and withering of illusions, was no doubt necessary. New wine cannot be poured into old bottles. No cycle succeeds another cycle in human affairs

without convulsions and revolutions that rouse the passions of humanity. It is thus that

"God fulfils Himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."

Yet even in this last dire struggle of the spirit of Pagan art with the spirit of Christian faith, when Beauty had become an abomination in the eyes of the Holiest, on the ruins, as it were, of the desecrated fanes of Hellas, weeds lovely in their rankness flourished. While Cyril's mobs were dismembering Hypatia, the erotic novelists went on writing about Daphnis, and Musæus sang the lamentable death of Leander.

Nonnus

was perfecting a new and more polished form of the hexameter. These were the last, the very swan's notes, of Greek poetry. In these faint and too melodious strains the Muse took final farewell of her beloved Hellas. And when, after the lapse of 1000 years, the world awoke upon the ruins of the past, these were among the first melodies which caught its ear. Our Marlowe in the 16th century translated Musæus. The French Amyot translated Longus, and bequeathed to his nation a voluminous literature of pastorals founded upon the tale of Chloe. Tasso and Guarini, in Italy, caught the same strain; so that the accents of the modern Renaissance were an echo of the last utterances of dying Greece. The golden age of pastoral innocence, the bell' età dell' oro, of which the Alexandrians had been dreaming in the midst of their effete and decaying civilization, fascinated the imagination of our immediate ancestors, when, three centuries ago, they found the Sun of Art and Beauty shining in the heavens, new worlds to conquer, and indefinite expansions of the spirit to be realized.

CHAPTER II.

EMPEDOCLES.

The Grandeur of his Fame.--His Versatility of Genius.-His Self-exaltation. -His Mysticism.-His supposed Miracles.- Legends about his Death. -His Political Action.-His Poems.-Estimation in which the Ancients held them.-Their Prophetic Fervour.-Belief in Metempsychosis.—Purifying Rites.—Contempt for the Knowledge of the Senses. Physical Theories.-The Poem on Nature.-The Four Elements.-The Sphærus.-Love and Discord.-The Eclecticism of Empedocles.

THE figure of Empedocles of Agrigentum, when seen across the twenty-three centuries which separate us from him, presents perhaps a more romantic appearance than that of any other Greek philosopher. This is owing in a great measure to the fables which invest his life and death with mystery, to his reputation for magical power, and to the wild sublimity of some of his poetic utterances. Yet, even in his lifetime, and among contemporary Greeks, he swept the stage of life like a great tragic actor, and left to posterity the fame of genius as a poet, a physician, a patriot, and a philosopher. The well-known verses of Lucretius are enough to prove that the glory of Empedocles increased with age, and bore the test of time. Reading them, we cannot but regret that poems which so stirred the reverent enthusiasm of Rome's greatest singer have been scattered to the winds, and that what we now possess of their remains affords but a poor sample of their unimpaired magnificence.

Nothing is more remarkable about Empedocles than his versatility and comprehensiveness. Other men of his age

were as nobly born, as great in philosophic power, as distinguished for the part they bore in politics, as celebrated for poetic genius, as versed in mystic lore, in medicine, and in magic arts. But Parmenides, Pythagoras, Pausanias, and Epimenides could claim honour in but one, or two at most, of these departments. Empedocles united all, and that too, if we may judge by the temper of his genius and the few legends handed down to us about his life, in no ordinary degree. He seems to have possessed a warmth and richness of nature which inclined him to mysticism and poetry, and gave a tone of peculiar solemnity to everything he did, or thought, or said. At the same time, he was attracted by the acuteness of his intellect to the metaphysical inquiries which were agitating the western colonies of Greece, while his rare powers of observation enabled him to make discoveries in the then almost unexplored region of natural science. The age in which he lived had not yet thrown off the form of poetry in philosophical composition. Even Parmenides had committed his austere theories to hexameter verse. Therefore, the sage of Agrigentum was easily led to concentrate his splendid powers on the production of one great work, and made himself a poet among philosophers, and a philosopher among poets, without thereby impairing his claims. to rank highly both as a poet and also as a thinker among the most distinguished men of Greece. But Empedocles had not only deeply studied metaphysics, nature, and the arts of verse; whatever was mysterious in the world around him, in the guesses of past ages, and in the forebodings of his own heart, possessed a powerful attraction for the man who thought himself inspired of God. Having embraced the Pythagorean theories, he maintained the fallen state of men, and implored his fellow-creatures to purge away the guilt by which they had been disinherited and exiled from the joys of heaven. Thus he appeared before his countrymen not