The Hellenes were great, not in the number of their citizens, but in their strength and sublimity — as long as beauty existed amongst them not in the mind only, but in piety, in the state, and in their social life. But as soon as the Greek turned his eye from the ideal, which he had earlier held in homage, and sacrilegiously turned his hand to works of pure art in place of those dedicated to the gods; as soon as he began to ridicule his own religion and abandon his earlier state traditions — it was all up for Hellenism and Hellenic freedom. In place of earlier beauty we find in Greece only the atrocious Peloponnesian War, in which Greek rages against Greek without any moral checks whatsoever, just as if the various parties of the individual city-states were competing with one another to se
