288 Dr. Charles Waldstein [April 13, 



be recognised that those qualities which distinguish Greek art at its 

 height, the combination of Nature and the Ideal, were given to it 

 chiefly through the influence which the athletic institutions and their 

 growth and development had upon the people at large and the artistic 

 world in particular. In all branches of science it has been found that 

 while certain broad currents of influence in the formation and develop- 

 ment of a growing organism could be perceived and traced during the 

 earlier and similar phases of its existence, or rather growth, this is 

 more difficult, indeed hardly possible, when once the body, genus, or 

 institution has reached the more complex and variegated forms of 

 full organisation. All the conscientious observer can then do, is to 

 record the parallelism and concomitance of the development in the 

 two forms which before held the relation of influencing force and the 

 thing influenced, showing a certain relation that exists between them 

 or which they have in common to some other force, and, in many cases, 

 leaving the question open which is the cause and which the effect. 



So in the present case, after having found that the palaestra was 

 efficient in bringing Greek art to its full development, we still have 

 evidence of an intimate relation existing between art and athletics. 

 Yet we cannot always say where exactly the influence lies, which is 

 the institution influenced, and which is the one influencing. All we 

 are bound to do is to record the parallelism in their development. 



The broad lines which mark the development of athletic institu- 

 tions are the same that characterise the development of Greek political 

 and social life, Greek literature, religion, and art. In political and 

 social life we have the undeveloped earlier forms of small communities 

 leading in the great age to the Panhellenic unity in which all Greek 

 states felt the common ties that united them and in so far submerged 

 their own individuality. More and more this great and broad con- 

 ception of state which animated the Greeks gives way to the growing 

 assertion of the interests of individual states clashing with one another. 

 Further, in the same state even party feeling asserts itself in opposi- 

 tion to the state, and within the party again, the individual seeks 

 his own good to the detriment of the party. Gradually, step by 

 step, with here and there a short flickering up of the great spirit 

 in a different form, the dissolution of Greek unity leads to the final 

 destruction of Greek independence. With the decline of political 

 grandeur, strength and virtue die in the social life of the Greeks. 

 The old simplicity and greatness of character decay, and dissoluteness 

 and vice more and more take root and undermine the moral strength 

 of the people ; for in no time and in no country were political and 

 social ethics so dependent upon one another. In literature, especially 

 in the history of the drama, we can notice the same step from the 

 more conventional forms, traces of which are still to be noticed in 

 -^schylus, to the more minute individualisation in Sophocles and 

 Euripides, sensationalism already beginning in the latter. Art was so 

 complete an expression of Greek religion that in studying the develop- 

 ment of art we can follow the course taken by religion. From the first 



