ABSTRACT
T HE reader will have noticed that the name of Athens has occurred several times in the preceding chapters. Hitherto we have spoken of foreign inftuences making
themselves feit there, during or shortly hefore the enlightened despotism of Peisistratos and in the first part of the tyranny of his son Hippias. We have now to discuss the contribution of Athens herself to the literature of Greece, in consequence of wh ich she hecame for some two hundred years the centre of the whole nation's thought and expression, • the Greece of Greece' as a well-known epigram styles her. J Slowly at first, hut more and more rapidly as the fifth century wore on, her writers became thc leading authors of the Greeks, her speech (the Attic dialect) the literary language, displacing hoth lonic and Doric, and the stamp of her approval the very hall-mark of literary worth. To this result three main factors secm to have contributed.
