Fairbanks, Arthur: Greek art: the basis of later European art (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1933)

GREEK ART

of the Persian empire; for Persia was a highly
organized military empire with small place for
individual initiative or for the growth of the
higher arts of civilization. The Greeks, on the
contrary, were a high-spirited people, ever in-
spired by their love of freedom. Freedom did
not mean for them license, nor did it mean in-
dividualism in our sense of the term, that is,
a keen sense of value of the individual, and of
his rights and his duties. The individual be-
longed to the family, the tribe, and the state, of
which he was but one unit. Freedom did mean
the right to self-development and self-satisfac-
tion as one member of a society in which laws
were enacted, taxes imposed, public works con-
structed, and order maintained with the consent
of the governed. It was only a member of the
old aristocracy of Athens who would describe
democracy as the rule of the tyrant Demos.
This love of freedom for the individual in the
state was at Athens a constant stimulus to
thought and to the expression of thought in lit-
erature and art. Further, pride in a free state
like Athens led to the erection of public build-
ings and statues for which the most talented
artists of the world were in demand.
Directness and clarity were marked traits
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