ION AND STESIMBROTUS 165 of Athens herself. If we look for a decisive moment by which to date it, we may fix upon the transference of the Federation Treasure from Delos in 454 B.C., the most typical of all the events which made Athens not only the Treasury, Mint, and Supreme Court, but the ordinary legal and commercial centre of Eastern Hellas. The movement of the time brought an im- mense amount of legal and judicial work to Athens, and filled the hands of those who could speak and write ; it attracted able men from all parts of the Empire ; it gave the Attic dialect a paramount and international validity. Athens herself wrote little during the prime of the Empire ; she governed, and left it for the subject allies to devote to literature the energies which had no legitimate outlet in politics. Ion of Chios (before 490-423 B.C.) is an instance. He was an aristocrat, a friend of Kimon and King Archidamus, and he probably fought in the allied forces against Eion in 470. But there was no career for him except in letters. He wrote tragedies, of course in Attic, with great success ; and it is pleasant to see (frag. 63) that he could openly express enthusiastic admiration of Sparta to an Athenian audience without any known disagreeable result. He wrote a Founding of Chios * and some books on Pytha- gorean philosophy. What we most regret is his book of Memoirs, telling in a frank, easy style of the Passing Visits* (Eirihiqixlai) to his island of various notable foreigners. The long fragment about Sophocles is in- teresting ; though the idea it gives of contemporary wit and grace is on the whole as little pleasing to our taste as the jests of the court of Queen Elizabeth. An utterly different person was Stesimbrotus of Thasos, a man with a pen and some education, and in
