Most of the chief states of Hellas possessed works of great beauty. The most perfect, perhaps, of all that has been preserved—the Venus of the Louvre—came from the island of Melos. The leading artists were of various nationality, and were willing to work for any state that would employ them. The great temples, especially those which were the seats of oracles, were filled with the offerings of expectant or grateful worshippers, some, no doubt, more remarkable for their costliness than their artistic merit, but many the work of the greatest artists of the present or the past.
Other influences which were modifying the Greek character were literature and philosophy. These did not find their earliest homes in Athens. The earliest poets, as we have seen, were mostly from Asia and the islands; the earliest historians from Miletus; the earliest philosophers from Ionia, Sicily, and Italy. Even in the Periclean age the chief seat of mental philosophy was Elea in Italy, and the leaders of a new physical philosophy came from Thrace or Asia. Simonides, the greatest writer of hymns and epigrams, was a native of Ceos; Pindar, the greatest lyric poet, was a Boeotian; and Herodotus, the first great writer of literary history, was a native of Halicarnassus, in Caria. Yet this age saw the beginning of the movement which was to make Athens for a long time the intellectual capital of Greece. Though his speculations on the nature and origin of the universe alarmed the people and caused his expulsion from the city, Anaxagoras spent some years in Athens and profoundly affected Pericles
