The Age of the Nobles and the Tyrants in Greece 141 greatest poets, an honor which led the noble class to spend much of their time in manly exercises. In art there had been distinct decay in the ^gean with the Early Greek incoming of the Greeks. The art of the Cretan palaces which the Dorians had sent up in smoke and flame long surpassed anything the Greek could produce. Echoes of it sur- vived on the coast of Asia Minor, where they were finally received by the Ionian Greeks. But for a long time the early Greeks fell under the influence of the oriental art imported in such abun- dance in the w^orks of the Phoenician craftsman. Greek sculpture had hardly begun to produce rude figures ; painting was confined to the decorative efforts of the craftsman, like the work of the painter of pottery jars. There was no great archi- tecture, for the State em- ployed only the simplest buildings of sun-baked brick, and the earliest Greek tem- ples were merely houses, like those of private citizens, consisting of a square room built of sun-baked brick, with a wooden roof and timbers, and a porch across the front with wooden posts supporting it. It was in literature that Greek genius achieved its first great Literature triumph in this age of the disappearing kingship and the rule of the nobles. In the pastures of Thessaly where the singer Fig. 73. An Ideal Portrait of Homer This head, from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is a noble example of the Greek sculptor's ability to create an ideal portrait of a poet whom he had never seen. Such work was un- known in the archaic days of Greece; it was produced in the Hellenistic Age (p. 232)
