388 



GREECE 



a reaction set in against it. Sparta had proclaimed 

 in the Peloponnesian war that her policy was to 

 restore to the Greeks the freedom which the 

 Athenians had robbed them of. True it is that 

 Sparta broke up the confederacy of Delos ; but she 

 did not give freedom to Athens late subject-allies. 

 She merely displaced democratic by oligarchic 

 governments, and placed in each town a Spartan 

 harmost or governor, whose excesses and violence 

 made Sparta loathed. At the same time it was not 

 the interest of the Persian king to allow Athens to 

 be entirely crushed, or any single state to have 

 preponderating power in Greece. Thus an anti- 

 Spartan coalition was formed ; and in spite of the 

 peace of Antalcidas (387), the terms of which were 

 designed to prevent the formation of any more 

 such confederations as that of Delos, in 378 Athens 

 was enabled to form a new confederacy, and to 

 carry on hostilities with Sparta. These hostilities 

 were not decisive, but they allowed Thebes to 

 unite all Bceotia into a single state, and by the 

 genius of Pelopidas and Epaminondas, so to con- 

 solidate its power as to defeat Sparta at Leuctra 

 (370), and establish a Theban supremacy. Sparta 

 had to withdraw her harmosts from all cities ; and 

 everywhere the democrats in consequence came 

 into power. Arcadia was made into one state with 

 a new city, Megalopolis, at its head ; and Messenia 

 was made independent of Sparta. But Thebes 

 was wholly unequal to the position which she 

 aspired to occupy ; Athens united with Sparta in 

 resisting her, a great anti-Theban coalition was 

 formed, and when Pelopidas fell at Cynoscephalre 

 (363) and Epaminondas at Mantinea (362) Thebes 

 lost the only two men of genius she possessed, and 

 with them all hope of maintaining the position she 

 had attained. 



Thus the village-communities with which Greek, 

 like English history, begins had become city-states ; 

 but the Greeks travelled no further along the path 

 of political coalescence or synoikismos. If the 

 English did travel further through heptarchy to 

 final unity, it was because in England ' war begat 

 the king, whereas in Greece monarchy ( if indeed 

 it ever existed ) passed away before history begins ; 

 and the spirit of autonomy, begotten of republican 

 rule, was centrifugal in tendency. Meanwhile in 

 Macedonia, whose inhabitants, if not of Greek 

 blood, were not distantly akin to Greeks, a kingdom 

 was forming which was destined to impose on 

 Greece, from without, the only unity it was capable 

 of receiving. The steps by which Philip of 

 Macedon made himself master of Greece were 

 well marked and rapid. The first places to be 

 absorbed by the expansion of Macedonia were the 

 Greek colonies on the coasts of Thrace and 

 Macedonia, in 3-57 Amphipolis and Pydna, in 356 

 Pangseum, in 353 Halonnesos, Abdera, Maroneia, 

 Methone ; and in 348 the fall of Olynthus and its 

 thirty-two confederate towns gave the whole coast 

 as far as the Hellespont into the hands of Philip. 

 The next step to take was to obtain a footing in the 

 internal affairs of Greece, and this he succeeded in 

 getting, as far as northern Greece was concerned, 

 in the Sacred War ( 355 ). Thebes having in vain 

 endeavoured to impose its supremacy on Phocis, 

 abused its influence over the Amphictyonic Council 

 to declare a sacred war against tne Phocians. The 

 latter found assistance at the hands of the tyrants 

 of Pherse in Thessaly, and the aristocracy of 

 Thessaly consequently placed themselves under the 

 protection of Macedonia. Meanwhile, even Athens 

 liad at last given ear to Demosthenes' denunciations 

 of Philip, and opened her eyes to the danger which 

 threatened her, when her own colonies were 

 captured by Philip ; and war had been declared, 

 though not immediately waged, against Philip by 

 Athens. But the Sacred War ended ( 346 ) in the 



destruction of the Phocians, and Athens having 

 ruined herself by procrastination concluded a 

 peace with Philip which confirmed all his gains and 

 ratified all her losses. As yet Philip had found no 

 excuse for interfering with the affairs of the 

 Peloponnese ; but this was afforded him in 344 by 

 an ill-timed revival of Sparta's pretensions, which 

 drove Messene, Argos, and Megalopolis into the 

 arms of Philip, in spite of Demosthenes' propaganda 

 in the first two places. In 340 Athens, having 

 formed extensive alliances, felt strong enough to 

 openly declare war against Philip. In 339 she 

 saved Byzantium from his attacks, and thereby 

 kept open the route by which her own corn carne 

 from the Black Sea. In 338 she at length (and 

 too late) consented to Demosthenes' proposal to 

 convert the moneys hitherto devoted to public 

 amusement to military purposes. But the fatal 

 field of Cha'ronea was followed by the peace of 

 Demades. Philip was acknowledged master of 

 Greece, and elected general of the Hellenic forces 

 against Persia ; but before he could commence his 

 invasion of that country he was assassinated by a 

 private enemy (336). A general rising against the 

 Macedonian power was promptly nipped in the bud 

 by Philip's son and successor, the world-famous 

 Alexander. His first act was to suppress the 

 attempted revolt by utterly destroying Ihebes. In 

 334 he commenced his invasion of Persia. We can 

 but enumerate his chief victories : in 334 his victory 

 at Granicus gave him Asia Minor, on this side of 

 Mount Taurus ; in 333 he defeated Darius in the 

 battle of Issus ; in 332 he stormed Tyre and Gaza 

 and founded Alexandria ; in 331 he finally over- 

 threw the Persian empire in the battle of Arbela ; 

 in 326 he crossed the Indus, but farther his troops 

 refused to follow him. He then sailed down that 

 river to the Indian Ocean, and thence marched to 

 Babylon, where, while preparing to invade Arabia, 

 he fell ill and died (323). Alexander not merely 

 conquered Asia Minor he planted Greek colonies 

 in it, and these centres of culture discharged 

 functions of the highest importance in the history 

 of the world. They gave to Greek culture, Greek 

 literature, thought, and art, even to the Greek 

 language itself, a career independent of and 

 unaffected by the fate or decay of Hellas itself. 

 They made Greek the language of the civilised 

 world, though it is true that it was not pure Attic, 

 but the ' common ' dialect, Hellenistic Greek yet 

 the language of the New Testament. In Alexandria 

 were sown seeds for the fruits of which we refer to 

 the section on the literature. Finally it was from 

 these colonies that the Mohammedans made their 

 acquaintance with Greek learning ; so that in the 

 time of darkness, when the very tradition of Greek 

 learning had perished from out of western Europe, 

 the Mohammedans were busy annotating Aristotle 

 even in Tirnbuctoo. 



The death of Alexander was the signal for a 

 fresh struggle for independence ; but this, the 

 Lamian, war ended with the battle of Crannon 

 (322) in the victory of the Macedonian general 

 Antipater and the extinction of political liberty 

 in Greece. In the struggles between the Diadochi 

 ( ' the successors ' ) for empire, Greece was the 

 battlefield. Even when the various generals had 

 made themselves monarchs of the kingdoms into 

 which Alexander's empire split, and Greece was 

 left unappropriated, the efforts of a statesman 

 such as Demochares to obtain a position of inde- 

 pendence for Athens by playing off one monarch 

 against another were fruitless. All that lends 

 interest to the next period that of the Epigoni 

 is that a new form of political coalescence federa- 

 tion was tried, and with some success, by the 

 Jitolian and Achaean leagues. But the centrifugal 

 tendency in Greek politics was manifest in Sparta's 



