GREECE 



different. There was a widespread 

 disposition to follow up the great 

 victories and to strike at Persia 

 herself. For such an enterprise 

 the first necessity was the whole- 

 hearted unity of Hellas. To rout 

 the Persian navy on the sea, and to 

 shatter Persian armies on Greek 

 soil, was one thing ; to invade the 

 Persian empire was somewhat as 

 though England should project an 

 invasion of Europe, as far as the 

 magnitude of the task was con- 

 cerned ; but we should have to 

 think of England as though every 

 county was a separate sovereign 

 state with no central English 

 government. 



Obstacles to Unity 



The difficulties in the way of 

 united action were greater than 

 those of the thirteen American 

 colonies when they opposed them- 

 selves to the power of the Mother 

 Country. A real continuous unity 

 of action was only possible of 

 attainment under the direction of 

 one recognized and unquestioned 

 control. Despite what Athens had 

 done, Sparta, not Athens, was the 

 only state to which the rest were 

 willing to concede a priority ; but 

 though the Spartan troops were ad- 

 mittedly of the best, Sparta herself 

 was quite unfitted for the task of 

 organizing a united Hellas, 



Sparta remained inert and 

 apathetic, and when it was left to 

 Athens to take the lead, continen- 

 tal Greece held aloof, though the 

 maritime states formed the Delian 

 League (see Delos) under the Athe- 

 nian presidency. But a naval 

 league could not do the work. 



Before five and twenty years had 

 passed the dream of a war of ag- 

 gression had in effect faded away, 

 and the Greek states had fallen back 

 into the old attitude of mutual 

 hostilities and jealousies, though 

 with this difference, that they were 

 now grouped roughly either as 

 allies or dependents of Sparta or as 

 allies or dependents of Athens. For 

 Athens, through the Delian League, 

 was founding a sort of maritime 

 empire. At its first formation the 

 states of the league had main- 

 tained the navy of the league by 

 providing contingents of ships and 

 men ; when they were permitted to 

 substitute money payments, the 

 ships and men were supplied by 

 Athens, so that the navy of the 

 league became virtually the navy 

 of Athens, and the enormously in- 

 creased power of Athens excited 

 the jealousy of every other state, 

 but especially that of the Spartans. 



A further cause of dissension lay 

 in the fact that in almost every 

 Greek state, whether the govern- 

 ment was oligarchical or demo- 

 cratic, there existed the two oligar- 



3670 



chical and democratic parties in 

 fierce antagonism. Oligarchical 

 states favoured Sparta, while 

 democratic states favoured Athens; 

 but the antagonistic party in each 

 state always hoped to effect a revo- 

 lution with the aid of either Athens 

 or Sparta. 



The Peloponnesian War 



The result was that, nearly fifty 

 years after the Persian debacle, 

 almost all Hellas was involved in 

 the great conflict between Athens 

 and Sparta, which is called the 

 Peloponnesian War. The struggle 

 opened in 431. After ten years it 

 was suspended, the advantage on 

 the whole lying with Athens, whose 

 naval supremacy was unequivo- 

 cally established ; but an ill-judged 

 attempt to extend her imperial 

 sway by a great expedition to 

 Sicily ended in a tremendous dis- 

 aster. Sparta seized her oppor- 

 tunity to renew hostilities, and 

 though for a long time Athens held 

 her own, a monstrous blunder at 

 last enabled the Spartans to cap- 

 ture or destroy the greater part of 

 her fleet at Aegospotami, and bring 

 the war to a decisive conclusion, 

 with Spartan supremacy com- 

 pletely established in 404. 



The next twenty years demon- 

 strated the inherent incapacity of 

 Sparta for political organization ; 

 she could not rise above the con- 

 ception of a Spartan dictatorship, 

 a military tyranny. A new ad- 

 versary arose when Thebes broke 

 from her sway, and, under the 

 leadership of Epaminondas de- 

 feated her armies at Leuctra in 

 371, and created a brief Theban 

 ascendancy which, however, did 

 not long survive the death of the 

 great captain at the battle of Man- 

 tinea in 362. 



Athens, though she had re- 

 covered much of her old strength, 

 was still in no position to renew 

 her bid for the leadership of 

 Greece. But a claimant for that 

 position now appeared in a 

 quarter which had hitherto been 

 regarded as at best semi-Hellenic. 

 On the N. of Greece lay Mace- 

 donia, a loosely organized king- 

 dom which had scarcely passed 

 beyond the tribal system. The 

 royal family, however, claimed a 

 pure Hellenic descent. In 359 the 

 Macedonian crown passed to 

 Philip, who was spending his boy- 

 hood virtually as a hostage in 

 Thebes. He returned to Macedon 

 to apply there the political and 

 military lessona which he had 

 absorbed. 



With excellent military material 

 ready to his hand, he shaped his 

 Macedonians into a highly dis- 

 ciplined army instead of a loose 

 congeries of clan levies ; inter- 



GREECE 



vened in the affairs of the Greeks ; 

 posed as the champion of Hel- 

 lenism in punishing for an act of 

 sacrilege the northern state of 

 Phocis, which but for his appear- 

 ance might have made a successful 

 bid for a military supremacy ; 

 and then virtually compelled the 

 whole of Greece not only to re- 

 cognise Macedon as an Hellenic 

 state, but to acknowledge him as 

 the elected leader of Hellas, the 

 captain of its armies in the revived 

 project of an Hellenic war upon 

 Persia. 



The entry of Macedon upon the 

 Hellenic stage was in itself a tre- 

 mendous revolution, for her or- 

 ganized military resources were 

 more than a match for those of 

 any casual combination of the 

 Greek states. Unlike the Per- 

 sians, Philip could with his Mace- 

 donians apply all that the Greeks 

 knew of the art of war, all that 

 had made them a match for ten 

 times their number of Asiatics. 

 The moment had actually come 

 when under Macedonian pressure 

 Hellas might have been unified as 

 a military empire. But in 336 

 Philip was assassinated and his 

 crown passed to his son, Alexander 

 the Great, a lad of twenty. 

 Alexander the Great 



For a moment the older states 

 thought they could shake them- 

 selves free of the new domination ; 

 the terrific energy of the voung 

 king soon undeceived them. A 

 revolt headed by Thebes was 

 crushed, and Alexander forth- 

 with took up the projected task of 

 hurling the West against the East. 

 In eleven momentous years (334- 

 323) he brought the whole of what 

 had been the Persian empire under 

 his dominion (See Alexander the 

 Great), bursting even through the 

 mountain gateways of India ; but 

 his mighty career was cut short 

 when he was no more than thirty- 

 three years of age in 323 B.C. 



In the midst of his tremendous 

 and unparalleled activities as a 

 conqueror and leader of armies, 

 the genius of Alexander had not 

 failed either to provide temporary 

 organization of his conquests or 

 to indicate the scheme for per- 

 manent structure. The barrier 

 between East and West, between 

 Oriental and Hellenic, was to be 

 broken down. The two were to be 

 fused, each giving of its best to the 

 other. Not only in Egypt but 

 in Afghanistan and Turkistan 

 arose cities which took from him 

 the name of Alexandria, cities 

 where Greeks and Macedonians 

 were planted for the diffusion of 

 Hellenic civilization ; Greeks were 

 settled even in the Punjab. But 

 his dream of a universal empire 



