archer deprived him of an eye. But early in the year 348 B.C. he attacked Olynthus itself, after a sudden declaration of war. The Olynthians, he said, must quit their city, or he must quit Macedonia. But he did not overcome them by fair fighting. They were betrayed by a party among their fellow-citizens. It was by bribery, as Horace says,[1] that "the man of Macedon" opened the gates of Olynthus as of other cities. It was to be expected that he would show no mercy. The fair city was razed to the ground, and its population, with all the women and children, sold into slavery.
This awful calamity sent a shudder through the Greek world. The like of it had never been seen since the great Persian invasion of Xerxes. As many as thirty-two free Greek cities had utterly perished in a period of less than two years at the hands of a barbarian. Divided as the Greeks were among themselves, they would have all heartily responded to the sentiment of Demosthenes that "a barbarian should be submissive to Greeks." It must have shocked and shamed them to see with their own eyes troops of poor enslaved creatures, of both sexes and of Greek blood, passing through the streets of their cities. And all this was the work of a Macedonian, a man of inferior race, whom Greeks had thought it almost a condescension to notice and patronise. How could they expect that he would much longer stay his hand from the destruction of the Greek cities on the Hellespont and the Propontis, and from the conquest of the rich corn-producing Chersonese? How
- ↑ Odes, iii. 16, 13.
