Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/288

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

272 HISTORY OF GREECE. the competing suitors, is reserved, not for any legitimate Helleni* arm, but for a semi-Hellenized 1 Macedonian, "brought up at Pella," and making good h'is encroachments gradually from the north of Olympus. The hegemony of Greece thus passes forever out of Grecian hands ; but the conqueror finds his interest in rekindling the old sentiment under the influence of which it had first sprung up. He binds to him the discordant Greeks, by the force of their ancient and common antipathy against the Great King, until the desolation and sacrilege once committed by Xerxes at Athens is avenged by annihilation of the Persian empire. And this victorious consummation of Pan-Hellenic antipathy, the dream of Xenophon 2 and the Ten Thousand Greeks after the battle of Kunaxa, the hope of Jason of Pheras, the exhortation of Isokrates, 3 the project of Philip, and the achievement of Alexander, while it manifests the irresistible might of Hellenic ideas and organization in the then existing state of the world, is at the same time the closing scene of substantive Grecian life. The citizen-feelings of Greece become afterwards merely secondary forces, subordinate to the preponderance of Greek mercenaries under Macedonian order, and to the rudest of all native Hellens, the JEtolian moun- taineers. Some few individuals are indeed found, even in the third century B. c., worthy of the best times of Hellas, and the Achaean confederation of that century is an honorable attempt to contend against irresistible difficulties : but on the whole, that free, social, and political march, which gives so much interest to the earlier centuries, is irrevocably banished irom Greece after the generation of Alexander the Great. The foregoing brief sketch will show that, taking the period fitun Croesus and Peisistratus down to the generation of Alex- ander (560-300 B. c.), the phenomena of Hellas generally, and ' Dcmosthcn. de Coron. c. 21, p. 247. 2 Xenophon, Anabas. iii. 2, 25-26. ' Xenophon, Hellen. vi. 1,12; Isocrates, Orat. ad Philipp., Orat. v. p. 107. This discourse of Isokrate's is composed expressly for the purpose of calling on Philip to put himself at the head of united Greece against the Persians the Oratio iv, called Panegyrica, recommends a combination of all Greeks for the same purpose, but under the hegemony of Athens, putting aside aU mtestine differences : see Orat. iv. pp. 45-68.