Sparta now assumed for a spell the naval mastery of Greece, and offered to history another tragedy of success brought low by pride. Instead of the freedom which she had promised to the cities once subject to Athens, she levied upon them an annual tribute of a thousand talents ($6,000,000), and established in each of them an aristocratic rule controlled by a Lacedaemonian harmost, or governor, and supported by a Spartan garrison. These governments, responsible only to the distant ephors, practiced such corruption and tyranny that soon the new empire was hated more intensely than the old.

In Sparta itself the influx of money and gifts from oppressed cities and obsequious oligarchs strengthened the internal farces that had long been leading to decay. By the fourth century the ruling caste had learned how to add private luxury to public simplicity, and even the ephors had ceased, except in outward show, to observe the Lycurgean discipline. Much of the land, by dowries and bequests, had fallen into the hands of women; and the wealth so accumulated gave to the Spartan ladies – free from the care of male children – an ease of life and morals hardly befitting their name. The repeated division of some estates had impoverished many families to a point where they could no longer contribute their quota to the public mess, and therefore lost the rights of citizenship; while the formation of large properties through intermarriage and legacies had created in the few remaining "Equals" a provocative concentration of wealth. [The homoioi, or Equals, numbered eight thousand in 480, two thousand in 371, seven hundred in 341.] "Some Spartans," Aristotle writes, "own domains of vast extent, the others have nearly nothing; all the land is in the hands of a few."' The disfranchised gentry, the excluded Perioeci, and the resentful Helots made a population too restless and hostile to permit the government to engage, on any large scale of space or tune, in chose external military operations which imperial rule required.

Meanwhile civil war among the Persians was affecting the fortunes of Greece. In 401 the younger Cyrus rebelled against his brother Artaxerxes II, enlisted Sparta's aid, and recruited an army from the thousands of Greek and other mercenaries left idle in Asia by the sudden termination of the Peloponnesian War. The two brothers met at Cunaxa, between the converging Tigris and Euphrates; Cyrus was defeated and slain, and all of his army was captured or destroyed except a contingent of twelve thousand Greeks whose quickness of mind and foot enabled them to escape into the interior of Babylonia. Hunted by the King's forces, the Greeks chose, in their rough democratic way, three generals to lead them to safety. Among these was Xenophon, once a pupil of Socrates, now a young soldier of fortune, destined to be remembered above all by the Anabasis, or Ascent, in which he later described with engaging simplicity the long "Retreat of the Ten Thousand" up along the Tigris and over the hills of Kurdistan and Armenia to the Black Sea. It was one of the great adventures in human history. We are amazed at the inexhaustible courage of these Greeks, fighting their way on foot, day by day for five months, through two thousand miles of enemy country, across hot and foodless plains, and over perilous mountain passes covered with eight feet of snow, while armies and guerrilla bands attacked them in the rear and in front and on either flank, and hostile natives used every device to kill them, or mislead them, or bar their way. As we read this fascinating story, made so dull for us in youth by the compulsion to translate it, we perceive that the most important weapon for an army is food, and that the skill of a commander lies as much in finding supplies as in organizing victory. More of these Greeks died from exposure and starvation than from battle, though the battles were as numerous as the days. When at last the 8600 survivors sighted the Euxine at Trapezus (Trebizond), their hearts overflowed.

As soon as the vanguard got to the top of the mountains, a great cry went up. And when Xenophon and the rear guard heard it they imagined that other enemies were attacking in front-for enemies were following behind them . . . . They pushed ahead to lend aid, and in a moment they heard the soldiers shouting, "The sea! the sea!" and passing the word along. Then all the troops of the rear guard likewise broke into a run, and the pack animals began racing ahead . . . . And when all had reached the summit, then indeed they fell to embracing one another, and generals and captains as well, with tears in their eyes.

For this was a Greek sea, and Trapezus a Greek city; they were safe now, and could rest without fear of death surprising them in the night. The news of their exploit resounded proudly through old Hellas, and encouraged Philip, two generations later, to believe that a well-trained Greek force could be relied upon to defeat a Persian army many times its size. Unwittingly Xenophon opened the way for Alexander.

Perhaps this influence was already felt by Agesilaus, who in 399 had succeeded to the throne of Sparta. Persia might have been persuaded to overlook Sparta's aid to Cyrus. But to the ablest of the Spartan kings a war with Persia seemed only an interesting adventure, and he set out with a small force to free all Greek Asia from Persian rule. ["In what respect," he asked, "is the 'Great King' greater than I, unless he is more upright and self-restrained?"] When Artaxerxes II learned that Agesilaus was easily defeating all Persian troops sent against him, he dispatched messengers with abundant gold to Athens and Thebes to bribe these cities into declaring war upon Sparta. The effort readily succeeded, and after nine years of peace the conflict between Athens and Sparta was renewed. Agesilaus was recalled from Asia to meet, and barely defeat, the combined forces of Athens and Thebes at Coronea; but in the same month the united fleets of Athens and Persia under Conon destroyed the Spartan navy near Cnidus, and put an end to Sparta's brief domination of the seas. Athens rejoiced, and set to work energetically, with funds supplied by Persia, to rebuild her Long Walls. Sparta defended herself by sending an envoy, Antalcidas, to the Great King, offering to surrender the Greek cities of Asia to Persian rule if Persia would enforce among the mainland Greeks a peace that would protect Sparta. The Great King agreed, withdrew his financial support from Athens and Thebes, and compelled all parties to sign at Sardis (387) the "Peace of Antalcidas," or the "King's Peace." Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros were conceded to Athens, and the major Greek states were guaranteed autonomy; but all the Greek cities of Asia, along with Cyprus, were declared the property of the King. Athens signed under protest, knowing that this was the most disgraceful event in Greek history. For a generation all the fruits of Marathon were lost; the Greek states of the mainland remained free in name, but in effect the power of Persia had engulfed them. All Greece looked upon Sparta as a traitor, and waited eagerly for some nation to destroy her.

As if to strengthen this feeling, Sparta assumed the authority to interpret and enforce the King's Peace among the Greek states. To weaken Thebes she insisted that the Boeotian Confederacy violated the autonomy clause of the treaty, and must be dissolved. With this excuse the Spartan army set up in many Boeotian cities oligarchic governments favorable to Sparta and in several cases upheld by Spartan garrisons. When Thebes protested, a Lacedaemonian force captured her citadel, the Cadmeia, and established an oligarchy subject to Spartan domination. The crisis aroused Thebes to unwonted heroism. Pelopidas and six companions assassinated the four "Laconizing" dictators of Thebes, and reasserted Theban liberty. The Confederacv was reorganized, and named Pelopidas its leader, or boeotarch. Pelopidas called to his aid his friend and lover Epaminondas, who trained and led the army that reduced Sparta to her ancient isolation.

Epaminondas came of a distinguished but impoverished family which proudly traced its origin to the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus a thousand years before. He was a quiet man, of whom it was said that no one talked less or knew more. His modesty and integrity, his almost ascetic life, his devotion to his friends, his prudence in counsel, his courage and yet self-restraint in action, endeared him to all the Thebans despite the military discipline to which he subjected them. He did not love war, but he was convinced that no nation could lose all martial spirit and habits and yet maintain its freedom. Elected and many times re-elected boeotarch, he warned those who proposed to vote for him: "Bethink yourselves once more; for if I am made general you wilt be compelled to serve in my army." Under his command the lax Thebans were drilled into good soldiers; even the "Greek lovers" who were so numerous in the city were formed by Pelopidas into a "Sacred Band" of three hundred hoplites, each of whom was pledged to stand by his friend, in battle, to the death.

When a Spartan army of ten thousand troops under King Cleombrotus invaded Boeotia, Epaminondas met it at Leuctra, near Plataea, with six thousand men, and won a victory that influenced the political history of Greece and the military methods of Europe. He was the first Hellene to make a careful study of tactics; he counted on facing odds in every battle, and concentrated his best fighters upon one wing for offense, while the remainder were ordered to follow a policy of defense; in this way the enemy, advancing in the center, could be disordered by a flank attack on its left. After Leuctra Epaminondas and Pelopidas marched into the Peloponnesus, freed Messenia from its century-long vassalage to Sparta, and founded the city of Megalopolis as a stronghold for all Arcadians. Even into Laconic the Theban army descended-an event without precedent for hundreds of years past. Sparta never recovered from her losses in this campaign: "She could not stand up against a single defeat," says Aristotle, "but was ruined through the small number of her citizens."

Winter coming, the Thebans withdrew to Boeotia. Epaminondas, overreaching himself in typical Greek style, began to dream now of establishing a Theban Empire to replace the unity that Athenian or Spartan leadership had once given to Greece. His plans involved him in a war with the Athenians; and Sparta, thinking to rehabilitate herself, made an alliance with Athens. The hostile armies met at Mantinea in 362. Epaminondas won, but was killed in action by Gryllus, son of Xenophon. The brief hegemony of Thebes left no permanent boon to Hellas; it liberated Greece from the despotism of Sparta, but failed, like its predecessors, to create beyond Boeotia a coherent unity; and the conflicts that it engendered left the Greet: states disordered and weakened when Philip came down upon them from the north.

Athens made a final attempt to forge such a unity. Through her rebuilt walls and fleet, the dependability of her coinage, her long-established facilities for finance and trade, she slowly won back commercial supremacy in the Aegean. Her former subjects and allies had learned from the wars of the last half century the need for a larger security than individual sovereignty could bring; and in 378 the majority of them combined again under Athens' leadership. By 370 Athens was once more the greatest power in the eastern Mediterranean.

Industry and trade were now the substance of her economic life. The soil of Attica had never been propitious to common tillage; patient labor had made it fruitful through tending the olive tree and the vine; but the Spartans had destroyed these, and few of the peasants were willing to wait half a generation far new olive orchards to yield. Most of the farmers of prewar days were dead; many of the survivors were too discouraged to go back to their ruined holdings, and sold them at low prices to absentee owners who could afford long-term investments. In this way, and through the eviction of peasant debtors, the ownership of Attica passed into a few families, who worked many of the large estates with slaves. The mines at Laurium were reopened, fresh victims were sent into the pits, and new riches were transmuted tour of silver ore and human blood. Xenophon proposed a genial plan whereby Athens might replenish her treasury through the purchase of ten thousand slaves and their lease to the contractors t Laurium. Silver was mined in such abundance tat the supply of the metal outran the production of goods, prices rose faster than wages, and the poor bore the burden of the change.

Industry, flourished. The quarries at Pentelicus and the potteries in the Ceramicus had orders from all the Aegean world. Fortunes were made by buying cheap the products of domestic handicraft or small factories, and selling them dear in the home market or abroad. The growth of commerce and the accumulation of wealth in money instead of in land rapidly multiplied the number of bankers in Athens. They received cash or valuables for safekeeping, but apparently paid no interest on deposits. Soon discovering that under normal conditions not all deposits were reclaimed at once, the bankers began to lend funds at substantial rates of interest, providing, at first, money instead of credit. They acted as bail for clients, and made collections for them; they lent money on the security of land or precious articles, and helped to finance the shipment of goods. Through their aid, and even more through speculative loans by private individuals, the merchant might hire a ship, transport his goods to a foreign market, and buy there a return cargo – which, on reaching the Piraeus, remained the property of the lenders until the loan was repaid. As the fourth century progressed, a real credit system developed: the bankers, instead of advancing cash, issued letters of credit, money orders, or checks; wealth could now pass from one client to another merely by entries in the banker's books. Businessmen or bankers issued bonds for mercantile loans, and every large inheritance included a number of such bonds. Some bankers, like the ex-slave Pasion, developed so many connections, and acquired by a discriminating honesty so widespread a reputation for reliability, that their bond was honored throughout the Greek world. Pasion's bank had many departments and employees, mostly slaves; it kept a complex set of books, in which every transaction was so carefully recorded that these accounts were usually accepted in court as indisputable evidence. Bank failures were not uncommon, and we hear of "panics" in which bank after bank closed its doors. Serious charges of malfeasance were brought against even the most prominent banks, and the people looked upon the bankers with that same mixture of envy, admiration, and dislike with ,vh1ch the poor favor the rich in all ages.

The change from landed to movable wealth produced a feverish struggle for money, and the Greek language had to invent a word, pleonexia, to denote this appetite for "more and more," and another word, chrematistike, for the busy pursuit of riches. Goods, services, and persons were increasingly judged in terms of money and property. Fortunes were made and unmade with a new rapidity, and were spent in lavish displays that would have shocked the Athens of Pericles. The nouveaux riches (the Greeks had a name for them – neoplutoi) built gaudy houses, bedecked their women with costly robes and jewels, spoiled them with a dozen servants, and made it a principle to feed their guests with none but expensive drinks and foods.

In the midst of this wealth poverty increased, for the same variety and freedom of exchange that enabled the clever to make money allowed the simple to lose it faster than before. Under the new mercantile economy the poor were relatively poorer than in the days of their serfdom on the land. In the countryside the peasants laboriously turned their sweat into a little oil or wine; in the towns the wages of free labor were kept down by the competition of slaves. Hundreds of citizens depended for their maintenance upon the fees paid for attendance at the Assembly or the courts; thousands of the population had to be fed by the temples or the state. The number of voters (not to speak of the general population) who had no property was in 431 some forty-five per cent of the electorate; in 355 it had mounted to fifty-seven per cent. The middle classes, which had provided by their aggregate number and power a balance between the aristocracy and the commons, had lost much of their wealth, and could no longer mediate between the rich and the poor, between an unyielding conservatism and a utopian radicalism; Athenian society divided itself into Plato's "two cities" – "one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, the one at war with the other." The poor schemed to despoil the rich by legislation or revolution, the rich organized themselves for protection against the poor. The members of some oligarchic clubs, says Aristotle, took a solemn oath: "I will be an adversary of the people" (i.e., the commons), "and in the Council I will do it all the evil that I can." "The rich have become so unsocial," writes Isocrates, about 366, "that those who own property had rather throw their possessions into the sea than lend aid to the needy, while those who are in poorer circumstances would less gladly find a treasure than seize the possessions of the rich."

In this conflict more and more of the intellectual classes took the side of the poor. They disdained the merchants and bankers whose wealth seemed to be in inverse proportion to their culture and taste; even rich men among them, like Plato, began to flirt with communistic ideas. Pericles had used colonization as a safety valve to reduce the intensity of the class struggle; but Dionysius controlled tile west, Macedonia was expanding in the north, and Athens found it ever more difficult to conquer and settle new lands. Finally the poorer citizens captured the Assembly, and began to vote the property of the rich into the coffers of the state, for redistribution among the needy and the voters through state enterprises and fees. The politicians strained their ingenuity to discover new sources of public revenue. They doubled the indirect taxes, the customs dues on imports and exports, and the hundredth on real-estate transfers; they continued the extraordinary taxes of war time into peace; they appealed for "voluntary" contributions, and laid upon the rich ever new opportunities ("liturgies") to finance public enterprises from their private funds; they resorted every now and then to confiscations and expropriations; and they broadened the field of the property-income tax to include lower levels of wealth. Any man burdened with a liturgy could by law compel another to take it over if he could prove that the other was wealthier than he, and had borne no liturgy within two years. To facilitate the collection of revenue the taxpayers were divided into a hundred "symmories" (cosharers); the richest members of each group were required to pay, at the opening of each tax year, the whole tax due from the group for the year, and were left to collect during the year, as best they could, the shares due from the other members of the group. The result of these imposts was a wholesale hiding of wealth and income. Evasion became universal, and as ingenious as taxation. In 355 Androtion was appointed to head a squad of police empowered to search for hidden income, collect arrears, and imprison tax evaders. Houses were entered, goods were seized, men were thrown into jail. But the wealth still hid itself, or melted away. Isocrates, old and rich, and furious at being saddled with a liturgy, complained in 353: "When I was a boy, wealth was regarded as a thing so secure as well as admirable that almost everyone affected to own more property than he actually possessed . . . . Now a man has to be ready to defend himself against being rich as if it were the worst of crimes." In other cities the process of decentralizing wealth was not so legal: the debtors of Mytilene massacred their creditors en masse, and excused themselves on the ground that they were hungry; the democrats of Argos (370) suddenly fell upon the rich, killed twelve hundred of them, and confiscated their property. The moneyed families of otherwise hostile states leagued themselves secretly for mutual aid against popular revolts. The middle classes, as well as the rich, began to distrust democracy as empowered envy, and the poor began to distrust it as a sham equality of votes stultified by a gaping inequality of wealth. The increasing bitterness of the class war left Greece internally as well as internationally divided when Philip pounced down upon it; and many rich men i the Greek cities welcomed his coming as the alternative to revolution.

Moral disorder accompanied the growth of luxury and the enlightenment of the mind. The masses cherished their superstitions and clung to their myths; the gods of Olympus were dying, but new ones were being born; exotic divinities like Isis and Ammon, Atys and Bendis, Cybele and Adonis were imported from Egypt or Asia, and the spread of Orphis brought fresh devotees to Dionysus every day. The rising and half-alien bourgeoisie of Athens, trained to practical calculation rather than to mystic feeling, had little use for the traditional faith; the patron gods of the city won from them only a formal reverence, and no longer inspired them with moral scruples or devotion to the state. ["Now that a certain portion of mankind," says Plato (Laws, 948), "do not believe at all in the existence of the gods . . . a rational legislation ought to do away with the oaths of the parties on either side."] Philosophy struggled to find in civic loyalty and a natural ethic some substitute for divine commandments and a surveillant deity; but few citizens cared to live with the simplicity of Socrates, or the magnanimity of Aristotle's "great-minded man."

As the state religion lost its hold upon the educated classes, the individual freed himself more and more from the old moral restraints-the son from parental authority, the male from marriage, the woman from motherhood, the citizen from political responsibility. Doubtless Aristophanes exaggerated these developments; and though Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates agreed with him, they were all conservatives who might be relied upon to tremble at any doings of the growing generation. The morals of war improved in the fourth century, and a wave of Enlightenment humanitarianism followed the teachings of Euripides and Socrates, and the example of Agesilaus. But sexual and political morality continued to decline. Bachelors and courtesans increased in fashionable co-operation, and free unions gained ground on legal marriage. "Is not a concubine more desirable than a wife?" asks a character in a fourth-century comedy. "The one has on her side the law that compels you to retain her, no matter how displeasing she may be; the other knows that she must hold a man by behaving well, or else look for another." So Praxiteles and then Hypereides lived with Phryne, Aristippus with Lais, Stilpo with Nicarete, Lysias with Metaneira, the austere Isocrates with Lagiscium. "The young men," says Theopompus, with a moralist's exaggeration, "spent all their time among flute-girls and courtesans; those who were a little older devoted themselves to gambling and profligacy; and the whole people spent more on public banquets and entertainments than on the provision necessary for the well-being of the state,"

The voluntary limitation of the family was the order of the day, whether by contraception, by abortion, or by infanticide. Aristotle notes that some women prevent conception "by anointing that part of the womb upon which the seed falls with oil of cedar, or ointment of lead, or frankincense commingled with alive oil." [On a similar use of olive oil in our own time, cf. Himes, Medical History of Contraception, 80.] The old families were dying out; they existed, said Isocrates, only in their tombs; the lower classes were multiplying, but the citizen class in Attica had fallen from 43,000 in 431 to 22,000 in 400 and 21,000 in 313. The supply of citizens for military service suffered a corresponding decrease, partly from the dysgenic carnage of war, partly from the reduced number of those who had a property stake in the state, partly from unwillingness to serve; the life of comfort and domesticity, of business and scholarship, had replaced the Periclean life of exercise, martial discipline, and public office. Athletics were professionalized; the citizens who in the sixth century had crowded the palaestra and the gymnasium were now content to exert themselves vicariously by witnessing professional exhibitions. Young men received some grounding, as epheboi, in the art of war; but adults found a hundred ways of escaping military service. War itself had become professionalized by technical complications, and required the full time of specially trained men; citizen soldiers had to be replaced with mercenaries-an omen that the leadership of Greece must soon pass from statesmen to warriors. While Plato talked of philosopher kings, soldier kings were growing up under his nose. Greek mercenaries sold themselves impartially to Greek or "barbarian" generals, and fought as often against Greece as for her; the Persian armies that Alexander faced were full of Greeks. Soldiers shed their blood now not for a fatherland, but for the best paymaster that they could find.

Making honorable exceptions for the archonship of Eucleides (403) and the financial administration of Lycurgus (338-26), the political corruption and turbulence that had followed the death of Pericles continued during the fourth century. According to the law, bribery was punished with death; according to Isocrates, it was rewarded with military and political preferment. Persia had no difficulty in bribing the Greek politicians to make war upon other Greek states or upon Macedon; at last even Demosthenes illustrated the morals of his time. He was one of the noblest of one of the lowest groups in Athens – the rhetars or hired orators who in this century became professional lawyers and politicians. Some of these men, like Lycurgus, were reasonably honest; some of them, like Hypereides, were gallant; most of them were no better than they had to be. If we may take Aristotle's word for it, many of them specialized in invalidating wills."

Several of them laid up great fortunes through political opportunism and reckless demagogy. The rhetors divided into parties, and tore the air with their campaigns. Each party organized committees, invented catchwords, appointed agents, and raised funds; those who paid the expenses of all this frankly confessed that they expected to "reimburse themselves doubly." As politics grew more intense, patriotism waned; the bitterness of faction absorbed public energy and devotion, and left little for the city. The constitution of Cleisthenes and the individualism of commerce and philosophy had weakened the family and liberated the individual; now the free individual, as if to avenge the family, turned around and destroyed the state.

In or near 400 the triumphant democrats, to insure the presence of the poorer citizens at the ekkfesia and thereby to prevent its domination by the propertied classes, extended scare payment to attendance at the Assembly. At first each citizen received an obol (17 cents); as the cost of living rose this was increased to two obols, then to three, until in Aristotle's time it stood at a drachma ($1) per day. It was a reasonable arrangement, for the ordinary citizen towards the end of the fourth century, earned a drachma and a half for a day's work; he could not be expected to leave his employment without some recompense. The plan soon gave the poor a majority in the Assembly; more and more the well to do, despairing of victory, stayed home. It was of no use that a revision of the constitution in 403 confined the power of legislation to a body of five nomothetai, or lawmakers, selected from the citizens chosen by lot for jury service; this new group also inclined to the side of the commons, and its interposition lowered the prestige and authority of the more conservative Council. Perhaps in consequence of the payment for attendance, the level of intelligence in the Assembly seems to have fallen in the fourth century – though our authorities for this are prejudiced reactionaries like Aristophanes and Plato. Isocrates thought that the Assembly should be paid by Athens' enemies to meet frequently, since it made so many mistakes.

These mistakes cost Athens both her empire and her freedom. The same lust for wealth and power that had undermined the first Confederacy now wrecked the second. After the fall of Sparta at Leuctra Athens felt that it might again expand. In organizing the new empire she had pledged herself not to permit the appropriation of land outside of Attica by Athenian subjects. Now she conquered Samos, the Thracian Chersonese, and the cities of Pydna, Potidaea, and Methone on the coasts of Macedonia and Thrace, and colonized them with Athenian citizens. The allied states protested, and many of them withdrew from the Confederation. Methods of coercion and punishment that had been used and had failed in the fifth century were used, and failed, again. In 357 Chios, Cos, Rhodes, and Byzantium declared a "Social War" of rebellion. When two of Athens' ablest generals, Timotheus and Iphicrates, judged it unwise to give battle in a storm to the rebel fleet in the Hellespont, the Assembly indicted them for cowardice. Timotheus was fined the impossible sum of one hundred talents ($600,000), and fled; Iphicrates was acquitted, but never served Athens again. The rebels fought off all attempts to subdue them, and in 355 Athens signed a peace acknowledging their independence. The great city was left without allies, without leaders, without funds, and without friends.

Possibly subtler factors entered into the weakening of Athens. The life of thought endangers every civilization that it adorns. In the earlier stages of a nation's history there is little thought; action flourishes; men are direct, uninhibited, frankly pugnacious and sexual. As civilization develops, as customs, institutions, laws, and morals more and more restrict the operation of natural impulses, action gives way to thought achievement to imagination, directness to subtlety, expression to concealment, cruelty to sympathy, belief to doubt; the unity of character common to animals and primitive men passes away; behavior becomes fragmentary and hesitant, conscious and calculating; the willingness to fight subsides into a disposition to infinite argument. Few nations have been able to reach intellectual refinement and esthetic sensitivity without sacrificing so much in virility and unity that their wealth presents an irresistible temptation to impecunious barbarians. Around every Rome hover the Gauls; around every Athens some Macedon.

Despite a full measure of political turbulence, Syracuse, throughout the fourth century, was one of the richest and most powerful cities In Greece. Dionysius I, unscrupulous, treacherous, and vain, was the most capable administrator of his time. By turning the island of Ortygia into a fortress-residence for himself, and walling in the causeway that bound it with the mainland, he had rendered his position almost immune to attack; and by doubling the pay of his soldiers, and leading them to easy victories, he secured from them a personal loyalty that kept him on the throne for thirty-eight years. Having established his government, he changed his early policy of severity to one of conciliatory mildness, and a kind of egalitarian despotism. [When he condemned the Pythagorean Phinrias (less correctly Pythias) to death for conspiracy, Phintias asked lease to go home for a day to settle his affairs. His friend Damon (not the music master of Pericles and Socrates) offered himself as hostage, and volunteered to suffer death in case Phintias should not return. Phintias returned; and Dionysius, as surprised as Napoleon at any sincere friendsghip, pardoned Phintias, and begged to be admitted into so steadfast a comradship.] He gave choice tracts of land to his officers and his friends, and (as a military measure) assigned nearly all the residences on Ortygia and the causeway to his soldiers; all the remaining soil of Syracuse and its environs he distributed equally among the population, free and slave. Under his guidance Syracuse flourished, though he taxed the people almost as severely as the Assembly taxed the Athenians. When the women became too ornate Dionysius announced that Demeter had appeared to him in a dream and bidden him order all feminine jewelry to be deposited in her temple. He obeyed the goddess, and the women for the most part obeyed him. Soon afterward he "borrowed" the jewelry from Demeter to finance his campaigns."

For at the bottom of all his plans law the resolve to expel the Carthaginians from Sicily. Envious of Hannibal's resort to battering machines in the siege of Selinus, Dionysius gathered into his service the best mechanics and engineers of western Greece, and set them to improve the tools of war. These men invented, among many new engines of offense and defense, the katapeltes, or catapult, for throwing heavy stones and similar projectiles; this and other military innovations passed from Sicily to Greece, and were taken up by Philip of Macedon. A call was sent out for mercenaries, and the armorers of Syracuse manufactured in unheard-of quantities weapons and shields to fit the habits and skills of each group of soldiers engaged, Land battles among the Greeks had heretofore been fought by infantry. Dionysius organized a large body of cavalry, and here, too, gave hints to Philip and Alexander. At the same time he poured funds into the building of two hundred ships, mostly quadriremes or quinqueremes; in speed and power this was such an armada as Greece had never seen. [A bireme was a galley with two banks or decks of oars a trireme, quadrireme, or quinquereme probably had not three, four, or five banks of oars, but so many men on each bench, handling so mane oars through one oarlock or port.]

By 397 all was ready, and Dionysius sent an embassy to Carthage to demand the liberation of all Greek cities in Sicily from Carthaginian rule. Anticipating a refusal, he invited these cities to expel their foreign governments. They did; and still enraged by the memory of Hannibal's massacres, they put to death, with tortures seldom used by Greeks, all Carthaginians who fell into their hands. Dionysius did his best to stop the carnage, hoping to sell the captives as slaves. Carthage ferried over a vast army under Himilcon, and war went on at intervals in 397, 392, 383, and 368. In the end Carthage recovered all that Dionysius had won from her, and after the bloodshed matters stood as before.

Whether through lust for power, or feeling that only a united Sicily could end Carthaginian rule, Dionvsius had meanwhile turned his arms against the Greek cities in the island. Having subjugated them, he crossed over into Italy, conquered Rhegium, and mastered all southwest Italy. He attacked Etruria and took a thousand talents from its temple at Agylla; he planned to plunder the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, but time did not permit. Greece mourned that in the same year (387) liberty had fallen in the west, and in the east had been sold to Persia by the King's Peace. Three years before, Brennus and the Gauls had stood in triumph at the gates of Rome. Everywhere the barbarians on the fringe of the Greek world were growing stronger; and the ravages of Dionysius in southern Italy pared the way for the conquest of its Greek settlements first by the surrounding natives, and then by the half-barbarous Romans. At the next Olympic games the orator Lysias called upon Greece to denounce the new tyrant. The multitude attacked the tents of Dionysius' embassy, and refused to hear his poetry.

The same despot who, after capturing Rhegium, offered freedom to its inhabitants if they would bring him nearly all their hoarded wealth as ransom, and then, when the wealth had been surrendered, sold them as slaves, was a man of -,wide culture, not prouder of his sword than of his pen. When the poet Philoxenus, asked by the dictator for his opinion of the royal verses, pronounced them worthless, Dionysius sentenced him to the quarries. The next day the King repented, had Philoxenus released, and gave a banquet in his honor. But when Dionysius read more of his poetry, and asked Philoxenus to judge it, Philoxenus bade the attendants take him back to the quarries. Despite such discouragements Dionysius patronized literature and the arts, and was pleased for a moment to entertain Plato, who was then (387) traveling in Sicily. According to a widespread tradition reported by Diogenes Laertius, the philosopher condemned dictatorship. "Your words," said Dionysius, "are those of an old dotard." "Your language," said Plato, "is that of a tyrant." Dionysius, we are told, sold him into slavery, but the philosopher was soon ransomed by Anniceris of Cyrene.

The dictator's life was ended not by any of the assassins whom he feared, but by his own poetry. In 367 his tragedy, The Ransom of Hector, received first prize at the Athenian Lenaea. Dionysius was so pleased that he feasted with his friends, drank much wine, fell into a fever, and died.

The harassed city, which had borne with him as an alternative to subjection by Carthage, accepted hopefully the succession of his son to the throne. Dionysius II was now a youth of twenty-five, weak in body and mind, and therefore, thought the crafty Syracusans, likely to give them a mild and negligent rule. He had able advisers in Dion his uncle, and Philistius the historian. Dion was a man of wealth, but also a foyer of letters and philosophy, and a devoted disciple of Plato. He became a member of the Academy, and lived, at home and abroad, a life of philosophical simplicity. It occurred to him that the malleable youth of the new dictator offered an opportunity of establishing, if not quite the Utopia that Plato had described to him, at least a constitutional regime capable of uniting all Sicily for the expulsion of the Carthaginian power. At Dion's suggestion Dionysius II invited Plato to his court, and submitted himself to Plato's tutoring.

Doubtless the young autocrat put his best foot forward, and concealed from his teacher that addiction to drink and lechery" which had drawn from his father the prediction that the dynasty would die with his son. Deceived by the youth's apparent willingness, Plato led him towards philosophy by its most difficult approaches-mathematics and virtue. The ruler was told, as Confucius had told the Duke of Lu, that the first principle of government is good example, that to improve his people he must make himself a model of intelligence and good swill. All the court began to study geometry, and to stand in diplomatic awe over figures traced in the sand. But Philistius, eclipsed by Plato's ascendancy, whispered to the dictator that all this was merely a plot by which the Athenians, who had failed to conquer Syracuse with an army and a fleet, would capture it through a single man; and that Plato, having taken the impregnable citadel with diagrams and dialogues, would depose Dionysius and put Dion on the throne. Dionysius saw in these whispers an excellent escape from geometry. He banished Dion, confiscated his property, and gave Dion's wife to a courtier whom she feared. Despite the dictator's protestations of affection, Plato left Syracuse and joined Dion in Athens. Six years later he returned at the King's invitation, and pled for Dion's recall. Dionysius refused, and Plato resigned himself to the Academy.

In 357 Dion, poor in funds but rich in friends, recruited in mainland Greece a force of eight hundred men, and sailed for Syracuse. Landing secretly, he found the people eager to aid him. With one battle – in which, though he was now fifty, his own heroic fighting turned the tide – he so completely defeated the army of Dionysius that the frightened youth fled to Italy. At this juncture, with Greek impulsiveness, the Syracusan Assembly that he had convened removed Dion from command, lest he should make himself dictator. Dion withdrew peaceably to Leontini; but the forces of Dionysius, liking this turn of events, made a sudden attack upon the popular army, and defeated it. The leaders who had deposed him sent appeals to Dion to hurry back and take charge. He came, won another victory, forgave the men who had opposed him, and then announced a temporary dictatorship as necessary to order. Despite the advice of his friends he refused a personal guard, being "quite ready to die," he said, "rather than live perpetually on the watch against friends and foes alike." Instead he maintained, amid surroundings of wealth and power, his accustomed modesty of life. For though, says Plutarch,

all things had now succeeded to his wish, yet he desired not to enjoy any present advantage of his good fortune . . . . He was content with a very frugal and moderate competency, and was indeed the wonder of all men, that when not only Sicily and Carthage but all Greece looked to him as in the height of prosperity, and no man living greater than he, no general more renowned for valor and success, yet in his guard, his attendance, his table, he seemed as if he rather communed with Plato in the Academy than lived among hired captains and paid soldiers, whose solace of their toils and dangers it is to eat and drink their fill, and enjoy themselves plentifully every day.

If we may credit Plato, it was Dion's aim to establish a constitutional monarchy, to reform Svracusan life and manners on the Spartan model, to rebuild and unify the enslaved or desolate Greek cities of Sicily, and then to expel the Carthaginians from the island. But the Syracusans had set their hearts on democracy, and were no more hungry for virtue than either Dionysius. A friend of Dion murdered him, and chaos broke loose. Dionvsius hurried home, recaptured Ortygia and the government, and ruled with the bitter cruelty of a despot deposed and restored.

Undeserved fates come sometimes to individuals, but rarely to nations. The Syracusans appealed for aid to their mother city, Corinth. The call came at a time when a Corinthian of almost legendary nobleness was waiting for a summons to heroism. Timoleon was an aristocrat who so loved liberty that when his brother Timophanes tried to make himself tyrant of Corinth, Timoleon killed him. Cursed by his mother and brooding over his deed, the tyrannicide withdrew to a woodland retreat, shunning all men. Hearing nevertheless of Syracuse's need, he came out of his retirement, organized a small force of volunteers, sailed to Sicily, and deployed his little band with such strategy that the royal army yielded after a brief taste of his generalship, and without killing any one of his men. Timoleon gave the humbled tyrant money enough to take himself to Corinth, where Dionysius spent the remainder of his life teaching school and sometimes begging his bread. Timoleon re-established democracy, tore down the fortifications that had made Ortygia a buttress of tyranny, repulsed a Carthaginian invasion, restored freedom and democracy in the Greek cities, and made Sicily for a generation so peaceful and prosperous that new settlers were drawn to it from every part of the Hellenic world. Then, refusing public office, he retired to private life; but the island democracies, appreciating his wisdom and integrity, submitted all major matters to his judgment, and freely followed his advice. Two "sycophants" having indicted him on a charge of malfeasance, he insisted, over the protests of a grateful people, on being tried without favor according to the laws, and thanked the gods that freedom of speech and equality before the law had been restored in Sicily. 1t'hen he died (337) all Greece looked upon him as one of the greatest of her sons.

V. The Advance of Macedonia

While Timoleon was restoring democracy for its last respite in ancient Sicily, Philip was destroying it on the mainland. Macedonia, despite the cultural hospitality of Archelaus, was still for the most part a barbarous country of hardy but letterless mountaineers when Philip came to the throne (359); indeed, to the end of its career, though it used Greek as its official language, it contributed no author, or artist, or scientist, or philosopher, to the life of Greece.

Having lived for three years with the relatives of Epaminondas in Thebes, Philip had imbibed there a modicum of. culture and a wealth of military ideas. He had all the virtues except those of civilization. He was strong in body and will, athletic and handsome, a magnificent animal trying, now and then, to be an Athenian gentleman. Like his famous son he was a man of violent temper and abounding generosity, loving battle as much, and strong drink snore. Unlike Alexander he was a jovial laugher, and raised to high office a slave who amused him. He liked boys, but liked women better, and married as many of them as he could. For a time he tried monogamy with Olympias, the wild and beautiful Molossian princess who gave him Alexander; but later his fancy traveled, and Olympias brooded over her revenge. Most of all he liked stalwart men, who could risk their lives all day and gamble and carouse with him half the night. He was literally (before Alexander) the bravest of the brave, and left a part of himself on every battlefield. "What a man?" exclaimed his greatest enemy, Demosthenes. "For the sake of power and dominion he had an eve struck out, a shoulder broken, an arm and a leg paralyzed." He had a subtle intelligence, capable of patiently awaiting his chance, and of moving resolutely through difficult means to distant ends. In diplomacy he was affable and treacherous; he broke a promise with a light heart, and was always ready to make another; he recognized no morals for governments, and looked upon lies and bribes as humane substitutes for slaughter. But he was lenient in victory, and usually gave the defeated Greeks better terms than they gave one another. All who met him – except the obstinate Demosthenes – liked him, and ranked him as the strongest and most interesting character of his time.

His government was an aristocratic monarchy in which the king's powers were limited by tile duration of his superior strength of arm or mind, and by the willingness of the nobles to support him. Eight hundred feudal barons made up the "king's Companions"; they were great landowners who despised the life of cities, crowds, and books; but when, with their consent, the King announced a war, they came out of their estates physically fit and drunkenly brave. In the army they served as cavalry, riding the sturdy horses of Macedonia and Thrace, and trained by Philip to fight in a close formation that could change its tactics at once and as one at the commander's word. Beside these was an infantry of rugged hunters and peasants, arrayed in "phalanxes": sixteen rows of men pointing their lances over the heads-or resting them on the shoulders-of the rows ahead of them, making each phalanx an iron wall. The lance, twenty-one feet long, was weighted at the rear, so that when held aloft it projected fifteen feet forward. As each row of soldiers marched three feet before the next, the lances of the first five rows projected beyond the phalanx, and the lances of the first three rows had a greater reach than the six-foot javelin of the nearest Greek hoplite. The Macedonian soldier, after hurling his lance, fought with a short sword, and protected himself with a brass helmet, a coat of mail, greaves, and a lightweight shield. Behind the phalanx came a regiment of old-fashioned archers, who shot their arrows over the heads of the lancers; then came a siege train with catapults and battering rams. Resolutely and patiently – laying Frederick William I to Alexander's Frederick – Philip drilled this army of ten thousand men into the most powerful fighting instrument that Europe had yet known.

With this force he was determined to unify Greece under his leadership; then, with the help of all Hellas, he proposed to cross the Hellespont and drive the Persians out of Greek Asia. At every step toward this end he found himself running counter to the Hellenic love of freedom; and in trying to overcome this resistance he almost forgot the end in the means. His first move brought him into conflict with Athens, for he sought to win possession of the cities that Athens had acquired on the Macedonian and Thracian coasts; these cities not only blocked his way to Asia, they also controlled rich gold mines and a taxable trade. While Athens was absorbed in the "Social War" that ended her second empire, Philip seized Amphipolis (357), Pydna, and Potidaea (356), and answered the protests of Athens with fine compliments to Athenian literature and art. In 355 he took Methone, losing an eye in the siege; in 347, after a long campaign of chicanery and bravery, he captured Olynthus. He now controlled all the European coast of the north Aegean, had an income of a thousand talents a year from the mines of Thrace," and could turn his thoughts to winning the support of Greece.

To finance his campaigns he had sold thousands of captives – many of them Athenians – into slavery, and had lost the good will of Hellenes. It was fortunate for him that during these years the Greek states were exhausting themselves in a second "Sacred War" (356-46) over the spoliation of the Delphic treasury by the Phocians. The Spartans and Athenians fought for the Phocians, the Amphictyonic League – Boeotia, Locris, Doris, Thessaly – fought against them. Losing, the Amphicryonic Council besought the help of Philip. He saw his opportunity, came swiftly down through the open passes, overwhelmed the Phocians (346), was received into the Delphic Amphictyony, was acclaimed as the protector of the shrine, and accepted an invitation to preside over all the Greeks at the Pythian games. He cast his eyes upon the divided states of the Peloponnesus, and felt that he could win all of them except weakened Sparta to accept him as leader in a Greek Confederacy that might free all Greeks in the cast and the west. But Athens, listening at last to Demosthenes, saw in Philip not a liberator but an enslaver, and decided to fight for the jealous sovereignty of the city-state, and the preservation of that free democracy which had made her the light of the world.

The Vatican statue of the great orator is one of the masterpieces of Hellenistic realism. It is a careworn face, as if every advance of Philip had cut another furrow into the brow. The body is thin and wearied; the aspect is that of a man who is about to make a final appeal for a cause that he considers lost; the eyes reveal a restless life, and foresee a bitter death.

His father was a manufacturer of swords and bedframes, who bequeathed to him a business worth some fourteen talents ($84,000). Three executors administered the property for the boy, and squandered it so generously on themselves that when Demosthenes reached the age of twenty (363) he had to sue his guardians to recover the remains of his inheritance. He spent most of this in fitting out a trireme for the Athenian navy, and then settled down to earn his bread by writing speeches for litigants. He could compose better than he could speak, for he was weak in body and defective in articulation. Sometimes, says Plutarch, he prepared pleas for both the opposed parties to a dispute. Meanwhile, to overcome his impediments, he addressed the sea with a mouth full of pebbles, or declaimed as he ran up a hill. He worked hard, and his only distractions were courtesans and boys. "What can one do with Demosthenes?" his secretary complained. "Everything that he has thought of for a whole year is thrown into confusion by one woman in one night." After years of effort he became one of the richest lawyers at the Athenian bar, learned in technicalities, convincing in discourse, and flexible in morals. He defended the banker Phormio against precisely such charges as he had brought against his guardians, took substantial fees from private persons for introducing and pressing legislation, and never answered the accusation of his colleague Hypereides that he was receiving money from the Persian King to stir up war against Philip." At his zenith his fortune was ten times as large as that which his father bad left him.

Nevertheless he had the integrity to suffer and die for the views that he was paid to defend. He denounced the dependence of Athens upon mercenary troops, and insisted that the citizens who received money from the theoric fund should earn it by serving in the arm)-; his courage rose to the point of demanding that this fund should be used not to pay citizens to attend religious ceremonies and plays, but to organize a better force for the defense of the state. [The theoric (i.e., spectacle) fund had now been extended to so many festivals as almost to pauperize a large part of the citizenry. "The Athenian Republic," says Glotz, "had become a mutual benefit society, demanding from one class the wherewithal to support another." The Assembly had made it a capital crime to propose any diversion of this fund to other purposes.] He told the Athenians that they were degenerate slackers who had lost the military virtues of their progenitors. He refused to admit that the city-state had stultified itself with faction and war, and that the times called for the unity of Greece; this unity, he warned, was a phrase to conceal the subjugation of Greece to one man. He detected the ambitions of Philip from their first symptoms, and begged the Athenians to fight to retain their allies and colonies in the north.

Against Demosthenes and Hypereides and the party of war stood Aeschines and Phocion and the party of peace. Very likely both sides were bribed, the one by Persia, the other by Philip, and both were sincerely moved by their own agitation. Phocionryas by common consent the most honest statesman of his time – a Stoic before Zeno, a philosophical product of Plato's Academy, an orator who so despised the Assembly that when it applauded him lie asked a friend, "Have I not unconsciously said something bad?" Forty-five times he was chosen strategos, far surpassing the record of Pericles – he served ably as a general in many wars, but spent most of his life in advocating peace. His associate Aeschines was no stoic, but a man who had risen from bitter poverty to a comfortable income. His youth as a teacher and an actor helped him to become a fluent speaker, the first Greek orator, we arc told, to speak extempore with success; his rivals wrote out their speeches in advance. Having served with Phocion in several engagements, he adopted Phocion's policy of compromising with Philip instead of making war; and when Philip paid him for his efforts his enthusiasm for peace became an edifying devotion.

Twice Demosthenes indicted Aeschines on the charge of receiving Macedonian gold, and twice failed to convict him. Finally, however, the martial eloquence of Demosthenes, and the southward advance of Philip, persuaded the Athenians to forego for a time the distribution of the theoric fund, and to employ it in war. In 338 an army was hastily organized, and marched north to face the phalanxes of Philip at Boeotian Chaeronea. Sparta refused to help, but Thebes, feeling Philip's fingers at her throat, sent her Sacred Band to fight beside the Athenians. Every one of its three hundred members died on that battlefield. The Athenians fought almost as bravely, but they had waited too long, and were not equipped to meet so novel an army as the Macedonian. They broke and fled before the sea of lances that moved upon them, and Demosthenes fled with them. Alexander, Philip's eighteen-year-old son, led the Macedonian cavalry with reckless courage, and won the honors of a bitter day.

Philip was diplomatically generous in victory. He put to death some of the anti-Macedonian leaders in Thebes, and set up his partisans there in oligarchic power. But he freed the two thousand Athenian prisoners that he had taken, and sent the charming Alexander and the Judicious Antipater to offer peace on condition that Athens recognize him as the general of all Greece against the common foe. Athens, which had expected harsher terms, not only consented, but passed resolutions showering compliments upon the new Agamemnon. Philip convened at Corinth a synedrion, or assembly, of the Greek states, formed them (except Sparta) into a federation modeled on the Boeotian, and outlined his plans for the liberation of Asia. He was unanimously chosen commander in this enterprise; each state pledged him men and arms, and promised that no Greek anywhere should fight against him. Such sacrifices were a small price to pay for his distance.

The results of Chaeronea were endless. The unity that Greece had failed to create for itself had been achieved, but only at the point of a half-alien sword. The Peloponnesian War had proved Athens incapable of organizing Hellas, the aftermath had shown Sparta incapable, the Theban hegemony in its turn had failed; the wars of the armies and the classes had worn out the city-states, and left them too weak for defense. Under the circumstances they were fortunate to find so reasonable a conqueror, who proposed to withdraw from the scene of his victory, and leave to the conquered a large measure of freedom. Indeed Philip, and Alexander after him, watchfully protected the autonomv of the federated states, lest any one of them, by absorbing others, should grow strong enough to displace Macedon. One great liberty, however, Philip tool: away-the right of revolution. He was a frank conservative who considered the stability of property an indispensable stimulus to enterprise, and a necessary prop to government. He persuaded the synod at Corinth to insert into the articles of federation a pledge against any change of constitution, any social transformation, any political reprisals. In each state he lent his influence to the side of property, and put an end to confiscatory taxation.