The Historians' History of the World 04

Subsequent events, in Greece itself first of all, offer sufficient explanation of what the Peace of 311 meant, so far as the freedom of the Grecian states was concerned. And yet it appears the old magic of the word did not cease to delude the mind and inflame the heart—for did not that word comprehend everything they thought they now lacked and had once enjoyed?

Free their city republics could yet certainly be, or become—free after a certain fashion; but independent, scarce one of them. Powers far superior stood round on every side; and although full of active men ready to be hired for fighting, these little states were too poor to bring up considerable armies, too jealous and bitter about one another to make a reliable alliance, and lastly the public spirit of their citizens was too decayed to permit any possible hope of a radically better state of things. Their day was over. Only the forms of a great monarchy could have held together this restless life which was fretting itself away; but whatever attempt had been made in this direction had taken no root among a people who were entirely separatist, and whose ideas of citizenship never went beyond the limits of their various cities. The very qualities that so peculiarly fitted the Greek spirit to serve as the fermenting leaven that should work through the peoples of Asia and forward their development, incapacitated it for the work of retaining its independent politics and keeping pace with the new developments of the time.

The situation of Sparta in these times is a strange one. The laws of Lycurgus and the old forms still linger there, but the old spirit has gone out, even to the last trace. It is a reign of the basest immorality. The citizens have dwindled to a few hundreds, the constitution of Lycurgus, formally observed, is a lie. The narrower the intellectual circle in which thought may move, the cruder must be the notions that obtain. Literature and science, the comfort and hope of the rest of Greece, were still, even to this day, proscribed in Sparta. Sparta had no other interest in the situation except that in her dominion was the universal recruiting ground for all parties—the peninsula of Tænarus—and distinguished Spartans were always glad to take the field as mercenaries. Even the son of the aged king Cleomenes II, Acrotatus, led a mercenary army to Tarentum and Sicily in 315, revolting those in whose pay he fought by his bloodthirsty savagery and his unnatural passions. He came home to Sparta dishonoured, and died before he could inherit from his father.

At the death of Cleomenes (309), Cleonymus, a worthy brother to Acrotatus in dissoluteness and arrogance, demanded the kingdom; the Gerousia decided in favour of the young son of Acrotatus, Areus, and after a few years Cleonymus entered the service of Tarentum with a force of mercenaries, to bring the name of Sparta into ignominy by behaving even worse than his brother. At home the power of the kings, since the state no longer existed for its business of war, was as good as gone. The ephorate ruled as an oligarchy, and the oligarchy wanted nothing but quiet and pleasure, wrapped up in the dead laws of Lycurgus; nothing was further from their thoughts than the idea of winning again their old hegemony, at least in the Peloponnese—an idea which might now have been justified by the distraction of Greece and the strife of parties that was bursting afresh into flames.

ATHENS UNDER DEMETRIUS; SPARTA BEHIND WALLS

Athens affords us the most vivid glimpse into this unhappy time. How often had the ruling party and the policy of the city changed since the battle of Chæronea. At last in the autumn of 318, after the victory of Cassander, the state was given a form which was anything but a democracy. The man whom the people chose, and Cassander confirmed, as state administrator, was Demetrius, the son of Phanostratus of Phalerus. He had grown up in the house of Timotheus and had been educated in science and for a political life by Theophrastus. He was a man as talented as he was vain, as versatile in the realm of letters as he was politically characterless—for the rest, a man of the world and its pleasures, who fell on his feet wherever he was.