The Historians' History of the World 04

Of Greece during this period we can give no account, except that the greater number of its cities were in dependence upon Demetrius and his son Antigonus—either under occupation by Macedonian garrisons, or ruled by local despots who leaned on foreign mercenaries and Macedonian support. The spirit of the Greeks was broken, and their habits of combined sentiment and action had disappeared. The invasion of the Gauls indeed awakened them into a temporary union for the defence of Thermopylæ in 279 B.C. But this burst of spirit did not interrupt the continuance of the Macedonian dominion in Greece, which Antigonus Gonatas continued to hold throughout most of a long reign. He greatly extended the system begun by his predecessors, of isolating each Grecian city from alliances with other cities in its neighbourhood—planting in most of them local despots, and compressing the most important by means of garrisons. Among all Greeks, the Spartans and the Ætolians stood most free from foreign occupation, and were the least crippled in their power of self-action. The Achæan League too developed itself afterwards as a renovated sprout from the ruined tree of Grecian liberty, though never attaining to anything better than a feeble and puny life, nor capable of sustaining itself without foreign aid.b

At this point Grote ends his immortal work and takes farewell of Grecian history in the following words:

“With this after-growth, or half-revival, I shall not meddle. It forms the Greece of Polybius, which that author treats, in my opinion justly, as having no history of its own, but as an appendage attached to some foreign centre and principal among its neighbours—Macedonia, Egypt, Syria, Rome. Each of these neighbours acted upon the destinies of Greece more powerfully than the Greeks themselves. The Greeks to whom these volumes have been devoted—those of Homer, Archilochus, Solon, Æschylus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Demosthenes—present as their most marked characteristic a loose aggregation of autonomous tribes or communities, acting and reacting freely among themselves, with little or no pressure from foreigners. The main interest of the narrative has consisted in the spontaneous grouping of the different Hellenic fractions, in the self-prompted co-operations and conflicts, the abortive attempts to bring about something like an effective federal organisation, or to maintain two permanent rival confederacies, the energetic ambition and heroic endurance of men to whom Hellas was the entire political world. The freedom of Hellas, the life and soul of this history from its commencement, disappeared completely during the first years of Alexander’s reign. After following to their tombs the generation of Greeks contemporary with him—men like Demosthenes and Phocion, born in a state of freedom—I have pursued the history into that gulf of Grecian nullity which marks the succeeding century; exhibiting sad evidence of the degrading servility, and suppliant king-worship, into which the countrymen of Aristides and Pericles had been driven, by their own conscious weakness under the overwhelming pressure from without.

“I cannot better complete that picture than by showing what the leading democratical citizen became, under the altered atmosphere which now bedimmed his city. Demochares, the nephew of Demosthenes, has been mentioned as one of the few distinguished Athenians in this last generation. He was more than once chosen to the highest public offices; he was conspicuous for his free speech, both as an orator and as an historian, in the face of powerful enemies; he remained throughout a long life faithfully attached to the democratical constitution, and was banished for a time by its opponents. In the year 280 B.C., he prevailed on the Athenians to erect a public monument, with a commemorative inscription, to his uncle Demosthenes. Seven or eight years afterwards, Demochares himself died, aged nearly eighty. His son Laches proposed and obtained a public decree, that a statue should be erected, with an annexed inscription, to his honour. We read in the decree a recital of the distinguished public services whereby Demochares merited this compliment from his countrymen. All that the proposer of the decree, his son and fellow-citizen, can find to recite, as ennobling the last half of the father’s public life (since his return from exile), is as follows: (1) He contracted the public expenses, and introduced a more frugal management. (2) He undertook an embassy to King Lysimachus, from whom he obtained two presents for the people—one of thirty talents, the other of one hundred talents. (3) He proposed the vote for sending envoys to King Ptolemy in Egypt, from whom fifty talents were obtained for the people. (4) He went as envoy to Antipater, received from him twenty talents, and delivered them to the people at the Eleusinian festival.