Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/116

Rh two : first, the duty of the Athenian citizen to sacrifice personal ease and gain to the service of Athens ; secondly, the duty of Athens, as the natural head of free Greece, to consult the interests of all the Greek cities. The energy of Demosthenes was not Grst roused by the progress of Philip. Before there was danger from the quarter of Macedon, Demosthenes had seen clearly that the decay of public spirit threatened the destruction of Hellenic life. As he said to the Athenians afterwards, if Philip had not existed they would have made another Philip for themselves. And the condition of Athens was at least not worse than that of any other city which could have aspired to lead.

A strategist so keen-sighted as Philip must early have perceived that he had little to fear from combined resistance, so long as he was careful not to attack too many separate interests at the same time. Greeks, he saw, were past fighting for each other as Greeks. This was the key-note of his policy to the last. While making aggressions on one Greek city or group of cities, he always contrived to have others on his side.

Philip s career in relation to Greece has two periods. The end of the first period is marked by his admission to the Amphictyonic Council ; the end of the second, by the battle of Clueronea. During the first period Philip is still a foreign power threatening Greece from outside. He takes Amphipolis from the Athenians ; he destroys Potidtea ; he acquires towns on the Thracian and Messalian coasts; he defeats the Phocians under Onomarchus, and even advances to Thermopylae, to find the pass guarded by the Athenians; finally, he destroys Olynthus and the thirty-two towns of its confederacy. In the second period he is no longer a foreign power. Having intervened in the Sacred War and crushed the Phocians, he has taken the place of Phocis in the Ampluctyonic Council, and has thereby been admitted within the circle of the Greek states. The First Philippic and the three Olynthiac speeches of Demosthenes belong to the first of these periods. The speeches On the Peace, On the Embassy, On the Chersonese, and the two later Philippics, belong to the second. In the Third Philippic, the climax of his efforts before Chaeronea, Demosthenes reviews the progress of Philip from the Hellenic, not merely from the Athenian, point of view. Philip has destroyed Olynthus, he has ruined Phocis, he has sown dissensions in Thessaly; Thebes is afraid of him ; he lias gained Eubcea and the Peloponnesus ; he is supreme from the Adriatic to the Hellespont; and the last hope of Greece is in Athens. Demosthenes succeeded in winning back Byzantium to the Athenian alliance, and in persuading Thebans to fight by the side of Athenians ; but he could not avert the cata strophe of Chajronea.

After the victory which made him master of Greece, Philip deprived Sparta of her conquests in the Pelopon nesus. The Messenians, Arcadians, Argives, recovered their old possessions. A congress was then summoned at the isthmus of Corinth. Macedonia and the Greek states were united in a federal league. A federal council was constituted to guard the federal laws ; and the Delphic Amphictyony was recognized as a tribunal to which this council should refer any breach of those laws. Philip, representing Macedonia, the most important member of the league, was acknowledged as its head or president. His position in regard to the Greek cities was thus in form much the same as that of Athens or Sparta in former days. It was nominally an hegemony, with somewhat more stringent powers, corresponding to the more systematic organization of the league ; in practice it was military kingship over Greece. Yet Demosthenes had not failed. The condition of the Greek states under Philip was favour able in proportion as they had given him trouble. Thessaly had actively helped him, and had been completely subju gated. The Peloponnesian rivals of Sparta had not been active either in helping or resisting him, and they were now more dependent on Philip than they had formerly been on Sparta. Athens alone had effectively resisted him, and Athens was treated by him with the prudent respect due to a serious antagonist.

If Greek liberty had received a fatal blow in Greece proper, there was another part of Hellas in which, almost simultaneously, it had been vindicated with splendid suc cess. While Demosthenes was making his heroic resistance. to the designs of Macedon, the enemies of Hellenic free dom in Sicily had been encountered with equal vigour and happier fortune by Timoleon. A few years after the defeat of the Athenian armament in 413, Sicily had suffered two invasions of the Carthaginians. Selinus and Himera, Agrigentum, Gela, and Camarina, had successively fallen. The first Dionysius, in consolidating his own tyranny at 405-36 Syracuse, had been content to leave half the island in the B.C. hands of the foreign foe. The feeble misrule of his son, Dionysius II., produced a series of revolutions. A party at Syracuse invoked the aid of Corinth. Timoleon was sent with only 1200 men (343 B.C.). His first work was to deliver Syracuse from the contending forces of Dionysius and a rival named Hicetas, and to restore the Syracusan democracy. His next work was to drive the Carthaginians out of Sicily. He defeated them with crushing effect at the river Crimesus (340 B.C.). The Sicilian Greeks were now free. Sicily entered on a new period of prosperity, which lasted until Agathocles became tyrant of Syracuse (317 B.C.). Thus the brightest days, perhaps, of Hellenic Sicily coincided with those in which the cities of the Hellenic mainland were learning to bear the Macedonian yoke.

The time seemed now to have come for an enterprise which, since the retreat of the Ten Thousand, had been the dream of many Greek captains, but which none had yet been in a position to attempt. Philip, in the forty-seventh year of his age, had declared war against Persia, and was preparing to invade Asia at the head of an army gathered from all Greece, when he was assassinated by a young Macedonian noble in revenge for a private affront (336 B.C.). Death Alexander, Philip s son and successor, was only twenty. Philip. Marching into Greece, he promptly repressed an insurrec- Alex- tionary movement, and was recognized by a new assembly auder. at Corinth as commander-in-chief of the Greek armies. He next marched against the tribes on the northern borders of Macedonia. While he was absent on this expedition, the Thebans rose against the Macedonian garrison. Alexander returned, took Thebes, and razed it to the ground (335 B.C.). At Corinth he received the homage of the Greek states, and then returned to Macedonia.

Alexander was now free to execute the design of Philip. As captain-general of Hellas, he sets forth to invade the Persian empire, and to avenge the wrongs suffered by Greece at the hands of the first Darius and of Xerxes. The army with which he crossed the Hellespont in 334 B.C. Alex- numbered perhaps about 30,000 infantry and 4000 cavalry. aiKlfcr It was composed of Macedonians, Greeks, and auxiliaries &quot; lva ( from the barbarian tribes on the Macedonian borders. The devotion of native Macedonians to their hereditary king was combined with the enthusiasm of soldiers for a great gene ral. Even if the military genius of Alexander had not been of the first order, his personal authority over his Macedonian troops, and through them over the rest, would still have been greater than was ever possessed by a Greek citizen commanding fellow-citizens.

Alexander s career of conquest has three stages, marked by his three great battles. The victory at the Granicus (334 B.C.) gave him Asia Minor. The victory at Issus (333 B.C.) opened his path into Syria and Egypt. The victory 