Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/285

Rh formed to repel him. Fifty years later, Tarentum—a colony of Sparta—began to claim the hegemony. But as far as it did exercise this leadership, Tarentum guided the Greek cities to their ruin. The Taren- tines adopted the policy, which had so often proved mischievous, of invoking foreign help against the surrounding natives—first from Sparta, in B.C. 338, when King Archidamus came to their aid, only to fall in battle with the Barbarians; next from Epirus in B.C. 333, when Alexander, King of the Molossi, and brother-in-law of Alexander the Great, came with great ideas of making an empire in the West like that of his namesake in the East. The result was that the Tarentines drew back, and he tried to establish a new Hellenic league to meet at Thurii. He lost his life, however, in the midst of his career by the treachery of a Lucanian native in his own bodyguard (B.C. 331). Finally it was the Tarentines who invited Pyrrhus in B.C. 280, not now against Samnite or Lucanian, but against Rome, with whom they had been strong enough some fifty years before to make an advantageous treaty. The defeat of Pyrrhus (B.C. 275) and the capture of Tarentum by the Romans (B.C. 272) were the sure prelude to the loss of freedom for all the Greek cities. They had to join the Roman system, some on better terms than others, but all in some sort as subjects. For a time this seems to have secured a spell of security and prosperity for some of them—a relief, perhaps, from the attacks of surrounding nations. In B.C. 264 it was to the Greek Tarentum, Locri, Elea, and Naples, that the Romans had to go for ships to meet the