Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/404

 382 HISTORY OF GREECE. but for a moment. During the very same year, there occurred that revolt among her principal allies, known by the name of the Social War, which gave to her power a fatal shock, and left the field comparatively clear for the early aggressions of her yet more formidable enemy Philip of Macedon. That prince had already emerged from his obscurity as a hostage in Thebes, and had sue ceeded his brother Perdikkas, slain in a battle with the Illyrians, as king (360-359 B. c.). At first, his situation appeared not merely difficult, but almost hopeless. Not the most prescient eye in Greece could have recognized, in the inexperienced youth strug- gling at his first accession against rivals at home, enemies abroad, and embarrassments of every kind the future conqueror of Chae- roneia, and destroyer of Grecian independence. How, by his own genius, energy, and perseverance, assisted by the faults and dissen- sions of his Grecian enemies, he attained his inauspicious eminence will be recounted in my subsequent volume. At the opening of my ninth volume, after the surrender of Athens, Greece was under the Spartan empire. Its numerous independent city-communities were more completely regimented under one chief than they had ever been before, Athens and Thebes being both numbered among the followers of Sparta. But the conflicts recounted in these two volumes (during an in- terval of forty-four years 404-403 B. c. to 360-359 B. c.) have wrought the melancholy change of leaving Greece more disunited, and more destitute of presiding Hellenic authority, than she had been at any time since the Persian invasion. Thebes, Sparta, and Athens, had all been engaged in weakening each other; in which, unhappily, each has been far more successful than in strengthening by Athens drove the Theban invaders out of that island), though it occur- red just about the same time as the recovery of the Chersonese. That expedition will more properly come to be spoken of in my next volume. But the recovery of the Chersonese was the closing event of a series of proceedings which had been going on for four years ; so that I could hardly leave that series unfinished.