Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/423

 rOLinCAl, NULLITY OF ATHENS. 39] Sj'artans and the -Si^tolians stood most free from foreij^n occupa- tion, and were the least crippled in their power of self-action. The Achasan league too developed itself afterwards as a reno- vated 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.^ 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 appen- dage attached to some foreign centre and principal among its neighbors — Macedonia, Egypt, Syria, Rome. Each of these neighbors acted upon the destinies of Greece more powerfnlly than the Greeks themselves. The Greeks to whom these vol- umes have been devoted — those of Homer, Archilochus, Solon, iEschylus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Demosthenes — present as their most marked characteristic a loose aggrega- tion of autonomous tribes or communities, acting and reacting freely among themselves, with little or no pressure from foreign ers. The main interest of the narrative has consisted in the spontaneous grouping of the different Hellenic fractions — in the self-prompted cooperations and conflicts — the abortive attempts to bring about something like an effective federal organization, or to maintain two permanent rival confederacies — the ener- getic 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, disappeai-ed 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 Phokion, born in a state of freedom — I have pursued the history into that gulf of Gre- cian nullity which marks the succeeding century ; exhibiting sad evidence of the degrading servility, and suppliant king-woi"ship, 1 Pausanias, vii. 17, 1. "Are Ik. 6ev6pov Xe?^Uj3ji/^ivot ufepXcinnjacv Ik rr/f 'E/.AaJof to 'A;i;aiVc6t'. '■' Plutarch, Aratus, 47. i'Sta^evre^ yup u'XXoTpiaL^ cui^eadai xfp'^iv, Ka] Toig MaKsSovuv uit?>.oic avToiic VTrsaraTiKoTEC (the Achjeans), etc. Compare hIso c. 12, 13, 15, in reference to the earlier applications to Ptolemy king of Egypt. ' Polybius, i. 3, 4 ; ii. 37