Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/291

 Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age 239 Indeed, in many Greek cities only a discouraged remnant of A last at- the citizens was left after the emigration to Asia. The cattle ^nTty among often browsed on the grass growing in the public square before ^^^ Greeks the town hall in such cities. To be sure, ^tolia, of little fame in Greek history, stood forth in these declining days of Hellas and devised. a form of federation for the union of the Greek states probably better than any before known. But alas, it was too late ; no lasting union ensued. The sumptuous buildings and the pretentious home of science Final decline in Alexandria (p. 234) represented little more than the high civilization aims of the Macedonian kings of Egypt. They were no indica- tion of widespread productive power still active in the Greek race as a whole. For when such state support failed, with its salaries and pensions to scientists and philosophers, the line of scientists failed too, and we see at once how largely science in the Hellenistic Age depended on the generosity of the Hellenistic kings, rather than on Greek interest in science as it had done of old. Add to this the extortions and robberies of the Roman tax gatherer under the last century of the Roman Republic (see p. 277); the criminal failure of Rome to protect her eastern dependencies of the Greek world from piracy and pillage (p. 277); the hopeless outlook for the liberties and the commercial prosperity of Hellas, and we have reasons enough for the tragic decline of Greek civilization which set in during the last two of the three centuries of the Hellenistic Age. The Greeks had brought the world to a higher level of civi- The end lization than men had ever seen before, but they had not been °eadeSiip able to unite and organize it. Not even their own Hellas was a unified nation. The world which the Greeks, as successors of the Orient, had civilized was now to be organized and U7ii- fied by a much less gifted but more practical race, whose city on the Tiber was destined to become the mistress of an enduring world empire.
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