Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/140

 132 DEMETRIUS. ers. And now it was almost impossible for the city, which hitherto had never been captured, to escape his arms. But certainly there never was any king upon whom fortune made such short turns, nor any other life or story so filled with her swift and surprising changes, over and over again, from small things to great, from splendor back to humiliation, and from utter weakness once more to power and might. They say in his sadder vicissitudes he used sometimes to apostrophize fortune in the words of jEschylus — Thou liftest up, to cast us down again. And SO at this moment, when all things seemed to con- spire together to give him his heart's desire of dominion and power, news arrived that Lysimachus had taken all his cities in Asia, that Ptolemy had reduced all Cyprus with the exception of Salamis, and that in Salamis his mother and children were shut up and close besieged: and yet, like the woman in Archilochus, Water in one deceitful hand she shows, While burning fire within her other glows. The same fortune that drew him off with these disastrous tidings from Spai'ta, in a moment after opened upon him a new and wonderful prospect, of the following kind. Cassander, king of Macedon, dying, and his eldest son, Philip, who succeeded him, not long surviving his fathei-, the two younger brothers fell at variance concerning the succession. And Antipater having murdered his mother Thessalonica, Alexander, the younger brother, called in to his assistance Pyrrhus out of Epirus, and Demetrius out of the Peloponnese. Pyrrhus arrived first, and, taking in recompense for his succor a large slice of Macedonia, had made Alexander begin to be aware that he had brought upon himself a dangerous neighbor. And, that