B. c. 361.

A few words must be devoted to his great rival Agesilaus, whose enmity towards Thebes had always been so deep and unwearied. The year after the death of Epaminondas a general pacification was made, in which Sparta refused to concur, as she would not acknowledge the independence of the Messenians. In the same year Agesilaus, at the age of eighty, went to Egypt to assist the rebels against Persia, with a view to weaken the Persian monarchy. Agesilaus, however, was not received with much respect in Egypt. The Egyptians saw before them a little deformed old man, poorly dressed, sitting on the grass, without any luxury or state. They even refused to accept the aged warrior as their general. Eventually, however, he returned from Egypt enriched with a present of two hundred and thirty talents. He did not live to reach home, but, putting into Cyrene, he died there, after a reign of thirty-eight years. His body was preserved in wax, and interred at Sparta B. C. 360. with great splendour. It was the saying of Augustus that he found Rome of brick and left it of marble. The opposite saying is true of Agesilaus: he found Sparta great, but he left her debased and degraded -Marmoream invenit, latericiam reliquit. There are many great points about the character of Agesilaus, but in the judgment and humiliation of his country he himself is judged and humiliated.

CHAPTER XLV.

THE SUPREMACY OF MACEDON.

A GENERAL decline of greatness, a general corruption of morals, seem at this time to have befallen Greece. The old Hellenic heroism may almost be said to have flashed its brightest and its last in the splendid character and career of Epaminondas. We first look at the position of the Athenians. They had certainly gone very far towards attaining that pre-eminence from which they had fallen in the course of the Peloponnesian war;

indeed, at no time of her history did she command a greater armament or a greater army. Her interference had been only slight during the wars between northern and southern Greece, and the conclusion of that long struggle left her the strongest of the Hellenic states. But beneath this apparent vitality were the seeds of insidious and fatal decay. All through Greece, and in Athens not the least, the former manliness and patriotism were vanishing away. Bands of mercenaries now went about Greece like the Italian condottieri of the middle ages, ready to fight for any wealthy state that had not the courage and energy to fight for itself. In this era also, as in every era of moral decline, peculation of public money became very rife; large sums were voted by states for armies which had little more existence than on paper, the generals cheating the public and bribing the auditors of accounts. The Athenians became noted for their luxuriousness, and for their increasing addictedness to the theatres and the law courts. "With the death of Epaminondas," says Justin, "the virtues of the Athenians also perished; for after the loss of him in whom they had, for a time, had a rival, the Athenians sank into idleness and a state of insensibility. They began to spend their revenue not, as formerly, upon their fleets and armies, but upon the celebration of festivals and public games. Having the most distinguished actors and poets, they visited the theatre more frequently than the camp, and prized verse-makers higher than generals. The public revenues, with which formerly soldiers and seamen had been paid, now began to be distributed among the population of the city." Such was the state of the Athenian people, and of Greece generally, although the time is not unredeemed by some splendid examples of courage, eloquence, and patriotism.

B. C. 359.

The year that followed the death of Agesilaus witnessed the accession to the throne of Macedon of a king who was destined to change the face of Greece and of the world. The reign of Philip of Macedon, which lasted for the prolonged period of four and twenty years, has always been a special study for soldiers and statesmen. There was yet a great part for Greece to play in the world, which in its enervated and de

clining state it was unable to achieve until it was renovated by and absorbed into the power of Macedonia. Philip was a great, bad man; but we know that the Most High maketh the wrath of man to serve Him, and Philip was the instrument of preparing the way for the accomplishment of His mighty and all-wise purposes. King Philip was a warrior and a statesman; a warrior, cool, courageous, of iron will; a statesman, far-sighted, sagacious, but capable of the greatest cruelty, unbounded craft and perfidy. It was not without many trials and difficulties, which served to discipline and mature his genius, that Philip sat safely on his ancestral throne.

Macedonia was a country which, strictly speaking, had been never reckoned to belong to Greece. Its limits have somewhat varied, but the ordinary boundaries may be taken as thus: On the south it was separated from Thessaly by the Cambunian mountains; from Illyria on the west by the great mountain chain called Scardus and Bernus, the same range which, under the name of Pindus, separates Thessaly from Epirus; a range of mountains separates it on the north from Moesia, and the river Strymon parts it on the east from Thrace. Most probably the Macedonian people were a branch of the Illyrian race; nevertheless, its kings, who claimed descent from the Heracleids, were allowed to contend at the Olympic games, from which all but Greeks were rigidly excluded. The kingdom might be called a constitutional monarchy, very much according to the manner of royalty described in the Homeric poems. In the time of the Persian war we find its kings on friendly terms with the Athenian people. There had at times been much disturbance in the country, and dynastic changes, and the Greek states estimated very lightly its political importance, and called its people barbarians. The country had, however, of late generations been blessed with a succession of able and enlightened monarchs, who were turning to good account the simplicity, vigour, patience, and endurance of its inhabitants. Under such sovereigns Macedonia was really a great element of danger to the Greek states. It has been truly said that nothing is so dangerous to the liberties and progress of a refined and educated race as the pre

sence on its borders of a mass of unenlightened physical power, controlled, regulated, and directed by the intellect and ambition of its sovereign. Philip himself had received a large tincture of Greek literature at Thebes ; he had probably made the acquaintance of Plato; he became a great orator, and in that age, as in the present, oratory was a necessity for the statesman-an advantage which in Philip's case was heightened by a commanding appearance and by pleasing manners. At Thebes also he became familiar with the highest strategy and soldiership of the time, as they existed in the practice of Pelopidas and Epaminondas. At a very early period of his reign he improved on the Theban tactics by the introduction of the invincible Macedonian phalanx. He also established a standing army, which gradually increased both in numbers and in efficiency, bringing their training and discipline to the highest attainable point of perfection.

To a monarch such as Philip, the addition of a seaboard to his empire was an object of the highest importance. During the reconstruction of her maritime empire Athens had been most anxious to regain possession of Amphipolis; it had been the jewel of their empire; its capture by Brasidas was the greatest evil that great general had ever inflicted on them; its recovery was the paramount object which they held before them, and the non-fulfilment of the promise of its restoration in return for the prisoners of Sphacteria was the great disappointment that had attended the Peace of Nicias. The Athenians of late years had made various unavailing attempts for its recovery; the Olynthians were anxious that it should become a member of their confederacy; Philip was especially desirous of gaining possession of it; the mountains bordering on the Strymon were clothed with forests, which would enable Philip to construct and send out a navy. The Olynthians proposed to the Athenians that they should form an alliance for the purpose of securing Amphipolis against the designs of Philip. At this period such a coalition would have saved Amphipolis from the Macedonians. Philip now gave an early but very high example of his consummate craft. He persuaded the Athenians to reject the proposals of the

He

Olynthians by promising to get them Olynthus if they would only give him Pydna, and he bought off the Olynthians by giving them the town of Anthemus. then besieged Amphipolis, which, being unaided, easily fell into his hands. He next found a specious plea under which he refused to surrender Amphipolis to the Athenians. Fearing the just anger of the Athenians he drew closer the bonds of amity with the Olynthians by assisting them to recover Potidea from the Athenians, and when he had taken Potidæa, he treated the Athenians with great kindness, that he might not aggravate their ill-will. Plutarch says that on the very day that Potidæa was taken three other fortunate events happened to Philip: he gained the chariot prize at the Olympian games; his general, Parmenio, defeated the Illyrians: and his son Alexander was born. Philip then crossed the Strymon, and reached the range of mountains known as the Pangaus. These mountains abounded with gold mines, which had always been inefficiently worked. Philip conquered the district, and founded on the site of an obscure town what became the famous city of Philippi. By improved methods of working the mines he made them yield about a thousand talents a year. With these he forged the golden weapons, which he found were the most effective of all his arms and munitions of war. He became by far the greatest pecuniary corrupter of that corrupt age. Such a crowded series of events illustrates the rapidity of Philip's progress, his intrepidity as well as the moral tortuousness of his character, his profound dissimulation, his craft, his policy, the insight and farsightedness of his plans.

A power so rising and so unscrupulous, bordering on the limits of the old historic Greek states, and making almost daily encroachments thereon, might have well banded all Greece together as against the common enemy of all the Greek states. But the Greek states were torn by dissensions, and most of them had their own special troubles. The Athenians were now engaged in war with their own allies-known by the name of the Social War. Unregardful of their misfortunes in the past, unmindful of their pledges and promises for the future, the Athenians were once more pursuing a policy of exaction and encroachment