Part 59

ATHENS: B. C. 336-322. End of the Struggle with the Macedonians. Fall of Democracy. Death of Demosthenes. Athenian decline.

"An unexpected incident changes the whole aspect of things. Philip falls the victim of assassination; and a youth, who as yet is but little known, is his successor. Immediately Demosthenes institutes a second alliance of the Greeks; but Alexander suddenly appears before Thebes; the terrible vengeance which he here takes, instantly destroys the league; Demosthenes, Lycurgus, and several of their supporters, are required to be delivered up: but Demades is at that time able to settle the difficulty and to appease the king. His strength was therefore enfeebled as Alexander departed for Asia; he begins to raise his head once more when Sparta attempts to throw off the yoke: but under Antipater he is overpowered. Yet it was about this very time that by the most celebrated of his discourses he gained the victory over the most eloquent of his adversaries; and Æschines was forced to depart from Athens. But this seems only to have the more embittered his enemies, the leaders of the Macedonian party; and they soon found an opportunity of preparing his downfall. When Harpalus, a fugitive from the army of Alexander, came with his treasures to Athens, and the question arose, whether he could be permitted to remain there, Demosthenes was accused of having been corrupted by his money, at least to be silent. This was sufficient to procure the imposition of a fine; and as this was not paid, he was thrown into prison. From thence he succeeded in escaping; but to the man who lived only for his country, exile was no less an evil than imprisonment. He resided for the most part in Ægina and at Trœzen, from whence he looked with moist eyes toward the neighbouring Attica. Suddenly and unexpectedly a new ray of light broke through the clouds. Tidings were brought, that Alexander was dead. The moment of deliverance seemed at hand; the excitement pervaded every Grecian state; the ambassadors of the Athenians passed through the cities; Demosthenes joined himself to the number and exerted all his eloquence and power to unite them against Macedonia. In requital for such services, the people decreed his return; and years of sufferings were at last followed by a day of exalted compensation. A galley was sent to Ægina to bring back the advocate of liberty. … It was a momentary glimpse of the sun, which still darker clouds were soon to conceal. Antipater and Craterus were victorious; and with them the Macedonian party in Athens: Demosthenes and his friends were numbered among the accused, and at the instigation of Demades were condemned to die. … Demosthenes had escaped to the island Calauria in the vicinity of Trœzen; and took refuge in the temple of Neptune. It was to no purpose that Archias, the satellite of Antipater, urged him to surrender himself under promise of pardon. He pretended he wished to write something; bit the quill, and swallowed the poison contained in it."

_A. H. L. Heeren, Reflections on the Politics of Ancient Greece, translated by G. Bancroft, pages 278-280._

See, also, on the "Lamian War," the suppression of Democracy at Athens, and the expulsion of poor citizens, GREECE: B. C. 323-322.

"With the decline of political independence, … the mental powers of the nation received a fatal blow. No longer knit together by a powerful esprit de corps, the Greeks lost the habit of working for the common weal; and, for the most part, gave themselves up to the petty interests of home life and their own personal troubles. Even the better disposed were too much occupied in opposing the low tone and corruption of the times, to be able to devote themselves, in their moments of relaxation, to a free and speculative consideration of things. What could be expected in such an age, but that philosophy would take a decidedly practical turn, if indeed it were studied at all? And yet such were the political antecedents of the Stoic and Epicurean systems of philosophy. … Stoic apathy, Epicurean self-satisfaction, and Sceptic imperturbability, were the doctrines which responded to the political helplessness of the age. They were the doctrines, too, which met with the most general acceptance. The same political helplessness produced the sinking of national distinctions in the feeling of a common humanity, and the separation of morals from politics which characterise the philosophy of the Alexandrian and Roman period. The barriers between nations, together with national independence, had been swept away. East and West, Greeks and barbarians, were united in large empires, being thus thrown together, and brought into close contact on every possible point. Philosophy might teach that all men were of one blood, that all were equally citizens of one empire, that morality rested on the relation of man to his fellow men, independently of nationalities and of social ranks; but in so doing she was only explicitly stating truths which had been already realised in part, and which were in part corollaries from the existing state of society."

_E. Zeller, The Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, pages 16-18_.

"What we have said concerning the evidence of comedy about the age of the first Diadochi amounts to this: Menander and his successors—they lasted barely two generations—printed in a few stereotypes a small and very worthless society at Athens. There was no doubt a similar set of people at Corinth, at Thebes, possibly even in the city of Lycurgus. These people, idle, for the most part rich, and in good society, spent their earlier years in debauchery, and their later in sentimental reflections and regrets. They had no serious object in life, and regarded the complications of a love affair as more interesting than the rise and fall of kingdoms or the gain and loss of a nation's liberty. They were like the people of our day who spend all their time reading novels from the libraries, and who can tolerate these eternal variations in twaddle not only without disgust but with interest. They were surrounded with slaves, on the whole more intelligent and interesting, for in the first place slaves were bound to exercise their brains, and in the second they had a great object—liberty—to give them a keen pursuit in life. The relations of the sexes in this set or portion of society were bad, owing to the want of education in the women, and the want of earnestness in the men. As a natural consequence a class was found, apart from household slaves, who took advantage of these defects, and, bringing culture to fascinate unprincipled men, established those relations which brought estragements, if not ruin, into the home life of the day."

_J. P. Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, pages 123-124_.

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"The amount of Persian wealth poured into Greece by the accidents of the conquest, not by its own industries, must have produced a revolution in prices not since equalled except by the influx of the gold of the Aztecs and Incas into Spain. I have already pointed out how this change must have pressed upon poor people in Greece who did not share in the plunder. The price of even necessary and simple things must have often risen beyond their means. For the adventurers brought home large fortunes, and the traders and purveyors of the armies made them; and with these Eastern fortunes must have come in the taste for all the superior comforts and luxuries which they found among the Persian grandees. Not only the appointments of the table, in the way of plate and pottery, but the very tastes and flavours of Greek cookery must have profited by comparison with the knowledge of the East. So also the furniture, especially in carpets and hangings, must have copied Persian fashion, just as we still affect oriental stuffs and designs. It was not to be expected that the example of so many regal courts and so much royal ceremony should not affect those in contact with them. These influences were not only shown in the vulgar 'braggart captain,' who came to show off his sudden wealth in impudent extravagance among his old townspeople, but in the ordinary life of rich young men. So I imagine the personal appointments of Alcibiades, which were the talk of Greece in his day, would have appeared poor and mean beside those of Aratus, or of the generation which preceded him. Pictures and statues began to adorn private houses, and not temples and public buildings only—a change beginning to show itself in Demosthenes's day, but coming in like a torrent with the opening of Greece to the Eastern world. It was noticed that Phocion's house at Athens was modest in size and furniture, but even this was relieved from shabbiness by the quaint wall decoration of shining plates of bronze—a fashion dating from prehistoric times, but still admired for its very antiquity."

_J. P. Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, pages 105-106._

"The modern historians of Greece are much divided on the question where a history of Hellas ought to end. Curtius stops with the battle of Chaeroncia and the prostration of Athens before the advancing power of Macedon. Grote narrates the campaigns of Alexander, but stops short at the conclusion of the Lamian War, when Greece had in vain tried to shake off the supremacy of his generals. Thirlwall brings his narrative down to the time of Mummius, the melancholy sack of Corinth and the constitution of Achaia as a Roman province. Of these divergent views we regard that of the German historian as the most correct. … The historic sense of Grote did not exclude prejudices, and in this case he was probably led astray by political bias. At the close of his ninety-sixth chapter, after mentioning the embassies sent by the degenerate Athenians to King Ptolemy, King Lysimachus, and Antipater, he throws down his pen in disgust, 'and with sadness and humiliation brings his narrative to a close.' Athens was no longer free and no longer dignified, and so Mr. Grote will have done with Greece at the very moment when the new Comedy was at its height, when the Museum was founded at Alexandria, when the plays of Euripides were acted at Babylon and Cabul, and every Greek soldier of fortune carried a diadem in his baggage. Surely the historian of Greece ought either to have stopped when the iron hand of Philip of Macedon put an end to the liberties and the political wranglings of Hellas, or else persevered to the time when Rome and Parthia crushed Greek power between them, like a ship between two icebergs. No doubt his reply would be, that he declined to regard the triumph abroad of Macedonian arms as a continuation of the history of Hellas. … The truth is, that the history of Greece consists of two parts, in every respect contrasted one with the other. The first recounts the stories of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, and ends with the destruction of Thebes and the subjugation of Athens and Sparta. The Hellas of which it speaks is a cluster of autonomous cities in the Peloponnesus, the Islands, and Northern Greece, together with their colonies scattered over the coasts of Italy, Sicily, Thrace, the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and Africa. These cities care only to be independent, or at most to lord it over one another. Their political institutions, their religious ceremonies, their customs, are civic and local. Language, commerce, a common Pantheon, and a common art and poetry are the ties that bind them together. In its second phase, Greek history begins with the expedition of Alexander. It reveals to us the Greek as everywhere lord of the barbarian, as foundling kingdoms and federal systems, as the instructor of all mankind in art and science, and the spreader of civil and civilized life over the known world. In the first period of her history Greece is forming herself, in her second she is educating the world. We will venture to borrow from the Germans a convenient expression, and call the history of independent Greece the history of Hellas, that of imperial Greece the history of Hellenism. … The Athens of Pericles was dictator among the cities which had joined her alliance. Corinth, Sparta, Thebes, were each the political head of a group of towns, but none of the three admitted these latter to an equal share in their councils, or adopted their political views. Even in the Olynthian League, the city of Olynthus occupied a position quite superior to that of the other cities. But the Greek cities had not tried the experiment of an alliance on equal terms. This was now attempted by some of the leading cities of the Peloponnese, and the result was the Achaean League, whose history sheds a lustre on the last days of independent Greece, and whose generals will bear comparison with the statesmen of any Greek Republic [sec GREECE: B. C. 280-146]. … On the field of Sellasia the glorious hopes of Cleomenes were wrecked, and the recently reformed Sparta was handed over to a succession of bloodthirsty tyrants, never again to emerge from obscurity. But to the Achaeans themselves the interference of Macedon was little less fatal. Henceforth a Macedonian garrison occupied Corinth, which had been one of the chief cities of the League; and King Antigonus Doson was the recognized arbiter in all disputes of the Peloponnesian Greeks. … In Northern Greece a strange contrast presented itself. The historic races of the Athenians and Boeotians languished in peace, obscurity, and luxury. With them every day saw something added to the enjoyments and elegancies of life, and every day politics drifted more and more into the background. On the other hand, the rude semi-Greeks of the West, Aetolians, Acarnanians, and Epirotes, to whose manhood the repulse of the Gauls was mainly due, came to the front and showed the bold spirit of Greeks divorced from the finer faculties of the race. The Acarnanians formed a league somewhat on the plan of the Achaean. {183} But they were overshadowed by their neighbors the Aetolians, whose union was of a different character. It was the first time that there had been formed in Hellas a state framed in order to prey upon its neighbours. … In the course of the Peloponnesian War Greek religion began to lose its hold on the Greeks. This was partly the work of the sophists and philosophers, who sought more lofty and moral views of Deity than were furnished by the tales of popular mythology. Still more it resulted from growing materialism among the people, who saw more and more of their immediate and physical needs, and less and less of the underlying spiritual elements in life. But though philosophy and materialism had made the religion of Hellas paler and feebler, they had not altered its nature or expanded it. It still remained essentially national, almost tribal. When, therefore, Greeks and Macedonians suddenly found themselves masters of the nations of the East, and in close contact with a hundred forms of religion, an extraordinary and rapid change took place in their religions ideas. In religion, as in other matters, Egypt set to the world the example of prompt fusion of the ideas of Greeks and natives. … Into Greece proper, in return for her population which flowed out, there flowed in a crowd of foreign deities. Isis was especially welcomed at Athens, where she found many votaries. In every cult the more mysterious elements were made more of, and the brighter and more materialistic side passed by. Old statues which had fallen somewhat into contempt in the days of Pheidias and Praxiteles were restored to their places and received extreme veneration, not as beautiful, but as old and strange. On the coins of the previous period the representations of deities had been always the best that the die-cutter could frame, taking as his models the finest contemporary sculpture; but henceforth we often find them strange, uncouth figures, remnants of a period of struggling early art, like the Apollo at Amyclae, or the Hera of Samos. … In the intellectual life of Athens there was still left vitality enough to formulate the two most complete expressions of the ethical ideas of the times, the doctrines of the Stoics and the Epicureans, towards one or the other of which all educated minds from that day to this have been drawn. No doubt our knowledge of these doctrines, being largely drawn from the Latin writers and their Greek contemporaries, is somewhat coloured and unjust. With the Romans a system of philosophy was considered mainly in its bearing upon conduct, whence the ethical elements in Stoicism and Epicureanism have been by their Roman adherents so thrust into the foreground, that we have almost lost sight of the intellectual elements, which can have had little less importance in the eyes of the Greeks. Notwithstanding, the rise of the two philosophies must be held to mark a new era in the history of thought, an era when the importance of conduct was for the first time recognized by the Greeks. It is often observed that the ancient Greeks were more modern than our own ancestors of the Middle Ages. But it is less generally recognized how far more modern than the Greeks of Pericles were the Greeks of Aratus. In very many respects the age of Hellenism and our own age present remarkable similarity. In both there appears a sudden increase in the power over material nature, arising alike from the greater accessibility of all parts of the world and from the rapid development of the sciences which act upon the physical forces of the world. In both this spread of science and power acts upon religion with a dissolving and, if we may so speak, centrifugal force, driving some men to take refuge in the most conservative forms of faith, some to fly to new creeds and superstitions, some to drift into unmeasured scepticism. In both the facility of moving from place to place, and finding a distant home, tends to dissolve the closeness of civic and family life, and to make the individual rather than the family or the city the unit of social life. And in the family relations, in the character of individuals, in the state of morality, in the condition of art, we find at both periods similar results from the similar causes we have mentioned."

_P. Gardner, New Chapters in Greek History, chapter 15._

ATHENS: B. C. 317-316. Siege by Polysperchon. Democracy restored. Execution of Phocion. Demetrius of Phaleron at the head of the government.

See GREECE: B. C. 321-312.

ATHENS: B.C. 307-197. Under Demetrius Poliorcetes and the Antigonids.

See GREECE: B. C.307-197.

ATHENS: B. C. 288-263. Twenty years of Independence. Siege and subjugation by Antigonus Gonatas.

When Demetrius Poliorcetes lost the Macedonian throne, B. C. 288, his fickle Athenian subjects and late worshippers rose against his authority, drove his garrisons from the Museum and the Piræus and abolished the priesthood they had consecrated to him. Demetrius gathered an army from some quarter and laid siege to the city, but without success. The Athenians went so far as to invite Pyrrhus, the warrior king of Epirus, to assist them against him. Pyrrhus came and Demetrius retired. The dangerous ally contented himself with a visit to the Acropolis as a worshipper, and left Athens in possession, undisturbed, of her freshly gained freedom. It was enjoyed after a fashion for twenty years, at the end of which period, B. C. 268, Antigonus Gonatas, the son of Demetrius, having regained the Macedonian crown, reasserted his claim on Athens, and the city was once more besieged. The Lacedæmonians and Ptolemy of Egypt both gave some ineffectual aid to the Athenians, and the siege, interrupted on several occasions, was prolonged until B. C. 263, when Antigonus took possession of the Acropolis, the fortified Museum and the Piræus as a master (see MACEDONIA, &c.: B. C. 277-244). This was sometimes called the Chremonidean War, from the name of a patriotic Athenian who took the most prominent part in the long defence of his city.

_C. Thirlwall, History of Greece, chapter 61._

ATHENS: B. C. 229. Liberation by the Achaian League.

See GREECE: B. C. 280-146.

ATHENS: B. C. 200. Vandalism of the second Macedonian Philip.

In the year B. C. 200 the Macedonian king, Philip, made an attempt to surprise Athens and failed. "He then encamped in the outskirts, and proceeded to wreak his vengeance on the Athenians, as he had indulged it at Thermus and Pergamus. He destroyed or defaced all the monuments of religion and of art, all the sacred and pleasant places which adorned the suburbs. The Academy, the Lycenm, and Cynosarges, with their temples, schools, groves and gardens, were all wasted with fire. Not even the sepulchres were spared."

_C. Thirlwall, History of Greece, chapter 64._

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ATHENS: B. C. 197-A. D. 138. Under Roman rule.

"Athens … affords the disheartening picture of a commonwealth pampered by the supreme power, and financially as well us morally ruined. By rights it ought to have found itself in a flourishing condition. … No city of antiquity elsewhere possessed a domain of its own, such as was Attica, of about 700 square miles. … But even beyond Attica they retained what they possessed, as well after the Mithridatic War, by favour of Sulla, as after the Pharsalian battle, in which they had taken the side of Pompeius, by the favour of Cæsar;—he asked them only how often they would still ruin themselves and trust to be saved by the renown of their ancestors. To the city there still belonged not merely the territory, formerly possessed by Haliartus, in Boeotia, but also on their own coast Salamis, the old starting-point of their dominion of the sea, and in the Thracian Sea the lucrative islands Scyros, Lemnos, and Imbros, as well as Delos in the Aegean. … Of the further grants, which they had the skill to draw by flattery from Antoninus, Augustus, against whom they had taken part, took from them certainly Aegina and Eretria in Euboea, but they were allowed to retain the smaller islands of the Thracian Sea. … Hadrian, moreover, gave to them the best part of the great island of Cephallenia in the Ionian Sea. It was only by the Emperor Severus, who bore them no good will, that a portion of these extraneous possessions was withdrawn from them. Hadrian further granted to the Athenians the delivery of a certain quantity of grain at the expense of the empire, and by the extension of this privilege, hitherto reserved for the capital, acknowledged Athens, as it were, as another metropolis. Not less was the blissful institute of alimentary endowments, which Italy had enjoyed since Trajan's time, extended by Hadrian to Athens, and the capital requisite for this purpose certainly presented to the Athenians from his purse. … Yet the community was in constant distress."