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 founding 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.

In England Hellenism has been less fortunate as to its historians than in Germany, where it has occupied the attention, among others, of Niebuhr, Heeren, and Droysen. The period of the Diadochi or Successors of Alexander does not attract the student. The tone of Greek life was everywhere lowered, and manners had become luxurious and corrupt. Literature survived, and in some branches (such as the Idyl and the Epigram) flourished, but it had lost its freshness and become full of affectations. Philosophy was eagerly pursued, and went on developing, but there was no Plato to write it. It is difficult to discover any political matter of interest amid the incessant wars of the Antiochi and Ptolemies. To most readers Hellas, in the third and second centuries before our era, is like a man smitten with foul and incurable disease, and they are glad when the Roman conquest gives the coup de grâce, and affords an opportunity of decent burial. And yet in this unattractive period is to be found the transition from ethnic and national to universal morality, from merely civic or autocratic to federal or imperial government, from ancient to modern sentiment and feeling. In it domestic life was largely developed, and the ground was prepared in which the seeds of Christianity were to be sown.

To write the history of Hellenism requires talents of no common order. In this field we have no leading authority like Thucydides or Tacitus. We have to piece together the scattered testimonies of Justin, Appian, and Diodorus; sometimes to try and fill up the enormous gaps they leave with quotations from writers like Zonaras and the Syncellus. An incidental statement of Pliny, of Lucian, or of Strabo, may contain all that we know of what happened during half a century in a great kingdom. These remarks apply of course rather to the eastern provinces of the empire of Alexander than to those bordering on the Mediterranean. Of the latter we have a tolerably consecutive account,

especially

especially when the Roman history of Polybius comes to our help. But in all cases the historians are far more ready to record the intestine wars which raged in the kingdoms of the Diadochi, and the crimes of their rulers, than to give us any notion of the systems of government, the municipal constitutions, the laws, the commerce, and the customs prevailing in the world of Hellenism. Yet these are the subjects on which now we eagerly desire information, while we are comparatively indifferent as to the results of the combats of the mercenaries of the Antiochi, the Antigoni, and the Ptolemies.

To a certain extent the silence of historians is compensated by the existence of less accessible but deeper and more trustworthy sources of information. The Greek inscriptions found in the cities of Asia Minor furnish us with numerous details as to the civic life, the habits, and the religious observances of the dwellers in those cities under Seleucid and Roman rule. From existing Egyptian papyri M. Lumbroso has compiled an account of the government, the trade, and the general condition of Egypt under the Ptolemies. Professor Helbig has traced in the mural paintings of Pompeii the entire history of painting from Alexander the Great onwards, and by an admirable induction has established a number of propositions as to the nature of the art of the Hellenistic world; whence we may learn much as to the emotions and perceptions of that world. Of the Greek kingdoms of Bactria and Cabul scarcely any memorial remains, except the abundant and interesting coins from which General Cunningham has been able to extract a surprising amount of information. Using these and other sources, and especially the masterly history of Droysen, who has brought all the rivulets of information together and united them into a stream of narrative, we will endeavour slightly to sketch the main characteristics of Hellenism, and to estimate the effects of the conquests of Alexander on Greece and Macedonia, on the various provinces of the old Persian Empire, in fact on the whole Oriental world, from Epirus on the west to India on the east, and from Pontus in the north to Egypt and Libya on the south. How slight such a sketch must be within the present limits of space, it is hardly necessary to point out.

In no country were the changes produced by Alexander more striking than in his own Macedonia. Before his time and his father's, that land was a kingdom of the old Homeric type, whose ruler was avaş ȧvdpov, but no despotic lord, and which was full of a sturdy and free population of ploughmen and shepherds. Even Philip never places his effigy on his coins nor calls himself King. But the Antigonid princes who afterwards ruled Vol. 149.-No. 297.

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in Macedon were despots of the Asiatic type. They wore the diadem, were surrounded by a court, and were the centre of a bureaucratic and military system. They regarded their people as taxable property and as material for the manufacture of armies. And that people itself was sadly fallen and diminished. The Macedonian, lord throughout Asia, was at home little better than a thrall. While he pushed his conquests down the Indus and up the Nile, he was at home scarcely able to make head against barbarous neighbours. All the youth and energy of the country flowed in a never-ceasing stream towards the East; only the unenterprising of the population remained at home. And this led to the most disastrous results. It was the age of the great eastward expeditions of the Gauls. A large body of them poured, about 280 B.C., through the passes of the Balkans down upon the devoted land. The King, Ptolemy Ceraunus, fell in battle, and like a flood the Gallic swarms swept over the plains of Macedon, slaying, torturing, burning, and committing every hideous excess which the heart of a barbarian can invent. In their own land, the Macedonians felt tenfold all the misery and shame which they had inflicted on Persia. This was no case of the overthrow of one Greek state by another, it was no contest between civilized or semi-civilized nations, but the wasting of a settled land by a barbarous horde, whose only desires were to satisfy every brutal and bloodthirsty passion, to carry off all that could be carried, and to leave nothing behind but a broad track of fire and blood. For a moment the militia of the land, rallied by the gallant Sosthenes, who ought to be better known to history, made a stand, but again they were swept away by fresh waves of barbarism. Under Brennus the Gauls swarm southwards until they reach the very gates of Greece. And for a moment Greece remembers her old self, and the day when the Persians were advancing on the same road. Thermopyla must again be garrisoned. Antiochus, King of Syria, remembered his relationship to Hellas, and sent a contingent. The Boeotians, Phocians, and Etolians mustered in force, Athens despatched 1500 men. The story of the defence of the pass reminds one of old Greek days. Brennus, like Xerxes, could not force a way until traitors showed him the old path over the mountains; then like Xerxes he took the defenders in rear, and but for the presence of Athenian triremes at hand to which they could fly, the little Greek army must have shared the fate of Leonidas. But the pass was forced, and Ætolia and Phocis lay at the mercy of the barbarians. Xerxes had made an attempt upon Delphi, and the god of Delphi had interfered to protect his temple; but, in spite of fears, the rich

treasures

treasures of the temple induced the Gauls to repeat the sacrilegious attempt. We seem to fancy that we are reading romance rather than history, when we find in Justin's narrative how Apollo appeared in person, accompanied by the warlike virgins Athene and Artemis, and wrought terrible havoc on the invading hosts; how an earthquake and a terrific storm completed the discomfiture of the Gauls, and Brennus fell by his own hand. At all events, whether the foes of the invaders at Delphi were mortal or superhuman, certainly they penetrated no further into Greece. Those who were not destroyed made a hasty retreat northward. Meantime their brethren, who had remained in Macedon, had been put to the sword by the hereditary King, Antigonus Gonatas, who had enticed them into his own deserted camp, and then fallen on them while they were feasting and spoiling. A third body of Gauls crossed over at Byzantium into Asia and founded the Gallo-Greek kingdom of Galatia in the heart of Phrygia. A fourth body settled in Thrace, and levied tribute on the Greek city of Byzantium.

The flood had spent its fury and had ebbed, and as it retired it left Macedon and Greece exhausted and depopulated, but not demoralized. Almost all great outbursts in the life of nations have followed the successful repulse of a powerful invader. So Holland awoke after expelling the Spaniard, and the England of Elizabeth after frustrating him. So in Greece the great burst of Hellenic literature and art followed on the retreat of Xerxes. And after the repulse of the Gauls, we find among the northern Greeks a political revival, and even a certain after-bloom of art, if the theory be true which sees in the Apollo Belvedere and the Artemis of the Louvre the representations in contemporary sculpture of the deities of Delphi, as they appeared to the terrorstricken barbarians. It was Antigonus Gonatas, as we said, who so severely defeated the Gauls: and the same monarch before his death had formed a new Macedon. During his reign Greek culture and manners advanced ever more and more towards the north, and influenced even the rude Triballi and Dardani as far as the Danube. The population began to recover and the cities to grow, and Macedon to become once more a great power. The old Homeric freedom was gone for ever, but order and civilization had taken its place.

If we turn to the Hellas which was contemporary with Antigonus and his successors, we shall find that the differences between it and the Hellas of Thucydides were rather deep-seated and radical than prominent and obvious. Thessaly was incorporated with the Macedonian kingdom. But in all Greece south of Thessaly the appearance of autonomy remained. No

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Macedonian harmost or oligarchy held sway in the cities. Only one or two of them, notably Corinth, usually contained a Macedonian garrison. Had the Greek cities now been content with an obscure autonomy, the kings of Macedon would probably have seldom interfered with them. But any city, which adopted a lofty tone in dealing with its neighbours, was sure to attract the attention of the King; any city, which attained wealth and prosperity, would certainly be called on to pay a subsidy to his exchequer. The Greeks, though much of their spirit was gone, were not so humbled as willingly to accept this position. Two courses were open to them. The meaner and more slavish of the cities sought to buy for themselves the protection of one of the new kings of Asia or Africa by embassies, flatteries, and presents. The more sturdy and independent cities, in their efforts to escape from a humiliating position, made a great political discovery.

This was the federal system of government. Hitherto, in Greece, either the cities had been independent one of another, or, if a confederacy was formed, the lead in it was always taken by one powerful state, which was practically master of the rest. 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 Achæan 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.

Twice a year the ordinary assemblies of the league were held at Ægium; but extraordinary assemblies might be convoked by the General to meet elsewhere. By this Assembly was made the selection of the officers of the League; the General, who was its head, and his colleagues, the Admiral, the Master of the Horse, the Secretary, and ten Councillors. The Assembly had further to deliberate on, and either accept or reject, measures brought before it by the Senate of the League. The voting took place, not by counting individuals, but by cities, and we have reason to believe that in the manner of reckoning the votes by individual cities some allowance was made for the influence of property. How this was done remains doubtful in the absence