The Chief Periods of European History. Freeman Edward Augustus
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history that fell to the lot of the Aryan of Persia. Once the worthy rival of Greece, he rose again to be the worthy rival of Rome; like the Greek, he could lead captive successive conquerors; in the grasp of the Saracen, in the grasp of the Turk, his old life could still abide, and, if he bowed to the creed of Arabia, it was only by changing it into a new shape which made it before all things the creed of Persia. The Lydian reaped the first-fruits of Greek subjection; the Persian threatened to turn the whole eastern half of Hellas, continuous and scattered, into part of a world-wide dominion. The King – βασιλεύς – forestalling in that simple word the titles and controversies of days to come, was indeed beaten back from old Hellas; he was beaten back from Europe; he was for a while forced to withdraw his fleets and armies from the Hellenic coasts of Asia. But the fact that he had to be driven back from all of them of itself showed what an enemy it was against whom Greece had now to strive. For a moment Thebes was the willing ally, Athens was the defenceless conquest, of the lord of Susa and Ekbatana. And after all the Persian did cut Hellas short on the side of Asia; he even declared his will as a master in the councils of Europe. A century had not passed since the day of Salamis when, by the peace of Antalkidas, the peace which the King sent down, the Greek cities of Asia, the Greek cities of Cyprus, were formally acknowledged to be the King’s.
In the West meanwhile Hellas had to strive against a rival yet more worthy of her rivalry, not against a barbarian empire, but against a barbarian commonwealth. The old Phœnicia on the Syrian shore had fallen from its glory; its commonwealths, still rich and flourishing, had sunk into dependencies of the Persian power. The great field of Phœnician enterprise now lay in the western seas. One Phœnician city, the youngest of the great Phœnician cities, had risen to a place in the world and the world’s history such as the cities of the elder Canaan had never reached. The New City, Carthage, was now the centre and representative of Phœnician life far more than Sidon or Tyre. Carthage, in after days the rival of Rome, was now before all things the rival of Greece. She was to bring Rome nearer to destruction than was ever done by any other power of the Mediterranean world; she was to destroy for a season, to weaken for ever, more than one of the greatest among the western cities of Hellas. At the head of a mighty following of dependencies of her own race, swollen by barbarian subjects and mercenaries of every race, the Asiatic city planted on the shores of Africa came nearer than any other power of those days to rooting up the elder life of Europe, the life of which first Greece and then Italy was the centre. We do not rightly take in the full significance of the struggle which Greece went through at the beginning of the fifth century B.C. if we do not at every moment bear in mind how the whole Greek folk was attacked on both sides at once. It may or may not be true that Xerxes entered into an actual league with Carthage; it may or may not be true that the fight of Salamis and the fight of Himera were fought on the same day. True or false, both beliefs set forth the true position of the Greek states at that moment, threatened by Persia on one side and by Carthage on the other. The Persian was beaten back; from the actual soil of continuous Hellas he was beaten back for ever. The Carthaginian was beaten back only for a moment; he still kept his hold on Sicily; he was yet to destroy Selinous and Akragas, to come within a hair’s-breadth of destroying Syracuse. In earlier days the scattered Phœnician settlements in eastern Sicily had withdrawn before the coming of the Greek colonists; but now the Phœnician power was wielded by a single mighty commonwealth which held some of its strongest outposts, Panormos at their head, in the north-western corner of the great island. In Sicily things seem to have turned round; the European holds the eastern, the Asiatic holds the western coast. And it is now the masters of the western coast that threaten the eastern.
But the Persian and the Phœnician were not the only enemies against whom the scattered Greek nation had to strive. Foes nearer to the Greek in race than the Phœnician, less widely removed in political and social institutions than the Persian, were threatening the power and the being of one great division of the Greek name. The second of the great peninsulas of southern Europe, the central one of the three, the peninsula which held Rome and Capua and the cities of the Etruscan, was beginning to come to the front in the drama of history. There was as yet no sign that Italy was to be the ruling land of the world; but there were signs that Italy was no longer to be a land in which settlers of foreign races might carve themselves homes at pleasure. The name of Rome was beginning to be heard in Hellenic ears, but it was as yet hardly a name of fear. It was as yet the native races of southern Italy that the Greek cities had to dread, and Rome was for a while the enemy of their enemies. The Persian and the Carthaginian were strictly enemies from without; the Persian was in every sense an invader of the soil of the oldest Hellas; the Carthaginian was at most winning a land in which other branches of his race had once made settlements; but the Lucanians and the other nations of southern Italy were, in the strictest sense, winning back their own land from strangers. When Kymê and Poseidônia ceased to be cities of Hellas, in one sense the boundaries of the civilized world fell back; in another we may say that they advanced, as the nations of Italy began to show that the time was come for the men of the central peninsula to play their part in the world’s history as well as the men of the older peninsula to the east of them.
By the middle of the fourth century B.C. the decline of Greece is, even on the shallowest view, allowed to have begun. But it is commonly held to have begun merely because the Macedonian kingdom was beginning to step into that position of primacy among the Greek powers which had been held at different times by the cities of Argos, Sparta, Athens, and Thebes. And as regards the political life of the great Greek cities, above all, as regards the political life of that Athens which we are so often tempted to mistake for Greece, the change was great indeed, sad indeed. But we must not forget that the political decline of the great cities of old Greece was but one part of the general political decline of the Hellenic people, and also that a large part of old Greece itself looked on the change in quite another light from that in which we are used to look at it from the purely Athenian point of view. With the voice of Dêmosthenês ringing in our ears, it is hard to listen to the calm comments of Polybios, when he hands on to us the traditions of Megalopolis and of so many other cities by whom Philip was looked on as a friend and deliverer, a pious crusader against the sacrilegious Phokian. But yet more important it is to remember that, if old Hellas lost much through the advance of the Macedonian, the younger Hellas beyond Hadria lost immeasureably more through the advance of the Phœnician and the native Italian. Cry after cry for help went up from Italy and Sicily to the motherland in Greece. A series of adventurers, republican and princely, crossed the sea to bear help to their threatened brethren or to carve out a dominion for themselves. Some went to free Greek cities from domestic tyrants, others to free them from the yoke of the advancing barbarian. That men from the motherland were needed for either work shows that the great day of the Western Greeks had passed away, that they could no longer keep either internal freedom or external independence by their own strength. And, dark as is the tale of Dionysios and Agathoklês, we cannot wholly put out of sight that even they had a brighter side as in some sort champions of Hellas against the barbarian. We must not forget Dionysios as the planter of Greek colonies on both sides of Hadria, nor Agathoklês as the man who carried the arms of Europe to the shores of Africa, the forerunner of Regulus and Scipio, of Roger of Sicily and Charles of Austria. But the mission of Diôn and of the nobler Timoleôn, the warfare of the Spartan and the Epeirot, of Archidamos and Alexander and Pyrrhos, showed that the Greeks of the West could no longer stand, even by the help of the Greeks of the old Hellenic lands or of the lands which had become Hellenic by adoption. Their doom was sealed; so before long was the doom of all lands, the lands of the Macedonian and the Carthaginian no less than the lands of the Sicilian and the Italian Greek. But the fall of Macedon and the fall of Carthage were yet far distant; those lands were reaching their highest pitch of greatness at the moment when it became plain that all that was left for the Greeks of the West was to become subjects or dependents of an Italian power.
Another point to be noticed is the close connexion between the destiny of the Eastern and of the Western Greeks. The Spartan princes sought for a career in Italy because, in face of the advance of Macedonia, there was no career left for them in old Greece. Moreover the Epeirot kings Alexander and Pyrrhos are themselves part of the Hellênismos; they are among the chiefest signs that the Hellenic name and culture had spread beyond the genealogical bounds of the Hellenic nation. Their people might have an ancient kindred with the Greeks; they themselves might come of the blood of Achilleus; but they were still, in the wider aspect of the