III. THE CELTIC INVASION, AND THE WAR WITH PYRRHUS.
A vast horde of Celtic barbarians had for some time been collecting around the head-waters of the Adriatic. Influenced by hopes of plunder they now overran Macedon to the borders of Thessaly, defeating Ptolemy Ceraunus, then King of Macedonia, in a great battle. The walled towns alone held out until the storm had spent its fury, when the Celts gradually withdrew from a country in which there was but little left to tempt their cupidity. But in the following year (279 B.C.) another band of them, estimated at over two hundred thousand men, overran Macedonia, passed through Thessaly, defeated the allied Grecians at Thermopylæ, and then marched into Phocis, for the purpose of plundering the treasures of Delphi. But their atrocities aroused against them the whole population, and only a remnant of them gained their original seats on the Adriatic.
The throne of Macedon now found an enemy in Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, a connection of the royal family of Macedon, and of whose exploits Roman history furnishes a full account. A desultory contest was maintained for several years between Pyrrhus and Antigonus II., the son of Demetrius, and then King of Macedon. While Pyrrhus was engaged in this war, Cleon'ymus, of the blood royal of Sparta, who had been excluded from the throne by the Spartan people, to give place to A'reus, invited Pyrrhus to his aid. Pyrrhus marched to Sparta, and, supposing that he should not meet with any resistance, ordered his tents to be pitched, and sat quietly down before the city. Night coming on, the Spartans in consternation met in council, and resolved to send their women to Crete for safety. Thereupon the women assembled and remonstrated against it; and the queen, Archidami'a, being appointed to speak for the rest, went into the council-hall with a sword in her hand, and boldly upbraiding the men, told them they did their wives great wrong if they thought them so faint-hearted as to live after Sparta was destroyed. The women then rushed to the defences of the city, and spent the night aiding the men in digging trenches; and when Pyrrhus attacked on the morrow, he was so severely repulsed that he soon abandoned the siege and retired from Laconia. The patriotic spirit and heroism of the Spartan women on this occasion are well characterized in the following lines:
Queen Archidami'a.
The chiefs were met in the council-hall;
Their words were sad and few,
They were ready to fight, and ready to fall,
As the sons of heroes do.
And moored in the harbor of Gyth'e-um lay
The last of the Spartan fleet,
That should bear the Spartan women away
To the sunny shores of Crete.
Their hearts went back to the days of old;
They thought of the world-wide shock,
When the Persian hosts like an ocean rolled
To the foot of the Grecian rock;
And they turned their faces, eager and pale,
To the rising roar in the street,
As if the clank of the Spartan mail
Were the tramp of the conqueror's feet.
It was Archidamia, the Spartan queen,
Brave as her father's steel;
She stood like the silence that comes between
The flash and the thunder-peal.
She looked in the eyes of the startled crowd;
Calmly she gazed around;
Her voice was neither low nor loud,
But it rang like her sword on the ground.
"Spartans!" she said—and her woman's face
Flushed out both pride and shame—
"I ask, by the memory of your race,
Are ye worthy of the name?
"Ye have bidden us seek new hearths and graves,
Beyond the reach of the foe;
And now, by the dash of the blue sea-waves,
We swear that we will not go!
"Is the name of Pyrrhus to blanch your cheeks?
Shall he burn, and kill, and destroy?
Are ye not sons of the deathless Greeks
Who fired the gates of Troy?
"What though his feet have scathless stood
In the rush of the Punic foam?
Though his sword be red to its hilt with the blood
That has beat at the heart of Rome?
"Brothers and sons! we have reared you men:
Our walls are the ocean swell;
Our winds blew keen down the rocky glen
Where the staunch Three Hundred fell.
"Our hearts are drenched in the wild sea-flow,
In the light of the hills and the sky;
And the Spartan women, if need be so,
Will teach the men to die.
"We are brave men's mothers, and brave men's wives:
We are ready to do and dare;
We are ready to man your walls with our lives,
And string your bows with our hair.
"Let the young and brave lie down to-night,
And dream of the brave old dead,
Their broad shields bright for to-morrow's fight,
Their swords beneath their head.
"Our breasts are better than bolts and bars;
We neither wail nor weep;
We will light our torches at the stars,
And work while our warriors sleep.
"We hold not the iron in our blood
Viler than strangers' gold;
The memory of our motherhood
Is not to be bought and sold.
"Shame to the traitor heart that springs
To the faint soft arms of Peace,
If the Roman eagle shook his wings
At the very gates of Greece!
"Ask not the mothers who gave you birth
To bid you turn and flee;
When Sparta is trampled from the earth
Her women can die, and be free."
Soon after the repulse at Sparta, Pyrrhus again marched against Antig'onus; but having attacked Argos on the way, and after having entered within the walls, he was killed by a tile thrown by a poor woman from a house-top. The death of Pyrrhus forms an important epoch in Grecian history, as it put an end to the struggle for power among Alexander's successors in the West, and left the field clear for the final contest between the liberties of Greece and the power of Macedon. Antigonus now made himself master of the greater part of Peloponnesus, and then sought to reduce Athens, the defence of which was aided by an Egyptian fleet and a Spartan army. Athens was at length taken (262 B.C.), and all Greece, with the exception of Sparta, seemed to lie helpless at the feet of Antigonus, who little dreamed that the league of a few Achæan cities was to become a formidable adversary to him and his house.