It is said that on his deathbed Alexander bequeathed his empire "to the strongest," but there was no one general able enough or strong enough to succeed him, and for about fifty years after his death, his empire was torn by strife and bloodshed. At last some kind of peace and order was restored, but the one great empire of Alexander had disappeared, and the civilized world was broken up into a number of independent states, of which the most important were the Kingdoms of Syria, Egypt and Macedonia. During the long wars which had preceded this settlement, many battles had been fought on Greek soil. The Greeks were not strong enough to prevent this and neither were they able to maintain their independence when Macedonia became a kingdom. She was too powerful and strong a neighbour and Greece fell under her rule. Tyrants were established in the Greek cities, a deep humiliation to the freedom-loving Greek.
But once more the old Greek spirit flared up and the tyrants were driven out. From time to time in the history of Greece, states had joined together in various leagues and alliances, but the inability of the Greeks to combine for long, even when their very life demanded it, had prevented such leagues from lasting any great length of time. But in 281 B.C. when once again the independence of Greece was threatened, one of these old leagues was revived, the Achaean League. It lasted for nearly a century and is of the greatest interest to modern times, for until the union of the American states, about two thousand years later, there was nothing in the history of the world like it again.
The Achaean League was not an alliance, but a real federation of states, with one central government. Each separate state kept its own sovereign rights over all its domestic affairs, but questions of war and peace, the support of the army, and all relations with foreign states were controlled by the federal government. It was the only experiment in ancient times of real federal government.
The head of the League was called the General, and it was under the general Aratus that it became very powerful. Almost all the more important of the Greek states entered the League, with the exception of Athens and Sparta. Neither by persuasion, nor by force, unless she might be recognized as head of the League, would Sparta consent to become a member, and so powerful was she in the Peloponnesus that Aratus begged the aid of Macedonia to subdue her. Sparta was conquered, but Macedonia regained her supremacy in Greece, and the power of the Achaean League was broken.
The old Greece of history no longer existed. Greek civilization had spread over the Mediterranean world, but the free and independent city-state had disappeared and nothing lasting had taken its place. Alexander himself, and still more his successors, had failed to create an empire which gave to those who belonged to it any sense of citizenship in it. The Hellenistic world was a Greek civilization, but it failed to arouse in men of Greek birth that patriotism which the city-state had inspired.
The creation of a world state of which men were to be proud to call themselves citizens and for which they would gladly die, was to be the work of another great power, which even as the old Greece was passing, was growing strong in the West. Rome was steadily conquering the civilized world. Already she ruled over Italy and was extending her power over the Eastern Mediterranean. She conquered Macedonia, and one by one the old free states of Greece and those of the Achaean League lost their independence, until in 146 B.C. Corinth, rich, commercial, gay Corinth, was taken by Rome, and Greece became a Roman province. The citizens of this great state, which was to include, not only Greece and the Levant, but the whole Mediterranean and lands far beyond its shores, were to be proud of the name of Roman. Yet Rome, destined to be the Mistress of the World, and in political power an empire, succeeding where Greece had failed, owed all that was most worth while in the things of the higher intellectual life of the mind to Greece. The Greek spirit was never to die.
[[1]] From Athenaeus.