Effusions such as these, while displaying unmeasured idolatry and subservience towards Demetrius, are yet more remarkable, as betraying a loss of force, a senility, and a consciousness of defenceless and degraded position, such as we are astonished to find publicly proclaimed at Athens. It is not only against the foreign potentates that the Athenians avow themselves incapable of self-defence, but even against the incursions of the Ætolians.—Greeks like themselves, though warlike, rude, and restless.[897] When such were the feelings of a people, once the most daring, confident, and organizing—and still the most intelligent—in Greece, we may see that the history of the Greeks as a separate nation or race is reaching its close—and that from henceforward they must become merged in one or other of the stronger currents that surround them.
After his past successes, Demetrius passed some months in enjoyment and luxury at Athens. He was lodged in the Parthenon, being considered as the guest of the goddess Athênê. But his dissolute habits provoked the louder comments, from being indulged in such a domicile; while the violences which he offered to beautiful youths of good family led to various scenes truly tragical. The subservient manifestations of the Athenians towards him, however, continued unabated. It is even affirmed, that, in order to compensate for something which he had taken amiss, they passed a formal decree, on the proposition of Stratokles, declaring that every thing which Demetrius might command was holy in regard to the gods, and just in regard to men.[898] The banishment of Demochares is said to have been brought on by his sarcastic comments upon this decree.[899] In the month Munychion (April) Demetrius mustered his forces and his Grecian allies for a march into Thessaly against Kassander; but before his departure, he was anxious to be initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries. It was however not the regular time for this ceremony; the Lesser Mysteries being celebrated in February, the Greater in September. The Athenians overruled the difficulty by passing a special vote, enabling him to be initiated at once, and to receive in immediate succession, the preparatory and the final initiation, between which ceremonies a year of interval was habitually required. Accordingly, he placed himself disarmed in the hands of the priests, and received both first and second initiation in the month of April, immediately before his departure from Athens.[900]
Demetrius conducted into Thessaly an army of 56,000 men; of whom 25,000 were Grecian allies—so extensive was his sway at this moment over the Grecian cities.[901] But after two or three months of hostilities, partially successful, against Kassander, he was summoned into Asia by Antigonus to assist in meeting the formidable army of the allies—Ptolemy, Seleukus, Lysimachus, and Kassander. Before retiring from Greece, Demetrius concluded a truce with Kassander, whereby it was stipulated that the Grecian cities, both in Europe and Asia, should be permanently autonomous and free from garrison or control. This stipulation served only as an honorable pretext for leaving Greece; Demetrius had little expectation that it would be observed.[902] In the ensuing spring was fought the decisive battle of Ipsus in Phrygia (B. C. 300), by Antigonus and Demetrius, against Ptolemy, Seleukus, and Lysimachus; with a large army and many elephants on both sides. Antigonus was completely defeated and slain, at the age of more than eighty years. His Asiatic dominion was broken up, chiefly to the profit of Seleukus, whose dynasty became from henceforward ascendent, from the coast of Syria eastward to the Caspian Gates and Parthia; sometimes, though imperfectly, farther eastward, nearly to the Indus.[903]
The effects of the battle of Ipsus were speedily felt in Greece. The Athenians passed a decree proclaiming themselves neutral, and excluding both the belligerent parties from Attica. Demetrius, retiring with the remnant of his defeated army, and embarking at Ephesus to sail to Athens, was met on the voyage by Athenian envoys, who respectfully acquainted him that he would not be admitted. At the same time, his wife Deidameia, whom he had left at Athens, was sent away by the Athenians under an honorable escort to Megara, while some ships of war which he had left in the Peiræus were also restored to him. Demetrius, indignant at this unexpected defection of a city which had recently heaped upon him such fulsome adulation, was still farther mortified by the loss of most of his other possessions in Greece.[904] His garrisons were for the most part expelled, and the cities passed into Kassandrian keeping or dominion. His fortunes were indeed partially restored by concluding a peace with Seleukus, who married his daughter. This alliance withdrew Demetrius to Syria, while Greece appears to have fallen more and more under the Kassandrian parties. It was one of these partisans, Lachares, who, seconded by Kassander’s soldiers, acquired a despotism at Athens such as had been possessed by the Phalerean Demetrius, but employed in a manner far more cruel and oppressive. Various exiles driven out by his tyranny invited Demetrius Poliorketes, who passed over again from Asia into Greece, recovered portions of Peloponnesus, and laid siege to Athens. He blocked up the city by sea and land, so that the pressure of famine presently became intolerable. Lachares having made his escape, the people opened their gates to Demetrius, not without great fear of the treatment awaiting them. But he behaved with forbearance, and even with generosity. He spared them all, supplied them with a large donation of corn, and contented himself with taking military occupation of the city, naming his own friends as magistrates. He put garrisons, however, not only into Peiræus and Munychia, but also into the hill called Museum, a part of the walled circle of Athens itself[905] (B. C. 298).
While Demetrius was thus strengthening himself in Greece, he lost all his footing both in Cyprus, Syria, and Kilikia, which passed into the hands of Ptolemy and Seleukus. New prospects however were opened to him in Macedonia by the death of Kassander (his brother-in-law, brother of his wife Phila) and the family feuds supervening thereupon. Philippus, eldest son of Kassander, succeeded his father, but died of sickness after something more than a year. Between the two remaining sons, Antipater and Alexander, a sanguinary hostility broke out. Antipater slew his mother Thessalonikê, and threatened the life of his brother, who in his turn invited aid both from Demetrius, and from the Epirotic king Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus being ready first, marched into Macedonia, and expelled Antipater; receiving as his recompense the territory called Tymphæa (between Epirus and Macedonia), together with Akarnania, Amphilochia, and the town of Ambrakia, which became henceforward his chief city and residence.[906] Antipater sought shelter in Thrace with his father-in-law Lysimachus; by whose order, however, he was presently slain. Demetrius, occupied with other matters, was more tardy in obeying the summons; but, on entering into Macedonia, he found himself strong enough to dispossess and kill Alexander (who had indeed invited him, but is said to have laid a train for assassinating him), and seized the Macedonian crown; not without the assent of a considerable party, to whom the name and the deeds of Kassander and his sons were alike odious.[907]
Demetrius became thus master of Macedonia, together with the greater part of Greece, including Athens, Megara, and much of Peloponnesus. He undertook an expedition into Bœotia, for the purpose of conquering Thebes; in which attempt he succeeded, not without a double siege of that city, which made an obstinate resistance. He left as viceroy in Bœotia the historian, Hieronymus of Kardia,[908] once the attached friend and fellow-citizen of Eumenes. But Greece as a whole was managed by Antigonus (afterwards called Antigonus Gonatas) son of Demetrius, who maintained his supremacy unshaken during all his father’s lifetime; even though Demetrius was deprived of Macedonia by the temporary combination of Lysimachus with Pyrrhus, and afterwards remained (until his death in 283 B. C.) a captive in the hands of Seleukus. After a brief possession of the crown of Macedonia successively by Seleukus, Ptolemy, Keraunus, Meleager, Antipater, and Sosthenes—Antigonus Gonatas regained it in 277 B. C. His descendants the Antigonid kings maintained it until the battle of Pydna in 168 B. C.; when Perseus, the last of them, was overthrown, and his kingdom incorporated with the Roman conquests.[909]
Of Greece during this period we can give no account, except that the greater number of its cities were in dependence upon Demetrius and his son Antigonus; either under occupation by Macedonian garrisons, or ruled by local despots who leaned on foreign mercenaries and Macedonian support. The spirit of the Greeks was broken, and their habits of combined sentiment and action had disappeared. The invasion of the Gauls indeed awakened them into a temporary union for the defence of Thermopylæ in 279 B. C. So intolerable was the cruelty and spoliation of those barbarian invaders, that the cities as well as Antigonus were driven by fear to the efforts necessary for repelling them.[910] A gallant army of Hellenic confederates was mustered. In the mountains of Ætolia and in the neighborhood of Delphi, most of the Gallic horde with their king Brennus perished. But this burst of spirit did not interrupt the continuance of the Macedonian dominion in Greece, which Antigonus Gonatas continued to hold throughout most of a long reign. He greatly extended the system begun by his predecessors, of isolating each Grecian city from alliances with other cities in its neighborhood—planting in most of them local despots—and compressing the most important by means of garrisons.[911] Among all Greeks, the Spartans and the Ætolians stood most free from foreign occupation, and were the least crippled in their power of self-action. The Achæan league too developed itself afterwards as a renovated sprout from the ruined tree of Grecian liberty,[912] though never attaining to anything better than a feeble and puny life, nor capable of sustaining itself without foreign aid.[913]
With this after-growth, or half-revival, I shall not meddle. It forms the Greece of Polybius, which that author treats, in my opinion justly, as having no history of its own,[914] but as an appendage attached to some foreign centre and principal among its neighbors—Macedonia, Egypt, Syria, Rome. Each of these neighbors acted upon the destinies of Greece more powerfully than the Greeks themselves. The Greeks to whom these volumes have been devoted—those of Homer, Archilochus, Solon, Æschylus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Demosthenes—present as their most marked characteristic a loose aggregation of autonomous tribes or communities, acting and reacting freely among themselves, with little or no pressure from foreigners. The main interest of the narrative has consisted in the spontaneous grouping of the different Hellenic fractions—in the self-prompted cooperations and conflicts—the abortive attempts to bring about something like an effective federal organization, or to maintain two permanent rival confederacies—the energetic ambition, and heroic endurance, of men to whom Hellas was the entire political world. The freedom of Hellas, the life and soul of this history from its commencement, disappeared completely during the first years of Alexander’s reign. After following to their tombs the generation of Greeks contemporary with him, men like Demosthenes and Phokion, born in a state of freedom—I have pursued the history into that gulf of Grecian nullity which marks the succeeding century; exhibiting sad evidence of the degrading servility, and suppliant king-worship, into which the countrymen of Aristeides and Perikles had been driven, by their own conscious weakness under overwhelming pressure from without.
I cannot better complete that picture than by showing what the leading democratical citizen became, under the altered atmosphere which now bedimmed his city. Demochares, the nephew of Demosthenes, has been mentioned as one of the few distinguished Athenians in this last generation. He was more than once chosen to the highest public offices;[915] he was conspicuous for his free speech, both as an orator and as an historian, in the face of powerful enemies; he remained throughout a long life faithfully attached to the democratical constitution, and was banished for a time by its opponents. In the year 280 B. C., he prevailed on the Athenians to erect a public monument, with a commemorative inscription, to his uncle Demosthenes. Seven or eight years afterwards, Demochares himself died, aged nearly eighty. His son Laches proposed and obtained a public decree, that a statue should be erected, with an annexed inscription, to his honor. We read in the decree a recital of the distinguished public services, whereby Demochares merited this compliment from his countrymen. All that the proposer of the decree, his son and fellow-citizen, can find to recite, as ennobling the last half of the father’s public life (since his return from exile), is as follows:—1. He contracted the public expenses, and introduced a more frugal management. 2. He undertook an embassy to King Lysimachus, from whom he obtained two presents for the people, one of thirty talents, the other of one hundred talents. 3. He proposed the vote for sending envoys to King Ptolemy in Egypt, from whom fifty talents were obtained for the people. 4. He went as envoy to Antipater, received from him twenty talents, and delivered them to the people at the Eleusinian festival.[916]
When such begging missions are the deeds, for which Athens both employed and recompensed her most eminent citizens, an historian accustomed to the Grecian world as described by Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, feels that the life has departed from his subject, and with sadness and humiliation brings his narrative to a close.