CHAPTER IX.
Post-Alexandrian Greece.
Tumults of the Diadochi:
their intricacy;
§ 69. The period which follows the death of Alexander is one so complicated with wars and alliances, with combinations and defections, with reshapings of the world's kingdoms[168:1], with abortive efforts at a new settlement, that it deters most men from its study, and has certainly acted as a damper upon the student who is not satisfied with the earlier history, but strives to penetrate to the closing centuries of freedom in Greece. There is very little information upon it, or rather there are but few books upon it, to be found in English. Thirlwall has treated it with his usual care and justice; and to those who will not follow minute and intricate details, I have recently given, in my Greek Life and Thought, a full study of the social and
artistic development which took place in this and the succeeding periods of Hellenism in Greece and the East. Hertzberg's and Droysen's histories, the one confined in space to Greece proper, the other in time to the fourth and third centuries B.C., are both thorough and excellent works. Holm's final volume, which will include the same period, is not yet accessible, so that I cannot notice it.
their wide area.
The liberation of Greece.
A great part of this history was enacted, not in Greece, or even in Greek Asia Minor, but in Egypt, in Syria, in Mesopotamia, and even in Upper Asia. The campaigns which determined the mastery over Greece were usually Asiatic campaigns, and each conqueror, when he arrived at Athens, endeavoured to enlist the support of Greece by public declarations of the freedom, or rather the emancipation, of the Greeks. This constant and yet unmeaning manifesto, something like the Home Rule manifestoes of English politicians, is a very curious and interesting feature in the history of the Diadochi, as they are called, and suggests to us to consider what was the independence so often proclaimed from the days of Demetrius (306 B.C.) to those of the Roman T. Flamininus (196 B.C.), and why so unreal and shadowy a promise never ceased to fascinate the imagination of an acute and practical people.
Spread of monarchies.