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?