In every department there were perceptible intellectual mobility and vigorously sustained effort. Of the fine arts painting received a specially successful development, distinguished by a thoughtful and clear treatment of intellectual ideas. Of the architecture of this period honorable evidence is to this day given by the well-preserved remains of the fortifications of Messene, constructed under the direction of Epaminondas—typical specimens of architecture constructed in the grandest style. Plastic art likewise found a home at Thebes. It was the endeavor of Epaminondas—although with prudent moderation—to transfer the splendor of Periclean Athens to Thebes.
Through Epaminondas Thebes was raised to an equality with the city of the Athenians, as a seat of a policy aiming at freedom and national greatness. It thus became possible for the two cities to join hands in the subsequent struggle for the independence of Greece. And, in this sense, Epaminondas worked beforehand for the objects of Demosthenes. If it is considered how, with his small resources, Epaminondas founded or helped to found Mantinea, Messene, and Megalopolis; how through him other places, such as Corone and Heraclea, likewise received Theban settlers—the honor will not be denied him of having been in the royal art of the foundation of cities the predecessor of Alexander and his successors.
But he was also their predecessor in another point. By spreading Greek manners and ways of life he enlarged the narrow boundaries of the land of the Greeks, and introduced the peoples of the North into the sphere of Greek history. In his own person he represented the ideas of a general Hellenic character, which, unconditioned by local accidents, was freely raised aloft above the distinction of states and tribes. Hitherto only great statesmen had appeared who were great Athenians or Spartans. In Epaminondas this local coloring is of quite inferior importance; he was a Hellene first, and a Theban only in the second place. Thus he prepared the standpoint from which to be a Hellene was regarded as an intellectual privilege, independent of the locality of birth; and this is the standpoint of Hellenism.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
By GEORGE GROTE.
[Son of Philip, King of Macedon, born 356 B.C., died 323. The greatest of the world’s conquerors in the extent and rapidity of his conquests, he began with the consolidation of his father’s conquests over the republics of Greece, overthrew the great Persian Empire, and carried his arms to farther India, within a period of thirteen years. At his death his dominions were divided among his principal generals. References: Grote’s “History of Greece,” Curtius’s “History of Greece,” Plutarch’s “Lives.”]
The first growth and development of Macedonia during the twenty-two years preceding the battle of Chæronea, from an embarrassed secondary state into the first of all known powers, had excited the astonishment of contemporaries and admiration for Philip’s organizing genius; but the achievements of Alexander during the twelve years of his reign, throwing Philip into the shade, had been on a
ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
scale so much grander and vaster, and so completely without serious reverse or even interruption, as to transcend the measure, not only of human expectation, but almost of human belief. All antecedent human parallels—the ruin and captivity of the Lydian Crœsus, the expulsion and mean life of the Syracusan Dionysius, both of them impressive examples of the mutability of human condition—sunk into trifles compared with the overthrow of the towering Persian Colossus.