But those thirty thousand were certainly men. "There were giants in those days." One sometimes stands in wonder at their boldness. What all Greece could not do, what Persia had completely failed in, they undertook. Athens alone should conquer the world. By force of arms they would found an empire of intellect. They fought Persia and Sparta, both at once. Plague swept their city, yet they would not yield.[[2]] Their own subject allies turned against them; and they fought those too. They sent fleets and armies against Syracuse, the mightiest power of the West. It was Athens against all mankind!
[!-- Note Anchor 2 --][Footnote 2: See [Great Plague at Athens], page 34.]
She was unequal to the task, superbly unequal to it. The destruction of her army at Syracuse[[3]] was only the foremost of a series of inevitable disasters, which left her helpless. After that, Sparta, and then Thebes, became the leading city of Greece. Athens slowly regained her fighting strength; her intellectual supremacy she had not lost. Socrates,[[4]] greatest of her sons, endeavored to teach a morality higher than earth had yet received, higher than his contemporaries could grasp. Plato gave to thought a scientific basis.
[!-- Note Anchor 3 --][Footnote 3: See [Defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse], page 48.]
[!-- Note Anchor 4 --][Footnote 4: See [Condemnation and Death of Socrates], page 87.]
Then Macedonia, a border kingdom of ancient kinship to the Greeks, but not recognized as belonging among them, began to obtrude herself in their affairs, and at length won that leadership for which they had all contended. A hundred and fifty years had elapsed since the Greeks had stood united against Persia. During all that time their strength had been turned against themselves. Now at last the internecine wars were checked, and all the power of the sturdy race was directed by one man, Alexander, King of Macedon. Democracy had made the Greeks intellectually glorious, but politically weak. Monarchy rose from the ruin they had wrought.
As though that ancient invasion of Xerxes had been a crime of yesterday, Alexander proclaimed his intention of avenging it; and the Greeks applauded. They understood Persia now far better than in the elder days; they saw what a feeble mass the huge heterogeneous empire had become. Its people were slaves, its soldiers mercenaries. The Greeks themselves had been hired to suppress more than one Persian rebellion,[[5]] and to foment these also. They had learned the enormous advantage their stronger personality gave them against the masses of sheeplike Asiatics.
[!-- Note Anchor 5 --][Footnote 5: See [Retreat of the Ten Thousand Greeks], page 68.]
So it was in holiday mood that they followed Alexander, and in schoolboy roughness that they trampled on the civilization of the East. In fact, it is worth noting that the most vigorous resistance they encountered was not from the Persians, but from a remnant of the Semites, the merchants of the Phoenician city of Tyre.[[6]] In less than eight years, B.C. 331-323, Alexander overran the whole known world of the East,[[7]] only stopping when, on the border of India, his soldiers broke into open revolt, not against fighting, but against further wandering.
[!-- Note Anchor 6 --][Footnote 6: See [Alexander Reduces Tyre], page 133.]