But in this there lies no danger as yet. Hellenism everywhere retains the upper hand and seems to come nearer and nearer to the goal of its mission for the world. In all fields of intellectual life the cultured classes have undisputed control and can look down with absolute contempt on the currents that move the masses far beneath them; the exponents of philosophical enlightenment may imagine they have completely dominated them. When the great ideas upon which Hellenism is based have been created by the classical period and new ones can no longer be placed beside them, the new time sets to work to perfect what it has inherited. The third century is the culmination of ancient science.
However, this whole civilisation lacks one thing, and that is a state of natural growth. Of all the states that developed out of Alexander’s empire, the kingdom of the Antigonidæ in Macedonia was the only one that had a national basis; and therefore, in spite of the scantiness of its resources, it was also the most capable of resistance of them all. All others, on the contrary, were purely artificial political combinations, lacking that innate necessity vital to the full power of a state. They might have been altogether different, or they might not have been at all. The separation of state and nationality, which is the result of the development of the ancient East, exists in them also; they are not supported by the population, which, by the contingencies of political development, is for the moment included in them, and their subjects, so far as the individual man or community is not bound to them by personal advantage, have no further interest in their existence. To be sure, had they maintained their existence for centuries, the power of custom might have sufficed to give them a firmer constitution, such as many later similar political formations have acquired and such as the Austrian monarchy possesses to-day; and as a matter of fact we find the loyalty of subjects to the reigning dynasty already quite strongly developed in the kingdom of the Seleucidæ. But a national state can never arise on the basis of a universal, denationalised civilisation, and the unity is consequently only political, based only upon the dynasty and its political successes. Therefore, except in Macedonia, none of these states can, even in the struggle for existence, set in motion the full national force supplied by internal unity.
The resources at the command of the Macedonio-Hellenic states were consumed in the struggle with one another; nothing was left for the great task that was set them in the West. The remains of Greek nationality, still maintaining their existence here, looked in vain for a deliverer to come from the East. An attempt made by the Spartan prince Cleonymus, in response to the appeal of Tarentum, to take up the struggle in Italy against the Lucanians and Romans, failed miserably through the incapacity of its leader (303-302 B.C.). In Sicily, to be sure, the gifted general and statesman Agathocles (317-289) had once more established, amid streams of blood, and by mighty and ruthless battles against both internal enemies and rivals and against Carthage, a strong Greek kingdom that reached even to Italy and the Ionian Sea. But he was never able to attain the position taken by Dionysius, and at his death his kingdom goes to pieces. At this point also the rôle of the Sicilian Greeks in the history of the world is played out; they disappear from the number of independent powers capable of maintaining themselves by their own resources.
FOOTNOTES
[1] It is altogether wrong to regard the kingdom of the Lagidæ as the typical state of Hellenism. Through the mass of material that the Egyptian papyri afford a further shifting in its favour is threatened, which must certainly lead to a very incorrect conception of the whole of antiquity. It is frequently quite overlooked that we have to do here only with documents from a province of the kingdom of the Lagidæ (later of Rome) which had a quite peculiar constitution, and that these documents therefore show by no means typical, but in every respect exceptional, conditions. The investigators who have made this material accessible deserve great gratitude, but it must never be overlooked that even a small fragment of similar documents from Asia would have infinitely greater value for the interpretation of the whole history of antiquity and specially that of Hellenism.
Greek City Seals