[112] Buckler and Robinson, Greek Inscriptions from Sardis. (American Journal of Archæology, XVI, 1912, pp. 11 ff.)
[113] Calder, Classical Review, XXVII (1913), pp. 9 ff.
[114] Kärst, Gesch. des hellen. Zeitalters, II, I, pp. 419 ff. Bouché-Leclercq's treatment of this subject (Hist. des Séleucides, pp. 469 ff.), is inadequate.
[115] Hellenistic Athens, pp. 303 ff.
VII
THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTIGONIDS
Of the Hellenistic empires the one from which Rome suffered most and learned least was that of the Antigonids in Macedon and Greece. We say "Macedon and Greece": the kings of Macedon from Philip II to Perseus said "Hellas"; for they never ceased to claim that Macedon was a part of Hellas—the part of Hellas which had earned by the achievements of Philip II and Alexander the right of hegemony for its kings. It was an imperial nation for which its king, nobles, and commons had an intense loyalty and pride, but which stood in their thinking to Hellas as Virginia did to the United States in the ante-bellum days, or as Prussia does to Germany, rather than as Austria does to the Austro-Hungarian empire.
It taught the Romans least because it had least to teach them. The one thing in which the Macedonians were masterful was the art of war; yet in this the Romans by native accomplishment were their superiors. They invented the phalanx, but the phalanx succumbed to the legion. In the art of government the Antigonids were resourceful, but to lift up a jellyfish on a spear-point is an impossible task. Yet that is what they had to do in Hellas. The only lessons of government they could teach were lessons of failure; but that this is not to their discredit is shown by the inability of Rome itself to cope with the same situation till Hellas was dead and desiccated. They were sagacious enough to realize that for a people with the customs, piety, and bluntness of the Macedonians a kingship was best which, to speak with Aristotle, was a perpetual magistracy and not an absolute monarchy. Hence they were under no necessity to demand that the Macedonians worship them as gods, and the Macedonians, having inherited rights which no Antigonid dared to ignore,[116] were under no legal necessity to thrust divinity upon their rulers. Hence the Antigonids alone of the Hellenistic dynasties governed as men supported by their people's loyalty, and not as gods to whom all things were permitted. They, moreover, organized no official cult of their family in Hellas, for reasons which will appear later. It was not Macedon but Greece which took the proud Roman victor captive and bore the arts to rustic Latium. For the Macedonians remained themselves a rustic people, and added little or nothing to the poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and science of Hellas.[117] Their élite were rulers and officers, their commons farmers and soldiers. From the time Philip II came to the throne (359 B.C.) to the battle of Cynocephalæ (197 B.C.), it is impossible to find a decade, and not easy to find half a one, during which the able-bodied men of Macedon were not called to the standards at least once either to defend their country against foreign attack or to march north, south, east, or west against their lord's enemies.[118] Their dead were to be found in every valley of Hellas, and their emigrants in every land of Asia; but theirs was a prolific race, so that, despite their many losses in the interval, they put 29,000 Macedonians in the field in the last struggle with Rome, or 2000 more than stood under the command of Alexander the Great when he had completed his arrangements for the conquest of Asia.