THE FAILURE OF THE GREEK CITIES
The trend in international affairs which began when the Spartans
came to terms with the Persians in 412 soon developed into something
almost too bewildering to follow. Athenians, Spartans, and Persians
played an intricate game of war and diplomacy in which the alignments
were constantly shifting. A new factor Thebes--appeared in Greece,
eclipsing both Athens and Sparta in military power. Within Persia,
the imperial power declined. From 404 to 341, Egypt regained independence
under the Twenty-Eighth to Thirtieth Dynasties, but the Thirty-First
was Persian again.
Within a year after her defeat by Sparta Athens regained her democratic
institutions and rid herself of the Spartan garrison. Sparta was
still the strongest power in the Greek world. Following the expedition
of the 10,000 she attacked Persia in Asia Minor. The Persians
then rebuilt a fleet for Athens and provided funds for Thebes
and Corinth, now jealous of Spartan power, to join with Athens
against Sparta.
In the Corinthian War (394-387 B.C.), Sparta learned that she
needed the aid of Persia to maintain her position against the
three allies. When peace came, the Persians resumed their favoritism
of Sparta. Sparta then succeeded in dominating the Greek world
to 371. She proved that she was willing to use brute force and
went beyond the previous excesses of the Athenian democrats.
At Leuctra in 371 the Thebans managed to defeat a Spartan Army,
the first defeat in nearly two hundred years. For ten years Thebes
dominated Greek politics, destroyed Sparta's Peloponnesian League
and freed the Messenian helots. Tbebes also destroyed the unity
remaining in Greece, but gave no new cohesion herself. Greece
was the poorer for the Theban hegemony.
In 362 a coalition of Sparta, Athens and others managed to halt
the Thebans on the battlefield. It was not a decisive victory;
no one power emerged supreme. The situation meant that this gloomy
period of desultory warfare would continue. No attempt at political
unity seemed to work; the polis as a healthy political form seemed
to be ineffective in bringing the Greeks together. Unity was later
accomplished from outside; around 350, another force in world
affairs accomplished a decisive change.
THE MACEDONIANS AND PHILIP II
Macedonia, lying across the top of the Hellenic peninsula, had
always seemed ''provincial,'' even semibarbaric, to the Hellenes,
though the Macedonians were essentially Greek. Macedonia had protected
the Greek states to the south from barbarian invasion and in the
fourth century became the unifier of the Greeks. Under Alexander's
leadership Macedonian-Greek armes extended Hellenic civilization
throughout the Eastern Mediterranean basin and beyond. Yet, at
the beginning of the fourth century Macedonia seemed to be breaking
up. Invaded by barbarians and under pressure from the Greek states
to the south, the burdens of external and internal strife helped
to create a difficult situation.
When Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great, came to power
in 359 matters looked hopeless. Philip was the most extraordinary
individual of his age. Within five years he defeated all his enemies
and unified the kingdom. He built a fine army and became a major
power in the Greek world. Macedonia was a unique state. Though
a monarchy, the king's powers were limited by an army assembly
and a companion cavalry, the mounted nobility of the realm. The
Macedonian king was regarded by the companions as merely first
among equals.
When Philip was invited into the political affairs of the traditional
Greek cities, he aroused some concern and appeared to many as
a threat to their liberties; he was violently opposed by the Athenian
orator Demosthenes. By skill at war and diplomacy, however, he
moved southward. After the battle of Chaeronea in 338 in which
he defeated Thebes and Athens, he was the master of Greece.
He appears to have thought of himself, however, as a deliverer,
rescuing the Greeks from their suicidal rivalries, and as a champion
of Hellenism against barbarism. He convoked assemblies at the
Isthmus of Corinth which elected him leader of a new Pan-Hellenic,
anti-Persian alliance with mandate to undertake at least a partial
conquest of the Persian empire. In 336, however, he was assassinated
by a disgruntled Macedonian nobleman.
THE CAREER OF ALEXANDER
His son, Alexander, at that time only twenty years of age, succeeded
him in both position and aspiration. In two years, Alexander consolidated
his position in Macedonia and Greece and was ready to resume the
crusade against Persia. In 334, he entered Anatolia; in 333, Syria;
in 332, Egypt; in 331, Babylonia and the Persian homeland. In
330 Darius, the last Persian king, died, murdered by treacherous
followers during a bitter retreat in Parthia south of the Caspian
sea. In 329 Alexander subdued the central Iranian plateau; in
328, Bactria; in 327, Sogdiana, and wintered in Samarkand. In
327, he campaigned in the Indus Valley, subduing it temporarily.
In 326, he even crossed the Indus but turned back to Persia; by
323, he was in Babylon, where he died of a mysterious but probably
natural disease.
The preceding paragraph is intended to convey a sense of the astonishing
rapidity with which the patterns of ancient history were revolutionized
within the space of a decade. Between the twenty-third and thirty-third
years of the effective adult life of Alexander, he had brought
under his own sway the known civilized world of his time, from
the Indus to the Adriatic Sea. For the first time Europeans dominated
the whole scene. His character, or at least a somewhat idealized
version of it, its summarized by the Greek historian Arrian, who
lived some four hundred years after Alexander in the second century
after Christ, at a time when Alexander was already a legend:
Alexander died in the hundred and fourteenth Olympiad, in the
archonship at Athens of Hegesias. He lived thirty-two years and
eight months, as Aristobulus says; he reigned twelve years and
the aforesaid eight months. In body he was very handsome, a great
lover of hardships; of much shrewdness, most courageous, most
zealous for honour and danger, and most careful of religion; most
temperate in bodily pleasure, but as for pleasures of the mind,
insatiable of glory alone; most brilliant to seize on the right
course of action, even where all was obscure; and where all was
clear, most happy in his conjectures of likelihood; most masterly
in marshalling an army, arming and equipping it; and in uplifting
his soldiers' spirits and filling them with good hopes, and brushing
away anything fearful in dangers by his own want of fear--in all
this most noble. And all that had to be done in uncertainty he
did with the utmost daring; he was most skilled in swift anticipation
and gripping of his enemy before anyone had time to fear the event;
he was most reliable in keeping promises or agreement; most guarded
in not being trapped by the fraudulent; very sparing of money
for his own pleasure, but most generous in benefits of others.1
Alexander hoped to create a world state dominated by a fusion
of Greco-Macedonians and the Iranians. During his lifetime he
put Persians into high offices and indicated his wish to unify
the two peoples. He and a number of his men married Iranian women
and Alexander, himself, wore a part Persian costume. Alexander's
successors, did not fully grasp his views, and a vast world empire
was doomed to break up politically. Culturally, though, Hellenic
speech and ideas still held the areas together.
THE HELLENIC VIEW OF MAN
The balance of success that attended the Hellenes from Miltiades
to Alexander in their confrontation with the more easterly powers
of the ancient world ensured that the Hellenic view of man and
the universe would not be lost to view but become one of the main
threads in the fabric of Western culture. Most simply and broadly,
this was the Homeric view of the individual human being as capable
in himself of making his own way in a potentially intelligible
universe, within his own life span without contingence on anything
beyond.
One does indeed speak of gods and divine powers, thereby acknowledging
the immeasurable power, subtlety, and beauty of the forces in
the universe and the element of active intelligence, or rationality,
which pervades the universe and by which its forces organize themselves.
But the intelligence is not a property of separate entities operating
the universe and their forces; it is a property of the universe
and its forces themselves.
The Romans during this period and even after they became absorbed
in Greek culture, retained the less abstract and metaphysical
concepts of animism discernible among the Aegean peoples of the
second millennium. The forces were more particularized in each
thing, in each event.
Colloquially, the Greeks themselves would conceptualize the ''divine''
powers as distinct, substantial beings, conceived, in human form
as its highest perfection. Most people did not respond rationally
to these forces in nature. The mystery cults (Demeter at Eleusis)
provided a means of achieving understanding through direct emotional
experience. But to an extraordinarily high degree, the Greeks
succeeded in achieving a rational though not mechanical concept
of the universe and man's role in it.
Throughout the sixth century and through the middle of the fifth,
the philosophers Heraclitus, Democritus, and others were primarily
concerned with the physical order of the universe--its composition
and structure. Their language is perhaps misleading. they spoke
of earth, air, water, fire; and they spoke of "first principles"
such as love, flux, and mind. Probably they were concerned with
concepts which we would recognize more easily as solid, gas, liquid,
heat, attraction, and energy. Some of them even proposed a naive
but precocious theory of atoms.