)
420
Council at Babylon after Alexander’s death,
422
. Perdiccas, Meleager, Eumenes, and the puppet king,
425
. The compact,
426
. The partition,
427
. Alexander’s posthumous plans,
428
. Alexander’s funeral described by Diodorus,
430
. Alexander’s heirs,
431
. Arrhidæus, the imbecile,
431
. The Diadochi,
432
. The women claimants,
433
. Death of Perdiccas,
435
. The feats of Eumenes,
436
. The empire of Antigonus,
437
. Polysperchon
versus
Cassander,
438
. Lysimachus,
441
. Cassander in power,
442
. The name of “king” assumed,
446
. The siege of Rhodes,
447
. The fall of Antigonus,
449
. Demetrius at large,
450
. Death of Cassander; Demetrius wins and loses,
452
. Lysimachus, Arsinoe, and Agathocles,
454
. Seleucus; Antigonus; the Ptolemies,
455
. Ptolemy Ceraunus in Macedonia,
457
. Anarchy in Macedonia,
458
. Antigonus Gonatas,
459
. The Chremonidean War,
460
. Pyrrhus’ son takes Macedonia,
461
.
CHAPTER LX
Affairs in Greece Proper after Alexander’s Death
(323-318
B.C.
)
463
The Lamian War,
463
. Return of Demosthenes; death of Leosthenes,
466
. Leonnatus,
467
. Death of Leonnatus; naval war; war in Thessaly,
468
. Dissolution of the league,
469
. The capitulation,
470
. The end of Demosthenes,
470
. Grote’s estimate of Demosthenes,
472
. Antipater in Greece,
474
. The deaths of Antipater and of Demades,
476
. Polysperchon and Cassander,
477
. Olympias and Eumenes,
478
. Imperial edict recalling exiles,
479
. Contest at Athens,
480
. Intrigues of Phocion,
481
. Phocion’s disgrace,
482
.
CHAPTER LXI
The Failure of Grecian Freedom
(318-279
B.C.
)
486
Hellas at peace,
487
. Athens under Demetrius; Sparta behind walls,
488
. The last acts of Olympias’ power,
490
. Ptolemy in Greece,
493
. Athens passive and servile,
494
. Success of Demetrius in Greece,
497
. Battle of Ipsus,
498
.
CHAPTER LXII
The Exploits of Pyrrhus
(
ca.
360-272
B.C.
)
502
The antecedents of Pyrrhus,
503
. The last adventures of Demetrius,
504
. The end of Lysimachus, king of Macedon,
505
. Death of Seleucus,
506
. Invasion of the Gauls,
506
. Defence of the temple at Delphi,
507
. Pyrrhus and the Romans,
508
. Pyrrhus summoned by the Tarentines,
508
. Pyrrhus in Sicily; his return to Italy,
510
. Magna Græcia subdued by the Romans,
511
. Return of Pyrrhus to Macedonia,
512
. Expedition of Pyrrhus against Sparta,
512
. Death of Pyrrhus,
513
. Antigonus Gonatas,
514
.
CHAPTER LXIII
The Leagues and their Wars
(249-167
B.C.
)
516
The Ætolians,
516
. The Ætolian League,
517
. The Achæan League and Aratus of Sicyon,
518
. Aratus controls the league,
520
. Aratus takes Corinth,
521
. Sparta under Cleomenes,
523
. Antigonus called in,
524
. The Social War,
526
. Alliance with Rome,
528
. Greek freedom proclaimed,
531
. The Ætolians crushed,
531
. Greece at the mercy of “friendly” Rome,
533
. Rome against Philip,
535
. Perseus, king of Macedonia,
537
. The humiliation of Greece,
538
.
CHAPTER LXIV
The Final Disasters
(156
B.C.
-540
A.D.
)
540
The Macedonian insurrection,
542
. The Achæan War,
542
. The destruction of Corinth,
545
. Greece under the Romans,
546
.
CHAPTER LXV
The Kingdom of the Seleucidæ
(323-65
B.C.
)
552
Seleucus,
553
. Antiochus Soter,
555
. Seleucus Philopator,
559
.
CHAPTER LXVI
The Kingdom of the Ptolemies
(323-30
B.C.
)
562
Ptolemy Philadelphus,
568
. Ptolemy Euergetes,
570
. Ptolemy Philopator,
572
. Epiphanes,
573
. Philometor and Physcon,
573
. Roman Interference,
575
. Ptolemy Auletes; Cleopatra and the end,
576
.
CHAPTER LXVII
Sicilian Affairs
(317-216
B.C.
)
578
Agathocles,
578
. Pyrrhus and the Romans,
583
.
CONCLUDING SUMMARY
The Development of the Hellenic Spirit.
By Dr. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff
587
Brief Reference-List of Authorities by Chapters
614
A General Bibliography of Grecian History
617
THE EVOLUTION OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY
Written Specially for the Present Work
By Dr. HERMANN DIELS
Professor in the University of Berlin.
It is a primary law of development that each generation should supplant and supersede that which preceded it. The parents bring forth the child, and when the child has advanced to full maturity they themselves lapse into oblivion; and the same fate overtakes their children and children’s children.
So it is with nations. One civilisation rises above the level of the rest, then sinks, yielding place to the fresh vigour of younger nations, to which it bequeaths its heritage of culture. For a while the elder mother-nation is held in remembrance as a teacher and model; but ultimately—when the new generation of nations has grown strong enough to maintain an independent existence—the elder vanishes to return no more.
Such a stage we ourselves seem to have reached. The peoples of the Classic Age have long passed away, but in the Renaissance the culture of their time rose again from the dead. A bevy of daughters entered upon the heritage of this mother—Italy, France, England, Germany, and many others—and added to it, each after her own fashion. Then they outgrew the imitation and mere echo of the antique, passing on to express in act an independent culture of their own; and now the time seems to have come when the modern spirit claims absolute liberty of action in every sphere, without the slightest reference to the traditions of antiquity. For the modern technician, the modern naturalist, the modern historian, the modern artist, the modern poet, the ancient world has no message. It is dead—dead past recovery, as we may say.
There is, however, one sphere in which it is not dead, where it still imparts fresh stimulus to the minds of men from day to day, in which it is still recognised as the guide to every fresh enterprise. This sphere is philosophy.
The last and loftiest height to which thinking humanity can climb is that comprehensive vision of all things which we Germans call Weltanschauung, and which the Greeks called Philosophia. In speculation of this illimitable range we have made but little advance upon the Greeks; nay, even those most modern of philosophers who, on the basis of biological knowledge, have built up the most modern of all conceptions of the world, are in unconscious agreement with the rudiments of Greek natural science in the sixth century B.C. Let anyone compare the “cosmological perspective” to which Ernest Haeckel has attained in his book Die Welträthsel [The Riddle of the Universe] (1900) p. 15, “from the highest point of monistic science yet reached,” with what Anaximandros taught in the reign of Cyrus, and he will perceive with amazement that modern times have hardly gone further by a single step. The eternity, infinity, and illimitability of the Cosmos; the substance thereof, with its attributes of matter and energy, which in perpetual motion occupy the boundless space; perpetual motion itself in its periodic changes of becoming and ceasing to be; the constant progress of decay and destruction in the innumerable celestial bodies which give place to fresh formations of a similar character; the process of biogenesis on our own planet, by which in the course of æons animal life was brought forth, and by which, through gradual metamorphoses, the vertebrates were evolved from its earliest forms, the mammalia from vertebrates, the primary apes from mammalia, and lastly, through progressive evolution, man was brought into being towards the end of the tertiary period—all these propositions had already been recognised and stated in germ by the Greek thinker who lived during the first generation of Greek philosophy. The sum total of the progress made in twenty-five hundred years, that what was then surmised from, rather than disclosed by, an empiric consideration of some few facts, has now been demonstrated in detail by scientific observation.