as little impunity could a king of Judah have robbed the temple and invaded the holiest of holies. But neither Spartans nor Athenians nor yet Thebans arose to avenge the affront offered to their common nationality. The whole of Greece proper lay paralyzed, and the foreigner stepped in—Philip, whom in their pride they had hitherto called the Barbarian. He took up the cause of Phœbus and punished the children of the Delphian god for their impiety. It was clearly proved to the states of Hellas that their independence was at an end. They submitted. Greece became the passive spectator of the deeds of Macedonia. Hellas, who had been the hero, was now the chorus. It was Alexander of Macedon who played the part of Achilles in her future drama.

One man vindicated the spirit of Greek freedom against this despotism. The genius of Athens, militant once more, but destined not to triumph, incarnates itself in Demosthenes. By dint of eloquence and weight of character he strives to stem the tide of dissolution. But it is in vain. His orations remain as the monuments of a valiant but ineffectual resistance. The old intelligence of Athens shines, nay, fulminates, in these tremendous periods; but it is no longer intelligence combined with power. The sceptre of empire has passed from the hands of the Athenians.

Still, though the states of Greece are humiliated, though we hear no more of Ionians and Dorians, but only of Macedonians, yet the real force of the Greek race is by no means exhausted in this fourth period. On the contrary, their practical work in the world is just beginning. Under the guidance of Alexander, the Greek spirit conquers and attempts to civilize the East. The parallel between Alexander and Achilles, as before hinted, is more than accidental. Trained in the study of Homer as we are in the study of the Bible, he compared his destinies with those of the great hero, and formed himself upon the type of Pelides. At Troy he pays peculiar reverence to the tomb of Patroclus. He celebrates Hephæstion's death with Homeric games and pyres up-piled to heaven. He carries Homer with him on war-marches, and consults the Iliad on occasions of doubt. Alexander's purpose was to fight out to the end the fight begun by Achilles between West and East, and to avenge Greece for the injuries of Asia. But it was not a merely military conquest which he executed. Battles were the means to higher ends. Alexander sought to subject the world to the Greek spirit, to stamp the customs, the thoughts, the language, and the culture of the Greeks upon surrounding nations. Poets and philosophers accompanied his armies. In the deserts of Bactria and Syria and Libya he founded Greek cities. During the few years of his short life he not only swept those continents, but he effaced the past and inaugurated a new state of things throughout them; so that, in subsequent years, when the Romans, themselves refined by contact with the Greeks, advanced to take possession of those territories, they found their work half done. The alchemizing touch of the Greek genius had transformed languages, cities, constitutions, customs, nay, religions also, to its own likeness. This fourth period, a period of transition from maturity to decay, is the period of Alexander. In it the Greek spirit, which had been gathering strength through so many generations, poured itself abroad over the world. What it lost in intensity and splendor, it gained in extension. It was impossible, even for Greeks, while thus impressing their civilization on the whole earth, to go on increasing in the beauty of their life and art at home.