READING HALL

THE DOORSOF WISDOM

ANTIGONUS GONATAS

CHAPTER XI.

THE LOST YEARS

To write any real history of the eight years from 261 to 253 is frankly impossible. All connected tradition is lost; even the Athenian inscriptions fail utterly until after 256/5; the meaning, and often the date, of each isolated event is a subject of controversy. All that can be done is to note certain points, and indicate what seems, on present materials, to be the likeliest method of joining them together. But the attempt has to be made; and no one will take the result, however expressed, to be other than largely hypothetical.

The preceding narrative has carried the story down to the surrender of Athens. So far as Antigonus was concerned, this ended the war; it demonstrated that, on land, he had completely mastered the formidable coalition formed against him. The principal members of that coalition had been Athens, Sparta, Epirus, and Egypt; and his measures for dealing with Athens have already been described. With Sparta he had no measures to take; the Peloponnesian League had broken up, and peace would be Sparta’s most urgent need for some years. But he had to settle with Epirus; and Demetrios’ victory and Alexander’s flight from his kingdom had put him in a position to exact what terms he pleased. After Pyrrhus’ death he had been scrupulously considerate; he had taken no compensation either in men, money, or territory. But it was clear now that he could not risk another attack of the sort from behind; and he knew that so long as the gorge of the Aoos, the famous ‘Narrows’ which formed the portal of Macedonia on the north-west and were compared to Tempe, was in Epirot hands, there could be no certainty of lasting peace. It is possible that he actually now governed Epirus for a little while; at any rate it must have been at this time that he restored the ancient boundaries of Macedonia, and gave back to her, not only Parauaia and Tymphaia, but also Atintania, which had belonged to Kassandros though not to Demetrios. The possession of this latter province drove a wedge between Epirus and Illyria and gave Antigonus access to the Adriatic; and it also gave him the Aoos pass, the key to his own kingdom. To secure the pass, he founded his second name-city, Antigoneia on the Aoos, doubtless as the seat of the strategos of the new province. Epirus never troubled Macedonia again.

The settlement with Epirus no doubt took place in 262/1, or at latest in the year after. There remains to be considered the last and most important member of the coalition, Egypt; and here it will be necessary to go back a little and explain the cause of Egypt’s inaction toward the end of the siege of Athens, an inaction which may seem to have been no less contrary to her self-interest than derogatory to her honour. For Egypt, unlike Sparta and Epirus, had not been defeated by Antigonus. She had not suffered in the war; on her had fallen none of the fighting. She had, made, when the process failed, she simply withdrew. The cause of her withdrawal seems merely to have been that a more promising opening had presented itself elsewhere.

It must be borne in mind that the Chremonidean war was Arsinoe’s war; he had intended to employ the forces of Egypt for the purpose of forwarding her son’s claim to the throne of Macedonia. Had she lived, her extraordinary energy might have given the struggle another aspect. But Arsinoe was dead and comfortably deified; and though the train which she had commenced to lay was laid and exploded, so much cold water had been thrown on it in the interval that the explosion, so far as Egypt went, was rather a damp affair. It was not in human nature that Philadelphus, with sons of his own, should continue to be so greatly concerned for the son of Arsinoe; and no doubt there was a strong party at court engaged in urging on him the claims of the rightful heir, and suggesting that the venerable goddess, lately deceased, had not said the last word on Egyptian herself with Macedonia; Antigonus’ navy was a negligible quantity and he was’ likely to remain too fully occupied on land to think of challenging Egypt’s possession of the sea. But the military power of half Asia was not a negligible quantity, and Antiochus was only too likely to use the first opportunity of challenging Egypt’s possession of Hollow Syria, a province which Antiochus claimed as his of right, and which was vital to the wealth and prosperity of Egypt; was it not the gateway of much of the trade of inner Asia? Egypt’s true policy was to keep her eyes firmly fixed on this danger-point, and to take every opportunity of weakening Antiochus, whose resources, unwieldy and scattered as they were, were nevertheless very great.

Ptolemy himself must, as will appear, have inclined to this view; and sometime in 263/2 the opportunity offered itself. Philetairos of Pergamon, who after Lysimachus’ death had established his independence, but had always remained on excellent terms with Antiochus I died, either in 263 or 262; and his nephew and successor, Eumenes I made a prompt change in his relationship with the king of Syria. How the war between these two started, we don’t know, but it must have broken out almost at once. Eumenes was wealthy, and no doubt followed the usual course of hiring Gauls; but Gauls were equally at Antiochus’ service, and the great disparity in the strength of the two shows that Eumenes must have had some further foundation for his confidence. As Antiochus was on very good terms with Antigonus, Eumenes naturally turned to Egypt; no doubt he had arranged matters with Egypt beforehand, possibly even before Philetairos was dead; for the war must have followed very promptly on his accession. Athens was left to endure her death agony unaided; there was something better now for Patroclus to do than to levy toll on fishing-boats in order to send Antigonus presents. The allies won prompt success, for a Seleucid mobilization was a slow matter; these kings were rarely able to bring their strength to bear till a war had been some little while in progress. Eumenes on land penetrated as far as Sardis, and there defeated Antiochus in open field under the walls of the great fortress. Meanwhile the Egyptian fleet, waging a war of limited liability (for Antiochus had no fleet to speak of), swept the coast northward from its base at Samos; and several of the Ionian towns, including not only Miletus but the great city and seaport of Ephesus, fell into Egyptian hands. All these cities had once belonged to Lysimachus, and had passed to Seleucus after Kouroupedion; and it is likely that they all contained elements hostile to the rule of the Seleucid, men who were prepared to welcome, as successor to Lysimachus’ rights, the country of which Lysimachus’ son was now co-regent.

When the good understanding between Antiochus and Antigonus is considered, it is natural to ask whether Egypt, in withdrawing from Europe in order to support Eumenes in Asia, was not really acting both in her own defense and in loyalty to her allies; that is to say, whether in 263 Antiochus was not preparing to intervene on Antigonus’ behalf, making the struggle worldwide. But it seems impossible to support this view; for Eumenes was clearly the aggressor. Had Antiochus been preparing to intervene on behalf of his brother-in-law, he would not have been caught so entirely unprepared.

Antiochus did not long survive his defeat; he died at some time in 262/1, and was succeeded by his son Antiochus II. This king’s accession was followed by a general peace. Athens had just fallen, and Antigonus was quite ready for a peace that should secure to him both what he had won and the opportunity of quietly carrying out the necessary re­organization at Athens and elsewhere. Egypt had nothing more to fight for in Europe, and had compensated herself for her loss of prestige in Greece by her territorial acquisitions in Asia. Antiochus II was not ready for war; he had losses to repair, but he needed time. A general cessation of hostilities between the three Powers followed Antigonus, as was natural in view of his success, was the one to benefit most; for one term of the peace between himself and Egypt seems to have been that Ptolemy should cease to support the claim of Lysimachus’ son to the throne of Macedonia. As Antigonus, who could not reach Ptolemy, could never have enforced such a stipulation, it must be supposed that it was a condition pleasing to Ptolemy himself; it gave him a good excuse for ridding himself of Arsinoe’s son and restoring his own son to the second place in the empire. And Ptolemy did in fact rid himself most effectually of Ptolemaios by appointing him to the governorship of Ephesus and the other Egyptian acquisitions in Ionia, which had once belonged to his father Lysimachus.

The peace lasted but a little while. It seems to have been in 259 that the wars between the three great Powers blazed out again, though it is quite possible that hostilities had even commenced the year before. The ashes of the Chremonidoan war may have never ceased to smoulder; while it cannot be coincidence that Ptolemaios at Ephesus revolted and was deprived of the co-regency in the same year (259/8) which saw the activity of Demetrios the Fair at Cyrene. As Ptolemaios can only have revolted with Antiochus' support, as Antiochus was friendly to Antigonus, and as Athens was simmering with discontent, the most probable view to take is that by 259 Antiochus II had completed his preparations and was ready to attempt the recovery of what his father had lost, and that coincidently when the outbreak of this war with Egypt, which is sometimes called the second Syrian, came fresh hostilities, of a sort, between Egypt and Antigonus, or rather between their respective friends, probably started by the intrigues or supposed intrigues of Egypt at Athens.  The two wars lasted down to about 256; but the central problem, whether Antiochus and Antigonus were definitely co-operating, is one at present incapable of solution. They could only have aided each other indirectly, in any case, as the Egyptian fleet would have absolutely hindered communication; but, though evidence is wanting, we may suspect that they had at least a good understanding. A connected narrative of the two wars is not possible; all that can be done is to mention a number of events which belong to this period, 259-256, but which cannot be properly ordered in chronological sequence. Antiochus II appears in the tradition as a drunken sot, and his ministers figure as something worse ; but in fact what can be made out of his actions at this time shows that his government was capable and energetic; and once the war began he waged it with vigour and success, bringing up large forces from the eastern provinces of his huge empire. He found an unexpected ally in Lysimachus’ son. Ptolemaios saw that, as the result of the Chremonidean war, all chance of the throne of Macedonia was lost to him for ever. He also understood that he had virtually been banished from Alexandria to the government of a by no means extensive set of possessions, while Philadelphus’ own son, afterwards Ptolemy III, was back in favour at court. He determined to do what he could for himself, and with Antiochus’ aid he declared himself independent of Egypt. His counsellor was an Aetolian soldier of fortune named Timarchos, who was probably an officer in the Ptolemaic service governing for him in Miletus. The garrisons of the towns under Ptolemaios’ control naturally consisted of mercenaries who had either taken the oath to him personally or were won over; and Antiochus sent him some Thracians to stiffen his men. Timarchos, too, was a man of energy; he crossed from Asia to some populous island, probably Samos, and compelled his men to victory by adopting Agathocles’ stratagem of burning his boats.

But Lysimachus’ son did not long enjoy his new power. His tenure of it may indeed have been very brief, for it does not appear that Egypt moved against him; but of course the record is too broken to speak with certainty. The Thracians plotted his overthrow; he fled to the temple of Artemis with his mistress Irene, where both were cut down; the city was handed over to Antiochus. Timarchos seized the reins in Miletus and made himself tyrant; the Milesians were well plundered to pay his mercenaries; and when Antiochus succeeded in overthrowing him, the grateful citizens deified the king of Asia, who was thenceforth known as Antiochus the god. The rest of the Ptolemaic possessions in Ionia fell to Antiochus with the two great cities. The Egyptian fleet apparently did nothing; it was probably engaged in trying to retake Samos, but at any rate the Egyptian admiral was in a dilemma; he could neither aid the rebel Timarchos to resist Antiochus, nor the enemy Antiochus to put down Timarchos; and he certainly could not storm a city like Miletus in defiance of both. The whole affair was probably over at latest by about 256; Egypt, had sustained a shrewd blow, and with the death of Ptolemaios there vanished the last of the pretenders to the crown of Macedonia.

Meanwhile Ptolemy had not been altogether idle in Europe. Probably one of his first acts in the war was the restoration of Alexander to the throne of Epirus. Alexander, driven out of his kingdom by Antigonus’ son Demetrios, had taken refuge in Akarnania; the motive of this step is obscure, for he had apparently just treated the country very badly. It is not known, however, on what terms he held it. If by garrisons and the strong hand, his action is explicable. If, on the other hand, he were titular head of the Acarnanian League, somewhat as Antigonus was of the Thessalian League, his action must perhaps be referred to the strong national feeling of the Acarnanians against Aetolia; the Macedonian king, Aetolia’s friend, was perhaps actually ruling in Epirus, and that part of Akarnania which was not Aetolian may have considered that Alexander’s rule was preferable to any of the apparent alternatives. His restoration to the throne of Epirus was no doubt a gain to Ptolemy ; but both his prestige and his country’s power were much’ impaired, and he was in no condition to attack Antigonus again.

At Athens, even under the rule of a powerful Macedonian governor, things were not altogether quiet. The war party, the nationalists, may still have been strong in the city; and at some date that cannot be very long after 261, and should therefore belong to this war of 259, some of the extreme members were again intriguing—with Egypt. Let Egypt act as she would, nothing could alter the fact that she alone held in her hand the two things needful, corn and gold. This time Antigonus took strong measures; Philochoros, seer and historian, was executed for treason, and it is not likely that he was the only person implicated. The history of the city for the next thirty years would appear to show that it had been very, thoroughly purged; and no doubt any strong members of the war party who yet remained were banished. As the war party would include some of the best and most capable citizens, Athens must have been weakened in the process; and her later history shows that she never really recovered from the crushing blows she had received. Material prosperity, a kind of freedom, a continued supremacy in philosophy—these were yet to be hers; but never again, save perhaps in Sulla’s siege, were men at Athens to know the glory of having struggled to the uttermost, even though in vain.

Histiaia in Euboea seems to have managed to retain its independence for a year or two after the fall of Athens; its hieromnemones appear at Delphi down to 259 or 258. Possibly its independence had been one of the conditions of the peace of 261; but during the present war, whether conquered or otherwise, it seems to have fallen into line with the rest of Euboea and again become subject to Antigonus.

Antigonus had in the late war restored the old bounds of Macedonia in almost every direction. But Paionia was still independent and thrust a great block of alien territory down the course of the chief river of Macedonia, the Axios. How and when Antigonus acquired Paionia is quite obscure; it may have been either at this time, or perhaps after the war with Alexander of Corinth; probably the country joined one of the coalitions formed against Antigonus, just as Audoleon had joined the coalition of 288 against Demetrios. It is almost certain, however, that its re-absorption by Macedonia belongs to some period in the reign of Gonatas; for the coins show that Dropion left no successor, and he cannot well have reigned till the time of Antigonus Doson. It may therefore be mentioned here for completeness. The country had more through which the Axios flowed, and which gave access from Paionia to Macedonia. Whether Antigonus pushed still farther to the north-east, and brought the country of the Agrianes under his rule, is quite unknown. They had once, for a time, been incorporated in Macedonia but all that can be said for certain is that they were independent in the time of Antigonus Doson.

Very early in the war—probably in 259—an opportunity presented itself to Antigonus of inflicting considerable, if indirect, damage upon Ptolemy. An actual attack on him without a strong fleet was not possible; but the occasion that now offered itself was one of promise. Cyrene had never taken kindly to Egyptian rule; and it has already been related how Magas, who governed Cyrene for Egypt down to 274, rebelled in that year and, in concert with Antiochus I, brought on the struggle known as the first Syrian war. Magas must have had the support of the strong party in Cyrene that was hostile to the Egyptian connexion; and the result of the war, so far as the Cyrenaica was concerned was that the country—practically won its independence; Magas was recognized as king, subject to some sort of vague Egyptian overlordship. He was a half-brother of Ptolemy II, being a son of Berenice by her first marriage; and his wife. Apame, a daughter of Antiochus I and Stratonice, was not only sister of Antiochus II but niece of Antigonus. Magas died at some time shortly after the taking of Athens by Antigonus, probably in 259, leaving no son to succeed him, but an only daughter Berenice, who cannot well have been more than fourteen years old at the time. It seems that, when he knew his end was at hand, he felt a desire to terminate all cause of quarrel between the two kingdoms, and betrothed Berenice to the eldest son of Ptolemy II, afterwards' Ptolemy III:  a circumstance that shows that this Ptolemy was at the time considered certain to be the successor to the throne of Egypt, and that Arsinoe’s son, if not yet actually in revolt, was looked upon as discarded by his appointment as governor of the Ionian towns, as he seems himself to have recognized.

The betrothal of Berenice to the heir of the throne of Egypt did not suit either the nationalist party in Cyrene or the queen-mother Apame. It is evident that there  two parties in the country; and as the projected marriage was pleasing to the party that favoured Egypt, Apame naturally turned to her own people. Doubtless with the approval of the anti-Egyptian or nationalist party, she sent to Antigonus, offering Berenice’s hand and kingdom to his half-brother Demetrios the Fair; as he was a grandson of Ptolemy I through his mother Ptolemais, it was doubtless thought that this might weigh with the philo-Egyptian opposition. Demetrios started at once; a fair wind and a swift ship enabled him to evade any Egyptian cruisers; he reached Cyrene in safety. The traditional version of what happened is somewhat as follows. Though a capable soldier, Demetrios lost no time, once Antigonus’ hand was removed, in showing that he was a son of the Besieger in other things beside military ability. He began with a successful campaign against Egypt in Libya; but after this he treated the court of Cyrene with contempt and the troops with despotic harshness; he also slighted the little Berenice, and made love to her mother Apame, who was not much older than himself and was attracted by his good looks. The result was that the Egyptian party in Cyrene, under the lead of Berenice, rose against him and slew him in Apame’s bedchamber; Berenice secured that her mother’s life should be spared.

But all the details of this story are absolutely untrustworthy, as Justin’s moral embellishments usually are. Demetrios statesman of his age; and it is not at all likely that the father of Antigonus Doson was, politically incapable. The only facts for which good evidence exists are, that Demetrios became king of Cyrene and died, and that Berenice, when a small girl, did something which a court poet could call extraordinary and speak of as removing some obstacle to her future marriage with Ptolemy III. As it is quite certain from contemporary evidence that Demetrios never married Berenice, who was the legitimate heiress to the throne, and as it is equally certain that he was for a time king of Cyrene, it is clear that what he really did do was to execute a coup d’état with the support of the nationalist party and no doubt of Apame, who saw her way to being again queen; thereupon the Egyptian party removed him by assassination, with Berenice’s privity. It is not the only case in history where an event whose mainspring was political has been turned into a story of passion; it may be added that it is by no means certain that Demetrios was ever even betrothed to Berenice. It is certain, however, that with his death a considerable opportunity was lost to Antigonus.

Demetrios’ death probably occurred in 258, not long after the revolt of Lysimachus’ son at Ephesus. It formed a set­off to the death of the Egyptian claimant to the Macedonian throne, and it brought to Egypt a very real gain of power. For Cyrene, for a little while, now came (it seems) substantially under Ptolemy’s rule. The friends of Egypt, who had killed Demetrios, threw themselves and their country into Ptolemy’s arms, perhaps from fear of the nationalists and Antigonus; and though Berenice was queen in name, she was betrothed to Ptolemy’s son, and Ptolemy made him in the meantime the real ruler of the country, with the name of king, working of course in Egypt’s interest. This advantage undoubtedly made it more easy for Egypt to negotiate. For things had not been going any too well with Egypt in Asia. Not merely had Antiochus recovered Ionia, but he had succeeded in occupying Pamphylia and that part of Cilicia which had previously belonged to Egypt, and had managed to slip transports across the narrow sea and capture Samothrace, important as a religious centre. Egypt seems to have retaken Samos, but that was all. In Asia she had been definitely weakened, and must have realized that she had undertaken more than she could carry through, and that a genuine peace would be desirable. Antiochus may have been willing enough to make peace, provided that it secured to him his considerable conquests. The result was the peace of 255 (or perhaps 256), which must, so far as concerns Ptolemy and Antiochus, have been a peace between them on the basis of the status quo. How far the peace reached is not known; but undoubtedly it included Antigonus. For though the new war between Egypt and Macedonia had only been waged by the friends of each, still the execution of Philochoros shows clearly enough that the two principals were on terms of hostility, even though they could not reach each other; and subsequent events, notably the actions of Antigonus at Athens and in regard to Bithynia, prove that he must have been a party  to the treaty, quite apart from the fact that a Delian inscription could hardly emphasize ‘peace’ if Ptolemy still remained at war with Macedonia.

Antigonus had now a very different position from any that he had ever heretofore occupied. He had gained heavily by these ten years of war. He had restored, or was in the way to restore, to Macedonia the most extended boundaries that she had ever known; but, more important than that, he had at last secured the loyalty of the Macedonian people. The steady work of years had borne fruit; save in a few cases near the Epirot frontier, his people had supported him loyally, and he had even been able to entrust the end of the struggle with Alexander to an army with which he himself was not present. He might at last consider himself firm on the throne. Long, too, as his two wars had lasted, they had probably exhausted Macedonia less than would have been the case with many other countries, seeing how self-contained and self-supporting it was; and though the Macedonian troops had been compelled to fight three considerable battles, each had been a decisive victory, and their losses may not have been great. Sparta and Epirus had both been conclusively beaten; neither was likely to be dangerous again for years. All the pretenders to his throne were dead, unless Alexander of Epirus can be reckoned as such, and Alexander was in no position to attack him again. Antigonus’ arrangement with Aetolia had been tested by events, and had held good. Athens, and everything that Athens implied, belonged to him; and it had been demonstrated to completeness that Egypt could not herself conduct an offensive war against Macedonia. Above all, Egypt had no, further claims on the Macedonian crown. In Peloponnese, Antigonus was popular in the Argolid; and it appeared as if his friends in the peninsula were now powerful enough to hold his enemies in check. Even his system of tyrants, the weak spot in his armour, appeared to be justifying itself in the hands of Aristodemos of Megalopolis. On land, Antigonus had reached his zenith. He had laboured hard; it began to look as if he were about to enter into the fruits of his labours.

Peace then was made, and in due course the world saw the extraordinary spectacle of Antigonus and Ptolemy working hand in hand. Nicomedes of Bithynia died somewhere about this time, leaving children by two marriages and his kingdom to the younger family: anticipating that the son of his first marriage, Ziaelas, would make trouble, he named Antigonus and Ptolemy joint guardians of the infants, together with the cities of Byzantion, Herakleia, and Kios. Ziaelas of course raised an army of Gauls and invaded Bithynia; the Bithynians obtained troops from the children’s guardians, and after a good deal of fighting an arrangement was come to through the mediation of Herakleia, which, however, gave Ziaelas the kingdom. The sole importance of the episode, in a history of Antigonus, is that it is the only occasion known on which Antigonus, since he became king of Macedonia, interfered in any way in Asia, and the only occasion in history, so far as is known, on which troops of the Antigonid and the Lagid, withdrawn from Athens herself, that is to say, from the Mouseion. This was the garrison which pressed most severely on the city; it was constantly before all men’s eyes. With the withdrawal of the Macedonian governor there was some rearrangement of commands; or, rather, a return was made to the system that had existed before the Chremonidean war. Hierokles no longer meets us; whether he was dead or superannuated cannot be said. But Piraeus, with the fort of Mounychia, was again placed in the hands of a separate strategos, who held, in addition, ‘the fortresses that go with Piraeus,’ Salamis and Sounion. The new strategos of Piraeus was that Herakleitos of Athmonon whom we have already met as agonothetes of the Great Panathenaia in 274 and as a zealous adherent of Antigonus. He had held some post under Antigonus in the interval; possibly he had been governor of Salamis in the years 261-255; he was popular in Salamis and perhaps in Athens, and no doubt it was considered that the Athenians would find his appointment less galling than that of a stranger. As Hierokles before him, he was entirely independent of Krateros at Corinth, and responsible directly to the king. In his hand were the keys of Athens from the side of the sea; Antigonus knew well enough that he had not yet finished with Egypt. What was done with the forts of Eleusis, Panakton, and Phyle is not known; it is very likely that Antigonus handed them back to Athens with the Mouseion.

It was an altered Athens that received back the right of self-government. A great generation had passed away, and their successors were hardly the equals of the men who were gone. The fitful freedom of the forty years preceding the Chremonidean war, interspersed though it was with periods of foreign rule, had at least been life; and Athens had been the home of a large number of men who, if not always great men in the proper sense, were at least notable personalities, men of mark in their time, bearing the impress of an age kept a stretch by the continued clash of arms and interests which had centred round the city. Now Athens had peace; such fighting as she was to do in the next twenty-five years was done for, and under the aegis of, her master; but she had a master, and the peace was like the peace of death. She was mot again to be an independent force in the world's politics; and the beginnings can perhaps be detected of the process by which she would ultimately cease to be a force in the world's thought. Zeno's death had indeed come at the parting of two epochs. It was not merely that many of the strongest statesmen had gone into exile; for the alteration was equally marked in the spheres of literature and philosophy. There was no great historian now in Athens; Philochoros was dead, and Timaios dead or gone to Sicily; Phylarchos did not write, apparently, till after Athens recovered a kind of freedom in 229; Klio loved free air. There was no one to replace Menander, Philemon, and the other prominent comedians who were dead or dropping out one by one; the New Comedy had seen its best days; poor as it was in some respects, it retained enough of the old tradition of Comedy to love free air also. Philosophy was different; no externals could make a slave of the philosopher who knew in his own soul that he was free. Yet in philosophy also, as in literature and politics, there was a change. It has happened before now that, in this or that country, conquest has called out, by way of reaction, a more intense intellectual fervour in the conquered, leading to manifestations which have restored their country’s place in the world; but nothing of the sort happened, nor could it well have happened, at Athens. Athens was growing old; she seems no longer to have had the strength to bring any great new thing to the birth. It is true that one of the most notable of the philosophic movements of antiquity was yet to come, and to come from Athens; but it was to be no longer positive and creative, but critical and destructive. Spring and summer were over; and the autumn sunshine already gave presage of the frosts to come.

But autumn has its own charm; and the philosophers of the new generation at Athens, if not the equals of those, who were gone, merit more than a passing glance. The balance of the schools had entirely changed; two of the four had broken in half, and the dominant personality in Athens no longer belonged to the Stoa. Epicurus’ school was unchanged; his successor, Hermarchos was a man of no note in himself, but a faithful friend of the master to whose teaching the school clung and was to cling without alteration or growth. Aristotle’s school was shattered: and Hieronymus of Rhodes, represented to us as a poor ill-natured creature, but not without wits, who had hankerings after Epicureanism, was leading the secession from Straton’s official successor Lykon. That there should have been a secession is perhaps not surprising; for Lykon’s chief title to fame is that he succeeded, during his long tenure of the scholarchate, in reducing Aristotle’s once great school to an insignificance which lasted, with brief intermission, for a couple of centuries. If tradition be true, he was indeed a curious kind of philosopher. He had been an athlete, well known as a wrestler, a boxer, and a tennis­player; and he became a devotee of the luxury of the table. His extravagant banquets, to which his pupils had to contribute, made membership of the school a prohibitive luxury to any but the wealthy; and the banquets themselves were symposia, not of wit or learning, but of eating and drinking. But he had his good points. He took much .interest in the early education of boys; he often gave advice on affairs to his fellow-citizens, and his advice was always sound. His lengthy will reveals a character both business-like and generous; by it he liberated his numerous slaves, and charged his heir with the education of one of them who was a minor.

The other school which had broken in two was Zeno’s. The official headship rested with Cleanthes. He was a man of sterling personal worth, who in youth had shrunk from no hardship or privation that he might earn enough during the night just to live while attending Zeno’s lectures by day; even his rivals esteemed him highly. But he was slow-witted, and never became a force in philosophy; his importance to Stoicism consisted in the fact that he received the torch from Zeno and handed it on to Chrysippos. One gift, however, was his. If not a great philosopher, he was a true poet; and his Hymn to the. World Power whom the Stoics called by the popular name of Zeus, with the wonderful lines which not only recall one of the best-known images in Isaiah but into which we can read, if we wish, a very modern and un-Hellenic feeling for those who appear to be failures,45 marks the highest point which Greek religious poetry ever reached.

Ariston of Chios led the secession from Cleanthes. Though inferior to the latter in character, he was far superior in commonplace ability, and succeeded in making himself a position in Athens second only to that of Arkesilaos. But he failed to found an independent school, which may seem to argue that he had no particular originality; and his greatest merit was to have taught Eratosthenes.

Politically, the Stoa and the Colonnade had almost changed places at Athens. The former, to Antigonus, was represented by Persaios at Pella; and there is no record that Kleanthes was ever a personal friend of the king, though Antigonus was said to have once given him a large sum of money, no doubt (if the story be true) that he might no longer have to work for his living. But Cleanthes had been a friend of Chremonides; and with Athens taken, Chremonides banished, and invited Cleanthes to come to Alexandria or, if he could not come, to send a pupil; and as Chrysippus would not leave Athens, Cleanthes sent Sphairos of Bosporos, a man who afterwards had the distinction of being the teacher and friend of another great enemy of Macedonia, Cleomenes III of Sparta. Eratosthenes too, Ariston’s pupil, was to become one of the greatest ornaments of the Museum at Alexandria. On the other hand, Lykon abandoned the traditional attitude of Aristotle’s school. That school had always been Macedonian in feeling, but their Macedonia was that of Kassandros; they had never been friends of the Antigonid, but on the fall of Demetrios of Phaleron had turned to Egypt. This attitude had lasted throughout Straton’s life; he had been the tutor of Ptolemy II, and had corresponded with Arsinoe. But the Macedonia of Kassandros was a vanished tradition; what remained of the extreme oligarchic action that in the old days had supported him had long since amalgamated with the modern pro-Macedonian party that supported Antigonus; a descendant   Demetrios of Phaleron had been one of Antigonus’ nominees for a magistracy. Above all, Antigonus’ star was in the ascendant. Both sections of Aristotle’s school made their peace with him. It is intimated that Antigonus, who had had nothing to do with Straton, knew Lykon well, and found a charm, which would not bear transplanting on to paper, in the fragrance and grace of his conversation; while the philosopher contributed 200 drachmai to the war fund raised by Athens when she fought for Demetrios II against Aratos.

But the most notable figure in Athens for twenty years after her fall was Arkesilaos, Krates’ successor as head of the Academy. Like Cleanthes of Assos and Lykon of the Troad, he too was a Greek of Asia; his native place was Pitane. He was obviously of considerable parts and really witty, and he made the Academy again the leading school in Athens. As a personality he deserved his prominence. He was a man of real worth; his kindly and actions, and his freedom from pride, were notorious; though well off and living in more than comfort, he cared little for money, and his generosity was as lavish as unostentatious : ‘Most ready to do good and most loath to have it known’ is his biographer’s verdict. There appears to have been much personal liking and mutual respect between him and Cleanthes, and each defended the other warmly on occasion, though intellectually they were at daggers drawn.

But if Arkesilaos raised Plato’s school once more to the leading position in Athens, it was largely because, under him, it was no longer the school of Plato. Though Pyrrhon does not appear to have been one of his numerous teachers, his contemporaries treated him as a Pyrrhonist; and the burden of his teaching was purely sceptical. He may have thought that he was going back to Socrates; he can hardly have thought that he was going back to Plato. The question has been warmly argued both in ancient and in modern times; and while some in antiquity defended him as a Platonist on the absurd ground that his scepticism was merely a touch­stone for pupils, and that to those chosen he then taught esoteric Platonism, a modern writer has taken up an exactly opposite standpoint; his aim was the search for truth, and he sought it as Plato did. But it must be remembered that whereas Plato came to certain positive conclusions, Arkesilaos came to none; he desired, as did every philosopher, to find truth, but he decided that truth could not be found, and that one must suspend one’s judgement. The comparative ease with which the sceptical position could be maintained, the assimilation of the little non-Athenian schools, and the fact that Arkesilaos was a persuasive lecturer and the ablest mind in Athens, inevitably raised him and his school to the highest position; not, however, without strong opposition, notably from Timon and Ariston and Antagoras the poet. These men were equally bitter against him, but on different grounds; Timon as the legitimate successor of Pyrrhon, on whose preserves Arkesilaos (he thought) was poaching; Antagoras as the friend of the true Platonists Polemon and Krates, from whose teaching Arkesilaos had departed; Ariston as the champion of the Stoic theory of knowledge, which Arkesilaos was especially attacking; in fact Arkesilaos and his greater successor, Karneades, were to damage that theory past any mending, a matter which of. course did not in the least impair the vital part of Stoicism, he  of conduct. So Antagoras abused Arkesilaos in the market place; Ariston’s friends brought up against him the time-honoured charge that he ‘corrupted the young’; Timon lampooned him as an owl courting the popularity of a mob of chaffinches, whose admiration stamped him as a trifler, and inquired of him, not without point, why he opened his mouth so wide as to call himself a Platonist; while Ariston himself, with insult still more pointed, turned him into a kind of chimaera, whose face might be the face of Plato, but whose body and tail were Diodorus the dialectician and Pyrrhon the sceptic. The actual result was probably to strengthen Arkesilaos’ position.

Politically, Arkesilaos in public maintained a strict neutrality. He had been an intimate friend of Hierokles, Antigonus’ general in the Piraeus, a circumstance which led to some feeling against him, for Hierokles, naturally, cannot have been popular; but he never courted the friendship of Antigonus, and indeed went out of his way to avoid it. It was not very easy for the friend of Hierokles never to meet Antigonus; but Arkesilaos kept his independence manfully, and the only favour he ever sought from Antigonus was something for his native city of Pitane, which seems not to have been in freedom required championing. In the darkest hours, of Macedonian ley Arkesilaos’ class-room was one of the places in which still glowed the spark of liberty, waiting to burst into flame. Well may the Athenians have set him above all his contemporaries.

The new-position of things must have made a sensible difference in Antigonus’ relations with the world of philosophy. In truth, they were hardy what they had been. The leading philosopher in Athens was now one who was quite detached from Antigonus, and belonged to a school that had never had any welcome for Macedonian kings; and, over and above this, Arkesilaos, as was not unnatural in a native of Pitane, stood in the friendliest relationship to Eumenes of Pergamon, with whom he perhaps corresponded; and Eumenes was a friend of Egypt. The Stoa had deserted Macedonia for Egypt and Sparta. The newly-acquired friendship of the Colonnade was perhaps hardly a set-off to this. So much of our knowledge rests on a tradition which is vividly anti-Macedonian that it is always possible that Lykon and Hieronymus of Rhodes have had hard measure dealt out to them precisely because they were Antigonus’ friends; but, even so, they cannot be made out to be very notable personalities. And Lykon, though he had changed the traditional attitude of his school, was anything but a partisan of Antigonus. His real sympathies, natural in a Greek of the Troad, were, like those of Arkesilaos, with Pergamon; both Eumenes and Attalos I honoured him above all his contemporaries, an indication that there may have been more in Lykon than our tradition allows; and he refused an invitation to go to Antiochus II, the friend of Antigonus and enemy of Eumenes.

Antigonus then, when he instituted and endowed a yearly festival at Athens in honour of his dead son Halkyoneus, could find no one better to have the conduct of it than Hieronymus of Rhodes : though it is always possible, as has been suggested, that Hieronymus was chosen because of some special friendship for the deceased. But although so many of the philosophers now looked away from Antigonus and toward Egypt and her friends, it is perhaps characteristic of the Athens of this time that none of them went very far in the matter; all, save Lykon, were ready to attend, and did attend, the yearly festival given by Hieronymus with Antigonus’ money: even Arkesilaos was found there, and Lykon’s absence was due solely to personal dislike of Hieronymus; one of the things, no doubt, which prevented him, the only scholarch at all so disposed, from drawing closer to the king of Macedonia.

Over and above this, we cannot but come to the conclusion that what was taking place in the schools was also taking place in the world, and that Antigonus’ conquest of Athens, unavoidable as it was on Antigonus’ part, had brought about an equally unavoidable change in his relationship with the city. The government, of course, after the withdrawal of the Mouseion garrison, was carried on by the pro-Macedonian party, and entirely in Antigonus’ interest; it could not be otherwise. But though Athens again offers her official sacrifices for the king’s welfare, and even engages in a war on his behalf, we feel that the times are changed, and that it is now the goodwill, no longer of a friend, but of a dependant.

There is one other event which falls at this time, as to which we would gladly know something. From the point of view of world-history, it can hardly be denied that one distinguishing peculiarity of the third century before Christ was  this that so many of its greatest men were Asiatics. In the earlier part of the century it had been Zeno, the Phoenician of Kition; at its end it was to be Hannibal, the Phoenician of Carthage. In the time between the two falls the reign of Asoka of Pataliputra, king of all India north of the Deccan. Any estimate of Asoka must of course always be based on what he himself says about himself; but there is no more reason to suppose it untrue, seeing the frankness with which he relates the horrors of war once inflicted by himself on the Kalingas, than there is reason to doubt the main fact of his life, that he found India Brahmin and left it largely Buddhist. It was after the conquest of the Kalingas in the ninth year of his reign (261), and in consequence, by his own account, of his remorse for the bloodshed and suffering so caused, that Asoka became a Buddhist lay disciple. Two years later, in 259, he formally entered the Order, and dispatched missionaries all over the world to effect a truer conquest, conquest (as he puts it) by the Law of Piety : these were sent, not only throughout India, but to five of the Hellenistic courts, those of Antiochus II, Ptolemy II, Magas of Cyrene, Alexander of Epirus, and Antigonus. Whether they ever arrived we do not know. A later Ceylonese work, which affects to know the names and destinations of all Asoka’s missionaries, conducts them all to places in India and Ceylon, except one, Maharakkita, who was sent to the country of the Yonas, the north-west frontier tribes of that name; but the particulars given in the Mahavamsa often deserve little enough credit, and it omits other missions attested by the inscriptions. There does not perhaps exist more than one actual indication of the presence of a Buddhist in the Hellenistic world. But an embassy would not necessarily leave archaeological traces of itself; and of how many other events of this time has all record perished? Several Greek envoys had already gone to the court of Pataliputra; Asoka’s father had petitioned Antiochus I for the visit of a Greek philosopher; in Augustus’ time, when overland communication was less easy than before the Parthian revolt, an Indian embassy came overland to Augustus, among their number being that famous ascetic, whether a follower of Buddha or Brahma, who burnt himself alive in the market­place at Athens as a demonstration of his creed. With these things before us, nothing hinders us from taking Asoka’s statement to be literally true.

We may picture for ourselves, if we please, the visit of that missionary to the court of Pella, dressed in the yellow robe of his Order, with shaven head and begging-bowl, undistinguished save for the king’s envoys that escorted him, undistinguished perhaps even by any escort at all, but representative of a faith that was to embrace one-third of the human race and of a belief, as yet uncorrupted in one who had found for his suffering fellow-mortals the path of peace. Much of what he had to say would go home to his audience. Antigonus must have had some fellow-feeling for a king who took his kingship seriously, whose time and work were his people’s. The statesmen of the court would listen, perhaps with interest; to the account of a monarch who planted trees and dug wells along his roadways, built rest-houses and founded hospitals; who said that slaves must be treated properly and every living creature with respect, and who professed to know a better way of conquest than that of the sword. The philosophers of the court might compare their own ideals with the Indian’s law of piety, while they listened to the story of an alien philosophy which had actually put into practice that which some of themselves had attempted, a philosophy whose followers, by abjuring the world and the things of the world, had thrown off with all their possessions the troubles that even the smallest possessions bring, and had by contemplation attained, not only to that present tranquillity of spirit at which some of the Greeks were aiming, but (as they believed) to a path of enlightenment which would at last lead them forth free of the confused turmoil of living and being, in a freedom with which the Stoic’s assumed liberty to usher himself forth from this life could not for a moment compare. It may even be that among the philosophers someone, in the spirit of Epictetus, would not have averted his head at the saying that wrongs must be borne patiently if it be possible; though all alike, king, statesmen, philosophers, would have been equally at a loss to understand how the master of India could think that nothing bore much fruit save only that which concerned the other world. It is perhaps but a fancy; but it may please us to think that for a moment there was in truth some sort of communication between the king who declared himself the servant of his people and the king whose ideal of king­ship was expressed in his master’s words, ‘All men are my children.’

CHAPTER XII

THE SECOND STRUGGLE WITH EGYPT

ANTIGONUS GONATAS