Finally, as a death-blow to Spartan power, he abolished the time-honored laws of Lycurgus, under which that city had for centuries been so great, and forced the people to educate their children and live in the same manner as the Achaeans. Thus ended the glory of Sparta. Some time afterwards its citizens resumed their old laws and customs, but the city had sunk from its high estate, and from that time forward vanished from history. At length, being then seventy years of age, misfortune came to this great warrior and ended his warlike career. An enemy of his had induced the Messenians to revolt from the Achaean League. At once the old soldier, though lying sick with a fever at Argos, rose from his bed, and reached Megalopolis, fifty miles away, in a day. Putting himself at the head of an army, he marched to meet the foe. In the fight that followed his force was driven back, and he became separated from his men in his efforts to protect the rear. Unluckily his horse stumbled in a stony place, and he was thrown to the ground and stunned. The enemy, who were following closely, at once made him prisoner, and carried him, with insult and contumely, and with loud shouts of triumph, to the city gates, through which the very tidings of his coming had once driven a triumphant foe. The Messenians rapidly turned from anger to pity for their noble foe, and would probably have in the end released him, had time been given them. But Dinocrates, their general and his enemy, resolved that Philopoemen should not escape from his hands. He confined him in a close prison, and, learning that his army had returned and were determined upon his rescue, decided that that night should be Philopoemen's last. The prisoner lay--not sleeping, but oppressed with grief and trouble--in his prison cell, when a man entered bearing poison in a cup. Philopoemen sat up, and, taking the cup, asked the man if he had heard anything of the Achaean horsemen. "The most of them got off safe," said the man. "It is well," said Philopoemen, with a cheerful look, "that we have not been in every way unfortunate." Then, without a word more, he drank the poison and lay down again. As he was old and weak from his fall, he was quickly dead. The news of his death filled all Achaea with lamentation and thirst for revenge. Messenia was ravaged with fire and sword till it submitted. Dinocrates and all who had voted for Philopoemen's death killed themselves to escape death by torture. All Achaea mourned at his funeral, statues were erected to his memory, and the highest honors decreed to him in many cities. In the words of Pausanias, a late Greek writer, "Miltiades was the first, and Philopoemen the last, benefactor to the whole of Greece." _THE DEATH-STRUGGLE OF GREECE._