=58.= Before a hundred years had passed since the death of Socrates, the face of the Greek world had been completely changed. Athens, Lacedaemon, Corinth, Thebes, which had been great powers, had sunk into comparative insignificance; their preeminence was gone, and even of their independence but little remained. Throughout Greece proper the Macedonian was master. But if the old-fashioned politician suffered a bitter disappointment, and the adherents of the old polytheism despaired of the future, there was rich compensation for the young and the hopeful. Petty wars between neighbouring cities, with their wearisome refrain ‘and the men they killed, and the women and children they enslaved[1],’ began to be less common; internal and still more murderous strife between bigoted oligarchs or democrats began to be checked from without. For the enlightened Greek a new world of enterprise had been opened up in the East. Alexander the Great had not only conquered Asia Minor, and established everywhere the Greek language and a Greek bureaucracy; he had opened the way to the far East, and pointed out India and even China as fields for the merchant and the colonizer. His work had been partly frustrated by the disorders that followed his death; but if achievement was thus hindered, hopes were not so quickly extinguished. These new hopes were not likely to be accompanied by any lasting regrets for the disappearance of ancient systems of government now regarded as effete or ridiculous, or of inherited mythologies which were at every point in conflict with the moral sense[2]. [Sidenote: East and West.] =59.= The same historic events which opened the East to Hellenic adventurers also made the way into Europe easy for the Oriental. As the soldier and the administrator travelled eastward, so the merchant and the philosopher pushed his way to the West. Not merely in Persia had ancient superstitions been swept away by reforming zeal; the Jews were now spreading from town to town the enthusiasm of a universalized religion which was ridding itself of bloody sacrifices; and, for the time at least, the humane philosophy of the Buddha was dominant in India, was being preached far and wide by self-sacrificing monks, and was inspiring the policy of great monarchies. We find it hard to picture the clashing of ideals, enthusiasms, and ambitions which was at this time taking place in all the great cities of the old world; but it is certain that in the universal excitement the old distinctions of Greek and barbarian, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, free and slave, man and woman were everywhere becoming weakened, and community of thought and temperament were beginning to reunite on a new basis individuals who had broken loose from the ties of ancient society. [Sidenote: New schools of philosophy.]