By the middle of the fourth century B.C. the decline of Greece is, even on the shallowest view, allowed to have begun. But it is commonly held to have begun merely because the Macedonian kingdom was beginning to step into that position of primacy among the Greek powers which had been held at different times by the cities of Argos, Sparta, Athens, and Thebes. And as regards the political life of the great Greek cities, above all, as regards the political life of that Athens which we are so often tempted to mistake for Greece, the change was great indeed, sad indeed. But we must not forget that the political decline of the great cities of old Greece was but one part of the general political decline of the Hellenic people, and also that a large part of old Greece itself looked on the change in quite another light from that in which we are used to look at it from the purely Athenian point of view. With the voice of Dêmosthenês ringing in our ears, it is hard to listen to the calm comments of Polybios, when he hands on to us the traditions of Megalopolis and of so many other cities by whom Philip was looked on as a friend and deliverer, a pious crusader against the sacrilegious Phokian. But yet more important it is to remember that, if old Hellas lost much through the advance of the Macedonian, the younger Hellas beyond Hadria lost immeasureably more through the advance of the Phœnician and the native Italian. Cry after cry for help went up from Italy and Sicily to the motherland in Greece. A series of adventurers, republican and princely, crossed the sea to bear help to their threatened brethren or to carve out a dominion for themselves. Some went to free Greek cities from domestic tyrants, others to free them from the yoke of the advancing barbarian. That men from the motherland were needed for either work shows that the great day of the Western Greeks had passed away, that they could no longer keep either internal freedom or external independence by their own strength. And, dark as is the tale of Dionysios and Agathoklês, we cannot wholly put out of sight that even they had a brighter side as in some sort champions of Hellas against the barbarian. We must not forget Dionysios as the planter of Greek colonies on both sides of Hadria, nor Agathoklês as the man who carried the arms of Europe to the shores of Africa, the forerunner of Regulus and Scipio, of Roger of Sicily and Charles of Austria. But the mission of Diôn and of the nobler Timoleôn, the warfare of the Spartan and the Epeirot, of Archidamos and Alexander and Pyrrhos, showed that the Greeks of the West could no longer stand, even by the help of the Greeks of the old Hellenic lands or of the lands which had become Hellenic by adoption. Their doom was sealed; so before long was the doom of all lands, the lands of the Macedonian and the Carthaginian no less than the lands of the Sicilian and the Italian Greek. But the fall of Macedon and the fall of Carthage were yet far