distant; those lands were reaching their highest pitch of greatness at the moment when it became plain that all that was left for the Greeks of the West was to become subjects or dependents of an Italian power. Another point to be noticed is the close connexion between the destiny of the Eastern and of the Western Greeks. The Spartan princes sought for a career in Italy because, in face of the advance of Macedonia, there was no career left for them in old Greece. Moreover the Epeirot kings Alexander and Pyrrhos are themselves part of the _Hellênismos_; they are among the chiefest signs that the Hellenic name and culture had spread beyond the genealogical bounds of the Hellenic nation. Their people might have an ancient kindred with the Greeks; they themselves might come of the blood of Achilleus; but they were still, in the wider aspect of the time, Greeks by adoption only. And the career of the Epeirot kings in the West was directly suggested by the career of the Macedonian kings in the East. Their land looked towards Italy and Sicily yet more directly than Macedonia looked towards Asia; and perhaps Alexander, certainly Pyrrhos, sought to found beyond the Hadriatic a Western Greek dominion to balance the Eastern Greek dominion which the Macedonians had founded beyond the Ægæan. So it was not to be. The decree had gone forth that Greece, in her new guise, was to leaven the East, for a while to rule over the East, but that in the West the political power of the Greek race was to die out, that even its intellectual influence was to be indirect, an influence which had to accept Roman masters and disciples as its instruments.