Modern historians, therefore, suckled on Bismarckism and devoted to physical force, turn aside from the old cities and pronounce them hopelessly degenerate. This is a proposition that deserves examination. In some respects it is false. If it be the mark of historical decadence that the motive power of a race is in some mysterious way paralysed so that invention ceases and no more new forms or experiments are made in culture or politics, then we may assert with some confidence that Greece was not yet even in the third century in such a condition. We shall see something of her new inventions in literature, philosophy, and art in this chapter. In politics the federal systems of Western Greece were distinctly novel and promising. Even in warfare she fought bravely enough at Chæroneia, as she did much later against the invading Gauls. Even Athens, when her dark hour came and she had to submit to garrisons and alien governors, never acquiesced, but rose again and again in rebellion against them. Sparta for a short time in the third century performed the most difficult of all political feats, namely, a reformation and regeneration of herself from within. At Sellasia under Cleomenes III. in 222 B.C. the few Spartans who remained fought against tremendous odds with all their ancient sublime devotion, and died to a man as their ancestors had done under Leonidas. So true is it that moral and spiritual qualities in a people do not come to the sudden end that often befalls a state when it depends for its greatness on material prosperity or physical force. But the most serious symptom of later Greece was a real racial decline, for which history has no remedy and no mercy, a decline of population. The Spartiate race of Lacedæmon, for example, became almost extinct. There were no more than 1500 of them at the date of the battle of Leuctra, and after that we hear of expeditions containing no more that thirty genuine Spartiates. In a less degree it was the same all over old Greece, and whether it was due to malarial fever or to economic distress, it made the political decline of these states inevitable.