brief period of splendour, and that soon over. At the time that the philosophy of Greece reached its highest point in Plato and Aristotle, Greece was in all other respects in a hopeless state of decline. Notwithstanding individual attempts to revive it, the old morality and propriety of conduct had disappeared since the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. The old belief in the gods was likewise gone. To the bulk of the people the rising philosophy with its ethics afforded no substitute. Art, although carefully cultivated, failed to come up to the excellence of the strictly classic period. Political relations became daily more unsatisfactory. In the fifth century before Christ the rivalry of Athens and Sparta had ranged the states of Greece into two groups. In the succeeding century disunion spread further. The effort made by Thebes under Epaminondas to found a new leadership only multiplied parties. Destitute of a political centre of gravity, the Greeks, of their own choice, drifted into a disgraceful dependence on the conquered and now declining Persian empire. Persian gold wielded an influence which Persian arms had been unable to exercise. The petty jealousies of tiny states and tribes frittered away in endless local feuds resources which with unity and leadership might have accomplished wonders. Civil order declined, and with it the well-being and martial prowess of the nation declined also. The growing pursuit of the art of war as a profession took the decision of battle more and more out of the hands of free citizens, and placed it in those of the numerous bands of mercenaries which are one of the most baneful phenomena of that age, a sure sign of the decline of freedom, and of the approach of a military despotism. When by the rise of the Macedonian power the danger of a military despotism loomed nearer, patriots in Greece continued to deceive themselves with the hope that their self-devotion would avert the danger, but any unbiassed reader of history sees in the failure of their attempts to avert it the natural and inevitable result of causes so deeply rooted in the Greek character and the course of Greek history, that neither the most heroic exertions of individuals, nor the united resistance of the divided states, which came too late, could for one moment have rendered the final issue doubtful. [C. Greece after the battle of Chæronea.]