By the battle of Chæronea the doom of Greece was sealed. Never since then has Greece attained to real political freedom. All attempts to shake off the Macedonian supremacy ended in humiliating disasters. In the subsequent struggles Hellas, and Athens in particular, were the play-ball of changing rulers, the continual arena of their warfare. The second half of the third century was reached before a purely Grecian power—the Achæan League—was formed, round which the hopes of the nation rallied, but the attempt was wholly inadequate to meet the real requirements of the times. Soon it became apparent that no remedies were forthcoming to heal the ills from which the country was suffering. Discord, their old hereditary failing, rendered it impossible for Greeks to be independent in foreign relations, or to be united and settled at home. Their best resources were wasted in perpetual struggles between Achæans, Ætolians, and Spartans. The very individual who led the Achæans against the Macedonians in the cause of independence, called the Macedonians back to the Peloponnesus to gain their support against Sparta. When the supremacy of Macedonia was broken by the arms of Rome, a more avowed dependence on Italian allies succeeded. And when, in the year 146 B.C., the province of Achaia was incorporated into the Roman empire, even the shadow of freedom which up to that time had been assured departed for ever. Sad as were the external affairs of Greece at this period, and marked as was the decline of its intellectual power, its mental horizon, nevertheless, extended and its culture became more generally diffused. The Macedonian ascendency, which gave the death-blow to the independence of Greece, also broke down the barriers which had hitherto separated Greeks from foreigners. A new world was opened out before them, and a vast territory offered for their energies to explore. Greece was brought into manifold contact with the Eastern nations belonging to the Macedonian monarchy, whereby it secured for its culture the place of honour among them, but at the same time became subject to a slow, but, in the long run, important back-current of Oriental thought, traces of which appear in its philosophy a few centuries later. By the side of the old famed centres of learning in the mother country of Hellas, new centres arose, suited by position, inhabitants, and peculiar circumstances to unite the culture of East and West, and to fuse into one homogeneous mass the intellectual forces of different races. Whilst Hellas, by the number of emigrants who left her shores to settle in Asia and Egypt, was losing her population and the Greeks in their ancestral homes were being ousted by foreigners, they were gaining the most extensive intellectual conquests at the time over the very nations by and through whom they had been oppressed. CHAPTER II. CHARACTER AND CHIEF FEATURES OF THE POST-ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY. [A. Causes producing the post-Aristotelian philosophy.]