ART. II.-GROTE ON ALEXANDER THE GREAT.

A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander. By George Grote. Vol. XII. Murray.

Ir is a just remark of Dr. Johnson's, and, what is unusual with him, it is a very feeling one, that we never do any thing consciously for the last time, of things, that is, which we have long been in the habit of doing, without sadness of heart. This sadness must be experienced by every one on the completion of some great literary task-his companion during many studious years, the receptacle of his matured thoughts, the object of alternate hopes and anxieties, perhaps, too, the instrument and pledge of a perpetual name. Gibbon has recorded in some of the most harmonious sentences that ever flowed from his pen the emotions which he felt after writing the final periods of his Decline and Fall. His words, however familiar, are sufficiently beautiful to justify their re-transcription. "It was on the day," he writes, "or rather night of the 27th of June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea, that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious."

Mr. Grote's history is completed. Among many contemporary narratives remaining, or likely to remain unfinished, this one stands forth accomplished in all its parts-for the promised volume on the Platonic and Peripatetic Philosophy is a πápepyov, not an essential portion of this history-and generally admitted to deserve all acceptation and applause. It is a proud thought for its author, that he has consummated the project of his youth it is a noble possession for the age which has long watched its progress and now hails its conclusion: and, reflectively, it is a splendid testimonial to ancient Hellas itself, that, removed from us as they are by more than two thousand years, its sages, heroes, arts, and institutions still retain a lively interest

for a people so pre-occupied as that of England in the nineteenth century by its own innumerable cares and controversies imperial, social, or religious.

It is not our design to review Mr. Grote's history generally, but to limit our attention, on this occasion, to such portions of it as relate to the Macedonian autocracy, and especially to the character and conquests of Alexander. Down to this period we generally acquiesce in the historian's views of men and events, and cannot but applaud the original and comprehensive spirit with which he has read and represented the annals of Greece. From his estimate of the Macedonian era, therefore, we dissent with the more regret. We think that it is erroneous, and even a blemish on his hitherto excellent narrative. The vindicator of the Athenian people appears to us to forego his judicial impartiality so soon as Philip and Alexander come into

court.

The close of the republican era of Greece is one of the most memorable in the records of the world. Of the various members of the Hellenic federation, Sparta alone was virtually extinct. Its extinction was owing to the narrow basis of its constitution; to the prejudices and corruption of its haughty aristocracy. Its constitution was fitted for a camp pitched among a hostile population, and served its citizens so long as it was necessary to present an armed front to Greece within the Isthmus. But so soon as the Spartans aspired to foreign conquest or took part in the great political controversy between Europe and Asia, their very virtues, being factitious and opposed to the laws of human development, were converted into vices; the most isolated of nations became the most grasping and aggressive, the most frugal and hardy the most greedy of pelf and the most prodigal in its selfindulgence. Twice the Spartan oligarchy was deposed from the leadership of Greece by the general murmurs and indignation of its allies and subjects. Its harmosts were more intolerable rulers than the Persian satraps or the Greek despots: its home-government was as venal as the ministers of the worst of the Ptolemies or the Comneni. Neither honour nor troops of friends stood around the death-bed of this decayed and decrepit oligarchy. But Athens, although declined from its high estate when Philip excluded its citizens from Amphipolis and vanquished them at Charonea, was hardly degraded, since it contained Demosthenes, and men who responded to his eloquent appeals and disinterested counsels. For Athens there was a possibility of self-restoration, had its sons been as inclined to act upon, as they were to approve, good advice. They succumbed because they procrastinated, and because, like the Italian republics, they placed in the hands of mercenaries the arms that ought to have been wielded by the

citizens themselves. In the century before Alexander, Thebes, which had been hitherto almost the least, and certainly the least noble, among the Hellenic states, shook off its sloth, put forth unexpected energy, rolled back upon Sparta the tide of victory, and though destined to a fate that made the ears of all who heard of it tingle, and the eyes of all who beheld it dim, yet maintained to the last an attitude worthy of the countrymen of Pelopidas and Epaminondas. Arcadia and Argolis, always second-rate members of the federation, had not visibly declined: Messenia retained its poverty and independence: Elis generally preserved its sacred character, and periodically attracted to its festivals all who spoke the language of the Greeks or worshipped Olympian Zeus: Corinth was still the resort of the busy and the voluptuous, and its yet virgin citadel looked down upon the double harbour thronged with the masts of Sicily and the lesser Asia: while for the Achæans was reserved the destiny of gathering up for the last time, before the Roman eagles "flouted cold the banners" of Hellenic freedom, the elements of civil and social order, and of presenting the august spectacle of a federation guided by wise laws and sustained by native valour.

But there was a worm at the root of the permanence and prosperity of Greece as a federal nation. Faction and corruption had relaxed or shrivelled up the sinews of political virtue, and the events of the Sacred War had shaken the foundations of the national religion, already sapped by the philosophical schools. Even Plato taught that the wise man may lawfully stand aloof from the occupations and intrigues of politics; and Aristotle busied himself rather with universal man than with the interests of his adopted city. And if Plato and his most distinguished pupil had tended by their lessons "to slacken public virtue and abate her edge," the doctrines of the sophists were yet more injurious to political energy and independence. The "unjust reason" survived the banter of Aristophanes; and although Demosthenes appealed to the example of the men of Marathon, the Athenians applauded but did not emulate the active valour of their forefathers. The great mutations, indeed, of both Athens and Sparta, had been acted, and none of the inferior commonwealths, either north or south of the Bay of Corinth, had the power or perhaps the wish to succeed to the vacant space. The military prestige of Sparta had expired: the naval predominancy of Athens was on the wane: her island dominion had cast off her yoke: and Rhodes was rapidly becoming the sea-queen of the Ægean. Hostility against Persia no longer strengthened the bonds of Hellenic union. On the contrary, the gold and promises of the great king multiplied and envenomed the factions of the Greek commonwealths. The danger which had been repelled at Marathon and Platea now

menaced Greece from another quarter yet nearer and more formidable. "A nation of yesterday," directed by the genius of an accomplished chief, sprang into firm though sudden existence; and while the Athenians were debating whether Macedon should be accounted Greek or barbarian, Macedon had constituted itself the arbiter of Greece. The hour for change had arrived and with it the man. The fluctuating resolutions of the Athenians were no match for the undivided will of Philip; his movements were planned and executed with secrecy and speed, while theirs were proclaimed in the market-place, and paralysed by delay. Greece, defended by mercenaries, could not resume its martial habits; and its civic levies went down before the militia of Macedon, as the Euboean cornfields bent beneath the blasts from the Thracian hills. Yet the end of republican Hellas was less ignoble than that of most ancient realms: the Greeks, though enervated, were not utterly corrupt: they had passed into the sixth age of senescence, but not into the seventh of decrepitude.

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Never, indeed, has a nation set more brilliantly than republican Greece. The gray hue of evening rested on Europe alone the horizontal beams of Hellenic culture diffused themselves over all western Asia, warmed into new life the primeval homes of civilisation, and even lighted up the fierce and rude tribes of Bokhara and Cabul. The conquests of Alexander enlarged the borders of the civilised world: those who drank the waters of the Oxus and Hyphasis learned to reverence the name of Athens and Delphi: the long-sealed kingdom of Egypt was brought within the European pale: Alexandria received and cherished the embers of Hellas, became for ten centuries the centre of commerce and literature, and by its ports on the Red Sea paved the way for the re-union of the eastern and western branches of the great Caucasian family.

It is among the conditions of a perfect historical era that it shall comprise a conspicuous terminus a quo, and an equally conspicuous terminus ad quem; that is to say, its beginning and its end shall be marked by some signal catastrophe dividing the era at either limit from whatsoever precedes and whatsoever follows it. The narrative now completed by Mr. Grote enjoys this rare privilege. At one end are visible the sacrifice at Aulis, the black-bearded kings on the Trojan beach, the ten years' siege and "the desolation of a hostile city." At the other we have Asia for the third time vanquished; Persepolis, a second Troy, reddening the horizon with its flames; and Babylon, which had successively opened its gates to the Mede and the Persian, tertaining in the halls of Belus the descendant of Eacus, and echoing along the quays of the Euphrates the tramp of Macedonian sentries. The interim is a rehearsal on a small stage of

en

the great European drama, in which republics with a territory no larger than an English county play the parts of England or France, and wars are carried on by armies inferior in numbers to Cæsar's tenth legion or Napoleon's old guard.

Such respectively are the limits of the work of which the concluding volume is now before us. On that work Mr. Grote has employed all the muniments of ancient record and modern investigation, and generally embodied them in language befitting such "high argument." The readers of the first ten volumes will be fully aware of their author's republican predilections; and so far they are both in place and season. For he has nobly vindicated a noble people: he has recited the story of Athens as Pericles or Demosthenes would have wished it to be told: his occasional sketches of the arts, literature, and philosophy of Greece justly and agreeably relieve the narrative of its wars and intrigues; and this, the latest monument to the Attic demus, is on the whole the most worthy of all that have hitherto commemorated its errors and its virtues.

We confess, however, that so far as regards his eleventh and twelfth volumes, Mr. Grote has frequently disappointed us: not that we love Athens less than he does, or less lament the extinction of its liberties by the strong arm of Macedon; but in these volumes Mr. Grote has, in our opinion, dropped the calmness of the judge and adopted the prejudices of the advocate. He sees only with the eyes and hears only with the ears of Demosthenes and his faction; forgetting the peculiar temptations of the orator to exaggerate, of the party-leader to misrepresent the acts and motives of his opponents. We can understand Mr. Grote's disregard of Isocrates, and even his dislike to Phocion; for the one was possessed by the overweening conceit that his rounded periods would save the state, and the other was a kind of heathen Puritan who deemed that dressing like a pauper and dining on herbs would render back to his countrymen the hardy worth of their ancestors. With each of these good men it fared as it will always fare with doctrinaires in political revolutions: Isocrates, who had spent his life and wasted gallons of midnight-oil in attempting to convince the Greeks of the propriety of putting themselves under an autocrator, died of chagrin when a practical autocrator presented himself at Charonca; and Phocion suffered as a traitor, although his only crimes were weakness and indecision. For his dislike of such politicians we can make all allowance; but we cannot so readily understand Mr. Grote's insensibility to the genius of Philip. Of Philip he writes with the temper and in the tone of an Olynthian exile: he is a liar, a drunkard, a voluptuary, a base Bezonian, two parts Illyrian to one Greek. To one thus prepossessed it is nothing that Philip called a nation