ABSTRACT
AEXANDER THE GREAT died in 32·3 B.C. and Aristotle in the following year. The task of tracing the course of Greek political thought becomes from that point onwards much more difficult and its material more elusive. There are no outstanding political philosophers, and no great political writings have come down to us; so that a river, whose course it was previously possible to trace, now suddenly comes to an immense area of sandy desert in which it dissipates or sends underground its own waters. It is little wonder that to many it has seemed as if the subject were exhausted and political thinking at an end: Alexander's conquests had changed the world; the Greek citystate seemed out of date, insignificant in size and power compared with Macedonian armies, powerless and even useless in its traditional function as an arbiter of morals and social habits. Philosophers who thought otherwise must have had their minds in the skies and politicians were burying their heads in the sand. The end of Greek freedom had already come when Philip of Macedon was victorious at Chaeronea in 3 3 8. But these are the comments of a historian who has learned subsequent events. In 3 3 8 B.c. Philip's attempt at a general settlement of Greek affairs seemed to many to be no more like the end of the city-state than the Great King's settlement of fifty years before. Even Alexander's conquests, astonishing though they were, did not at first reveal what was to come. The average man, like Aeschines the orator, could not possibly have divined the changes which the next fifty years would gradually bring about. The destruction of Thebes, the reduction of Athens into subservience to Macedon and, above all, the dramatic collapse of the great Persian empire, these things
he knew and they filled him with amazement ;1 but there was still no sign of any change in his own way of life or any diminution of the importance of the 7T6Ats. Besides, though the mainland had been humiliated by Macedon, many of the Greek cities of Asia Minor welcomed Alexander as a liberator from their ancestral enemy. At first sight indeed the triumph of the Philhellene Alexander over the foreign king Darius looked like the defeat of the armies of the older Darius at Marathon, another victory for the Greek way of life. It was of course not a victory for Greek arms but for Macedonian. The Greek cities played no direct part in it and within a few years it became evident that, so far as they were concerned, the victory was a hollow one. The 'liberation of the cities' became a sorry farce when after Alexander's death his generals, fighting each other, used it as a war-cry or as a bribe. In the wake of Alexander's armies came Greeks from the mainland, conscious rather of new opportunities than of lost freedom. They could not all be successful in the race for wealth and position nor, where they mingled with barbarians, refrain from intermarriage. But changes came slowly. The children of the mixed marriages spoke Greek and it needed two or three generations before the mixture of races became at all evident. Moreover Hellenism had the official support of Alexander, whose policy of founding cities was continued by the successors; and the universal use of the Greek language seemed to give some assurance that Greek notions of 1TOALTEla had a great future as well as a glorious past.
