upply their needs
and their amusements. They considered that they had performed, to the
full, their duty as citizens when they had taken part in the noisy
debates of the Assembly, or had sat as paid jurymen in the never-ending
succession of court procedures of this most litigious of peoples. Among
men even in their better days not callous to the allurements of bribes
judiciously administered, it was a logical sequence that corruption
should now pervade all classes and conditions.

Literature and art, too, shared the general decadence, as it ever must
be, since they always respond to the dominant ideals of a time and a
people. To this general statement the exception must be noted that
philosophy, as represented by Plato and Aristotle, and oratory, as
represented by a long succession of Attic orators, had developed into
higher and better forms. The history of human experience has shown that
philosophy often becomes more subtle and more profound in times when men
fall away from their ancient high standards, and become shaken in their
old beliefs. So oratory attains its perfect flower in periods of the
greatest stress and danger, whether from foreign foes or from internal
discord. Both these forms of utterance of the active human intellect
show, in their highest attainment, the realization of imminent emergency
and the effort to point out a way of betterment and safety.

Not only the condition of affairs at home was full of portent of coming
disaster. The course of events in other parts of Greece and in the
barbarian kingdom of Macedon seemed all to be converging to one
inevitable result,--the extinction of Hellenic freedom. When a nation or
a race becomes unfit to possess longer the most precious of heritages, a
free and honorable place among nations, then the time and the occasion
and the man will not be long wanting to co-operate with the internal
subversive force in consummating the final catastrophe. "If Philip
should die," said Demosthenes, "the Athenians would quickly make
themselves another Philip."

Throughout Greece, mutual jealousy and hatred among the States, each too
weak to cope with a strong foreign foe, prevented such united action as
might have made the country secure from any barbarian power; and that at
a time when it was threatened by an enemy far more formidable than had
been Xerxes with all his millions.

The Greeks at first entirely underrated the danger from Philip and the
Macedonians. They had,