ult and contumely, and with loud shouts of triumph, to the city
gates, through which the very tidings of his coming had once driven a
triumphant foe.

The Messenians rapidly turned from anger to pity for their noble foe,
and would probably have in the end released him, had time been given
them. But Dinocrates, their general and his enemy, resolved that
Philopoemen should not escape from his hands. He confined him in a
close prison, and, learning that his army had returned and were
determined upon his rescue, decided that that night should be
Philopoemen's last.

The prisoner lay--not sleeping, but oppressed with grief and trouble--in
his prison cell, when a man entered bearing poison in a cup.
Philopoemen sat up, and, taking the cup, asked the man if he had heard
anything of the Achaean horsemen.

"The most of them got off safe," said the man.

"It is well," said Philopoemen, with a cheerful look, "that we have
not been in every way unfortunate."

Then, without a word more, he drank the poison and lay down again. As he
was old and weak from his fall, he was quickly dead.

The news of his death filled all Achaea with lamentation and thirst for
revenge. Messenia was ravaged with fire and sword till it submitted.
Dinocrates and all who had voted for Philopoemen's death killed
themselves to escape death by torture. All Achaea mourned at his funeral,
statues were erected to his memory, and the highest honors decreed to
him in many cities. In the words of Pausanias, a late Greek writer,
"Miltiades was the first, and Philopoemen the last, benefactor to the
whole of Greece."

_THE DEATH-STRUGGLE OF GREECE._

Greece learned too late the art of combining for self-defence. In the
war against the vast power of Persia, Athens stood almost alone. What
aid she got from the rest of Greece was given grudgingly. Themistocles
had to gain the aid of the Grecian fleet at Salamis by a trick. Philip
of Macedonia conquered Greece by dividing it and fighting it piecemeal.
Only after the close of the Macedonian power and the beginning of that
of Rome did Greece begin to learn the art of unity, and then the lesson
came too late. The Achaean League, which combined the nations of the
Peloponnesus into a federal republic, was in its early days kept busy in
forcing its members to remain true to their pledge. If it had survived
for a century it would probably have brought all Greece into the League,
and have produced a nation capable