nched a ship,
but Antigonus found himself brought up short, his friends gone, his
fleet paralysed." Then death came unexpectedly to his aid and removed
his principal enemies. His great opponent, the masterful Arsinoe, who
had engineered the Chremonidean war, was already dead, and, in Mr.
Tarn's words, "comfortably deified." Other important deaths now followed
in rapid succession. Alexander of Corinth, Antiochus, and Ptolemy all
passed away. "The imposing edifice reared by Ptolemy's diplomacy
suddenly collapsed like the card-house of a little child." Antigonus was
not the man to neglect the opportunity thus afforded to him. Though now
advanced in years, he reorganised his navy and made an alliance with
Rhodes, with the result that "the sea power of Egypt went down, never to
rise again." Then he triumphantly dedicated his flagship to the Delian
Apollo. The possession of Delos had always been one of the main objects
of his ambition. It did more than symbolise the rule of the seas. It
definitely brought within the sphere of Macedonian influence one of the
greatest centres of Greek religious thought.

The rest of the story may be read in Mr. Tarn's graphic pages. He
relates how Antigonus incurred the undying enmity of Aratus of Sicyon,
one of those Greek democrats who held "that the very worst democracy was
infinitely better than the very best 'tyranny'--a conventional view
which neglects the uncomfortable fact that the tyranny of a democracy
can be the worst in the world." He lost Corinth, which he never
endeavoured to regain. His system of governing the Peloponnesus through
the agency of subservient "tyrants" utterly collapsed. "It is," Mr. Tarn
says, "a strange case of historical justice. As regards Macedonia,
Antigonus had followed throughout a sound and just idea of government,
and all that he did for Macedonia prospered. But in the Peloponnese,
though he found himself there from necessity rather than from choice, he
had employed an unjustifiable system; he lived long enough to see it
collapse."

The main interest to the present generation of the career of this
remarkable man consists in the fact that it is illustrative of the
belief that a man of action can also be a man of letters. As it was in
the days of the Antigonids, so it is now. Napier says that there is no
instance on record of a successful general who was not also a well-read
man. General Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, on being asked how he came to
adopt a cert