than that. Athens, which had first been a
monarchy, then under the rule of a few wise men in the Areopagus, had then
lost all her liberties under the "Tyrants." Pericles created a Democracy.
He believed the true ideal was a government by the people. That if Athens
governed Greece, then the Athenians should govern Athens. And that the
power of a state should rest, not with one, nor a few, but with the many!

During a period of fifty years free Athens was the acknowledged head of
the Greek states, and in those years Greece had reached the meridian of
her glory. But Sparta was jealous of the dazzling splendor of her rival;
and she hated this new democracy which was spreading through all the
states. She believed in the good old idea of one despotic king, and a
people cowed into submission by his authority.

Two parties were thus created in the Greek states, and in a dispute which
occurred about 420 B.C., the friends of the Spartans or
Aristocratic ideal ranged themselves on the one side, and those of the
Athenian or Democratic on the other.

From this arose the long conflict known as the Peloponnesian War, which
lasted for twenty-seven years, its real cause being that Sparta was
determined to lead Greece.

It was in vain that the Athenians fought with the energy of despair. Their
beautiful city--the City of the Gods--was at last surrendered, and the
scoffing Spartans (404 B.C.) took possession of the treasures
they scorned.

Athens had fallen, but her real kingdom was indestructible. She was to be
forever Queen in the empire of ideas, of literature, and of art!

The coarse, harsh rule of Sparta lasted less than a century. Then Thebes,
another powerful Greek state, arose to the leadership of discontented
Greece. And so Hellas, the land in which they all gloried, had become a
mass of quarrelling, struggling states, until it was seized by the rough
hand of a master.

In the north of Greece was the State of Macedonia. It was not composed of
a multitude of free cities like the rest of Greece, but its people were
diffused throughout the state, and all governed by one king.

Compared with the Athenians, these unpolished, rude Macedonians were
almost barbarians.

But in the year 359 B.C. a man came to the throne of this state,
who was not going to be satisfied with being merely a Greek among Greeks.
He was resolved to be the head of the Greeks. This was Philip of Macedon.
He bent all the energies of his strong, crafty mi