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Had Sparta been wise, with this vast accession of power gained by the victories of Lysander, she would have ruled moderately, and reorganized the Grecian world on sound principles, and restored a Panhellenic stability and harmony.
Again, as Athens displayed more of a Panhellenic feeling than any other Greek city, so Florence was invariably more alive to the interests of Italy at large than any other state of the peninsula. Florence, like Athens, was the center of culture for the nation. Like Athens, she give laws to her sister towns in language, in literature, in fine arts, poetry, philosophy, and history.
The Panhellenic union under Sparta was now broken forever, and two rival States disputed the supremacy,—the maritime States adhering to Athens, and the land States, which furnished the larger part of the army at Platæa, adhering to Sparta. It was then that the confederacy of Delos was formed, under the presidency of Athens, which Aristides directed.
On the occasion of the one hundred and fourth Olympiad, war existing between Arcadia and Elis, a combat took place in the sacred ground itself, an unholy struggle which dishonored the sanctuary of Panhellenic brotherhood, and caused the great temple of Zeus to be turned into a fortress against the assailants.
She loved her own, as selfish people generally do, but nothing outside her territory with any true magnanimity. And she thus provoked her allies into rebellion, so that her chance was lost, and her dominion short-lived. Athens would have been more enlightened, but she never had the power, as Sparta had, of organizing a general Panhellenic combination.
Demosthenes now takes the broad ground of Panhellenic policy, and formally proposes to send envoys throughout Greece, to unite all the Greek states against Philip, as well as to send immediate reinforcements and supplies to the Chersonese. Many critics, ancient and modern, have regarded this as the greatest of all Demosthenes' political orations.
He had never been popular in the country, and this failure to realize a step in the Panhellenic policy made him for the time the object of all the popular indignation. But he probably realized that nothing was ready for such a movement and that it was certain to end in disaster.
His imagination rejoiced in splendour splendour of stately palace halls where the columns were of marble and the entablature of wrought gold, splendour of temples of gods where the sculptor's waxing art had brought the very deities to dwell with man, splendour of the white-pillared cities that glittered across the Aegean and Sicilian seas, splendour of the holy Panhellenic games, of whirlwind chariots and the fiery grace of thoroughbreds, of the naked shapely limbs of the athlete man and boy.
At Acanthus, Xerxes separated from his fleet, which was directed to sail round Mount Athos, while he pursued his march through Pæonia and Crestonia, and rejoin him at Therma, on the Thermaic Gulf, in Macedonia, within sight of Mount Olympus. A Panhellenic congress, under the presidency of Athens and Sparta, assembled at the Isthmus of Corinth.—the first great league since the Trojan war.
For his very calling of song-writer to all Hellenic states without discrimination, especially when the songs he had to write were of the class which we still possess, triumphal odes for victories in those great games which drew to them all men of Hellenic blood at the feet of common deities, and which with each recurring festival could even hush the clamour of war in an imperious Truce of God such a calling and such associations must have cherished in him the passion for Panhellenic brotherhood and unanimity, even had there not been much else both within and without him to join to the same generous end.
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