selves would not pass, in any discovery or conquest by them intended to be made upon Spain; in which regard they might have some honest pretence to require the like of the Carthaginians; though Rome, as yet, had no foot on the one side of Iberus, whereas Carthage, on the other side of that river, held almost all the country. Howsoever it were, this indignity was not so easily digested, as former injuries had been. For it was a matter of ill consequence, that the nations which had heard of no greater power than the Carthaginian, should behold Saguntum resting securely among them, upon confidence of help from a more mighty city. Wherefore, either in this respect, or for that the sense is most feeling of the latest injuries; or rather for that now the Carthaginians were of power to do themselves right,-war against Saguntum was generally thought upon, let the Romans take it how they list. In such terms were the Carthaginians, when Asdrubal died, after he had commanded in Spain eight years, (being slain by a slave, whose master he had put to death,) and the great Hannibal, son of the great Hamilcar, was chosen general in his stead.

SECT. VI.

The estate of Greece, from the death of Pyrrhus, to the reign of Philip, the son of Demetrius, in Macedon.

In the long term of the first Punic war, and the vacation following between it and the second, the estate of Greece, after the death of Pyrrhus, was grown somewhat like unto that wherein Philip of Macedon had found it; though far weaker, as in an after-spring. The whole country had recovered, by degrees, a form of liberty; the petty tyrannies, (bred

of those inferior captains, which in the times of general combustion, had seized each upon such small, towns as he could get,) were, by force or accident, extirpated and reformed; and some states were risen to such greatness as not only served to defend themselves, but to give protection to others. This conversion to the better, proceeded from the like dissensions and tumults in Macedon, as had been in Greece, when Philip first began to encroach upon it. For after many quarrels and great wars about the kingdom of Macedon, between Antigonus the elder, Cassander, Demetrius, Lysimachus, Seleucus, Pyrrhus, and the Gauls, Antigonus the son of Demetrius finally got and held it, reigning six and thirty years; yet so, that he was divers times thence expelled, not only by the Gauls and by Pyrrhus, as hath been already shewed, but by Alexander, the son of Alexander the Epirot, from whose father he had hardly won it. This happened unto him by the revolt of his soldiers, even at such time as, having overthrown, with great slaughter, an army of the Gauls, he was converting his forces against the Athenians. But his young son, Demetrius, raised an army, wherewith he chaced Alexander, not only out of Macedon, but out of his own Epirus, and restored his father to the kingdom.

By the help of this young prince Demetrius, (though in another kind,) Antigonus got into his possession the citadel of Corinth, which was justly termed the fetter of Greece. This citadel, called Acrocorinthus, stood upon a steep rocky hili on the north side of the town; and was by nature and art so strong, that it seemed impregnable. It commanded the town, which was of much importance, as occupying the whole breadth of the isthmus, that, running between the Ægean and Ionic seas, joineth Peloponnesus to the main of Greece. Wherefore, he that held possession of this castle was able to cut off all passage by land from one half of Greece unto the

other, besides the commodity of the two seas, upon both of which this rich and goodly city had commodious havens. Alexander, the son of Polysperchon, and, after his death, Cratesipolis's wife, bad gotten Corinth, in the great shuffling of provinces and towns that was made between Alexander's princes. Afterwards it passed from hand to hand, until it came, I know not how, to one Alexander, of whom I find nothing else, than that he was thought to be poisoned by this Antigonus, who deceived his wife Nicaa thereof, and got it from her by a trick. The device was this: Antigonus sent his young son Demetrius to Corinth, willing him to court Nicæa, and seek her in marriage. The foolish old widow perceived not how unfit a match she was for the young prince, but entertained the fancy of marriage; whereto the old king was even as ready to consent, as was his son to desire it, and came thither in person to solemnize it. Hereupon all Corinth was filled with sacrifices, feasts, plays, and all sorts of games; in the midst of which Antigonus watched his time, and got into the castle, beguiling the poor lady, whose jealousy had been exceeding diligent in keeping it. Of this purchase he was so glad, that he could not contain himself within the gravity beseeming his old age. But as he had stolen it, so was it again stolen from him; neither lived he to revenge the loss of it, being already spent with age.

Demetrius, the son of this Antigonus, succeeding unto his father, reigned ten years. He made greater proof of his virtue before he was king than after. The Dardanians, Etolians, and Achaans, held him continually busied in war; wherein his fortune was variable, and for the more part ill. About these times the power of the Macedonians began to decay, and the Grecians to cast off their yoke.

Philip, the only son of Demetrius, was a young child when his father died; and therefore Antigonus, his uncle, had the charge of the kingdom dur

ing the minority of the prince; but he assumed the name and power of a king, though he respected Philip as his own son, to whom he left the crown at his death. This Antigonus was called the Tutor, in regard of his protectorship; and was also called Doson, that is as much as Willgive, because he was slow in his liberality. He repressed the Dardanians and Thessalians, which molested his kingdom in the beginning of his reign. Upon confidence of this good service, he took state upon him, as one that rather were king in his own right, than only a protector. Hereupon the people fell to mutiny; but were soon appeased by fair words, and a seeming unwillingness of his to meddle any more with the government. The Achæans took from him the city of Athens, soon after Demetrius's death; and likely they were to have wrought him out of all, or most that he held in Greece, if their own estate had not been endangered by a nearer enemy. But civil dissension, which had overthrown the power of Greece, when it flourished most, overthrew it easily now again, when it had scarcely recovered strength after a long sickness; and gave to this Antigonus no less authority therein, than Philip, the father of Alexander, got by the like advantage.

These Achæans, from small beginnings, had increased, in short time, to great strength and fame; so that they grew the most redoubted nation of all the Greeks. By the equality of their laws, and by their clemency, (notwithstanding that they were a long time held under by the Macedonians and Spartans,) they did not only draw all others, by their love and alliance; but induced, through their example, the rest of the cities of Peloponnesus to be govern ed by one law, and to use one and the same sort of weights, measure, and money.

Aratus, the Sicyonian, was the first that united them again, and gave them courage, after that they had been, by the Macedonian captains, divided into

many principalities. In elder times they were governed by kings, as most of the great cities of Greece were to which kind of rule they first subjected themselves, after the descent of the Heraclidæ, when Tisamenes, the son of Orestes, possessed the territory of Achaia. In this estate they continued to the time of Gyges; after whom, when his sons sought to change the legal government of their predecessors into tyranny, they expelled them, and made their state popular, as seeming most equal. This form of commonweal had continuance, with some small changes, according to the diversity of times, till the reign of Philip and Alexander, kings of Macedon; who, tempest-like, overturned all things in that part of the world. For those twelve cities, called the cities of alliance, (whereof Helice and Bura, or Olenus, the sea had eaten up a little before the battle of Leuctra,) were, by disturbance of the Macedonians, divided from each other; and trained into a war, no less foolish than cruel, among themselves. But in the one hundred and four and twentieth Olympiad, (in which, or near it, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, Lysimachus, Seleucus, and Ptolemy Ceraunus, left the world,) two of the ten remaining cities and people, namely, the Patrænses and the Dimei, united themselves, and laid the foundation of that general accord and re-union which after followed. For having been some of them partisans with sundry Macedonian captains, and others having been governed by petty kings, they began to fasten themselves in a strong league of amity; partly in the Olympiad before spoken of, and partly at such time as Pyrrhus made his first voyage into Italy. Now, after the uniting of the Patrænses and Dimei, to whom also the cities of Tritaa and Pharæ joined themselves, Egira chased out her garrisons; and the Burians, killing their kings, entered with the Ceraunians, into the same confederacy. These cities, for twenty and five