Here the whole force was at last carried over to the opposite shore, and once more found itself on European soil, having received promises of pay from the admiral Anaxibius.  Suspicions of his real intentions were aroused, and Xenophon had no little difficulty in preventing his soldiery from breaking loose and sacking Byzantium itself.

Ultimately, the greater part of the force took service with the Thracian king Seuthes.  Seuthes, however, failed to carry out his promises as to payments and rewards.  But now the Lacedaemonians were engaged in a quarrel with the western satraps, Tissaphernes and Artabazus; six thousand veterans so experienced as those who had followed this famous march into the heart of the Persian empire, had fought their way from Cunaxa to Trapezus, and had supported themselves mainly by their military prowess in getting from Trapezus to Europe, were a force by no means to be neglected, and the bulk of the troops were not unwilling to be incorporated in the Lacedaemonian armies.  And so ends the story of the Retreat of the Ten Thousand Greeks.

* * * * *

GEORGE GROTE

History of Greece

George Grote, born at Beckenham, England, Nov. 17, 1794, entered the bank founded by his grandfather, from which he withdrew in 1843.  He joined the group of “philosophic Radicals,” among whom James Mill was a leader, and was a keen politician and reformer, and an ardent advocate of the ballot.  His determination to write a sound “History of Greece” was ensured, if it was not inspired, by Mitford’s history, a work full of anti-democratic fervour and very antagonistic to the great Greek democratic state of Athens.  In some respects his work is a defence of the Athenian democracy, at least as contrasted with Sparta; it appeared in twelve volumes between 1846 and 1856, and covered Greek history from the earliest times “till the close of the generation contemporary with Alexander the Great.”  It at once occupied, and still holds, the field as the classic work on the subject as a whole, though later research has modified many of his conclusions.  His methods were pre-eminently thorough, dispassionate, and judicial; but he suffers from a lack of sympathetic imagination.  He died on June 18, 1871, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

I.—­Early History

The divine myths constitute the earliest matter of Greek history.  These may be divided into those which belong to the gods and to the heroes respectively; but most of them, in point of fact, present gods, heroes, and men in juxtaposition.  Every community sought to trace its origin to some common divine, or semi-divine, progenitor; the establishment of a pedigree was a necessity; and each pedigree contains at some, point figures corresponding to some actual historical character, before whom the pedigree is imaginary, but after whom, in the main, actual.  The precise point where the legend fades into the mythical, or consolidates into the historical, is not usually ascertainable.