Persia, too, was waiting for that Greek military cycle; until it should rise, however, something had to be going on in West Asia.  The Athenian first half-cycle—­sixty-five years from the inception of the hegemony—­ended in 413, when the Peloponnesian War entered its last, and for Athens, disastrous, phase.  Another half-cycle brings us to the rise of Philip; who about that time became dominant in Greece.  But not yet had a power consolidated, which could contest with Persia the hegemony of the world.  Having enabled Sparta to put down Athens, the western satraps turned their attention to finding those who should put down Sparta.  Corinth, Thebes, Argos and Athens were willing; and Pharnabazus financed them for war in 395.  A year after, he and Conon destroyed the Spartan fleet.  In 387 came the Peace of Antalicidas, by which Persia won what Xerxes had fought for of old; the suzerainty of Greece.  But she was not strong; her cycle was long past; she stood upon the wealth and prestige of her better days, and the weakness of her contemporaries.  Internally she was falling to pieces until Artaxerxes Ochus, between 362 and 338, wading through blood and cruelty, restored her unity, wore out her resources, and left her apparently as great as under Xerxes, but really ready to fall at a touch.  He prepared the way for Alexander.

So ended an impulse that began, who knows when? on a high spiritual plane in the pure religion of the Teacher we call Zoroaster; a high system of ethics expressed in long generations of clean and noble lives.  From that spirituality the impulse descending reached the planes of intellect and culture; with results we cannot measure now; nothing remains but the splendor of a few ruins in the wilderness—­the course the lion and the lizard keep.  It reached the plane of military power, and flowed over all the lands between the Indus and the Nile; covering them with a well-ordered, highly civilized and wisely governed empire.  Then it began to ebb; meeting a counter-impulse arising in Eastern Europe.

Which, too, had it source on spiritual planes; in the heart and on the lyre of blind Maeonides; and worked downward and outward, till it had wrought on this plane a stable firmness in Sparta, an alertness in Athens.  It contacted then the crest of the Persian wave, and received from the impact huge accession of vigor.  It blossomed in the Age of Pericles on the plane of mind and creative imagination.  It came down presently on to the plane of militarism, and swelled out under Alexander as far as to the eastern limits of the Persian Empire he overthrew.  Where it met a tide beginning to rise in India; and receded or remained stationary before that.  And at last it was spent, and itself overthrown by a new impulse arisen in Italy; which took on impetus from contact with Greece, as Greece had done from contact with Persia.