It is surely the irony of posthumous fame that whereas every schoolboy knows something about Pyrrhus—­how he fought the Romans with elephants, and eventually met a somewhat ignoble death from the hand of an old Argive woman who dropped a tile on his head—­but few outside the ranks of historical students probably know anything of his great rival and relative, Antigonus Gonatas, the son of Demetrius the Besieger.  Yet there can in reality be no manner of doubt as to which of these two careers should more excite the interest of posterity.  Pyrrhus made a great stir in the world whilst he lived.  “He thought it,” Plutarch says—­we quote from Dryden’s translation—­“a nauseous course of life not to be doing mischief to others or receiving some from them.”  But he was in reality an unlettered soldier of fortune, probably very much of the same type as some of Napoleon’s rougher marshals, such as Augereau or Massena.  His manners were those of the camp, and his statesmanship that of the barrack-room.  He blundered in everything he undertook except in the actual management of troops on the field of battle.  “Not a common soldier in his army,” Mr. Tarn says, “could have managed things as badly as the brilliant Pyrrhus.”  Antigonus was a man of a very different type.  “He was the one monarch before Marcus Aurelius whom philosophy could definitely claim as her own.”  But in forming an estimate of his character it is necessary to bear constantly in mind the many different constructions which in the course of ages have been placed on the term “philosophy.”  Antigonus, albeit a disciple of Zeno, the most unpractical idealist of his age, was himself eminently practical.  He indulged in no such hallucinations as those which cost the Egyptian Akhnaton his Syrian kingdom.  As a thinker he moved on a distinctly lower plane than Marcus Aurelius.  Perhaps of all the characters of antiquity he most resembles Julian, whose career as a man of action wrung from the Christian Prudentius the fine epitaph, “Perfidus ille Deo, quamvis non perfidus orbi.”  These early Greek philosophers were, in fact, a strange set of men.  They were not always engaged in the study of philosophy.  They occasionally, whilst pursuing knowledge and wisdom, indulged in practices of singular unwisdom or of very dubious morality.  Thus the eminent historian Hieronymus endeavoured to establish what we should now call a “corner” in the bitumen which floated on the surface of the Dead Sea, and which was largely used for purposes of embalming in Egypt; but his efforts were completely frustrated by the Arabs who were interested in the local trade.  The philosopher Lycon, besides displaying an excessive love for the pleasures of the table, was a noted wrestler, boxer, and tennis-player.  Antigonus himself, in spite of his love of learning, vied with his great predecessors, Philip and Alexander, in his addiction to the wine-cup.  When, by a somewhat unworthy stratagem, he had tricked the widowed queen Nikaia