=Agesilaus.=—­Three years after, Agesilaus, king of Sparta, with a small army invaded the rich country of Asia Minor, Lydia, and Phrygia.  He fought the satraps and was about to invade Asia when the Spartans ordered his return to fight the armies of Thebes and Athens.  Agesilaus was the first of the Greeks to dream of conquering Persia.  He was distressed to see the Greeks fighting among themselves.  When they announced to him the victory at Corinth where but eight Spartans had perished and 10,000 of the enemy, instead of rejoicing he sighed and said, “Alas, unhappy Greece, to have lost enough men to have subjugated all the barbarians!” He refused one day to destroy a Greek city.  “If we exterminate all the Greeks who fail of their duty,” said he, “where shall we find the men to vanquish the barbarians?” This feeling was rare at that time.  In relating these words of Agesilaus Xenophon, his biographer, exclaims, “Who else regarded it as a misfortune to conquer when he was making war on peoples of his own race?”

CONQUEST OF ASIA BY ALEXANDER

=Macedon.=—­Sparta and Athens, exhausted by a century of wars, had abandoned the contest against the king of Persia.  A new people resumed it and brought it to an end; these were the Macedonians.  They were a very rude people, crude, similar to the ancient Dorians, a people of shepherds and soldiers.  They lived far to the north of Greece in two great valleys that opened to the sea.  The Greeks had little regard for them, rating them as half barbarians; but since the kings of Macedon called themselves sons of Herakles they had been permitted to run their horses in the races of the Olympian games.  This gave them standing as Greeks.

=Philip of Macedon.=—­These kings ruling in the interior, remote from the sea, had had but little part in the wars of the Greeks.  But in 359 B.C.  Philip ascended the throne of Macedon, a man young, active, bold, and ambitious.  Philip had three aims: 

  1.  To develop a strong army;

  2.  To conquer all the ports on the coast of Macedon;

  3.  To force all the other Greeks to unite under his command
  against the Persians.

He consumed twenty-four years in fulfilling these purposes and succeeded in all.  The Greeks let him alone, often even aided him; in every city he bribed partisans who spoke in his favor.  “No fortress is impregnable,” said he, “if only one can introduce within it a mule laden with gold.”  And by these means he took one after another all the cities of northern Greece.

=Demosthenes.=—­The most illustrious opponent of Philip was the orator Demosthenes.  The son of an armorer, he was left an orphan at the age of seven, and his guardians had embezzled a part of his fortune.  As soon as he gained his majority he entered a case against them and compelled them to restore the property.  He studied the orations of Isaeus and the history of Thucydides which he knew