[Sidenote: Radical monarchy of Cleomenes.]
At last there arose a still more attractive alternative, which was rapidly destroying the Achæan League, when its leader, Aratus, called in the common enemy from Macedon, and enslaved his country in order to checkmate his rival. This rival was the royalty of Sparta, who offered to the cities of the Peloponnesus an Union on the old lines of a Confederation under the headship of Sparta, but of Sparta as Cleomenes had transformed it; for he had assassinated the ephors, abolished the second king, and proposed sweeping reforms in the direction of socialistic equality,--division of large properties, and protection of the poor against the oppression of aristocrats or capitalists. This kind of revolution, with the military genius of Cleomenes to give it strength and brilliancy, attracted men's minds far more than the constitutional, but somewhat torpid and plutocratic, League. Of course the fatal struggle led practically to the destruction of both schemes by the superior force and organization of Macedon.
[168:1] We may well apply to it the famous words of Tacitus at the opening of his _Histories_: 'Opus adgredior opimum casibus, atrox proeliis, discors seditionibus, ipsa etiam pace saevum; principes ferro interempti, bella civilia, plura externa ac plerumque permixta . . . pollutae caeremoniae; magna adulteria; plenum exiliis mare; infecti caedibus scopuli . . . corrupti in dominos servi, in patronos liberti; et quibus deerat inimicus, per amicos oppressi.'
[170:1] This judgment seems likely to be reversed by the wonderful accession of new materials upon the Ptolemaic age, the first instalment of which I have published in a monograph upon the Petrie Papyri (with autotype plates, Williams & Norgate, 1891). We shall presently know the conditions of life in one province at all events, the Fayoum, which was peopled with Greek veterans along with Jews and Egyptians. I have now under my hand their wills, their private letters, their accounts, their official correspondence in hundreds of shreds and fragments.
[171:1] The best special work on the conflict of the Greek settlements with the Jewish population, and with the Asmonæan sovrans all along the coast of Palestine, is B. Stark's _Gaza und die Philistische Küste_.