11.3 Europe: 400 to 301 b.c.  (Page 25/5)

Europe

Back to Europe: 500 to 401 B.C.

Southern europe

Eastern mediterranean islands

In the last third of this century, all these islands were conquered by the men of Alexander the Great, but his control was short-lived. By 323 B.C. Rhodes was independent again and Cyprus belonged to Egypt until Demetrius Poliocertes, aspirant to the throne of Macedon, took Cyprus again. Then in 307 he besieged Rhodes, using 30,000 men to build siege towers and engines, but all of this failed. (Ref. 38 , 222 )

Greece

Throughout the peninsula there was endless conflict between the slaves and the ruined proletarian masses who demanded that the state support them. Up until about 378 B.C. the police force of Athens consisted of about 300 state-owned Scythian slaves. At the beginning of the century Sparta, having won the Peloponnesian War with the help of subsidies from Persia, dominated southern Greece; then, by forming an "Arcadian League", Thebes took over control from about 370 to 360 B.C.; then Athens, with growing special- ization of professional soldiers and generals, professional orators and financial experts be- came supreme for awhile. But in the last part of the century the unity which the Greeks could not find among themselves was forced on them by Philip of Macedon. The battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.) was the end of Greek liberty and the beginning, in some sense, of Greek unity. (Ref. 28 , 8 )

In spite of the wars this was one of the great eras of culture. Plato lived until well into this century and the political problems always remained a central issue for him and he became a frustrated politician. The mainly hereditary tripartite class division of the "Republic" corresponded closely to the divisions of 6th century B.C. Greek society, with an aristocracy that guided the state, citizens who fought for the polis and slaves and foreigners who labored. Plato brought together diverse intellectual strands from different parts of the Greek world and he did so with a consummate artistry that few have even equaled, giving to subsequent Greek and European philosophy its central themes and problems, as well as much of its working vocabulary. It is not generally realized that Plato also wrote medical speculations, logical but without any direct experimentation and leading to many faulty conclusions about the human body, errors that persisted well into later centuries and were difficult to eradicate. (Ref. 47 , 125 )

Near the end of the century Aristotle, a pupil of Plato, returned from his travels with Alexander to found the Peripatetic School or Lyceum. Scientific material of all kinds had come to him through the Greek-Macedonian armies' conquests (Please see next section UPPER BALKANS) and his work became the basis of knowledge even 1,500 years later in the Middle Ages of Europe. Aristotle pioneered in biology, embryology and physiology and was a champion of inductive reasoning. Three great structural ideas appeared in this era which rule the mind of contemporary mankind today: ( l) Science, in the broad sense, including history and relation of man to the total environment; (2) the idea of one universal God of righteousness; and (3) the concept of world policy.