CHAPTER IX.
We now enter on a period of melancholy disgrace and humiliation for the Greek race. Within two years the barbarian destroyer of Olynthus becomes master of the key to Greece, the famous pass of Thermopylæ, and of the whole of Phocis, the country in which stood the mountains of Parnassus, and the old and venerable temple of Delphi. Events more terrific and momentous, says Demosthenes in one of his speeches, had never occurred either in his own time or in that of any of his predecessors. Athens was forced into a miserably ignominious peace, and many of her citizens had stooped to the infamy of being the mere tools and paid agents of the "man of Macedon." Even Isocrates, true Greek as he was in all his sympathies, as well as thoroughly upright and high-minded, was now convinced that the best wisdom for Greece was to put itself under the leadership of this wonderfully successful prince, and allow him to conduct its united armies to the conquest of Persia.
