. Whether,
however, these ideas were dreams or actual projects, the king died
without having interfered in the affairs of the west, and his ideas
were buried with him. For but a few brief years a Greek ruler had
held in his hand the whole intellectual vigour of the Hellenic race
combined with the whole material resources of the east. On his death
the work to which his life had been devoted--the establishment of
Hellenism in the east--was by no means undone; but his empire had
barely been united when it was again dismembered, and, amidst the
constant quarrels of the different states that were formed out of
its ruins, the object of world-wide interest which they were destined
to promote--the diffusion of Greek culture in the east--though not
abandoned, was prosecuted on a feeble and stunted scale. Under such
circumstances, neither the Greek nor the Asiatico-Egyptian states
could think of acquiring a footing in the west or of turning their
efforts against the Romans or the Carthaginians. The eastern and
western state-systems subsisted side by side for a time without
crossing, politically, each other's path; and Rome in particular
remained substantially aloof from the complications in the days
of Alexander's successors. The only relations established were of
a mercantile kind; as in the instance of the free state of Rhodes,
the leading representative of the policy of commercial neutrality in
Greece and in consequence the universal medium of intercourse in an
age of perpetual wars, which about 448 concluded a treaty with Rome
--a commercial convention of course, such as was natural between a
mercantile people and the masters of the Caerite and Campanian
coasts. Even in the supply of mercenaries from Hellas, the universal
recruiting field of those times, to Italy, and to Tarentum in
particular, political relations--such as subsisted, for instance,
between Tarentum and Sparta its mother-city--exercised but a very
subordinate influence. In general the raising of mercenaries was
simply a matter of traffic, and Sparta, although it regularly supplied
the Tarentines with captains for their Italian wars, was by that
course as little involved in hostilities with the Italians, as in the
North American war of independence the German states were involved in
hostilities with the Union, to whose opponents they sold the services
of their subjects.

The Historical Position of Pyrrhus

Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, was himself simply a