Tarn's comprehensive treatment of an
important chapter in the history of the Antigonids. It is surely the
irony of posthumous fame that whereas every schoolboy knows something
about Pyrrhus--how he fought the Romans with elephants, and eventually
met a somewhat ignoble death from the hand of an old Argive woman who
dropped a tile on his head--but few outside the ranks of historical
students probably know anything of his great rival and relative,
Antigonus Gonatas, the son of Demetrius the Besieger. Yet there can in
reality be no manner of doubt as to which of these two careers should
more excite the interest of posterity. Pyrrhus made a great stir in the
world whilst he lived. "He thought it," Plutarch says--we quote from
Dryden's translation--"a nauseous course of life not to be doing
mischief to others or receiving some from them." But he was in reality
an unlettered soldier of fortune, probably very much of the same type as
some of Napoleon's rougher marshals, such as Augereau or Massena. His
manners were those of the camp, and his statesmanship that of the
barrack-room. He blundered in everything he undertook except in the
actual management of troops on the field of battle. "Not a common
soldier in his army," Mr. Tarn says, "could have managed things as badly
as the brilliant Pyrrhus." Antigonus was a man of a very different type.
"He was the one monarch before Marcus Aurelius whom philosophy could
definitely claim as her own." But in forming an estimate of his
character it is necessary to bear constantly in mind the many different
constructions which in the course of ages have been placed on the term
"philosophy." Antigonus, albeit a disciple of Zeno, the most unpractical
idealist of his age, was himself eminently practical. He indulged in no
such hallucinations as those which cost the Egyptian Akhnaton his Syrian
kingdom. As a thinker he moved on a distinctly lower plane than Marcus
Aurelius. Perhaps of all the characters of antiquity he most resembles
Julian, whose career as a man of action wrung from the Christian
Prudentius the fine epitaph, "Perfidus ille Deo, quamvis non perfidus
orbi." These early Greek philosophers were, in fact, a strange set of
men. They were not always engaged in the study of philosophy. They
occasionally, whilst pursuing knowledge and wisdom, indulged in
practices of singular unwisdom or of very dubious morality. Thus the
eminent historian Hieronymus endeavoured to establish what we shou