Greek Life and Thought: From the Death of Alexander to the Roman Conquest

From the introduction: "... By a sort of tacit consent the battle of Chaeronea is considered the minor limit of all that was good and perfect in Greek thought and life. The conquests of Alexander, the high culture of Rhodes and Alexandria, the profound thinking of the later schools, the deep learning, the splendid art, the multiform politics of Hellenism - all this is shut out from the schoolboy, as forming no part of the Greek he is to know, and it is but seldom taken up - with the exception of Theocritus - by those who preserve the habits and prejudices of school in their college life. A man may consider himself, and be considered by the classical English public, an adequate and even distinguished Greek Professor, who has never read Strabo, Diodorus, or Polybius, who has never seen the poems of Aratus, Callimachus, or Apollonius, and who does not know a single date in Greek history between the death of Alexander and the battle of Cynoscephalae. From that time onward the accident tat Greece enters into the field of Roman history lifts the veil, and the student comes upon a Hellenistic world, so different from the old Hellenic republics, that but for the permanence of names and places the people might be difficult to recognize. After the conquest of Greece by Mummius, Greece as a living moment in the world's history is forgotten. ..."