Why Classical Greece Went To Pot

    The predicament was the political, economic, and moral bankruptcy of classical Greece prior to the Macedonian conquest. A century of constant war and civil strife had bled the country of men and money; venality and corruption were poisoning public life; hordes of political exiles, reduced to the existence of homeless adventurers, were roaming the countryside; legalized abortion and infanticide were further thinning out the rank of citizens. The history of the fourth century, wrote a modern authority,

is in some of its aspects that of the greatest failure in history. . . . each in his different way tries (by suggesting forms of constitution other than those under which the race had fallen into political decadence) to rescue that Greek world which was so much to him from the political and social disaster to which it is rushing. But the Greek world was past saving.

Plato, Thaetetus, quoted by Th. L. Heath, Greek Astronomy, (London, 1932)

 

The Sleepwalkers, Arthur Koestler, Penguin Arkana, NY, NY, 1989, pg 56.