i liiiiiif ' . . s * v^ ►">^fe>I^ ALEXANDER THE GREAT HEROES OF ALL TIME FIRST VOLUMES Alexander the Great. By Ada Rxjssell, M.A. (Vict.) Augustus. By Ren^ Francis, B.A. Alfred the Great. By A. E. McKilliam, M.A. Jeanne d'Arc. By E. M. Wilmot-Buxton, F.R.Hist.S. Sir Walter Raleigh. By Beatrice Marshall. William the Silent. By A. M. Miall. Other volumes in active preparation 'ALEXANDER AND DIOGENES' ALEXANDER THE GREAT BY ADA RUSSELL, M.A. (Vict.) With Frontispiece in Color and Eight Black-and-White Illustrations NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1914, h Frederick A. Stokes Company All Rights Reserved August, 1914. SEP iim ©aA380350 Contents C KAPTEB PAGE I, The Old World 9 II. Philip II of Macedonia 25 III. Alexander as Prince 37 IV. Alexander in Thrace, Illyria, and Greece ... 49 V. The Conquest of Asia Minor 60 VI. Conquest of Syria and Phcbnicia 76 VII. Alexander in Egypt 88 VIII. The Conquest of Persia 96 IX. Alexander in Central Asia Ill X. The Conquest of the Punjab 125 XI. The Return to Susa 138 XII. The Last Two Years 152 XIII. Alexander's Character and Place in History . . 172 XIV. The Alexandrian Empire 179 Illustrations Alexander and Diogenes Frontispiece '^ PAGE Alexander coercing the Delphic Oracle 52 " Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot 72 ^"^ The Fight about the Chariot op Darius at Issus . . 78 "^ ' The Siege of Gaza 86 The Death of Darius 108 The Murder of Clitus 122 The Phalanx attacking the Centre on the Htdaspes . 132 The Death of Alexander 168 - MAP To Show Empire of Alexander the Great 190 CHAPTER I: The Old World IT is difficult to realize that the earth on which Alexander the Great was born was the same in its main outlines as the earth on which we stand to-day, and at the same time to realize how very different from our present knowledge were men's ideas then of its area. Even modern writers picture Alexander as primitive in his notions, and it will be interesting to remember, when we find him anxious to press ever farther and farther east and south, that the philosophers of his time, espe- cially his great teacher Aristotle, had just announced new arguments to prove that the earth was spherical in form. The old Homeric ideas that the earth was a flat disk, that the bronze firmament, set with stars, was upheld on great pillars by Atlas, and that the sun (as Herodotus imagined) could be blown out of its course by a strong wind, had passed away for ever. Among the earliest peoples to travel about the sea were the Phoenicians, a Semitic race akin to the Jews, and the greatest trading and maritime race of antiquity. They ventured far in search of the rich merchandise which they brought back to their cities of Tyre and Sidon on the coast of Syria, to Carthage on the north coast of Africa, and to their other settlements at all quarters of the Mediterranean. They are believed to have learned the alphabet and other arts from their customers the Egyptians, and to have been the teachers of the Greeks in these matters. The Phoenicians told nobody of the geo- graphical knowledge which they acquired in their wanderings, as they were anxious to keep a trading 9 Alexander the Great monopoly. They rounded the coast of Spain by the 'Pillars of Hercules' at a very early date, sailed through the Bay of Biscay, established trade with Britain, and perhaps even fetched amber from the shores of the Baltic. When the Greeks, however, first began to launch their merchantmen the Phoenicians assured them that the Pillars of Hercules stood at the western end of the earth, and probably many of the legends which make early Greek geography so picturesque were invented by those wily adventurers in order to discourage the Greeks from following in their steps. Thus the Greeks of the early fifth century B.C. believed that the Arabian frankincense brought by the Phoenicians was guarded by dragons, and that screeching, winged animals sought to peck out the eyes of the Arabians who, clad in stout armour, gathered cassia by the shores of a remote lake. Cinnamon was supposed to be got by artful devices from the nests of birds on an unscaleable precipice; and gold, the story ran, was stolen by the one-eyed Arimaspi from the griffins. The Persians, who dazzled Greek eyes with their quantities of gold, told the Greeks that it was obtained by Indians at the peril of their lives; they were pursued, as they gathered the gold-dust, by ants somewhat smaller than dogs but bigger than foxes and swifter than any other animal on earth. Many of these legends had become discredited by Alexander's time, but it was owing to his travels that they passed for ever out of the realm of geography into that of myth, as far as the ancients were concerned. The Greeks, unlike the Phoenicians, took a Platonic interest in geography, and before they had many The Old World facts to go upon commenced to make maps of the world. More than that, they began to have ideas about the universe. Anaximander, who made the first map early in the sixth century B.C., declared his belief that the earth swung in the sky hke the planets. He does not seem to have taught that it was spherical in shape, but later on in that century Pythagoras made as great a stir as did Copernicus more than two thousand years later, by declaring that the earth revolved round some great central fire in the heavens, and that it was itself a globe. These were only good guesses, and very few people could accept the curious, mystical reasons which Pythagoras gave for his opinions; but the philoso- phers of the fourth century approved of the theory of sphericity and found good reasons for it. Aristotle, who possessed one of the most scientific brains ever given to a mortal, said that the phenomenon of gravitation would make the earth spherical, and pointed to the fact that the shadow cast by the earth on the moon in an eclipse was invariably circular in shape. Alexander, who had more than the normal Greek geographical curiosity, cannot have failed to know Aristotle's views. Before Alexander lived the Greeks considered Delphi, where the shrine of Apollo stood, as the centre of the earth's surface. Two eagles, the story ran, released by Zeus at the edges of the eastern and western oceans, had flown until they met at Delphi, where a stone, still in the museum there, was known as the 'navel of the earth.' The Greeks originally divided the earth into the two continents of Asia (including Africa), the land of the sunrise, and Alexander the Great Europe, the land of night, but by the fifth century B.C. they had come to recognize the third continent of Africa, which they named Libya. America and Austraha were not to emerge until two millenniums had passed over; the Red Indians enjoyed their hunting-grounds as yet undisturbed by any white man, and even the Phoenician traders had caught up no story of the Australian aborigines. In the three continents which composed the Old World no one in Alexander's time had any idea of the vast expanse of Africa or of the southern extension of India. The existence of China was unsuspected, while the Pillars of Hercules remained the western boundary of the world at the conqueror's death. About a year after Alexander passed away, Pytheas, a Greek, sailed between the Pillars and cruised along the coast of France to Britain. He was probably the first of his countrymen to adventure so far. The Greek knowledge of Europe was almost con- fined to the small portion of it inhabited by them- selves, that was, the most easterly of the three peninsulas of the Mediterranean — Greece — colonies on the shores of Thrace and the Hellespont, numerous cities planted on the heel and toe of Italy and in Sicily, and one or two colonies on the coasts of Gaul and Spain Of inland Spain they knew nothing. At the time of Alexander's accession the Greek cities of South Italy were engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Italian tribes, among whom the Romans were not yet predominant. If Alexander had lived longer he might have further changed the course of the world's history by conquering Italy, but as it was he never went near Italy, which is thus out of 12 The Old World our story. His only connexion with Rome was to prepare her path by his own work. North of the three peninsulas Httle was known to any one except, perhaps, the Phoenicians. In this district our own Germanic and Celtic ancestors were living, far away from the central stage of history. The Germanic peoples were settled on the north-west shores of the Baltic, and separated from Mediterranean civiliza- tion by widespread Celtic tribes. At the commence- ment of Alexander's reign the Celtic people inhabited North Italy, Spain, France, Britain, and the Nether- lands as far as the Weser, as far east as the lower Danube, and almost as far south at that point as the borders of Macedonia. These people, of huge stature and proverbial for their pride, were well known to the Greeks; in 390 B.C. they had made their famous sack of Rome, and after Alexander's death they nearly broke down the power of Mace- donia. Alexander's relations with them only amount- ed to a military demonstration on his part, and their subjugation was reserved for the Romans. The continent of Africa recognized by the Greeks did not include Egypt, which they considered to be in Asia, as it was a member of the Persian Empire. Egypt was to be conquered by Alexander, and through his con(juest many events fateful for modern civiliza- tion were to happen. West of Egypt lay the im- portant Greek colony of Cyrene, and, farther west, Carthage, the rival of the Greeks now, as she was to be in future times of the Romans. South of these states there were strange races called by the Africans — what they probably were — gorillas; and, according to Greek tales, there were still wilder men and women, 13 Alexander the Great with eyes in their shaggy breasts, and with dogs heads or no heads at all. In the continent of Asia all but a year of Alexander's reign was spent, and the scene of our story will lie there almost entirely. His invasion of the Persian Empire is a chapter in the old struggle between West and East, commenced when the Greek Agamemnon besieged Troy and continued when the Persian monarchs, Darius and Xerxes, invaded Greece in the days of Marathon and Salamis. Two centuries before Alexander's birth Persia had risen to be the chief power in the Old World, and its sovereign assumed the title of King of Kings or Lord of the Four Quarters of the Earth. To-day we should call this ruler over many peoples an emperor, but *emperor' was one of the words invented by the Romans and not used in its present sense before the establishment of the Roman Empire; in modern histories, therefore, these ancient rulers of the Persian Empire are often styled for convenience *the Great King.' Before turning our attention to Macedonia and Alexander we will now look briefly at the history of the forma- tion of the Persian Empire and its connexion with Greece before the rise of Macedonia. Three great empires had risen and passed in Western Asia before the birth of Alexander — those of the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Medes. Assyria (with its capital at Nineveh, in ruins in Alexander's time) and Babylonia (with its capital, Babylon, still one of the finest cities in the world) formed the district of Mesopotamia, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates; its civilization was perhaps as old as that of Egypt and far older than that of Greece. 14 The Old World The Medes establislied their supremacy over this district in the seventh century B.C., and came into bitter conflict with the Greeks of Asia Minor and the iEgean islands, but it was reserved for the Persians, the successors of the Medes, to attack Greece proper. Before, however, the Persians could expand westward into Greek lands they had to overrun the strong state of Lydia, concerning which such charming stories have been handed down to us by the Greeks. Besides their western colonies the Greeks had planted cities on the coast of Asia Minor before the memory of man. Three successive strips of coast, iEolis, Ionia, and Doris, going from north to south, represented the iEolian, Ionian and Dorian tribes of Greece. Adjoining, there stretched from north to south the non-Greek districts of Phrygia, Mysia, Lydia, Caria, and Lycia. The Lydians extended their supremacy over Greek cities westward and northward, and over Assyrian provinces eastward, until at last their boundary was established at the river Halys, which runs northward into the Black Sea. At their capital, Sardis, the great road from Mesopotamia terminated. For a long time Lydia formed a barrier between the restless Medes and Greece, but in the middle of the sixth century its power was destroyed by the Persian Cyrus, who rebelled against Media and established a Medo- Persian empire. His subjects were largely Medes, and generally called Medes by the Greeks. The last Lydian king was Croesus, whose wealth, famed then, has now become proverbial. Croesus sought in vain to oppose the westward IS Alexander the Great advance of Cyrus, and was at last (in 546 B.C.) driven into his capital, which was besieged and taken by the Persian conqueror. After the subjugation of Lydia the Persians occupied the Greek coast towns and the Greek islands off the coast of Asia Minor. Mighty Babylon fell in 538 B.C.; ancient Egypt became a Persian satrapy in 5^5 B.C.; and the Perso-Median Empire extended from the Nile to Afghanistan. Darius I, a ruler only to be compared with Alexander, divided his vast dominions into provinces (satrapies), and established the capital at Susa, about 150 miles from the Persian Gulf. The Royal Road from Sardis, the head of the new Persian satrapy of Lydia and Ionia, was extended to Susa; it was 1,500 miles long and made swift communication possible between West and East. Along the line of this road the first postal service was established. Men and horses were kept in readiness at stations of a day's journey from each other, and the rider from the first station delivered his letter to a rider at the second, who rode off to the third, and so on along the whole route. Nothing mortal, the Greeks said, travelled so fast as these Persian messengers, who were hindered neither by snow, rain, heat, nor the darkness of night. Natur- ally inns grew up at the stations, and other travellers besides postmen and adventurous merchants began to pass about from country to country. Darius crossed into Europe in about 512 B.C., subdued Thrace, and, like Alexander after him, made a military demonstration across the Danube. The next step was to conquer Greece, for the Greeks were encouraging their kinsmen in Asia Minor to i6 The Old World revolt against Persia. A rising in Ionia took place in 499, and Athens aided in burning Sardis. For the first time the Great King heard of the existence of the Athenians, and, it is said, he bade his attendants say- to him thrice daily when his dinner was spread, "Master, remember the Athenians!" For he meant to punish them heavily when he should have time. The Ionian rebellion practically came to an end in 494, when Miletus submitted; its male inhabitants were put to the sword, while the women and children were sent as slaves to Susa. Nothing remained but to punish Eretria and Athens for aiding the rebels, and Darius declaring himself overlord of Greece, sent to her chief cities to demand earth and water ^ as a sign of subjection. At Sparta his envoys were thrown into a well; at Athens they were hurled into the Pit of Punishment, wherein iron hooks tore the bodies of falling malefactors; and in 490 B.C., there- fore, the Persians sailed for Greece, bringing with them the tyrant Hippias, whom the Athenians had ex- pelled from their city. Burning Eretria, they landed their large army on the plain of Marathon, where by the lowest estimate, 6,400 Medes fell, while the Athenians lost only 192 men. This defeat probably seemed of little consequence to the Persians, but it was of the greatest consequence in Greek history. It really only showed that the Greek soldier well led was more than a match for a number of Asiatics badly led, but it gave the Greeks a confidence which made them irresistible against the Persians. Darius died in 485, and was followed on the throne by Xerxes, under whom the greater^ invasion of ^ The Asiatic symbols of submission. 17 Alexander the Great Greece took place. Unlike Darius, Xerxes de- termined to come over in person, and it was not until 480 that his enormous force was ready. In the summer of 481 he left Susa and came up to Lydia, staying with Pythius, the richest man in the world after himself. Before crossing the Helles- pont in 480 he took up his position on a white marble throne on a hill near Abydos to review his countless troops on the shore below. Draining rivers dry in its course,^ the army marched over Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly to the pass of Thermopylae, where Leonidas and his three hun- dred Spartan soldiers made their immortal resistance. From Thermopylae the Persians advanced south and burned Athens, deserted by its citizens, but the Athenians defeated the Persians in the great naval battle in the Bay of Salamis (480 B.C.), and Xerxes fled away to secure his bridge over the Hellespont. He left his general, Mardonius, to winter in Thessaly, but in the spring of 479 Mar- donius was defeated by the united Greek states at the decisive battle of Platsea. The olive-tree of Athena shot up afresh on the Acropolis at Athens, a new and finer array of temples soon took the place of those burned down, and over all Greece there dawned, as a result of the Persian wars, a more splendid day. The story of Greece until the Macedonian conquest was that of numerous city-states entirely independent of each other. A few of the larger cities had sub- jugated some of their neighbours, but this subjugation, ^ Modern estimates of the numbers which might be led so far, spoil this old story. i8 The Old World was fiercely resented, and the subject city was always ready to throw off the yoke, while the attempts of one or two leading states to establish small empires roused a clamour of indignation. We know to-day that the nation was bound to supersede the city-state, and we wish that the Greeks could have united in a voluntary federation, and so avoided the fate of passing under the yoke of an inferior civilization, but we see that there were the greatest difficulties in the path of such a movement. In this moun- tainous country nature kept the different towns apart; each was a separate family, and nothing would induce them to enter into a common life under one national roof. When joint action became necessary, as in the Persian wars, national leaders like Athens and Sparta emerged, but whenever one state won any superiority over the others it always abused its power. Athens and Sparta were 'yoke-fellows' in the leadership of Hellas during the Persian wars, Sparta being regarded as the military head of Greece, while Athens was its intellectual chief. Whether the ancient Spartans were a merely martial race remains the same problem to history as it was to their contemporaries. Their sternly trained youths were models of masculine beauty, and though they seldom spoke they sometimes came out, Plato tells us, with pithy sayings which made other people feel childish. But whether they were the deepest of philosophers or the simplest of fighting peoples, their wisdom was of no benefit to the other Greeks or to the after- world. They kept it so jealously to themselves that most people are uncharitable enough to think its existence an Athenian fiction; it was difficult 19 Alexander the Great enough for a stranger to find entry into Sparta at any time, and they carefully expelled strangers from their gates, so the Athenians said, before holding any intellectual assemblies. The Athenians, fortunately for the after- world, loved to communicate their ideas. After the second Persian war Athens became the first state in Greece, and so remained until the close of the fifth century B.C. The Parthenon (still lovely though spoiled by time, Turk, friend, and foe) rose on the Acropolis, ^schylus had fought at Marathon, and soon afterward the young Sophocles commenced to produce his tragedies. Euripides, born on the day of Salamis, lived to see the decline of his great city. Driven into exile by unworthy attacks, he came north to the court of Macedonia and there died. Peculiarly associated with Mace- donia, lines from Euripides spring to the lips of Alexander and his companions at the great moments of their lives, and in estimating Alexander's attitude toward the religion of his age it is well to remember that he must have been plentifully nourished on a poet who was a notorious heretic. In Macedonia Euripides wrote his BacchcB, which, according to an ingenious modern explanation of its meaning, was the boldest Euripidean atlack on the Olympic deities. The most remarkable personality of fifth- century Athens was one who left no written word behind him, but, on the contrary, informed all and sundry that he "knew nothing." To him, never- theless, far more justly than to Aristotle, might be given the title of 'Master of those that know.' This was Socrates, the teacher, although he dis- claimed such a title, of this great generation; through The Old World his chief companion, Plato, the wisdom of Socrates was handed down to Aristotle, Plato's cleverest pupil, and, as tutor of Alexander, an important character in our history. For a few years of his boyhood Alexander was in direct contact with the best thought of the world. Socrates, too, saw the beginning of the decline of his city and the day of its humiliation, and the Athenian people stained its annals by forcing him to drink the cup of hemlock in 399 on the threefold charge of not worshipping the city gods, of introducing new gods (a most ignorant accusation), and of corrupting the youth of the city. Whenever in after-years men have described the ideal city-state destroyed by Macedonia they have been forced to make a more or less feeble apology for the murder of Socrates by the city government. The invasions by Persia had roused for the first time a national feeling in Greece, and Athens was able to form a federation which contained the germs of a nation; in the end, however, her yoke was found unbearable by her allies, and when they were able to do so they immediately threw it off. This federation was a union of states, mostly Ionian, formed in 478 B.C., with its headquarters at Delos, the sacred island where the twins Apollo and Artemis were born. Athens undertook to be treasurer, and very soon the Delian League became the Athenian Empire and the allies tributary vassals. It had been formed in the deepest national enthusiasm for the defence of Greece against Persia and the liberation of Asia Minor; and the voluntary activity of Athens had created a real loyalty toward that public-spirited state in all Ionian communities. Her statesman Alexander the Great Pericles, could truly say in his famous speech: "Athens is the school of Hellas and ... we have compelled every land and every sea to open a path for our valour, and have everywhere planted eternal memorials of our friendship and of our enmity." Now the splendid 'tyrant city,' on the magnificent buildings of which there was suspiciously much money to spare, excited the jealousy and anger of her allies, who could with difficulty pay the tribute; and Sparta, quite put into the shade by Athens, was still more wroth. In 431 B.C., therefore, the fatal Peloponnesian War broke out, and by its close, in 404 B.C., Athens had been stripped of her empire, and Sparta was more important than ever in Greece. Worse than this, national feeling had been injured by Athens' failure. The Greek states would rather, now, give earth and water to the Great King than acquiesce in the rule of one of their own number. Moreover, the Athenian example had roused an imperial hunger; it was considered wicked to subjugate another Greek state, and yet each had seen the advantage of doing so. From her League there had rolled into Athens a great current of trade, and her rivals had begun to meditate on how to obtain wealth by the same means. In 404 B.C. the Long Walls of Athens, built during this century from the city to the sea, were pulled down to the sound of flutes amid the wild rejoicing of her enemies, and for a short time a Spartan gar- rison occupied the Athenian Acropolis; but Athens revived in the most marvellous fashion, and was able to re-enter the lists in the fourth century B.C. The fourth century was occupied until the Macedonian The Old World conquest by tlie struggles of the various states for supremacy. Sparta, convalescent Athens, Thebes, and a Thes- salian tyrant took it in turns to sway Greece, and the fall of each of them was brought about by a famous battle. Sparta was pre-eminent from 404 to 371, and was not content to be the figure-head as in old days, but proved a greater tyrant to her allies and subjects than Athens had ever been. She had obtained the aid of Persia in reducing Athens, and allowed the Persians to take back the Greek cities of Asia Minor as a reward, but now began to pose as the national champion against Persia. Her warlike king Agesilaus formed plans hke those afterward carried out by Alexander the Great. He invaded Asia Minor and won several victories over the Persians, but the Spartan fleet was defeated, and Persia, alienated from Sparta, assisted Athens in her wonderful recovery, helping her to rebuild her Long Walls and refortify her port. At the earliest possible moment Athens eagerly discarded the Persian alliance, but by the Peace of Antalcidas (387 B.C.) the Greeks were forced to abandon their kinsmen in Asia Minor to the tender mercies of Per- sia. Scarcely a hundred years had gone by since Mara- thon, and yet there was little feeling against this westward retm'n of Persia. Far less outcry was made than when Greek cities were forced to accept the over- lordship of the Greek sovereigns of Macedonia. Sparta fell in 371 B.C., when her tyrannous attack on Thebes was defeated at Leuctra. Her place was taken by Thebes, an old-fashioned country town whose provincial citizens, proverbially stupid, were 23 Alexander the Great little expected to make any noise in the world, al- though Thebes in old times had furnished not only- heroes but gods to Greece. The commander of the Thebans at Leuctra was the great general Epaminon- das, who had evolved a new method of fighting. Like the Spartan hoplites, his soldiers carried pikes, but instead of using shallow lines of regular depth Epaminondas formed at one part a wedge of men standing so close together that their shoulders touched and their pikes projected past the men in front of them. This phalanx or column charged against the Spartans, who were drawn up in the usual columns, widespread and of little depth, and broke their lines by sheer impact. The Spartans were at once thrown into disorder, the rest of the Theban columns joined in, and a scene of carnage followed. Philip and Alexander of Macedon afterward made use of this new 'wedge' in their battles. Not only at Leuctra did the Thebans perform the unheard-of action of defeating a Spartan army fighting under its king, but they proceeded to invade the Peloponnesus, and harried the lands of Sparta up to the precincts of the city itself. It was in 367 B.C. that Thebes, Athens, and other Greek states appealed to the Great King to settle their disputes. Theban supremacy was bitterly contested, but remained a fact until the death of Epaminondas, who was slain while winning a great victory at Mantinea in 362 B.C. Thebes' power fell with her hero, but neither Athens nor Sparta was to profit by it. For long Greece refused to recognize the fact, but the Macedonian conquest had already begun. 24 CHAPTER II: Philip II of Macedonia MACEDONIA, over which Turk, Greek, Bulgarian, and Servian have quarrelled so bitterly to-day, became for the first time a united monarchy under Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great. It lay north of Thessaly, from which it was divided by the lofty Cambunian range of hills, snow-capped Olympus, the home of the Greek gods, towering over its southern border. On the west the mountains of Scardus and Pindus separated it from Illyria and all communication with tiie Adriatic, except for the narrow valley of the Eordaicus and a few mountain passes. In the east the boundary between Macedonia and Thrace was, until Philip's reign, the river Axius (the Vardar) which flowed south-eastward to the Gulf of Therme. Round this gulf stretched the fertile province of Emathia. the nucleus of the Macedonian sovereignty. Among ils hills stood the oldest capital, ^gse,' and, lower dovn, in a dreary position over the marshes, the new capital, Pella, where to-day scarcely a stone remains ol the city from which Alexander the Great set forth tc conquer the world. Alexander's successor, Cassander, removed the capital to the coast, and at Therme spiang up the new town of Thessalonica, now the di:ty and picturesque babel of Salonica, of the utmcst importance as a railway terminus. Eastward laj the three-pronged peninsula of Chalci- dice, for whidi Philip fought so bitterly with Athens, and, farther east, Greek colonies were scattered along the coast as far as and beyond Byzantium, 25 Alexander the Great destined in Christian times, under the name of Constantinople, to become the capital of a new Greek empire, and afterward the headquarters of the Turk. The Greeks of Alexander's day were as anxious to prove that Macedonia was not a Greek country as the Greeks of to-day are anxious to prove that it is a Greek country. The truth seems to have been that in these northern mountains a conquering Greek stock had united with the native Illyrians and Thracians. The Macedonians spoke a Greek dialect and retained Greek traits, but, cut off as they were from communication with their southern kinsfolk, they had come to seem a barbarous people to the cultured Greeks of the south. These latter, however, seldom questioned that the Macedonian kings were of Greek descent, and a legecd existed that Perdiccas, a scion of the royal house of Argos (itself descended from Heracles), had fled with his brethern into northern Greece, and after living for long as a cowherd had gradually conquered all Macedonia. The first historical king of Macedonia is Amyntas (c. 540-498 B.C.), who was compelled to submit to Darius the Great. His son, Alexander 1 (498-454 B.C.), extended his domains, but was foTced, though extremely unwilling, to aid Xerxes as ais vassal in his invasion of Greece. His right to tate part in the Olympic Games was called in question, but the Greek descent of his line was recogrized, and he strove and obtained the garland. His son, Per- diccas n (448-413 B.C.), aided in tie destruction of the Athenian Empire; his successor, Archelaus, 26 Philip II of Macedonia raised himself to the throne by many crimes, but he was an able ruler and the patron of Greek art and a friend of Euripides. He came down from iEgae to Pella and established a brilliant court there. Thus the flame of civilization was kindled in this land of the wild beast and the huntsman and warring highland tribes. The names of the successors of Archelaus are as much a matter of dispute as the amount of truth in the lurid stories handed down of the crimes they committed, but Macedonia was com- paratively tranquil at the accession of Alexander II in 370 B.C. He was called in by the Thessalian cities in 369 B.C. to aid them against the tyrant of Pherse, and proved difficult to get rid of when he had performed his task, but was subdued by the Thebans. He was murdered by the Macedonian Ptolemy, who became regent for the heir, Perdiccas III, and made a treaty with Thebes in 367 B.C., sending Philip, younger brother of Perdiccas, to Thebes as a hostage. There Philip remained, learn- ing all he could in that great school for soldiers, until 364 B.C., when he returned to Macedonia. On the death of Perdiccas in 359 B.C. he became guardian of his brother's son and heir, Amyntas, but soon, at the request of the nobles, assumed the kingship as Philip II. At the time when his brother Perdiccas fell, fighting against the hill-tribes, Philip II was twenty- four years of age. His part in the world hitherto had been chiefly that of observer, and, we may guess, of roisterer, but he at once displayed the very highest practical ability, and brought an iron will to the carrying out of schemes as vast as those of his greater 27 Alexander the Great son. Pliilip loved more to make merry than Alex- ander ever did, but Demosthenes, no friend of his, was right when he told the pleasure-loving Athenians the secret of his success. "Philip," he said, "for the sake of empire and absolute power, had his eye knocked out, his collar-bone broken, his hand and his leg maimed, and was ready to resign any part of his body that Fortune chose to take from him, provided that with what remained he might live in honour and glory." He was more cynical than Alexander, or at least more outspoken about it, for he was accustomed to say that he could take any fortress into which an ass laden with gold could climb, and he did more by 'diplomacy* of this and other sorts than by war. This portrait, drawn of him by an historian of a few centuries later, is not an unfair one: "His chief wealth was his army. He was more skilled in obtaining riches than in keeping them; so, though constantly engaged in rapine, he was ever poor. He was equally mild and faithless. To him no way of conquering was base. He was both persuasive and deceptive in speech, and would promise more than he would stand by; a master of both wisdom and fooling. He cherished friendships according to their profitableness, not as a matter of honour. He would constantly pretend liking for an enemy and simulate vexation against those dear to him. It was his practice to stir up discord among allies and to try to keep in favour with both parties. Add to these traits a distinguished eloquence, pith and experience as a speaker, with neither ease lacking to ornament nor ornament to invention." This well-qualified prince Philip II of Macedonia now came to the head of affairs in Macedonia, and at once, as if by magic, the pretenders to the throne disappeared and the hill-tribes were broken, the troublesome Pseonian and Illyrian vassals of Mace- donia being quelled at last with great slaughter by the man who had learned how to fight from Epami- nondas. Philip, however, modified the idea which he had learned from Epaminondas; both he and Alexander were accustomed to concentrate their strength at one point of the line in the Theban fashion in order to throw the enemy's ranks into confusion, but they did this with a wedge of cavalry, not of infantry, and with their archers and slingers. The Macedonian phalanx of infantry became dreaded chiefly from the use which its leaders taught it to make of pikes considerably longer than those of the Greeks. Epaminondas had introduced the long pike, but Philip and Alexander used still longer ones. The ordinary Spartan pike was twelve feet in length; the Macedonian sarissa was fourteen or sixteen feet in length in illexander's time, and seems afterward to have been increased to the absurd extent of twenty-four feet. This appears to have been the military hierarchy as Philip left it: All Macedonians were the King's Companions, the cavalry being known simply as Companions (ffetorz), the infantry, their inferiors in social rank, as the Foot-Com- panions (Pesetceri), a picked force in both forming the Agema of each. The most famous infantry corps was that of the Guards (Hypaspistce), about 3,000 in number and including the infantry Agema; they were afterward known as the Silver-Shields (Argyraspides), won fame under Philip and Alexander, 29 Alexander the Great and after the latter's death came to a tragic end through their betrayal of their general for a reward. Among other special institutions was that of the Somatophylakes, seven persons of great honour appointed to guard the king's person, evidently as a reward for some great deed; while boys of the chief families of Macedonia were brought up in the court in time of peace, and followed the king to war in the capacity of pages. Philip introduced the first standing professional army, for the Greek and Persian arrays were either citizen or mercenary levies. The citizens could not be kept together for long, and the mercenaries could not always be trusted, but now a national army was in readiness for use at any time that the king wished for it, winter or summer, and in Macedonia it was an army devoted to its king as the tribe is to the chieftain. Philip, therefore, created the Macedonian army which was to be his son's instrument in conquering the world, he consolidated the various Macedonian tribes into one nation, and he made that nation a wealthy one by obtaining control of the gold-mines of Mount Pangseus. Commanding these mines stood Amphipolis near the mouth of the Strymon (the Struma), on his eastern frontier, and Philip out- witted the Athenians and obtained possession of Amphipolis in 357 B.C. He definitely abandoned iEgse and its traditions; the sovereign of Mace- donia was to be no more the chieftain of a semi- savage people, but the autocrat of a cultured and powerful Greek realm. Philip's mother only learnt to read in her old age; but Pella might have claimed to be the * Athens of the North' when Alexander 30 Philip II of Macedonia the Great saw the Hght there in ^^^^ probably in the month of October. At this time Greece, still blind to coming events, invited Philip, as they had grown used to inviting the Great King, to interfere in one of their quarrels. Twice he attacked Phocis, against which a 'Sacred War' had been declared, and although he was compelled to withdraw on each occasion he managed to make himself overlord of Thessaly on his way through, thus adding the fine Thessalian cavalry to the Macedonian army. Then he continued to annex Greek cities on the coast adjoining Macedonia, built a fleet, and at last became a serious menace to Athenian trade. The first person to take the alarm was the Athenian orator Demosthenes, who by his ardent 'Philippics,' commenced to create a panic in the city. Many people nowadays think that Demosthenes showed lack of political vision, and blame him for throwing obstacles in the path of the force which was at work striving to create a united Greek people. To others he will always remain the last defender of his country's liberties and a prophet who preached military and naval defence, but was unheeded until it was too late. To all he stands for a panic-monger whose predictions came to pass. Again and again he sought to unite Southern Greece against Philip, and at last he inspired the resistance which collapsed in 338 b.c. at 'Chaeronea, fatal to liberty,' as Milton sang. Meanwhile Philip was permitted to come south, pass through Thermopylae, and, in a third attack on Phocis, destroy all the Phocian cities, even Athens lifting no finger to stop him, despite Demosthenes' outcry. Phocis 31 Alexander the Great had possessed the presidency of the Amphietyonic League, and this position of high honour Phihp received from the servile electors, the name of Phocis being struck off the list altogether. After Demosthenes' Second Philippic in 344 B.C., Persia was less hated in Athens than was Macedonia. Philip took little notice. In 342-1 he made Thrace a Macedonian province, and might have conquered the Chersonese but for Athens. Then, after a successful attack on the barbarians at the mouth of the Danube, he turned south for his last and fateful journey into Greece. This time it was to aid in a * Sacred War' against Amphissa. He was allowed by the anti-Macedonian party to pass Thermopylae, but at Chaeronea (338 B.C.) Thebans and Athenians, and the citizens of many a lesser state, including the dispossessed Phocians, stood drawn up in battle array to resist the farther passage of the Macedonian. A bitter struggle took place, and Philip, it is said, would have been slain but for the aid of Alexander, who, now a boy of eighteen, commanded the cavalry and made the decisive attack on the Greek allies. All fled except the Sacred Band of Thebes, who fought on until they fell, like Leonidas and his Spartans in the days of old, and so gave to Chaeronea a glory something like that of Thermopylae. Athens became a member of the Macedonian empire without a further effort, and Philip marched south into the Peloponnesus to try to obtain Sparta's submission. Entirely without a national spirit, Sparta had taken little part in the protection of Greece, but she refused to submit to the invader, 32 Philip II of Macedonia and Philip, after devastating her territories, retired, probably grudging the time required for the re- duction of this city which was now of so little importance in the world. He then held a congress of Greek states at the Isthmus of Corinth (337 B.C.), and was elected commander-in-chief for a great expedition against Persia. This appointment was the formal acknowledgment of Macedonia's supremacy. There is nothing to show what was the magni- tude of Philip's designs against Persia, and, owing to the fact that the Athenians and Spartans of Philip's time took no interest in foreign affairs, we are entirely ignorant as to what may have been the nature of the Persian peril at this point, or if it was some commercial advantage which the *Maker of Macedonia' proposed to obtain for his country from his projected invasion. Certain it is that he shares whatever blame there may be for this deed with Alexander, for he sent out his chief general, Parmenio, in 336 B.C., to occupy the other side of the Hellespont and prepare for the passage of his army. In this year, however, an end was put to this active existence by the hand of an assassin. The assassin had a deep enough grievance of his own, but it was known that he was stirred up by Olympias, the mother of Alexander, for a reason of which we shall hear later, and some people thought that Alexander, utterly estranged from his father, had a hand in the business. Olympias was a character as much out of the ordinary as Philip himself. From Philip Alexander Alexander the Great got his extraordinarily wide political grasp, his rest- less energy, and his indomitable will. His debt to his mother is less certain. She was of the royal family of Epirus and claimed descent from Achilles, as Philip did from Heracles. She, like Phihp, was characterized by marvellous energy, and she was passionate, revengeful, and mystical, qualities which peer out as rare visitants in Alexander. The chief fact known about her is her following of the new religion which had penetrated into Greece from Thrace during the last few centuries. By the close of the fifth century the belief of cultured Greeks in the old gods of Olympus had waned; even a Conservative mocked the old idea of Charon ready with his ferry-boat to take souls across to Hades. There had sprung up, on the ruins of the old faiths, two new forms of religion. The 'philosopher of the stage,' Euripides, who exercised the strongest influence on religion from his own time until the Christian era, revived the Greek idea, found in Homer, that human passions are due to possession by the gods, so that Ares, Aphrodite, Dionysus or Demeter, for example, could enter into a man for their own purposes, perhaps punishment for neglecting their altars, and sway him as they list, to virtue or crime. Thus we find Alexander before the battle of Issus sacrificing to the god Fear; and he always thought that he slew Clitus at a drunken feast because Dionysus was angry with him for destroying Thebes, the home of the god's mother, Semele. Above and beyond these deities, however, the Greeks believed that there were Powers which punished wrong- doers. The cry of the injured person was in itself a 34 Philip II of Macedonia curse, and for the righteous man, as Euripides sang, 'Far away. Hidden from the eyes of day. Watchers are there in the skies. That can see man's life, and prize Deeds well done by things of clay.' The height of the normal faith of Greek and Asiatic in the fourth century B.C., as with the Mohammedan and Japanese of to-day, was to bow cheerfully to the will of Destiny. *Orphism,' however, had given to those emotionally inclined a more inspiring faith, and Olympias was among its adherents. It was a worship of Dionysus and Orpheus, with mysterious ceremonies kept so closely secret that, although the Initiated were very numerous, little is known of their tenets now. There is no sign that Alexander was influenced by Orphism, which was, indeed, largely a religion of the common people. Philip was tired both of the eccentricities of Olympias and her temper, and took a young wife, Cleopatra, thereby incurring the wrath of both mother and son. Alexander went to his father's wedding-feast in no very good mood, and we hear of the first of those fits of passion which were to come on him in after-years in the East. When the wine had been circulating freely for ;^ome time, the uncle of Cleopatra began to indulge in remarks in- sulting to Olympias and to Alexander, and speedily received Alexander's drinking-cup full in the face. Philip leaped to his feet and drew his sword, ready in his drunken frenzy to slay his son, but slipped and fell, whereupon Alexander stood taunting him: 35 Alexander the Great "Look!" he cried to the courtiers, "the man who is getting ready to cross over into Asia can't even step from one couch to another." The prince then took his mother to her kinsfolk in Epirus, and himself retired into Illyria. The affair was patched up for appearances' sake, but there remained a bitterness between father and son which nothing could remove, and probably neither Olympias nor Alexander ever forgave the slur put on both of them. There is a pleasanter side to Alexander's relationship with his father, and we shall consider it in the next chapter, but a friend- ship which seems to have been deep, at least on Philip's side, had unfortunately been broken before the latter's death. 36 ^<. , oMA.^^'^-^ t*o Q CHAPTER III: Alexander as Prince ALEXANDER III, the * Great,' was, as we have seen, born at Pella in the autumn of 356 B.C. while Philip was busy outwitting the Athenians in Chalcidice and annexing its towns. He had just taken Potidsea, when three pieces of good news were brought to him; one was the victory of his chariot in the races at Olympia, the second was a great slaughter of the Illyrians by a Mace- donian army, and the third was the birth of his son and heir Alexander. The chief omen which marked the night of the boy*s birth was the burning down of the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Some courtier of Alexandria afterward said that Artemis was so occupied on that night with what was going on in Macedonia that she forgot her own affairs, but^ the people of Asia read a deeper significance into' the event. A story was invented that a madman had destroyed the splendid building, and when asked his reason, replied, *'Only to make my memory immortal by a great crime"; and the soothsayers, they said, had prophesied that somewhere in the world at that hour a man had been born who should utterly destroy Asia for a similar reason. Alexander was not a madman, but he was certainly born to inflict a great deal of evil upon Asia, and so this tale is of interest. His childhood as well as his man- hood was dominated by the dream of conquering the Persian Empire. Many are the stories, some no doubt true, many of them legends, told us of Alexander's youth; 37 Alexander the Great and it is curious that, although he was Olympias' only child, we should have no single anecdote of mother and son in these early years. His foster- mother, a noble Macedonian woman named Hellenice or Lanice, daughter of Dropidas, held the first place in his infancy, and probably continued to do so. Her brother Clitus was afterward one of his chief generals. When a Greek boy was about six years of age his school life began, and Alexander's educa- tion seems to have followed the regular course. He had for governor his mother's kinsman, Leonidas, and for inferior instructor and attendant ('peda- gogue,' as the Greeks called it) the Acharnanian Lysimachus, while another Acharnanian, Philip, had charge of his health and afterward accompanied him to Asia as his physician. Anaximenes, then or later, taught him rhetoric. Leonidas, perhaps instructed by the prince's father, gave the boy a Spartan's training, searching his chests to see that no unnecessary luxury had been put into them, and severely repressing extravagance. Once he stopped the child as he was throwing handfuls of incense on the fire at a sacrifice, and told him : " Thus you may sacrifice when you have conquered the regions where frankincense grows." Alexander had evidently been chattering about his future great deeds, and was annoyed at his master's lack of confidence in him. Some years later, when his dreams had come true, he sent many hundred pounds' worth of perfumes from Asia to Leonidas, with the injunction, "Be less stingy in sacrificing to the gods, for, as you see in my case, they repay generously gifts cheerfully made." 38 Alexander as Prince Alexander was taught, like Frederick the Great, to sleep Httle. Like a young Spartan he scorned the adornment of his body, caring for nothing but its hardihood and suppleness, and eternally exercising it. His one coquetry was his armour. From the remark of Leonidas about the incense we know that his earliest days were filled with ambitious dreams of a well-defined nature — one day, after marvellous wars and journeys, he would become lord of Asia; and he grew increasingly uneasy at the extent of his father's conquests and could hardly contain his rage when the Asiatic scheme came to be mooted. That was not to come for a few years, but meanwhile he informed his companions, Ptolemy, Nearchus, Phrygius, Lysimachus and Harpalus, that his father would leave nothing great for them to do when they were grown up; and when the court was rejoicing over some new victory of King Philip's, Alexander would sit by in moody silence. When he was seven years old, they say, he carefully questioned some Persian satraps who had come to the court at Pella, how many days' journey it was from Macedonia to the Persian capital, what sort of king Artaxerxes was, and what sort of an army he had. He would seldom engage in useless amusements or j^outhful competitions, and when it was suggested that he ran swiftly enough to win a prize in the Greek games, he said: "I would compete if I could have kings for my antagonists. " At the age of thirteen Philip seems to have con- sidered that Alexander's was too high and fine a spirit to remain under the control of pedagogues 39 Alexander the Great any longer, and needed the most skilful management if his character was not to be spoiled. It was now time for Aristotle of Stagira, son of a court physician of Macedonia, to be called in. At Alexander's birth Philip, it is said, wrote straightway to Aristotle: "I announce to you the birth of my son. I do not so much thank the gods that he is born, but because his birth happened in your time, by whom he may be trained and taught; nor, I hope, will he be un- worthy of either of us, nor unequal to the control of my kingdom. For I would rather be childless than be the unhappy father of a child who should bring dishonour to his race. " Thus in 343 e.g. Aristotle, not yet as famous as he was to become, was invited to try his hand at forming a model ruler, as Plato in Sicily had had the opportunity of forming a model state. From his own point of view Aristotle was to fail as utterly as Plato. Philip might well feel secure now that he had obtained a tutor like Aristotle for his son. The philosopher was a gracious, graceful personality, a courilier and the son of a courtier, able to teach Alexander the ways of men as well as the contents of books. In all branches of human learning the saying is still, *'Go back to Aristotle," and Alexander is said to have testified that from his father Philip he had received life, but from Aristotle the knowledge of how to live well. Philip gave them a school-house at pleasant Mieza, where * Aristotle's' stone seats and shady walks were shown for long. Aristotle may have given Alexander his copy of Homer; he is said to have corrected the manuscript, and, in the three or four years which he spent on the educa- 40 Alexander as Prince tion of Alexander and his friends, he must have thrown new Kght on the whole of Hterature, pohtics and rehgion. He probably remained enthroned in his pupil's imagination as an authority on literature and religion, but Alexander never paid any attention to his political ideas. Aristotle had no political adaptability. He had been brought up in a Greek city-state, and the Greek city-state remained for him the one perfect form of government. He believed that it should be so small that one man could address all the citizens and they might all be well known to one another. There is much to be said for the small state in the interests of ideal government, but there are possibilities of justice and virtue under other forms of rule, and to these possibilities Aristotle was blind. He does not even consider the empire in his Politics. The Persian realm, which lay like a waxing moon round Greece, was to him merely a congregation of *slaves' under a slave-driver. He believed that Asiatics were by nature slaves, and he advised Alexander, in a treatise On Monarchy, to treat them as such. But on this point at least the pupil was a greater states- man than the master, and when he became king of Asia Alexander put Greek and Asiatic on a foot- ing of absolute equality. How he came to it we do not know, perhaps it was from his father, but Alexander, alone in his age, conceived the great doctrine of the Brotherhood of Man. It is not to be conceived that Aristotle was ignorant of the notion, for he must have turned every human institution about in every light; but, like Plato, he deeply disapproved of it, both theoretically and 41 Alexander the Great because in fifth-century Athens cosmopolitanism had meant deterioration. Foreign merchants had landed and departed in streams at the Piraeus, and the adaptable citizens had speedily taken to imitat- ing their ways, with the result that the moral founda- tions of the state had been threatened; for, already in that early age, men adopting new manners and customs began to question the existence of a Universal Right and Wrong. So deeply did Plato feel the danger from this, that he would not have had a city built on the coast for fear of the visits of foreigners. To him and to Aristotle the inland valley of the Eurotas where Sparta reigned was the ideal situation for a virtuous state. Alexander in Asia was in a false position from Aristotle's point of view, and he could give him no reasonable advice. We can imagine him discovering with horror that this boy, whose opinions were one day to be of such importance, had ideas of politics into which his own beloved city-state entered not at all, and it is strange to picture his position in the Macedonian court when it was humming with the excitement of Philip's Asiatic plans. Aristotle's political ideas do not seem to have influenced Alexander in the slightest, and, in revenge, in after-years, when Alexander was conquering the world and Aristotle at Athens was continuing his Politics, the latter persisted in omit- ting the empire, as if too big a monstrosity to notice, from his considerations of forms of government. It is strange, again, that Aristotle took no notice in his scientific writings of the new fauna discovered in Alexander's journeys, and, in fact, there seems to have been a complete breach between the philosopher 42 Alexander as Prince and his pupil. When Alexander set out for Asia, however, they were still on good terms; the young King is said to have invited his master to accompany him, to have given him vast sums for his scientific pursuits, and furnished him with a thousand natural- ists to carry out the details of his investigations. Aristotle's treatise On Monarchy was addressed to Alexander, and his work Concerning Colonies was written as advice to him. On the whole, however, the man to whom the world traces back most of its intellectual notions, and the man who altered the whole course of Western history, brought into the closest contact in an important relation, had remark- ably little influence on each other's lives. That Alexander had great knowledge of geography, engineering, and science generally, appears in his hfe, but he was, clearly enough, not an all-round genius. Montaigne said that it was possible to conceive of Socrates in the place of Alexander, but not of Alexander in the place of Socrates; most people would find it hard to imagine either of these things. There is an amusing story of Alexander writing from Asia to chide Aristotle for publishing books on esoteric philosophy: "You have not done well, " ran the letter, "... For wherein will your pupils be above others, if those things which you have secretly taught us, be made common to all? I assure you I would rather excel others in learning than in dominion." Aristotle may well have thought that Alexander's actions behed his words, but he did not say so. Instead he returned a polite and soothing missive, saying that these books were "published and yet not published," for, 43 Alexander the Great as Socrates had taught the world, no man could learn anything which he did not know already. Alexander perhaps meant what he said about pre- ferring letters to warfare, and had realized early that his life was not his own. In stormy times he to whom the book is dear may bear the sword but not the crown; and when Alexander lived, the national existence of Macedonia, and the expansion which was vital to her, depended on the King's practical activity. Throughout his life he loved Homer. A copy of the poet's work was kept under his pillow with his sword, and he bestowed on it a gorgeous case from the spoils of Darius' tent after Issus. One day when a messenger came running to announce a victory, he said, "By the joyful expression of your face one would say that Homer had risen from the dead!" When far away in Asia he wrote home for books, and received copies of nearly all the tragedies of iEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and various books of dithyrambic hymns to Dionysus. Whether due to the imagination of his biographers or no, Alexander seldom speaks except, like Plato's Spartans in "some brief compact saying worthy of remark." The incident of Bucephalus probably occurred when Alexander, at the age of sixteen, about to be plunged into the affairs of state, was discontinuing Aristotle's tuition, although his master continued to live in Macedonia until after his accession, then retiring to Athens to make the Lyceum and the Teripatetics' famous. The Thessalian Philonicus brought the beautiful charger Bucephalus to Bella to offer him to Philip for the fancy price of nearly £3,000. Thessaly was a famous breeding-place for 44 Alexander as Prince horses, and the King was accompanied by the Prince and many of the nobles when he went out into the field to see trial made of the black steed with a white star on his forehead. To the general disappoint- ment he appeared vicious and unmanageable, and was so far from suffering himself to be mounted, that he would not bear to be spoken to, but turned fiercely upon all the grooms. Phihp was displeased at their bringing him so wild and ungovernable a horse, and the animal was being led away, when Alexander, who had observed him well, said: *'What a horse they are losing for want of skill and spirit to manage him!" As Philip took no notice of this forwardness, pretending not to hear, he kept repeating his remark, and finally his father said: *'My boy, you find fault with your elders as if you could manage the horse better yourself. " "That I certainly could," answered Alexander. "Well, have a try," said Philip, "but if you can't ride him, what forfeit will you pay for your presumption?" "The price of the horse," replied his son. The company laughed; the King and Prince settled the forfeiture, and Alexander ran toward Bucephalus. Taking the bridle he turned the horse to the sun, for he had discovered that the shadow which fell before him as he moved, frightened him. While the animal's rage and agitation lasted he merely talked softly to him, stroking him gently, but when he felt him beginning to grow eager he slipped his mantle to the ground, vaulted lightly upon his back and, without whip or spur, set him 45 Alexander the Great going with a light pull of the reins. At last the anxious spectators saw the Prince and Bucephalus flying along like the wind, and they recognized that it was indeed a fine horse, but they were speechless with fear for Alexander's safety. They were amazed when Alexander turned and rode him back, the horse quivering with excitement but docile as a child. Cheers burst forth, but his father wept for joy, and, kissing Alexander, said: "Seek another kingdom, my son, more worthy of your abilities: Macedonia is too small for you." Macedonia was too small for either of them or for the Macedonians! In this remarkable and immortal way Alexander had shown a future ruler of the highest kind; he was all his life to be feared, obeyed and loved, and bullying was to enter little into the matter. In this year Alexander was entrusted by his father with the regency of Macedonia while Philip was vainly attacking Byzantium, and when a revolt of a subject tribe near home broke out, Alexander led an army forth, crushed the rising and planted the agitated country with colonies, one of which he called, in his presumptive way, Alexandro- polis. Two years later he led the fateful charge at Chseronea, where he saved, it was said, his father's life; and for long afterward 'Alexander's Oak' was pointed out near the battle-field. Philip, who at this time loved Alexander as deeply as he wondered at him, was content to hear his son called 'king' and himself only 'general.' If the Greeks, however, with their fatal blindness to the trend of events at this time, paid any attention to Alexander's feats, they probably con- sidered him a dashing cavalry officer and nothing 46 Alexander as Prince more. It remains to consider the personal appearance of Alexander at the moment of his accession. He had been brought up to disapprove of athletics, as the excellence of the athlete depended on regularity, while for the soldier's life, such as was awaiting himself, the body must be trained to submit to irregularity. Carefully exercised, however, he be- came, like the typical Greek statue, not extremely tall nor over-developed, but perfect in proportion and grace. Once the bloom of boyhood was passed he must have been insignificant looking, for we are told that on two occasions visitors ushered into the royal presence were in doubt as to which was the King. Perhaps his carelessness of dress and deep mental absorption caused this. In 1795 the first sculpture that could claim to be a portrait of Alexander was discovered in Italy, and is now in the Louvre. It shows the classical locks, the straight Greek forehead, with no break of direction at the starting of the hair and with the slightly aquiline nose in the same straight line, while the large, clearly cut mouth and chin recall, without the dimple, the massive beauty of Michael Angelo's "David. " After the discovery of this bust, inscribed "Alexander son of PhiUp," the Alexander type became better known than had been possible from the vague descriptions of the ancients, and other representa- tions of the conqueror were found. His successors, who used his name as their battle-cry, engraved his head on their coins, and beautiful portraits of Alexander, wearing the lion's scalp of the Heraclid sovereigns of Macedonia, are to be seen on the gold medallions of Tarsus. A bronze statuette, now at 47 Alexander the Great Naples, is supposed to be a copy of a life-sized por- trait of Alexander by Lysippus after the battle of the Granicus; a Pompeian mosaic, with all the quaint- ness of drawing of early mosaics, represents him as a warrior at Issus; and he is perhiaps to be seen in that battle in the famous reliefs of the Sarcophagus of Sidon. From nearly all these sculptures he appears to have approximated to the best Greek type in appearance. His skin, we are told, like that of the original David, was white, with a pleasing flush on cheeks and breast; but his complexion was not like this in the paintings of Apelles, and it is not likely that the warlike Macedonian kept his extreme fairness of face after he left the nursery; nor would it have been considered a beauty at the time. When the Spartan king, Agesilaus, wished to sell some Asiatic captives as slaves, "their clothes found many purchasers; but as to the prisoners them- selves, their skins being soft and white on account of their having lived so much within doors, the spectators only laughed at them," while Agesilaus said scornfully to his troops, "These are the persons you fight with!" Alexander's lion's mane of hair was yellow and curly, his eyes * liquid,' and, it is said, of different colours, the left bluQ, the right jet black, and his gaze had an extraordinary power both of attraction and command. When he grew up he clean-shaved. His habit of carrying his head a little bent toward the left shoulder has been imitated by aspiring soldiers ever since, and his fault of walking too rapidly for Greek notions of dignity and grace was carefully copied by his *Suc- cessors.'^ 48 CHAPTER IV: Akxanderin Thrace, Illyria, and Greece (336-335 B-C-) WHEN the news of Philip's assassination was brought to Athens the citizens fell into holiday-making. Solemn sacrifice was made to the gods, and it was determined to present a golden crown to his murderer. Demosthenes laid aside the mourning which he was wearing for his daughter, newly dead, and appeared in public in a rich dress and with a garland upon his head; and his fellow townsmen, forced to pay Philip honour while he lived, now joined, with questionable taste, in insulting his memory. Demosthenes once more roused Greece, representing that it would be an easy task to throw off the yoke of the incapable * child' who had mounted the Macedonian throne. Nevertheless, he wrote off to the Great King for aid. The * child' — he was twenty years of age — might have been expected to be too busy at home to interfere for some time in Greece. It was only by swift action that he secured the throne, and he and his mother were forced to offer up a holocaust of his kinsfolk (including Cleopatra and her infant), a task from which a Macedonian rarely shrank. Pirates attacked the coasts, and the highland tribes took the opportunity of what they thought would be an interregnum to rise. Alexander assembled a council of his father's oldest servants, and listened attentively to the advice they gave him to leave Greece alone, establish 49 Alexander the Great order at home, and make himself master of the neighbouring barbarians. They knew aheady that he was a fine soldier, but they did not yet know how fine, and they could not yet have guessed with what consummate ability he would from the first handle the political situation. But he was able to persuade them in a remarkable speech that he must act while his enemy was unprepared. *'The im- pression which a ruler makes," he told them, "at the commencement of his reign, remains throughout his Hfe. The death of my father has taken by surprise the rebels as much as myself, and we must seize the opportunity before they rally." Then he turned to account the lessons in oratory which he had learned from Anaximenes, not the least useful of lessons for a king, and addressed the populace. The king's name and person had changed, he said, but they should perceive no change in policy or rule, and he besought the Macedonians to give him the same spirits and the same arms with which they had fought for his father for so many years with so much glory. He offered large rewards for faithful service, the one use which Alexander the Great ever had for money. He appeared in Thessaly before the Greeks had any idea of his approach. He had waxed on his way from a child to a youth, he said, and Demosthenes should find him a man before the walls of Athens. Some Thessalians held the narrow pass of Tempe, where ten soldiers could dispute the passage of an army, but Alexander turned aside and scaled Mount Ossa, cutting steps on its lofty sides, and went on his way. After this surprising feat Thessaly sub- 50 Alexander in Thrace mitted and paid tribute, the King exempting the city of Phthia, whence his ancestor and pattern, Achilles, had come. From Thessaly he proceeded to Thermopylae, and was elected president of the Amphictyons in his father's place. Thebes and Athens made their peace, and a second Congress of Corinth appointed Alexander commander-in-chief to carry out Philip's designs in Aisa. Sparta alone held severely aloof, saying that it was her custom to lead, not to follow. In a suburb of Corinth took place the delightful meeting of Alexander and Diogenes. The Cynic philosopher was basking in the sun in a grove of cypresses, enjoying the good things which he had preferred to a hfe of care and riches, when the Macedonian conqueror sought him out. Alexander asked him what form a royal favour might take, and the idle philosopher replied: *'Only stand aside a little, so that you won't be between me and the sun. " Astonished at this reply and at the man on whom he in his greatness could confer nothing, the Mace- donian said: "If I had not been Alexander, I would have been Diogenes. " Returning toward Macedonia, he paid a visit to Delphi to have his fortune told by the priestess of Apollo. There were seasons in which the oracle, originally, perhaps, a vernal deity, was dumb, and as this was one of them the pythoness refused to approach the god. Alexander, however, seized her and was dragging her toward the temple, when she exclaimed: 51 Alexander the Great *'My son, you are irresistible!" He at once released her, saying that that was good enough oracle for him. Apollo had evidently gone a little out of fashion in Alexander's time, and might be treated in this sacrilegious way. When the spring of 335 B.C. came, and all was quiet at home, he set forth against the revolted Thracians. After a ten days' march his army came to Mount Hsemus, where the Shipka Pass was occupied by a numerous Thracian army. The bar- barians had surrounded themselves by a rampart of wagons, which they were prepared to roll down on the enemy. Alexander, however, directed his troops to commence the ascent, instructing the phalanx to open when the wagons came crashing down and let them pass, or, if they had not time to do this, to throw themselves quickly to the ground with their shields over them, close together, so that the wagons would roll over the smooth metal surface. These stratagems succeeded. The perfectly trained battalions opened for the most part, and the wagons rolled harmlessly down into the valley, but even where they passed over the human railway nobody was crushed. The Macedonians then charged the heights, uttering their fierce war- cries. From their right wing a shower of arrows fell among the barbarians, while Alexander, at the head of the left wing, gained the top. The almost naked and scantily weaponed foe fled to secret hiding-places, leaving 1500 men dead on the field. Across the Balkans were congregated in arms the valiant tribes of the Triballians, who had come from their homes in what is now Servia. As Alexander 52 ALEXANDER COERCING THE DELPHIC ORACLE Alexander in Thrace approached tliey fled to an island in the Danube. This great stream, then known as the Ister, had been the limit of the Persian Empire at its widest extent, and Alexander had no idea of going beyond the Persians at this point, but he wished to terrify the barbarians by making a demonstration on the other side of the stream. Byzantium, as an ally, had sent him a few ships across the Black Sea to the Danube, and, filhng these with archers and heavy-armed troops, Alexander sailed up the stream. There was, however, a swift, dangerous current round the island, and its steep shores made landing almost impossible for the small force in the boats, while a large army of the warlike Getse had collected on the northern bank of the river to bar his way if he should attempt to cross. He therefore with- drew and waited for nightfall. We shall hear him saying later, on a great occasion, "I steal no victory!" But we shall always find him steal- ing a victory when it is the wisest thing to do. The hides which served his soldiers for tents were stuffed with hay and stitched together to serve as boats, the simple craft of the neighbouring popula- tion of fishermen and pirates were gathered together, and in the dead of the night the soldiers were con- veyed over the river to a spot hidden from view of the enemy by a field of standing corn. When dawn came the Macedonian army stood glittering in battle-array by the side of the slumbering foe. The phalanx bristled with its sarissce, while on the right of it stood Alexander at the head of a matchless band of cavalry. The Getse, startled at the awful apparition, did not even wait to be attacked. They S3 Alexander the Great fled for their lives to their homes, and, on Alexander's approach, took their^families to the far-away moun- tains. He razed their chief city to the ground and then returned to the stream, where he offered sacrifice to Zeus the Saviour, Heracles, and the river god. Many tribes sent ambassadors to make terms with him. From the upper reaches of the Danube came envoys from the Celts, and Alexander evidently thought the moment favourable for taking down their pride. He inquired what they were most afraid of in the world, but as they had heard he was leaving for Asia and felt pretty safe in their distant homes, they did not think it necessary to pay him a compliment, and replied simply that they suffered a great deal of terror from the idea that the sky would one day fall down on their heads. Alexander seems to have found no answer, and he used to say afterward that the Celts were great braggarts. As the Macedonian army was returning home- ward through Thrace, news arrived of the revolt of various lUyrian tribes subdued by Philip. A chieftain named Clitus had seized the city of Pelium, almost impregnable from the mountains and thickets that surrounded it. At the King's approach the rebels made the primitive sacrifice to the gods of three boys, three girls, and three black rams, and sallied forth. Seized', however, with sudden panic at the sight of the phalanx, they retreated in haste and stood a siege in their city. Another tribe, under Glaucias, arrived to the assistance of Clitus, and Alexander found himself in a very diflScult position, caught between two warlike forces in a wild moun- 54 Alexander in Thrace tainous country where the enemy held the heights. He therefore retreated, fighting his way through the enemy in his rear, and the Illyrians believed that the King had gone back to Pella. Alexander, how- ever, recrossed the frontier one evening at dusk, fell on the united forces of the foe, and slew nearly all then* number. Clitus succeeeded in escaping back to Pelium, but, not feeling safe there, reduced it to ashes and went into exile. News now came to Alexander of the rising of Greece. For five months Alexander had been absent, and the Greeks had been overjoyed to receive tidings that he had been slain by the Triballians. A man who pretended to have been an eye-witness of the event described the battle and showed his own wounds to the Thebans and Athenians, who at once rejected the Macedonian supremacy, while the Thebans slew some of the garrison whom Alexander had placed in their Cadmea and besieged the rest in that stronghold. Demosthenes and the Thebans sent ambassadors to the other Grecian states, and Peloponnesian troops assembled at the Isthmus. The Great King sent over three hundred talents to Demosthenes for war purposes. All this prepara- tion was revealed to Alexander as he crossed into Macedonia from Illyria. He hastily marched south and appeared in Thessaly seven days after leaving Pelium. Six days later he encamped in Boeotia, a few miles from Thebes. Rumours had been circulated regarding the approach of the Macedonian army with Alexander at its head, but the Thebans entirely discredited such stories brought in from, the country-side, and it 55 Alexander the Great was with horror and despair that they at last per- ceived Alexander's cavalry and infantry advancing across the Boeotian plain, and finally descried the form of the King on his charger. They refused his repeated summons to surrender, although he stated that he would be content with the death of their two leaders, and at last the Macedonian general Perdiccas commenced the attack, without waiting, it is said, for orders. When the fight had begun the Macedonian garrison in the Cadmea descended to the King's aid, and after a bitter struggle the city of Epaminondas, forced at every gate, fell into the hands of the enemy. Men, women, and children, combatants and non-combatants, were slaughtered by the victorious troops. Six thousand had been slain when the order went forth for the massacre to stop. Thebes was so hated by her neighbours in Boeotia for her tyranny, that, it was said, the Mace- donians could not prevent this carnage, in which they took no part, but there are signs that Alexander wanted to give Greece a severe lesson, and he may also have thought Thebes the only city through which he had anything to fear from a military point of view. He paid Thebes the honour of wiping her out of existence. On the day following the fall of the city, Alexander summoned a congress of the Greeks to decide upon its fate; the voice of the Boeotians was allowed to rule, and the walls and entire city of 'Seven-gated Thebes' were levelled with the ground to the sound of flutes, after the Greek fashion, the temples alone being spared. Cassander rebuilt the city twenty years later, but the new Thebes never rose to greatness like the old. Thirty thou- 56 Alexander in Thrace sand of the free inhabitants were sold into slavery; those exempted, besides the priests, were a few who were known to have advocated submission to Mace- donia and those who had in former times been the hosts of Alexander or his father. Moreover, 'The great Emathian conqueror bade spare The house of Pindarus.' Not only was the actual dwelling of the poet left standing in the general destruction of the city, but Pindar's descendants were pardoned their share in the rising. The conqueror himself was touched with pity for his victims, and never in after-days refused a favour to any Theban whom he met on his travels, for exile from his city was the saddest fate which could befall men to whom even the dwellers in the next town were foreigners. Many a Theban as he left his ruined home must have had on his lips the words of Euripides, the poet so dear to this generation: 'Ah, not that! Better the end: The green grave cover me rather. If a break must come in the days I know. And the skies be changed and the earth below; For the weariest road that man may wend Is forth from the home of his father.' Athens was preparing in great panic for a siege, but she was not to receive from Alexander the treatment of Thebes. Alexander has been compared to a lion whose first fell wrath was now sated, but there was generally method behind his , moods of cruelty. The one fearful example had been made, 57 ^ Alexander the Great and his present task was to reconcile the Greeks to their lot. Something, too, must be allowed for the Macedonian respect for Athens. It is to the honour of Philip and Alexander that they recognized that Athens stood for all that was best in the world. Alexander hoped, almost to the end of his life, that she would be brought to sympathize with his aims; he inflicted a merely nominal punishment on her when she lay at his mercy at this time, and it was only her unchanging disapproval that made him in the end very bitter whenever the name of Athens was mentioned. He demanded the surrender of the orators who had addressed the people against him, and Phocion called on them to offer themselves up cheerfully for the good of their city. The orator Demosthenes had the invidious task of persuading the city that such a surrender was beneath its dignity. He told the people that the wolf was trying to get hold of the sheep-dogs that guarded (worried, some people thought) , the Athenian fold. It was decided, through Demosthenes' eloquence, to defy the King, and Athens can have little expected his forbearance. She had given an asylum to the refugees from Thebes, as she was bound in honour to do, against his express commands, and she had stopped the celebration of her Mysteries to pay honour to the Theban dead. Alexander, however, moderated his demands; he would accept, he said, the exile of the orator Chari- demus as a sign of submission. His offer was accepted by the unwarlike city with relief, and Charidemus went into exile. His tongue was to get him iUito stiU Worse trouble at the Persian court. 58 Alexander in Thrace Even Athens had sent to^ congratulate Alexander on his victory at Thebes immediately after she had closed her doors behind the refugees from the city; and now .congratulations and specious excuses poured in on him from all parts of Greece, except Sparta. He was at first amused when little Megara offered him her citizenship, but when he learned that no stranger since Heracles had been admitted to that honour he graciously accepted it. He then returned to Macedonia and prepared to set forth on the conquest of Asia in the succeeding spring. 59 CHAPTER V: The Conquest of Asia Minor (3 34-33 3b.c ALEXANDER had not been two years on the throne when he left Macedonian shores , for ever. His father's ministers, Parmenio and Antipater, strongly disapproved at first of his haste to attack Persia, but Alexander was able to persuade them that if he did not attack Persia, Persia would attack Macedonia. As it was decided to attack Persia no one will ever know if the King was right, but it seems highly probable. The Great King must have seen by this time that gold had done all that it could do, and that, if he was to remain in possession of Asia Minor, he must take up arms against Macedonia. Moreover, but for Mace- donia Greece was so weak that it might easily at this time have been made into a Persian satrapy. The Macedonian progress through Greece had made this clear. Finally, Macedonia could not support all her stirring children; there was no room for them in Greece; and Asia offered them a plentiful field. Alexander reminded his councillors that the Ten Thousand Greeks with Xenophon in 401 B.C. had penetrated into the heart of Asia and found Asiatic troops no match for them, and that the Lacedse- monian king Agesilaus had ravaged Lydia, Phrygia, and Paphlagonia. In the end Parmenio became as eager as the King. He was never of much use as a councillor, but until extreme old age he showed himself a general worthy of Philip's praise: Philip, scornful of the democratic institutions of Athens, once said that the Athenians were extremely favoured The Conquest of Asia Minor in having a supply of ten generals yearly; he had only found one (Parmenio) in many years. Long harangues were made to the soldiery about the effeminate Asiatics, who wore trousers and other unseemly garments, and were so wealthy that the spoils of a few pitched battles would make the Macedonians rich for life. Nor were appeals to their appetite for glory forgotten. When news arrived of Alexander's preparations, Darius III, who had succeeded to the Persian throne in the year of Alexander's accession, made what he considered adequate arrangements for destroying the rash invader. Adopting the policy of setting Greek to fight Greek, he hired 50,000 Greek merce- naries, over whom was placed Memnon, a Greek of Rhodes. Memnon sought to seize Cyzicus, and from that base prevent Alexander's passage of the Hellespont, but Parmenio managed to keep this city for Alexander, and had everything ready for the King's crossing. Macedonian resources were infinitesimal in com- parison with those of Darius, especially as Alexander did not care to call for soldiers, whom he could not have entirely trusted, from the cities of Greece. His army is supposed to have numbered 30,000 foot- soldiers and 5,000 cavalry, mostly Macedonian and Illyrian. His fleet was a negligible quantity, while Persia had all the ships of Cyprus and Phoenicia. Despite Philip's wealth his expenditure had been so great that Alexander not only found the treasury practically empty, but the state heavily in debt; and when he declared war on Persia he had raised this debt from 500 to 1 ,300 talents. The Great King 6i Alexander the Great slept every night with many times that amount under his head and feet! The Macedonian army started with supplies for thirty days only. Before he left, Alexander, who had no gold to scatter, made such large gifts of land to those whom he wished to bind to his service, that at last Perdiccas said to him: "If you give away so much, what will you have left for yourseK?" *'Hope!" replied Alexander. *'But in that," answered Perdiccas, "we too share, since we fight with you," and he refused the estate offered him. Antipater was installed as regent of Macedonia during the King's absence, and after sacrificing to Olympian Zeus and giving a great feast to the gods, Alexander said farewell to Macedonia and led his army along the coast through Macedonia and Thrace to Sestos on the Hellespont. Thence he sent Parmenio, with the larger part of the army, over to Abydos, by the route which Leander swam in the legendary days of Greece. The King, before crossing, visited Elseus, where he offered sacrifice on the tomb of Protesilaus, the first Greek to fall in the Trojan War, and prayed that he might land in the foeman's country under better auspices. Then, entering his ship and taking the helm himself, he turned his back on Europe for ever. In the middle of ^the Hellespont he sacrificed a bull to Poseidon and the Nereids, and flung into the sea as an offering the golden cup from which the libations had been poured. As they came into the harbour of Sigeum, the King hurled a javelin on to the shore, "to take seisin," our English forefathers 62 The Conquest of Asia Mifior would have said. He was the first to leap from the vessel, and he caused altars to be erected, both here and on the spot where he had left Europe, to Zeus, Heracles, and Pallas. At Troy he behaved like a romantic boy on the Grand Tour. In honour of the shade of his great ancestor Achilles, he and his companions ran naked to the hero's tomb, on which they poured oil and placed a garland. Hephsestion, says legend, crowned the tomb df Achilles' friend Patroclus to signify that he loved Alexander as Patroclus loved Achilles. Hephsestion had not yet become Alexander's favourite, but in after-days his death was to be mourned by the King in as tragic a fashion as that in which the old Homeric hero bewailed the slaughter of his companion. Some one, perhaps a mendicant, or even a curiosity-vendor at his stall, offered the King the *Iyre of Paris,' only to be told sternly: *'I care nothing for this vile instrument of un war- like delights! Bring me Achilles' lyre! That will play the kind of music I shall like to hear!" The shade of Priam received its honours, and special sacrifice was offered to the goddess Pallas, who had been so helpful to the Greeks in the Trojan War; in her temple Alexander left his arms, taking in their place some said to have been consecrated there from the time of the fall of Troy. He secured what he believed was the immortal shield of Achilles, and in days to come it was to save him in a miracu- lous fashion. Alexander picked up his armour, every piece notable, as he went on. His cuirass was among the spoils of the battle of Issus; the King of Citium gave him his famous sword, and the 63 Alexander the Great Rhodians presented him with his belt, made by the renowned Heheon. His helmet, the work of Theophilus, shone like silver, and was adorned by a lofty and magnificent white feather terrible to see as it nodded in war. These arms, objects of venera- tion for long after the conqueror's death, came into the possession of the Roman general Pompey the Great, and were shown by him in his last Triumph. Alexander joined Parmenio at Arisbe and com- menced to take the towns in the neighbourhood, unopposed by the Persians. They may have thought to get him away from his ships and then utterly destroy his army, but it was more likely the fatal Asiatic custom of waiting to be attacked. Again and again, in Asia, the Persians allowed Alexander to choose his battle-field and his time and mode of fighting. The satraps of the West assembled at Zeleia, a city at the foot of Mount Ida, and the able Greek mercenary Memnon advised them to lay waste the country and retire, so that the Macedonians, who had no commissariat, would be driven by famine to retreat. Meanwhile the Persian fleet could have forced its way into the Hellespont and cut off the Macedonians* return route. If this scheme had been carried out, the world might never have heard again of Alexander the Great, but the satraps did not entirely trust Memnon, and they were afraid that Darius would not approve of their abandoning the peoples of Asia Minor to the mercy of the in- vader, the more so as, far from appreciating the danger, he expected them to destroy the invading force as it was trying to land. To make Memnon further suspect to the Persians, Alexander, as usual 64 The Conquest of Asia Minor aware of what was passing in his enemies' minds, forebore to ravage some estates of Memnon's. It was at a ford of the River Granicus, a stream which rises in Mount Ida and falls into the Sea of Marmora (the Propontis) near Cyzieus, that Alexander found the satraps' army, stationed on the opposite bank, awaiting him. The spirits of the Macedonians failed them when they saw the wide, rapid river running between steep banks and guarded by a force inferior, indeed, to their own in infantry, but infinitely superior to it in cavalry. To ford the stream within range of the enemy and climb the bank in disorder in its face seemed madness. Parmenio advised the King to wait to see if the Persians would retire, but Alexander answered: "I should be ashamed, Parmenio, if, after having crossed the Hellespont so easily, I should be stopped by this brook. . . . Moreover, the Persians might regain courage by our hesitancy, as being a match in war for Macedonians." He arranged his army in the usual Macedonian way, with the phalanx in the centre, the cavalry on the wings. To Parmenio was always entrusted the supreme command on the left, while Alexander himself led on the right. The Persian cavalry numbered about 20,000, and their infantry was somewhat less than that. This great cavalry force was placed in front of the Persian infantry, and was densely massed at the spot where it was thought Alexander would try to land. The enemy saw clearly his shining armour and great white feather, and knew who he was by the respect paid him. At last they perceived him give a word of command 6s Alexander the Great followed by a movement of his host. Amyntas, son of Arrhabseus, at the head of the skirmishing cavalry, the Pseonians and one infantry regiment, rushed into the river. Then with a flourish of trumpets and shouting of their war-cry to Ares, the right wing under Alexander entered the water, the King keeping his line extended obliquely in the direction in which the stream flowed, to guard against Persian attack on his flank as he emerged from the water. Javelins and darts were showered down from the high bank opposite as the Macedonians sought to land, and after they had forced their way up a fierce fight took place on the brink of the stream. Alexander became the centre of a desperate cavalry engagement, in which it seemed as if the invaders would be thrust backward and downward into the water. It was some time before the Persians began to give way and were pushed back into the plain. Alexander's spear was shivered, and a guard from whom he demanded one brandished a broken stump and bade him ask of some one else. Demaratus of Corinth, one of the Companions, gave him his, and Alexander dashed away to smite Mithradates, son- in-law of Darius, to the ground. Rhoesaces there- upon struck Alexander with such force that a piece of his helmet fell off and the scimitar touched his hair; but Alexander, turning, pierced him with his lance. Spithridates, satrap of Lydia and Ionia, stole behind Alexander and had raised his scimitar to slay him through the hole in his helmet, when Clitus, brother of his foster-mother Lanice,^ pre- vented the blow by striking off the satrap's arm. By this time the entire Macedonian army stood in 66 The Conquest of Asia Minor order on tlie Persian side of the stream, and made a charge which broke the Persian centre; it turned, and the wings followed. Alexander did not pursue far; the strongest part of the Persian army, the Greek mercenaries, of whom no use had been made, still stood where they had first been posted, on a neighbouring eminence, and against these he now turned. After a sharp skirmish, in which the young King's horse (he was not riding Bucephalus) was killed under him, 2,000 of them were taken prisoners, the rest slain, with the possible exception of a few who had crept in among the dead upon the battle- field. The captives were sent in chains to Macedonia to till the soil, on the ground that they were fighting against Greece for foreigners in defiance of the Edict of Corinth. About twenty-five Macedonian Companions had been slain at the onset. Alexander ordered bronze statues of them to be made by Lysippus and in 148 B.C., when the Roman governor Metellus conquered Macedonia, he carried away these statues to decorate the portico of his own house in Rome. The Macedonian losses at the Granicus were very light, and Alexander granted the parents and children of the slain freedom from military service and from various imposts, and visited and chatted with the wounded, letting them show their wounds and brag of their deeds. The conqueror, in the first flush of success, sent to Athens to inform her of a victory in which she took no pleasure, and presented the old leader of Hellas against Persia with three hundred suits of Persian armour, to be hung up in the Acropolis with the inscription: "Alexander, son of Philip, and all 67 Alexander the Great the Greeks except the Lacedemonians, present this offering from the spoils taken from the Asiatics." Much of the spoil, precious raiment and goblets, he sent to his mother; it is significant, however, that the public offering went to Athens, not to Pella, showing that he thought little of Pella and much of Athens, and also that he hoped to stir up in Athens her old ardour against Persia. Alexander proceeded to form Asia Minor into a Macedonian province, exacting the same tribute that Darius had received and allowing old institu- tions to continue. Some of the Greek cities resisted him, but most of them seized the opportunity to overthrow the oligarchy or tyranny under which they suffered, and established democracies under Macedonian protection. Persia had rarely allowed democratic constitutions. In a few cities garrisons mostly composed of faithful Greek mercenaries stood out for their Persian employers. Sardis sent ambassadors to proffer submission, thereby saving Alexander the siege of a town with a citadel on an almost impregnable rock surrounded by a three- fold wall. The account books he found here showed what large sums the Greeks, especially Demosthenes, had received for anti-Macedonian propaganda, and from this time forward he cared less for the opinion of the Athenians. Perhaps he did not know before what sums had been spent by his father in winning over a pro-Macedonian party in Greece. His father, we are told, warned him that bribery was bad policy, fearing that Alexander should try to make his own party in the state, and the boy may quite well have felt a shock when he learned that the so 68 The Conquest of Asia Minor lofty-seeming Athenians could be bought and sold. After a few years he ceased to write to anybody in Europe as a friend except Antipater and the Athenian orator Phocion, who had spoken for him against Demosthenes. The Greek mercenaries at Ephesus fled at the news of the Granicus, and the people were just about to stone their oligarchs to death when Alexander arrived. He had a triumphal reception in this great city where St Paul was afterward to live and work. Apelles, the only painter whom Alexander would ever allow to portray him, lived here, and perhaps the artist now made a quick study of the youthful conqueror fresh from his first great battle in Asia. To replace the temple of Artemis, destroyed on the night of his birth, Alexander allowed the city to keep the tribute due to him as successor of Darius, and in the new temple was placed one of Apelles' portraits of the King holding the hghtning, a mar- vellous work of art. Lysimachus reduced most of the cities of Ionia and iEolia, but Miletus, the chief city of Ionia until its destruction by the Persians in 494, offered a more serious resistance. Alexander's admiral, Nicanor, secured the harbour, but the Persian fleet lay anchored near, ready to give assist- ance to the garrison, and Parmenio advised Alexander to fight a naval battle. Alexander, however, knew that the enemy was stronger at sea than himself, and refused. The Milesians offered the Macedonians privileges of trading equal to those they gave the Persians, but received the answer that they must expect an attack at day-break. On the morrow Nicanor held the harbour while Alexander's batter- 69 Alexander the Great ing-engines made breaches in the city walls. Soon the soldiery streamed into the town and slew nearly all the inhabitants. Three hundred escaped by leaping down into the sea and floating on their shields to a neighbouring island, but they were captured and compelled to enter the Macedonian army as mercenaries. The Persian fleet, unable to tempt the astute young soldier into an engagement, sailed away. In the siege Alexander's two foster- brothers were slain. In this city, which had been so great and flourishing of old, there stood so many statues of Milesian athletes of distinction, that Alexander cried: "Where were all these strong people when the Persians conquered you?" And no doubt he thought of what Aristotle used to say about the uselessness of athleticism. The most desperate resistance with which Alex- ander met in Asia Minor was at Halicarnassus, the present Budrum, a Carian city on the south- west coast, strongly placed and strongly fortified. Visible from far in Alexander's time was the gigantic quadriga, with the statues of Mausolus and Artemisia which now stand in their majesty in the Brit- ish Museum. The city had a garrison of Asiatics and Greek mercenaries under Memnon, whom Darius, too late, had appointed governor of Lower Asia as well as supreme commander of the fleet; and it had several warships in the harbour. For long Alexander employed in vain the great siege engines evolved in this century in Syracuse and perfected by Philip and himself. No better artillery was made for many a long day. The Macedonians filled up the trench, thirty cubits wide and fifteen cubits deep, 70 The Conquest of Asia Minor dug by the citizens round their wall, under a fire of ammunition from the balistse of the besieged. When at last the wall began to give way before their battering-engines, they found that the defenders had built up a second wall, in the shape of a crescent, behind the first. Daring sorties and daring attacks caused much bloodshed on both sides. Not wishing to repeat the carnage of Ephesus, and yet determined not to be merciful in the face of defiance, Alexander spared the city when he might have taken it, hoping to receive a surrender, as it was plain that it could hold out no longer. Memnon, however, meant to fight to the end. He caused the weapons in the town to be set on fire lest they should fall into Macedonian hands, and prepared to retreat to the citadels still untaken. The wind bore the flames toward the houses, and at midnight the Macedonians saw the city they had determined to take on the morrow wrapped in raging flames. The King at once led out his troops, entered the town and slew the incendiaries. Most of the defenders escape to the citadels, and Alexander decided to leave them there. Razing their city to the ground, he appointed Ptolemy with a strong force to hold this region. As viceroy of Caria he instituted Ada, its former queen, who adopted him as her son. She was sister of the famous Mausolus, husband of Artemisia, the builder of the Mausoleum, and had been deposed from her throne by another brother. At Alexander's approach she went to meet him and offered the surrender of the city of Alinda, which she still ruled, and she was treated by him in a way that did much to reconcile neighbouring native potentates 71 Alexander the Great to his rule. The queen's gratitude took the form of sending Alexander wonderful table delicacies and the offer of chefs, but the pupil of Leonidas told her that his mouth was easy to please and his old governor had taught him how to find the best cooks: walk from break-of-day till dinner-time; and, for supper- appetiser, a small dinner. From Caria Alexander sent home the young men who had married just before leaving Macedonia and might naturally be supposed to wish to visit their wives. Their officers were to bring them back with as many recruits as possible in the spring. He then dispatched Parmenio by way of Sardis to Phrygia, where all were to meet for the campaign of 333 B.C., and himself spent the winter in subjugating the inhabitants of the Lycian and , Pamphylian coasts. His fleet was so poor that he disbanded it as useless. He had probably already conceived the idea of winning over the enemy's fleet by seizing the sea-board. In any case, he could not leave the strongest part of the hostile force behind him, and so, instead of pushing on to the Persian capitals in the following spring, he had determined to make himself master of the entire coast of the Persian Empire from the Hellespont to the western frontier of Egypt. In Lycia, Marmaria offered a stubborn resistance, and finally her citizens fired their town and escaped to the mountains. At Phaselis Alexander rested, as the roads were impracticable, and honoured the memory of his dead friend Theodectes, a fellow- pupil under Aristotle. A Lycian spring, we are informed, cast forth an inscription: "The end of the Persian Empire approaches." 72 ALEXANDER CUTTING THE GORDIAN KNOT The Conquest of Asia Minor In Pamphylia Alexander sent part of his army by the mountain road and himself proceeded by the beach at a point only uncovered when the north wind blew, in ordinary times. Now some miracle occurred: either the wind changed suddenly to the north or the boisterous sea retired. * Alexander's luck' was proverbial in a later, irreverent age. Turning inland, the King then proceeded toward Phrygia, the place he had appointed for a general meeting for the next campaign. At Gordium, the capital of the old Phrygian kings, on the Persian * Royal Road,' he found the young married men and new levies from Macedonia, and also ambassadors from Athens to beg for the releaseof the Athenians captured fighting for Persia at the Granicus, and now convicts in Macedonia. The request was refused on this and several other occasions, but was ultimately successful. At Gordium, in the temple of Zeus, Alexander was shown a cart on which, it was said, Gordium, father of King Midas, used to drive. It was a very common object, with the exception of intricate knots, of which the ends were hidden, fastening the yoke. The inhabitants affirmed that an oracle had declared that he who should untie the knot should be king of Asia. Naturally Alexander was expected to make an attempt to unloosen the knot, and he offered to do so. A crowd of Phrygians and Macedonians stood round the King — the Phrygians curious, the Macedonians fearful of his failure. He tried in vain to undo it in legitimate fashion, and then boldly cut the knots with his sword, saying: *'H(yw doesn't matter!" All his plans for becoming lord of Asia were prospering; Memnon, the only 73 Alexander the Great Persian leader of talent, had been busily capturing islands in the iEgean at the head of a powerful fleet, but was now dead, while Antipater, regent in Mace- donia, had managed to rake together some ships and had captured eight Phoenician vessels one dark night. After subjugating Cappadocia and receiving the submission of Paphlagonia, Alexander, in 333 B.C., advanced to the Gates of Cilicia, as the chief pass over the Taurus at this point was named. The Gates being guarded, he tried a night attack. His approach was observed, but the discovery served him better than a surprise would have done, so invincible did he already seem. The defenders fled when they saw his form, and at dawn, thanking his lucky stars (or the gods), Alexander passed through the Gates and descended into Cilicia, de- vastated by the Persians who, again too late, were following the former advice of Memnon. Now they had fled when, from the mountains above, a small force could have easily stoned Alexander's army to death as it walked four abreast through the narrow pass. They were about to destroy Tarsus when Alexander, by a forced march, appeared and saved the city, and then the Persians abandoned a province made easy to defend by nature herself. Tarsus, the birthplace of St Paul and the last resting-place of Julian the Apostate, was an im- portant city from its position on the River Cydnus at a point where roads led north to the Cilician Gates, the entrance to Asia Minor, and east to the Syrian Gates, the entrance to Syria. Here, through bathing in the Cydnus (now the Tersoos-Chai) while very hot, perhaps already feverish, Alexander fell 74 The Conquest of Asia Minor dangerously ill. His recovery was despaired of by all but his childhood's doctor, Philip. Philip was tending him and about to give him a dose of medicine when a messenger hastened in with a letter from Parmenio stating that Philip had been bribed by Darius to poison the King. Alexander read the letter, handed it to Philip and, while the latter was reading it, drained the cup. He recovered, and ever after- ward showed great favour to Philip. There was no doubt some laughter against Parmenio; but the moral of the story was Alexander's royal fearlessness. From Tarsus Parmenio was sent on to capture the Syrian Gates, while Alexander visited Anchialus. Here were the ruins of a city said to have been founded by the last Assyrian king, Sardanapalus, and written on a monument in Assyrian characters Alexander saw this inscription, so alien from his own turn of thought: "Sardanapalus built Anchialus and Tarsus in one day; but do thou, O stranger, eat, drink and be merry, since that is the best life has to give us." The King went on to Soli (now Mezetli), whence our word 'solecism' has sprung, through the rough Greek spoken by its people. He left a garrison there, and thence dashed inland into the mountains and defeated a little gathering of desperate Cilicians. Returning to Soli he received news that the last citadel of Halicarnassus had fallen, and that all resistance was dying out in Caria. He then offered sacrifice to Asclepius for his return to health, and held games and a torch race. Leaving Soli he performed sacrifices at Mallus to the shade of Amphi- lochus, and there received news that Darius was en- camped within two days' march of the Syrian Gates. 75 CHAPTER VI: The Conquest of Syria and Phoenicia (333-332B.C.) IN the late autumn of 333 B.C. the great battel of Issus took place. Darius, the unfortunate Persian monarch whose reign fell in Alexander's day, had at last taken the field in person against the Macedonian invader and assembled a vast oriental army on a Syrian plain very suitable for arraying such a force. Darius was burning with impatience to meet his enemy, and, as Alexander still tarried in Cilicia, he broke up his camp and sought him, believ- ing that he had retreated on news of the approach of such an overwhelming force led by the sacred majesty of Persia. Thus he entered Cilicia by the Amanic Gates at the same time that Alexander was hastening into Syria by the Syrian Gates. The Athenian orator Charidemus, now living at the Persian court, was slain for warning Darius of the excellence of the Macedonian army, and evil dreams in vain visited Darius' pillow as he tossed on the magnificent couch in his rich tent. In Asia and in Greece it was be- lieved that Alexander's army could never face the multitudinous host of Asia, led by the Great King in person. When Alexander heard that he had passed Darius unawares, he turned and came up with him at Issus and was hardly able to believe his own good fortune in the chance of the battle-field; the superiority of the Asiatics in numbers was entirely nullified by the nature of the ground, a coast plain only three 76 Conquest of Syria and Phoenicia miles broad. The River Pinarus, which flows west into Issus Bay, lay between the two armies, and Alexander proceeded to arrange his lines on the south side of the stream, with the sea to his left and the mountains to the right — as near to the sea as possible, so that the foe, who held the mountain heights, might not cast down missiles on his army. At the same time he had to guard against the possibility of being outflanked on his right. As it turned out, the Asiatics on the heights fled when a small force that Alexander sent to keep them in check approached, and troops detached by Darius to turn the flank of the Macedonians failed to execute their orders. Alexander made one of the eloquent speeches with which he roused his soldiers' hearts to war. When he closed, the soldiers shouted with one voice that they only wished to be led on. The King then rode slowly forward, restraining their impetuosity so that they might not be out of breath, but when he came to the Pinarus he let them go. They dashed swiftly across the stream and up its precipitous sides to meet the foe on the top of the bank. A cavalry fight like that at the Granicus followed. The riders were so closely locked together that even those who wished to do so could not fly. All the time, Alexander, both soldier and general, sought to come to Darius, clear to view, seated in his chariot in the centre of his army and surrounded by his chief subjects. His valiant brother Oxathres, a prominent figure, fought near him, slaying every would-be assailant, and round the royal chariot soon lay a heap of corpses of the most distinguished Persians slain in the defence of Darius. Alexander, in endeavouring to reach him, 77 Alexander the Great received a wound in the thigh. At length the Persian monarch, who had shown great personal courage in earlier years, was either seized with panic or thought it right to save himself. He turned to flee away in his chariot, but the country soon proving too rough he leaped to the ground, cast off the insignia of royalty, leaving even his bow, and rode away on a horse kept for this contingency. The two great kings had come face to face, and the Genius of Darius was rebuked under that of Alexander. The greater part of his army followed him in flight, the soldiers throwing away their armour that they might fly the faster. Alexander longed to pursue, since Asia was not his until he had captured Darius, but he was forced to return by a call for help from his own left wing. The Persian right had compelled the Thessalian cavalry on Alexander's left to give ground, even pushing them back across the Pinarus. Before he arrived, however, the Thessalians had rallied and slain their opponents, daunted by the way the battle had gone on the other side of the field. Alexander then set out in pursuit of the fugitives, but the Great King was already far away, and at nightfall he returned. Sparta and Athens at this time were rejoicing over tidings that Alexander was blocked up in Cilicia by the Persians in the last extremity! Meanwhile 100,000^ Asiatics lay dead upon the field or along the line of flight, a ravine being bridged by the pursuers by filling it with corpses, and the air round them was heavy with the scent of death and resounding with the howls of beasts of prey. 1 We cannot be sure of these numbers and it seems probable that the accounts exaggerate. 78 THE FIGHT ABOUT THE CHARIOT OP DARIUS AT ISSUS Conquest of Syria and Phoenicia The Macedonian conquerors were holding their revels in the tents of the vanquished at Alexander's return, and he found that his soldiers had already entered the tents of the enemy, religiously reserving for their King the personal possessions of Darius, in- cluding his wife and children. The greater part of the baggage with most of the women and children had been bestowed at Damascus, but there was never- theless much to seize in the luxurious Persian tents. The King found the ground strewn with purple raiment, gold, silver and precious stones dropped by the pillagers on their way to their own quarters, while the shrieks and sobs from the women's quarters testified to the brutality with which the non-com- batants were being treated by the rough soldiery. Alexander arrived hot and dusty from the chase of the Persians, and exclaimed eagerly as he entered the camp that he should wash off the sweat of battle in Darius' own bath. He amused himself with all the toilet accessories of the Great King, the basins, ewers, and vials of perfume all of purest gold, wrought with skill, and with luxuries and appointments new to his simplicity. He examined the bed-chamber and feast prepared, and then, instead of flouting it as a Spartan king would have done, he said, "This was a king indeed!" A new notion of monarchy was already forming in the mind of the Macedonian chief. He and his intimates, bathed and probably per- fumed, were enjoying their magnificent feast, when they became aware of anguished groans in the neigh- bouring tent. Alexander sent the guard, who entered and found the ancient Sisygambis, mother of Darius, and his beautiful wife, Statira, with her children, 79 Alexander the Great lamenting the death of Darius. The royal mantle had been found and brought to the harem as a sure token of the Great King's death. Alexander, it is said, was moved to tears, and sent Leonnatus and some guards to assure the royal family that Darius lived. They received the news of Leonnatus* approach in sullen silence, believing that Alexander had sent to murder them in their turn. The mes- senger was forced to enter unbid, and they threw themselves at his feet to beg, not for life, but that before death they might bury Darius with due rites. Their fears were at once dispelled, and they were treated by Alexander in a way that was highly praised by the ancients. It is even said that his captives became attached to him as to a son and protector, and afterward, shortly before his death, he married one of the children, Statira. Alexander continued southward along the coast of Phoenicia, sending Parmenio to Damascus to secure the treasure of Darius. At Marathus a letter from Darius arrived, begging for the surrender of his mother and wife and children, and reproaching Alexander for his invasion of Asia. To this letter Alexander replied that the predecessors of Darius had invaded Greece, that Darius had commenced the present war by aiding Alexander's Grecian enemies, and that Darius had bribed his father's assassins; he was a murderer and usurper, but if he came to Alexander in person (and Alexander would send hostages) he should receive whatever he should demand, but *'in future," concluded the King, "address me as King of Asia, and not as your equal. Make your request as of one who is lord of all your 80 Conquest of Syria and Phoenicia lands. If you do not do this you will be considered as a rebel, or, if you like, we will fight another battle on the subject. And save yourself the trouble of running away, for wherever you go, I shall follow you." Alexander then left Marathus and occupied Byblus, which stood on a hill near the sea and was said to be the oldest city in the world and the birthplace of Adonis. Sidon welcomed him eagerly. He deposed its king, a Persian protege, and a romantic story is told of the choice of a new king by Hephsestion. According to the laws of Sidon the sovereign must be of the royal house, and it appeared that a humble gardener in the district was of this blood, besides being of primitive virtue. The deputies of Hephaestion sought him out and found him weed- ing. They saluted him as king, bathed him, clothed him in purple, decked him with the royal insignia, and led him to the palace, where he managed to keep his simple nature unspoiled. Tyre alone in Phoenicia remained independent. Old Tyre lay on the mainland. Tyre proper on an adjacent island, the "island of the princes of the sea," "full of wisdom and perfect in beauty," described by the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. Shalmaneser had besieged it for five years, and Nebuchadnezzar had invested it for thirteen years in vain, although the King of Tyre ultimately con- sented to pay tribute, and the city was now tributary to Persia. Alexander sent to inform its king that an oracle had bidden him sacrifice to Heracles, with whom Melkart, an old Phoenician deity, was identified, in the famous temple in their city. The Tyrians replied that they were willing to obey any 8i Alexander the Great other command of his, but would suffer neither Persian nor Macedonian to enter their city. If the King wished to sacrifice there was a more ancient temple of Heracles at Old Tyre. Alexander then knew that he must attack the island, even if it proved difficult as the Labours of Heracles. Its capture would mean the possession of the celebrated Phoenician navy for war purposes, the absolute sovereignty of the sea, Macedonia and Greece safe behind him, and the easy conquest of Egypt. The siege of Tyre is the most interesting in the history of classical warfare, and illustrates the courage, inventiveness, patience and good-fortune which are so equally mixed in Alexander's life. He could not match the fleet of Tyre, 'rich in ships,' and, in order to conquer the city by land, set about to destroy its island condition, starting the con- struction of a mole two hundred feet broad from the mainland to the island. The strait, about half a mile wide, was shallow near the mainland but about three fathoms deep near the island, and the current at the point where Alexander commenced the mole bade him defiance. Abundant timber for the work was found on the mountains of Lebanon, stone was obtained from Old Tyre, and these, heaped high as a mountain on the shore, were thrown down into the sea in alternate layers, stakes fixed in the mud of the channel holding the pier together. As long as the masons worked at a distance from the island all went fairly well, but when they came into deeper water and at the same time approached the city, they suffered severely under missiles from the walls. Then, too, the Tyrian triremes kept sailing up and 82 Conquest of Syria and Phoenicia attacking the workmen, clothed for work, not for war. Two wooden towers were erected on the mole and protected from the fire-bearing missiles of the enemy by specially prepared hides, which were also placed where they might screen the workers. From these towers missiles were hurled at the Tyrian ships. In reply, the Tyrians filled a vessel with dry fuel, chaff and torches, pitch and brimstone. They fixed two masts on the prow and stretched on each a double yard-arm, from which they hung caldrons of com- bustibles. Triremes towed the heavily laden vessel toward the mole and towers, and sailors threw fire from the vessel among the wood, at the same time running her aground as violently as possible, and dashing her against the end of the mole. If skill and heroism could have saved Tyre she would not have been wiped off the face of the earth. As her crew swam away, a great flame caught Alexander's towers and burned those within them to death. The triremes hovered near and discharged showers of missiles on those who leaped down into the sea, or those who approached to extinguish the flames, while fresh detachments from the city sailed out and did as much damage as they could to the mole and the engines of war. A storm aided the Tyrians in their work of destruction. Alexander had then to start his work afresh, and did so with dogged perseverance. The new mole was to have a wider base, contain more towers and be in a direction better adjusted to the storms on this coast. How many years might have been con- sumed by the Macedonians in this way we cannot say, but a piece of great good fortune now befell 83 Alexander the Great them. The sister cities of Tyre, not content with giving her no aid, as they had submitted for the most part to Alexander, now sent him their ships, while the kings of Cyprus, an abode of the Hittites, whose history is so much interesting the learned world to-day, sent him one hundred and twenty vessels to Sidon. With these he could blockade Tyre. At the head of a magnificent fleet he sailed from Sidon ready for his first naval battle. The Tyrians had been anxious to fight Alexander at sea, but drew back when they found to their dismay that he had obtained all the ships of Cyprus and Phoenicia. The city had two harbours, one, the Sidonian, on the north, looking toward Sidon, the other, the Egyptian, on the south, and these were now filled with Tyrian triremes in battle array. Alexander placed the Cyprian ships outside the Si- donian harbour, the Phoenician outside the Egyptian harbour, and himself took up his position near his mole. His artillery was turned on from the towers, and the Tyrians answered from towers constructed on their battlements to face the mole. The city walls were about 150 feet high and of great breadth, and it was not easy for ships or horses to convey battering-engines near enough to make a breach, as large stones were cast down by the besieged. Alexander stationed ships to seize these stones and convey them by means of cranes into deep water, but Tyrian divers cut the cables and made anchoring impossible. Red-hot brass shields full of burning sand and boiling filth were thrown on their heads, but at last the besiegers got close enough to batter down the wall, and the besieged, in the last straits, deter- 84 Conquest of Syria and Phoenicia mined to make a surprise sortie from the Sidonian harbour. In their despair they even thought of making human sacrifice to the gods. At about midday, when the Macedonian sailors were scattered in quest of necessaries and Alexander usually retired to his tent, a few Tyrian vessels, with picked rowers and fighters, sailed out quietly in single file and attacked the Cyprian fleet. It happened, however, that Alexander on that particular day did not stay in his tent. He saw the Tyrian ships sail out, and hastily manned a few vessels, with which, before the rest were ready, he sailed right round the island to the rescue. The Tyrians sought to fly back into harbour, but the King forced them to an engagement and disabled most of their vessels. He then sailed round the city walls testing every part, for he had not been able to shake the wall opposite the mole, and found a weak portion on the south side. A breach was made and Alexander tried to throw a bridge over, but was beaten back. On the third day following he made attacks on all sides to distract the enemy; breaches were opened, bridges thrown on to the broken wall, and, Alexander among the foremost to mount, the wall was scaled. Admetus, the first to ascend, was struck dead with a spear as he stood cheering, and the citizens disputed every inch of the way with the enemy. Advancing along the battlements, Alexan- der descended to the royal palace. Meanwhile the Phoenician and Cyprian fleets had forced their re- spective ways into the two harbours and captured the Tyrian fleet. The Tyrians for some time hurled stones from the roofs of their houses down on the 85 Alexander the Great Macedonians, and made a last stand at the fane of Agenor, father of Cadmus, the legendary founder of Tyre and Sidon as of Grecian Thebes. Eight thou- sand were slain, the rest, about 30,000, sold into slavery. Massacre commonly followed conquest in the East then as it does to-day, but Alexander was in so blood-thirsty a mood that his own soldiers were re- volted. Thus fell Tyre, after a seven months' siege, at the end of July or beginning of August 332 B.C. The coast regions of Palestine submitted, with the exception of Gaza, which the eunuch Batis had forti- fied and considered stronger than Tyre. It was the last city met with by the traveller going from Phoenicia to Egypt, at the parting of *the desert and the sown,' and stood on a lofty mound surrounded by a strong wall. Alexander, expert now in sieges, at- tacked the foundations of this town, built upon the sand, and caused a counter-mound to be constructed; on this the artillery used at Tyre was placed, and after a two months' siege this city also fell. The in- habitants stood fighting for long after the Macedonian army had entered, as they knew from the fate of the Tyrians what alternative to death there was for them to choose, and nearly 10,000 were slain. Their women and children were then sold into slavery by the conqueror. These terrible examples made other cities chary of bidding Alexander defiance, and were t heref ore necessary to his conquests, but as Alexander's gigantic plans unfold he seems to get farther and farther away from normal human nature. At Gaza he appears to have shown barbarous cruelty, perhaps partly on account of the two wounds he had received during the siege. Tyre rose again to greatness in 86 THE SIEGE OP GAZA Conquest of Syria and Phoenicia Roman times, but Gaza, which Alexander used as a frontier fortress, was then still desolate. If, how- ever, Alexander was to conquer the Persian Empire, and we do not know at this day the weight of his reasons for doing so, these deeds of cruelty were mercy, for numbers of cities that would have fought for Persia now peacefully submitted. Even his treatment of Batis (if true) may have been calculated. It depended on the satrap of Egypt as to whether that province should be organized to resist Alexander or be delivered over to him without a blow being struck. When Mazaces heard of the barbarous treatment suffered by the commander at Gaza, he probably laid aside any ideas he had entertained of resistance. 87 CHAPTER VII: Alexander in Egypt (3 32-331 b.c.) DARIUS had sent again to Alexander, offer- ing to divide his empire with him and sug- gesting the Euphrates as the boundary. Alexander must return his royal captives, and should receive 10,000 talents (over £2,000,000) and the hand of the daughter of Darius. Parmenio ventured to say: "I should close with those terms if I were Alex- ander." He received the scornful answer: "And so should I if I were Parmenio." None of his followers had the slightest suspicion that Alexander was burning to push on to the world's end, over Media, Hyrcania, Bactria, Sogdiana, the Hindu Kush and India to the Ocean. He sent answer to Darius that he could not offer what no longer belonged to him, and prepared to leave Syria. Before he went he organized Syria and Phoenicia as he had done Asia Minor, leaving Parmenio to ad- minister Syria until his return. Greece was plunged in despair at the news of the battle of Issus, and vari- ous Lacedemonians, Thebans and Athenians who had joined the Persians and were captured at Damascus, were in great fear, but were treated with great mildness, the Thebans being at once liberated. The conqueror was glad of this chance of clemency toward men who, through his action, were without a city. From the immense treasure taken at Damascus, the Macedonians tasted their first of the sweets of Asiatic luxury, and they were already dreaming of 88 Alexander in Egypt the delights of sacking Susa and Babylon. For those who survived the prize seemed indeed worth it; they Httle dreamed that in the few short years they were to spend in obtaining wealth, the strength of manhood would become exhausted in their veins, that most of their veterans would have fallen by the way, and their young men become old men through their superhuman exertions; and it was a paltry pittance that in the end those who survived were to take back to Macedonia. From 615 B.C. until this day the immemorial civihzation of Egypt has been under the control of foreign powers, Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Turk, and Briton, and from its position and fertility it has always proved a valuable possession to its owner, although from ^'l^ B.C. until this day religious questions have always cheated difficulties between governor and governed. Difficult as it is now for Bri- tain to administer a country largely Mohammedan, it was just as difficult for Persia to keep order two and a half millenniums ago among a populace who worshipped Isis and Osiris. It was Persia's best milch-cow, but she had been foolish enough to treat the native deities with scorn. Hence beneath out- ward calm, Egypt was seething with insurrec- tion, and Alexander appeared almost as a liberator. The satrap had heard the news of Issus, the head- long flight of Darius, and the submission or sack of the cities of Syria and Phoenicia, and, no doubt fear- ing lest he should meet with a fate similar to that of Batis at Gaza, he surrendered Egypt to the King as soon as he appeared upon the frontier. Alexander had ridden by land with his army, while the fleet 89 y^ Alexander the Great sailed to Pelusium. He garrisoned Pelusium and sent the fleet up the Nile to the capital, Memphis, then a fair and flourishing city, the rival of Babylon and Susa, fourteen miles south of the site of the present Cairo. After a journey across the desert to take Heliopolis, the sacred city of the Sun, Alexander, too, went to Memphis, where he pleased the natives by sacrificing to Ptah and Apis. The Greek gods were gratified by games and a musical festival, to which famous athletes and artists came from Greece at the King's summons. He did not stay long among the glories of Memphis, but set about one of those enormous practical projects which prove him as much ruler as conqueror. Among the Persian treasures taken after Issus was an extremely rich casket, in which Alexander had decided that nothing less precious than his copy of Homer's Iliad might be kept. Homer, pleased with this little attention, proved, as Plutarch says, *' neither an idle nor unprofitable companion to him." A grey-headed old man appeared one night in a vision and recited to him this verse from the Odyssey: An island lies where loud the billows roar. Pharos they call it on the Egyptian shore. Alexander had decided to settle a Greek colony in Egypt, and had for some time been pondering where it should be. This dream, he said, resolved his doubts. Pharos, where the Ptolemies afterward built the famous lighthouse which became one of the Seven Wonders of the world in the place of the great wall of Babylon destroyed long before, was to be. 90 Alexander in Egypt the site of the new city of Alexandria. Alexander had foreseen that a new port on the Mediterranean might grow up to take the place from which Tyre had fallen, and therefore he placed the Greek city, which he built to hold down Egypt, upon the coast. He chose Pharos, then an island, now an isthmus, as the most easterly point at which it was practicable to build a sea-port, it being just out of reach of the heavy deposits from the mouths of the Nile. As Pharos was seen to be too small he founded his city, in 331 B.C., on the mainland opposite, where the town of Alexandria stands to-day, between Lake Mareotis and the sea. The King led the way, and one follow- ing him scattered barley as he went, to mark the boundaries. A flock of birds carried away these grains, and Aristander, who attended Alexander wherever he went as soothsayer foretold from the omen that strangers would flock to the new city and that it would nourish many countries. Alexander himseK marked out the site of the market-place and temples, and appointed the gods to whom the temples were to be dedicated. Until the foundation of Cairo in the tenth century, and, to a large extent, until the discovery of the route to India by the Cape of Good Hope inl498, Alexandria was the greatest trading city of the world. Until Egypt became a Roman province in the first century B.C. it had also enormous political importance. It was the capital of the Ptolemies until Cleopatra came to her end, and was known for subtlety, refinement, gaiety and vice more strangely mixed than in Rome in the days of Nero or France under the last Valois. The residence there of the Ptolemies also made 91 Alexander the Great Alexandria the capital of Greek culture, and so it remained until the conquest of Egypt by Moham- medans in the seventh century a.d. The Egyptian climate was peculiarly suited to the preservation of antiquities, and it would be difficult to estimate the world's debt to Egypt for the preservation of manu- script copies of the Greek classics, even as the earliest Greek paintings saved to us are those of mummy faces in Egyptian tombs. We should know much less of the Greeks had Alexander not conquered Egypt. After the rule of the Ptolemies had long passed away, Alexandria was the stage for many important events in the early development of Christianity. Here they sought to break St Katharine on the wheel; here Arianism raged; and here the learned Hypatia suffered death at the hands of the Chris- tian mob. Alexandria was to be associated with ends which Alexander could not have foreseen, but its founding was a great conception, and its success points to the sagacity of the founder. His city rising, Alexander left Cleomenes in charge, but one important act remained to be done in Egypt. The ancient Pharaohs had been 'Sons of Ammon,' and Alexander wished to conciliate the natives of what would be his second richest province by becom- ing a *Son of Ammon' in his turn. This act of affiliation was never understood, and created almost as great a scandal as if an English administrator of Egypt to-day should turn Mohammedan. The motive which modern minds ascribe to the King was never gues&ed at by the men of his time. There was a deep mental chasm between this commander and his soldiery, and even between him and his generals, 92 Alexander in Egypt and they believed in their ignorance that he wished to set himself above ordinary humanity. In the only serious revolt which Alexander ever had to face, the army bade him go and conquer with his father Ammon. Alexander never explained the motives of his actions; he was always right, and he insisted on unquestioning obedience, and therefore he left the Macedonians in their ignorance, an ignorance at which he could hardly complain, for it served him better than if his followers had known his aims; even a pretence to deity brought with it some political advantage. But once when he was wounded he said to some of his intimate friends, "This, my friends, is real flowing blood, not ichor, 'Such as immortal gods are wont to shed.'" The oracle of Ammon in the Oasis of Siwah was one of the most famous in the ancient world. Perseus and Heracles had both visited it in their adventurous careers, and Alexander imitated them. He advanced from Alexandria along the desert tract by the coast for about 180 miles, to Parsetonium, where he re- ceived the submission of Cyrene. Then he turned inland. The way lay south over burning, shifting sands, with never a tree or a hill for a land-mark, and where neither rain fell nor dew. When Cambyses led his army that way, it was said, the whole desert rose like a sea, and 50,000 were swallowed up in the sands. On the third day water fell short, but miracles, even the best authorities say, befell the Macedonians. Rain fell; ravens or snakes (there are different accounts) appeared and led the way, and the party arrived at the Oasis of Ammon. In this delightful 93 Alexander the Great spot of palm and fountain, the King sought the oracle, and obtained from him the confirmation of his sacred status as an Egyptian sovereign. He told his followers that the oracle had told him many im- portant things that he could not divulge, and gave them permission to question it in their turn. The state of their minds may be guessed from the fact that one and all asked the priest if Alexander were really of divine origin, and were one and all informed that they were to treat him as Son of Ammon. Some words which Alexander is reported to have let fall are the best commentary on this episode. God, he said, was the common father of us all, but more particularly of the best of us. It was from this time that some of the Macedonians dated Alexander's unbearable lord- liness. Ready as they were to honour the repre- sentative of the tribe in all due and accustomed ways, they were fiercely opposed to any assumption on his part of oriental monarchical manners. The Greek was unhappy in the service of a despot, and their young king was becoming a despot. Some, however, think that this change only came after Susa and Persepolis fell into his hands and the Great King had died a miserable death in an abject flight before him. The Macedonian nobles, whom Alexander was raising up to be rulers of mighty provinces as he went on, were many of them to feel with the nurse in Medea: Rude are the wills of princes: yea Prevailing alway, seldom crossed. On fitful winds their moods are tossed: 'Tis best men tread the equal way. Aye, not with glory but with peace May the long summers find me crowned: 94 Alexander in Egypt For gentleness — her very sound Is magic, and her usages All wholesome: but the fiercely great Hath little music on his road. And falleth, when the hand of God Shall move, most deep and desolate. The Son of Ammon returned from the oasis to Memphis, where he assumed the pschent of Pharaoh. Ambassadors of the Greek states, who had sent a golden crown to the conqueror after Issus, had come to seek favours, and recruits sent by Antipater arrived. In Egypt Alexander established a govern- ment of divided command, not being willing to entrust this rich province to a single person; the Romans followed Alexander's policy in this, never sending any man of proconsular rank to administer Egypt, their 'granary.' In the spring of 331 B.C. the King left Egypt and marched back into Phoenicia. At Tyre his fleet met him, and great celebrations and games were again held. Here at last he granted the Athenians' request f or'the release of their fellow-citizens. Several honours were bestowed, and Ptolemy, who was after- ward to rule over Egypt, became at this time one of the chief body-guards. Then the King struck into the interior for his final struggle with Persia. 95 CHAPTER VIII: The Con^ quest of Persia (331-330 b.c.) IN June or July of 331 B.C., after an eleven march, Alexander arrived at Thapsacus on the Euphrates. Darius had assembled an army half as large again as his former vast force. Wild Bactrians, Scythians, Indians, Syrians, Cappadocians and other far-away peoples had flocked across moun- tain, desert and river to Babylon at the summons of the Great King, and a million foot-soldiers and forty thousand horse-soldiers filled the plain of Mesopo- tamia. When he heard of Alexander's approach Darius sent the brave Mazaeus to prevent him from crossing the Euphrates, and to ravage the country so that the Macedonians could not proceed by thp direct route to Babylon, a way it was also improb- able that they would take on account of the heat. He himself passed with his army over the Tigris and sought for a favourable battle-field. This he found at Gaugamela, a village on the River Bumodus (now the Ghazir), near the city of Arbela (Erbil), famous in history as the place where he and Alexander fought their last fight for the possession of Asia. The battle (1st October 331 B.C.) is often called Arbela, but more correctly Gaugamela. The scene was a vast plain, unbroken by tree or ravine, and Darius, remembering Issus, levelled to the ground any slight eminences. Alexander had sent a force to make a bridge over the Euphrates. It was not quite completed on account of Mazaeus' presence on the other side, but at the appearance of Alexander, Mazaeus and his 96 The Conquest of Persia 3000 cavalry fled. Alexander passed over, and, after a few days' rest, hastened across Mesopotamia, reduced by Mazaeus to a wilderness of fire and ashes, to the Tigris (Dijleh), the 'great river' of the East, known to the Hebrews and Persians as *the Arrow' on account of its swiftness. Nineveh, long in ruins, stood on its banks, and, centuries later, Bagdad was to rise lower down the stream. There was no one to resist the Macedonians' crossing, but they had great difficulty in finding a ford, and then the water was so deep as to reach to the horses' heads, and the current so strong that horse and rider were nearly swept away, while their packages were whirled down the stream. It was a hard moment for the men when they saw their cherished booty diminishing on the racing river and disappearing in its waters. Alexander led the infantry at this critical moment, and motioned in a manner that there was no disobey- ing for them to hold their armour above their heads and let all else go, pointing out the route with his hand as his voice could not carry over the whole force. *Menelaus of the Loud War Cry' would have been useful at this crisis. Had Darius appeared, one won- ders what would have become of the Macedonian army. The soldiers seem to have felt very dismal after their crossing, and as an eclipse of the moon followed (20th September 331 B.C.), they were entirely dis- heartened. Alexander, to cheer them, offered sacri- fices to the Sun, the Moon, and to the Earth, whose doing it was, and the omens in the sacrifices were declared to be most propitious. The real cause of the eclipse was known to the King, who had carried away some Egyptian astrologers, the astronomers 97 Alexander the Great of the time, in his train; but he did not attempt to explain the phenomenon to the crowd, who would probably have thought the explanation impious. The army then turned south toward Babylon, with the Tigris on the right hand side. As it proceeded toward the plain of Gaugamela, the wife of Darius, a delicately-bred woman little fitted for these hard journeys, died, and the sorrow of the conqueror and the splendid funeral he gave her can hardly have been of much comfort to old Sisygambis and the high- spirited Persian children who were now eating the bitter bread of captivity. A eunuch escaped to make the heart of Darius still heavier by telling him the news. A panic, of which the cause has never been dis- covered, seized the Macedonian army at this point, and Alexander was forced to give the soldiers time for rest, and exercise all his wits to restore their courage. At last he succeeded, and the camp was broken up. Mazaeus, who watched them from a neighbouring height, fled at their approach to warn Darius; and the Macedonians, occupying the summit he had left, looked eagerly out to see the Persian army congregated in the plain below A thick mist at first hid the immense multitude, but its noise filled their ears, and even the royal heart of Alexander misgave him. Then the mist cleared and the myriads of the enemy came clearly into view, and, miracu- lously enough, as the soldiers of the Iliad would have thought, Ares himself, 'bane of mortals,' filled every Macedonian heart with longing for battle. The Macedonians gave great shouts, which the Persian host returned, until the distant forests and 98 The Conquest of Persia mountains re-echoed with horrible war-cries, the neighing of battle-steeds and the clanging of armour. At this crisis of his life Alexander appears to have hesitated for the first time as to his course of action. He expressed himself as doubtful in the council of generals, and took Parmenio's advice as to recon- noitring the ground to see if the enemy had laid any traps. Parmenio said boldly that a fight by day- fight was out of the question; the soldiers must not be terrified by the view of the numbers of the enemy. They had faced the Great King at Issus, but the Great King could not deploy his forces in a mountain defile; here he could surround the Macedonians at his ease; the Macedonians must take him by surprise at night. Nearly all the generals applauded, but the King replied with what seemed childish folly to these old men who did not yet know his depth. He had probably learned through his excellent intelligence department that Darius ex- pected a night attack, and that morning would find him weary with watching. Secondly, a night attack was a risky thing: who knew what panic might not fall on his own troops fighting the strange tribes of the East by the wild light of the camp-fires, and in a district which the enemy knew far better than they "i Lastly, the moral effect of a victory in the light of day would be infinitely greater than that of a stolen victory. It was with all this weight behind his words that Alexander answered in the grand manner: *'I steal no victory!" The generals shrugged their shoulders, but the King's laconism roused a better fighting spirit than any amount of unfolding of policy would have done. Alexander the Great Thus, while the Persian army kept vigil in the plain, shining afar with lights and fires, Darius and his officers going from watch to watch to see that all was well and invoking the aid of Ormuzd, the Macedonian soldiers were ordered to repose. Ari- stander and the King sacrificed to Zeus, Athena, and Victory, and Alexander was some time before he could compose his mind to slumber, but he finally sank into a profound sleep. His generals came at sunrise to receive their orders, and were surprised to find sleeping him who generally roused the camp. They even suspected that he desired to avoid the combat, and depression fell on all. At last Parmenio was forced to wake him, and even reproached his master. Alexander, however, rose fresh as the morn. He explained his deep sleep by his freedom from care now that he had no longer to chase Darius. Calling for his cuirass, which he only bore in im- portant engagements, he soon appeared at the head of his army, and never had his face so shone with gaiety. The scythed chariots seemed from a dis- tance to be the most formidable part of the Great King's preparations, and Alexander prescribed similar tactics to those employed against the barbarians' wagons four years before in the Shipka Pass. When the chariots, drawn by swift war-steeds, wheeled in among their ranks, the soldiers were to open if possible and let them pass through; if not possible they were to frighten the horses by their cries and stop their advance with flights of arrows. The Indians had furnished Darius with about fifteen elephants, now first heard of in the history of war- fare; "not only were these mighty beasts formidable The Conquest of Persia combatants, but their smell caused such terror to horses that they were much used against cavalry. The Macedonian line was extended to the utmost, so as to prevent out-flanking, and a special force was placed in the rear to guard against that great danger. Alexander's army numbered about 40,000 infantry and 7000 cavalry. As usual he commanded the right wing, where were the cavalry Companions under Clitus, Parmenio the left with the cavalry of the Thessahans and Greek alHes, while the phalanx was in the centre, with the archers on the wings and in the second array in the rear. Darius sat on a raised seat in his chariot in the centre of the army, according to the Persian custom. Round him were his * Kinsmen' and the Persian Guards, carrying spears with golden apples at the butt end, Indians, Albaiiians, Carians, and Mardian archers. Beyond them stretched TJxians, Babylonians, Sitacenians, Armenians, Cappadocians, and Greek mercenaries, the Greeks this time stationed in the van, in two divisions, one on each side of Darius and the Per- sian contingent. For once Alexander had no stream to cross before the enemy's eyes. After his inspection of the force opposite him, he moved to the right, and the Persians followed, moving to their left. The King con- tinued this manoeuvre until Darius had been nearly drawn away from his prepared battle-field, and ad- vanced cavalry to prevent Alexander moving farther. A general cavalry engagement followed, in which the Macedonians suffered severely from the Scythians, but at last broke the enemy's line. Meanwhile the chariots had been directed against the phalanx, and for a while their scythes mowed down and mutilated Alexander the Great the Macedonians. The Macedonians in some cases seized the horses, while their archers directed fatal showers of missiles against steeds and charioteers, but also succeeded, as they had been ordered, in opening their ranks and letting these Eastern engines of war roll through to be thereupon overpowered in the rear. The much-feared Persian chariot did a negligible amount of damage. Parmenio, with char- acteristic fussiness, sent to inform Alexander that his baggage was in danger, and Alexander impatiently replied, "Tell Parmenio that if we conquer we shall recover our possessions and seize the enemy's. No one must be taken from the battle for this purpose; and bid him forget such unworthy things and fight as becomes so distinguished a Macedonian soldier. '* The Persians, therefore, were left with a free hand at the baggage, slew the guards and set the prisoners free. They found Sisygambis, to whom they an- nounced the joyful news that Darius had won a great victory. They failed, however, to deceive the old woman or in any way to rouse her. She listened in silence with immobile countenance, and refused to leave the Macedonian camp. Perhaps some instinct of the horrible fate awaiting the last of the royal house of the Achsemenids may have possessed her. When Alexander had at last made a break in the front line of the Persians, he formed a wedge of the Companion cavalry and the bristling phalanx and led it into the gap. The charioteer of Darius was slain, and the battle became a carnage. Alexander had tired out several horses and was fighting like Heracles, smiting down those who resisted him and those who turned their backs to flv. Darius himself The Conquest of Persia fled with the first, this time in clear cowardice, as he left the way to Babylon open to the invader. The great majority of his host followed him, hidden in the cloud of dust they raised; by the shouting and cracking of whips alone could the Macedonians tell which way the Great King's guard had passed. A far more pitiable fate awaited Darius than death upon the field. Parmenio vexed Alexander again by sending for aid just when the King was anxious to follow after Darius, for much would have been spared the army if this had been the end of the chase. Mazseus, on the Persian right wing, had been threatening the Thessalian cavalry with destruction, but lost hope and fell back when he saw the flight of Darius. The spirits of the Thessalian cavalry revived and they were eager to pursue, but Parmenio re- strained them, and Mazseus escaped with a few of his men to Babylon. Alexander appeared in time to slay the greater number in the hottest engagement of the day. While Parmenio took possession of the Persian camp, Alexander advanced to theriverLycus (now the Great Zab), a tributary of the Tigris, through the mul- titude of the dead and the wounded abandoned in the flight. The losses of Darius were estimated at 300,000. After allowing his men to rest until midnight Alex- ander made a forced march to Arbela, 69 miles from the battle-field, and here, though he captured the treasure of Darius, with his chariot, spear and bow, he did not succeed in finding the Great King. The Macedonians were soon driven away from this neigh- bourhood by the smell from the battle-field, where vultures and dogs were disposing of the Persian slain. Darius fled neither to Babylon nor Susa, but 103 Alexander the Great northward through the mountains of Armenia to Media, there hoping to gather a fresh force. He meditated in the philosophical way of a Persian that wealth and prosperity had a corrupting effect on human character, and accepted his lot with the characteristic resignation of the East. Alexander did not follow: the way to Babylon was open, and thither he and his army eagerly advanced. Maz^eus, his son, and other magnates came forth to surrender it, and Alexander peacefully entered into the city of Semiramis, Bel, and Nebuchadnezzar. The Baby- lonians even decked his way with flowers and gar- lands, and made rich gifts, and Alexander here also was able to take up the position of liberator from the alien Persian. There is nothing to show that the yoke of Persia had been particularly hard upon her subject peoples; the tribute she levied was not heavy, and life was so good in Babylon, for instance, that the Jews were unwilling to return to their country when Cyrus ended the Captivity. Yet Persia was hated, and the chief reason for this, besides the natural love of freedom, was that Persia had never been polite to native deities. Alexander never erred in this way. He commanded the temples de- stroyed by Xerxes in Babylon to be rebuilt, and paid his respects to Bel (the Baal of Scripture), spending an enormous amount in the restoration of his temple, for which the labour of ten thousand workmen was re- quired. He also appointed the Persian Mazseus, as a reward for his submission, satrap of Babylonia. In Babylon Alexander kept up royal state. He and his army were amazed at this immense city with its palaces and its hundred gates. Before the Persian 104 The Conquest of Persia conquest, its wall, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, had enclosed an area four times the extent of London, and was three hundred feet high, with lofty towers rising still higher all round its circum- ference, and, we aie told, twenty-eight yards wide. This wall had gone, apparently pulled down by the Persian conquerors, but there still remained the inner wall, itself of remarkable loftiness and of such width that on the top, among the towers which rose all round it, the picturesque quadrigae of the ancients could pass each other. The swift Euphrates ran between pleasant embankments through the city, the two parts of which were united by a bridge accounted a miracle of engineering skill; and above Ihe river, round an ancient palace, rose the famous Hanging Gardens of Semiramis. In this city, adorned by the old Babylonian kings with so many marvels, the Macedonian soldiers who had conquered all Asia rested from their labours and took their pleasure, the fearful inhabitants eager to gratify their least whim, and Alexander anxious to let them see that so much fighting and weariness was worth while. Five weeks were spent in this way while he was waiting for the arrival of fresh troops. Then he made a twenty days' march to the capital, Susa (the Shushan of the Book of Esther), on the river Choaspes, a stream famous for its sweet water. Here he found the principal Persian treasure-house, containing fifty thousand talents, a sum equivalent to from fifty to a hundred million dollars. Objects brought from Greece by Xerxes came into his possession, and he sat at last upon the throne of Darius, a proud moment for Greeks if they could los Alexander the Great have accepted Alexander's work. It was a bitter moment for loyal Persians and for the captive Queen-mother and royal children. Alexander, see- ing them droop more and more each day, recom- mended weaving as a distraction to Sisygambis and the princesses, as he remembered how much it occupied his mother and female relatives at home; but their tears fell thick and fast at this insult to their noble birth, and he had great difficulty in assur- ing them of the kindness of his intention. He could not consider himself free to follow Darius until he had visited the old centre of Persian power, Persepolis, the town built by Cyrus. He had to fight his way into Persia proper, for the passes which led from the plain of Mesopotamia into the highlands of Persia were held by the warlike Uxians, who would not let the Great King himself pass with- out payment. They hurled down missiles on the conqueror's army, and after he had chased them away he had to face Ariobarzanes, the royal satrap of Persis, at the head of 40,000 infantry and 700 cavalry in the Persian Gates. Ariobarzanes had entrenched his men behind a wall which he had caused to be built across the pass, and awaited Alexander as the Thessalians had awaited him at Tempe six years before. Now, as then, Alexander circumvented the enemy. A Lycian prisoner, who had been a shepherd in these parts, led part of the army in the night by a forest track known only to the herdsman, while Craterus remained with the rest of the army to deceive the enemy. It was a rough, precipitous track; snow fell and a bitter wind stung the Macedonians, who began at length to doubt the io6 The Conquest of Persia Lycian's purpose; and it was after memorable hard- ships that when morning dawned the httle army burst forth on the enemy at the head of the pass and took it unawares. Craterus swarmed up from the plain, and a terrible carnage took place on both sides. The King in this January of 330 B.C. received news that Persepolis was to be pillaged to prevent its wealth falling into Macedonian hands, and, leaving his infantry, he dashed forward with his cavalry, marched all night, and arrived at the Araxes at day- break. By the destruction of several hamlets the materials were obtained for a bridge, and Alexander hastened on. As he approached Persepolis a large body of captive Greeks was allowed to come out to meet him, and they were a sight to inspire terrible revenge in their fellow-countrymen's breasts. They were mutilated in the most horrible way, no longer possessing human faces, and nearly all refused Alexander's offer to send them back to Greece, where they knew they could only shock their old friends. They, at least, saw in Alexander an avenger sent by Zeus, and the King did all he could to make them happy in this outlying part of his empire. On the day following, Alexander entered the city from which the troops of Darius the Great and Xerxes had set forth to conquer Greece, and it was found to surpass even Babylon and Susa in the treasure it contained. Camels, it is said, had to be fetched from those places to carry away all the wealth — one hundred and twenty thousand talents — in the public treasury. Stories now utterly discredited tell us that for a while the King allowed free massacre and pillage, but Persepolis had made no opposition to 107 Alexander the Great him and even as he had to be severe where a city was held against him, so it would have been fatal to his career of conquest if he had slaughtered those who surrendered. The Macedonians feasted and revelled in Persepolis as in Babylon, and Dry den has described the great revel and bonfire with which their visit closed. At 'Alexander's Feast' the young King and his war-worn officers lay listening with varying emotions to the musician Timotheus: War, he sung, is toil and trouble; Honour but an empty bubble; Never ending, still beginning. Fighting still, and still destroying: If the world be worth thy winning. Think, O think it worth enjoying: Lovely Thais sits beside thee. Take the gifts the gods provide thee. Whatever the actual temper of the Macedonian army, never has the mood of soldiery in an hour of relaxation been better caught than by Dryden. The poet continues, much on the lines of the legend, that at last 'the mighty master' smote the chord of vengeance; the King, stirred to madness, rose and grasped a flambeau; Thais with a torch led the way, and the palace of the Kings of Persia, built of cedar wood, was soon flaring in the night-sky. Others believe that this was no outrage of the wine-cup, but a calculated and impressive act. The Persian inva- sions had been the deed of the Great Kings, not of their subjects, and Alexander emphasized this fact by the symbol he chose for destruction. He took no vengeance on Asia, now his own kingdom. Some- what sobered by their outburst of frenzy, the Mace- io8 THK DEATH OF DARIUS The Conquest of Persia donlans went on their way. Their King was now the Great King, and it only remained to find his dispos- sessed rival. They sought him at Ecbatana, the capital of Media, where he had been residing since Gaugamela, but he had fled northward to the Caspian Gates, meaning to lay waste Parthia and Hyrcania and hide in Bactria. Alexander stayed some time in Ecbatana, which was the summer residence of the Persian kings. Its palace was adorned with capitals and entabla- tures of gold and silver and with silver tiles and wainscottings, and the city, with its strong citadel and seven walls, seemed to him a fitting place to make his treasury. Here he left the Persian horde, amounting to nearly half a hundred million pounds of Enghsh money in value, in charge of his childhood's friend Harpalus, who was to prove too weak for such a gigantic trust. The King sent home from Ecbatana all the soldiers of the Greek allies who wished to leave him, but retained, with or without its will, his own national levy. The dis- missal of the allies made no constitutional difference to his presidency over Hellas. Parmenio was left with a large portion of the army to attend to various affairs in Media and then march through Cadusia to Hyrcania, while Alexander and his force pushed on after Darius. He made such speed that horses and men fell by the way, and on the eleventh day he arrived at Rhagse, near Teheran, a day's march from the Caspian Gates, only to find that Darius had passed through. After five days' rest, Alexander left Media, now a part of his empire, and marched by the Caspian Gates into Parthia, a state of little importance in his time. As news arrived that 109 Alexander the Great the Persian nobles under Bessus, satrap of the rich province of Bactria, had revolted against Darius and put him in chains, he pressed forward at a still more mad rate, taking with him only the Companions and a few picked infantry, marching the whole night until noon the next day and the whole of the second night until he found a cold camp-fire where he had expected to find the Persians. He learned that the Greek mercenaries and a few Persians had remained faithful to Darius, but, powerless to protect him from Bessus, had left him. Despite the most fearful fatigue Alexander hastened on, riding all night and until noon next day, when he came to Thara, the Parthian village where Bessus had encamped the day before. He learned that the enemy also was fleeing night and day, and determined to try a short cut through the desert, leaving the infantry to follow by the route Bessus had taken. Before daybreak he came upon the Persians, unarmed and defenceless. Stabbing the hapless Darius, whom they were conveying in a covered carriage, Bessus and his companions left him and fled, and the train of pursuers passed by. His horses dragged the Great King away from the road- side,and,desertedbyeveryfriendandservant,hedied. There was a story of a courteous, dying message to Alexander delivered to the Greeks who found him. Alexander, when he came up, threw a cloak in pity over the body of this king, robbed of his purple robe and lying dead in the dust in a condition sad enough for a beggar. Like Croesus, Darius had experienced the utmost from the mutability of fortune, and, like Cyrus, Alexander showed respect to fallen greatness, rendering every honour to his dead rival's corpse. CHAPTER IX: Alexander in Central Asia (330-327 b.c.) ALEXANDER was now lord of the empires which had belonged to the Assyrians and Babylonians, Lydians, and Medes, not yet of the whole extent of the Persian Empire. The Persians had extended the Median realm over valley, desert, and mountain to the far-away Jaxartes, now the Sir Darya. To that stream Alexander also marched, and the reduction of this district was to take him a disproportionate amount of time. Having hunted down the Mardians in their lairs in hill and forest, and forced them by terrible threats to restore Bucephalus, which they had stolen, he advanced to Zadracarta, the capital of Hyrcania, situated on the south shore of the Caspian Sea. Here Persian magnates and their suites poured in to do homage to the new sovereign, and the Greek mercenaries, who had remained faithful to Darius but would not serve under Bessus, sent offers of surrender. Bessus, it appeared, had assumed the style of Great King. Alexander was about to enter Bactria, when news of Persian risings compelled him to dash southward into Areia and Drangiana. At Prophthasia, the capital of Drangiana, the grow- ing discontent of the army received its first reply from the King. A rumour that Alexander meant to return home had caused such joy while they were in Hyrcania that Alexander had been seriously alarmed, but his eloquent reproaches had rendered officers and men again anxious to follow him wherever he wanted to go. He, moreover, drew a picture of all Alexander the Great the newly conquered nations rising and attacking them if they retreated, and of Bessus becoming sovereign in his place. For a while the impression of this speech lasted, but the Macedonians had other causes of uneasiness, and it is said that Alexander's inspection of his subjects' correspondence left him in no doubt about their opinions of himself and his actions. Alexander seemed to consider the simple ways of the old kings of his race now unworthy of him, and had begun to imitate the state of the monarch he had dispossessed. He encouraged Macedonians who addressed him to prostrate themselves in the Asiatic way, and soon he accustomed the generals who had conquered so many peoples to render him what the Macedonians considered menial services. The first ruler in antiquity to lay aside distinctions of race to such an extent, Alexander placed Persian officials, whom his men thought it was leniency not to slay, over nearly all the provinces of Asia. Worse than all, he assumed on state occasions, and expected those about him to wear, Asiatic dress — a purple vest, loose scarlet trousers and a purple robe, a white mixture in the vest being a royal prerogative, as was the wearing of the tiara erect. He even used the seal of Darius for Asiatic business. To men of a later age these seem the deeds of one who was both a statesman and a cosmopolitan born out of his time; but the Greeks so despised the Asiatics that they were outraged and scandalized. The old soldiers cried out that they had lost more than they had gained by their victories, since they were turned into slaves. Also tales are told of terrible debauches by which Alexander saddened the Macedonian soldiery. Alexander in Central Asia and the readiness of Asiatic royalties to take life seemed to have come to him with the garb they had worn. Now, at Prophthasia, a plot was formed against his Hfe, and led to the execution of Philotas, son of Parmenio, who was worshipped by the army. Brave, tireless and munificent, the common soldiery had probably adored him all the more for his haughti- ness, but he had become hated among his equals, and his father had once said to him, "My son, to be not quite so great would be better." He had once spoken presumptuously to the King, who had never forgiven it: Alexander had questioned him as to what the oracle at Siwah had said to him, and hav- ing, like everybody else, questioned the priest as to Alexander's deity, he replied that Zeus was sorry for men who had to obey one who considered himself more than a man. When a young officer, who had got to know of the plot, went to the royal tent to in- form the King, Philotas came out, and the young man thought it quite sufficient to warn this great officer. Was not Parmenio the King's chief general, and had not his other sons. Hector and Nicanor, died in the royal service? Philotas commended him and re-entered the tent, where he conversed alone with the King for a long time, but mentioned no word of the conspiracy. The young officer waited for a day or two, and then informed some other courtier, and the news was at once carried to the King, together with the story of Philotas' suspicious conduct. Alexander wept bitterly, and after an interview with Philotas, summoned a council to which Philotas was not admitted. Craterus, to whom Alexander gave his chief trust, took up the brief against Philotas and "3 Alexander the Great urged his death. On the following day the soldiers were assembled as a court-martial, for in peace the Macedonian people had the right to try Macedonians in capital cases, and in war this power belonged to the army. The King disclosed the plot against his life, and his auditors listened in tears and anger, and when he told them that Parmenio was at its head and Philotas was its chief instrument, a great murmur of indignation rose. When, however, depositions were taken and Philotas appeared in no way incriminated, silence succeeded to the murmuring. Philotas was brought forward in bonds, and Alexander left the court. Having determined on his death, he did not wish to hear his justification of himself. The strongest point in Philotas' defence was that he and Parmenio had before carried such information to the King, as in the case of their suspicion of Philip, and been mocked for their pains. The enemies of Philo- tas were busy haranguing the crowd, this impression- able crowd of uneducated soldiers, and at last the old soldiers of this famous cavalry general called for his blood. Hephaestion, Craterus, and Coenus, who were all to rise on the ruins of the house of Parmenio, superintended his torture, and for long neither groan nor confession was wrung from him, but in the end he cried out that he and Parmenio had been maturing a plot against Alexander ever since they left Egypt. He was utterly broken down by the torture, and Alexander, concealed behind a tapestry hanging, called forth in his wrath, "Are you so mean-spirited and effeminate, Philotas, and yet can engage in so desperate a design?" He and all the others convicted by the depositions 114 Alexander in Central Asia were then slain by the Macedonians with their javehns. After Philotas was dead, the army had a reaction. They remembered the debt of gratitude which Alexander owed to the aged Parmenio, who had now lost all his sons. The King, however, sealed and dispatched Parmenio's death-warrant. He must surely have been convinced of Parmenio's guilt, for he was wise enough to know that a faithful servant of Parmenio's gifts was priceless. He may, however, have feared from Parmenio effectual opposition to his wider plans, as he appears to have snatched at the opportunity of getting rid of him. It is difficult to believe that he was simply wrought upon by the enemies and rivals of this house. When the head of Parmenio was brought into the camp, a commotion in the army was with difficulty repressed. The deed was a milestone in Alexander's career; not only did the nations tremble at his name, but his own people became fearful under the King's eye. He adopted Persian methods of mutilating captives of a certain degree of guilt, and his frown, like those of sultans gone and sultans to come,' spelt death. From this time we may picture him in his Oriental costume, like some caliph of Eastern story. Hephsestion and the King's foster-uncle, Clitus, received joint command of the Companion cavalry, over which Philotas had been sole ruler, and Ptolemy took the place of another fallen suspect, Demetrius, in the body-guards. Alexander appointed a governor of Gedrosia (Baluchistan) in the South, and in the spring of 329 B.C. marched, fighting, through Southern Afghanistan (Arachosia). He founded a city of IIS Alexander the Great Alexandria in 'this province. Physical features have so changed in Afghanistan and India that it ;s in vain, to try and identify most of the places mentioned in Alexander's story, but this Alexandria may have been corrupted into Kandahar. The Hindu-Kush was known to the ancients as the Paropanisus, the Himalayas as the Imaus, and, with the Pamirs, the whole system was called the Indian Caucasus, associ- ated in Greek legend with the sufferings of Prome- theus and the childhood of Dionysus. At the foot of the Hindu-Kush Alexander founded another city of Alexandria. In the spring of 328 B.C. he led his army over the heights of the Hindu-Kush, possibly by the Khawak Pass, a task from which Heracles might have shrunk. The very Promethean rock was pointed out, and the Macedonians were now in a position to sympathize with the god who had suffered so much to give humanity the great blessing of fire. Many of them lost limbs or life with cold, and the rest ate herbs and mountain sheep or slew their horses. Bessus was laying waste the country beyond them, and Alexander pushed on despite snow and ice. Below lay the beautiful province of Bactria with its plentiful fruit-trees and fields of corn and meadows, now part of Afghanistan; but the Macedonian armyhad to march through the desert tract of its western border, and here suffered terribly from drought and heat; and Alexander's heart misgave him as he saw the con- dition of his troops. He, at least, took more than his share of the toil of the march,^ and refused to drink when no water could be got for others; and he sent back to Macedonia and Greece the oldest Mace- donians and the Thessalians. ii6 Alexander in Central Asia When Alexander approaelied the yellow Oxus, the boundary between Bactria and Sogdiana (now Bokhara and Turkestan), Bessus fled_across the stream, burning his boats, and, after conquering Aornus and Balkh (Bactra), the Bactrian capital, Alexander prepared to follow him. The Oxus, best known to most of us as the scene of Matthew Arnold's Sokrah and Rustum, entered the Caspian, not the Aral Sea, in Alexander's time. It was the broadest stream which the Macedonians had yet had to cross, and it took five days to convey the army over in primitive boats of hides stuffed with straw, native skiffs like those in which Alexander had crossed the Danube. In Sogdiana, the frontier province of the Persian Empire, Alexander carried out an even more far-fetched vengeance than at Persepolis. A century and a half ago the Branchidse of Miletus had given to Xerxes the treasures of the temple of Apollo to aid him in his invasion of Greece, and pitiable indeed would have been the fate of these traitors if the Greeks of their own time could have got hold of them. Xerxes, therefore, settled them in this farthest prov- ince of his realm where no Persian thought that any of their fellow-countrymen would ever come till the world's end. There their descendants still lived, unmixed with the natives, and speaking Greek. Strangers in a strange Eastern land, they received the Macedonians with rapture; they cannot have dreamed that the sins of their fathers would have been visited upon them after this lapse of time; and Alexander committed a .crime for which no excuse of any sort can be made, by slaying them and razing their city to the ground. 117 Alexander the Great Alexander had lost more men in his march through North-East Persia than in many of his battles, but he had now come to the Jaxartes, which was to be the north-eastern frontier of his as of the Persian Empire. On its southern bank, commanding the route to Northern Persia and the pass over the Tian-shan mountains, by which South-Eastern Europe has com- munication with China, he built Alexandria the Ultimate, on the site of the modern Khojend. As he was planning this town he heard of the rising of Sogdiana behind him, and immediately turned back. The inhabitants sought refuge in their seven cities; in two days five of these fell, and at two of them all the male inhabitants were slain, while the women and children and other booty were carried to the Mace- donian tents. At the largest of the seven, Cyropolis, the frontier city founded by Cyrus, Alexander brought up his military engines to batter down the high wall, but noticing that the bed of the river, which flowed through the town, was dry, he determined to creep into the town by its means in the night. All the Sogdian soldiery were engaged on the walls when he entered with a picked force by this route, and the city was in his hands before the garrison was aware of his presence. Still they made a valiant resistance, and it was only through lack of water that the citadel was surrendered on the following day. Both Alexander and Craterus were wounded. After the capture of the seven towns Alexander returned to the Jaxartes, and in twenty days fortified his new city, which he peopled with natives, Greek mercenaries, and worn- out Macedonians. From the opposite bank a gather- ing of 'Scythians' (it is thought that this may have ii8 Alexander in Central Asia been the first emergence of the Turk in history) defied him, as the Getse had done on the Danube, and Alexander crossed for a mihtary demonstration here as there. He ordered skin boats to be prepared, and, despite his feebleness from his last wound and Arist- ander's warning that the omens were unfavourable, passed over and scattered the barbarians, chiefly by means of his archers. The excellent field artillery (a new thing in the history of war) protected the army as it was rowed across. The heat was so terrific that the King did not follow the flying foe; he drank some of the same sort of water that the natives drink to their detriment to-day and on which the Western traveller hardly dares to look, and fell dangerously ill. Hear- ing, however, of a fresh rising and of Macedonian disasters, he rose and laid waste Sogdiana. Alexander spent the winter of 328-7 B.C. in Bactria and Sogdiana, but failed in Hellenizing this typical Eastern country; indeed, he merely permanently weakened brave and warlike peoples, so that the nomad Magyars and Turks from the desert steppes north of the Oxus found no difficulty in overrunning it later, and it passed from hand to hand until Russia annexed the greater part in the nineteenth century. Sogdiana is, for the most part, a desolate region of desert, steppe, snow-capped mountain and glacier, but between it and Bactria runs the life-giving stream of the Zarafshan, the 'Strewer of Gold,' with the beautiful cities of Samarcand and Bokhara, so rich in mediaeval memories, on its banks. Afrosiab, adjoin- ing Samarcand on the east of that fair Moslim city, is the site, of the Maracanda of Alexander the Great's travels. Bessus fell into Alexander's hands this 119 Alexander the Great winter. He had won the dislike of his fellow- traitors, and, in fact, they could fly no farther: Scythia was no home for luxurious Persians. They therefore sought to save their own skins by surrendering Bessus, who received what ingenuity of punishment a king could devise for one who had been traitor to a king; finally, according to one account, his nose and ears cut off, he was taken to Ecbatana to die on the cross. Commanders and men were worn out by the labours and hardships of the last few years, and Alexander showed the effects of the strain. He was too pur- poseful to be often merry, but he became increasingly grim and forbidding, and he felt deeply the chasm between him and his friends; Hephsestion alone followed him cheerfully in his policy of conciliating Asiatic peoples to his rule by adopting their habits and customs, and he could trust few beyond him to deal with Asiatics. Craterus, whom he respected more than Hephaestion, clung to his old Macedonian ways, and Alexander said that Craterus was the King's friend, Hephsestion the friend of Alexander. On his part he showed ideal tolerance for their weak- nesses; Hagnon wore silver nails in his shoes; Leonnatus employed several camels to bring him powder out of Egypt for use when he wrestled; the dead Philotas used to have hunting nets a hundred furlongs in length; most of them used precious oint- ment instead of oil after the bath. He pardoned their various smallnesses, avarice, and folly, but would sometimes chide them for avoiding all bodily labour, saying that it was both noble and royal; and when they were not fighting he organized great hunting expeditions, so that sloth might not corrupt Alexander in Central Asia his Macedonians, who were now lords of many slaves. Now, amid the magic peace of Maracanda, Alexander still further darkened his shadowed life by the murder of his old friend Clitus. He and his courtiers sat late at a drinlving-party, and the King was listening, in approval, and, by his own confession, in drunkenness, to one who was praising him at the expense of Castor and Pollux, while some one was witty about the officers who had been defeated by the Sogdianians. Alexander was blind to the anger brewing among the older men, who, however, sought to calm down Clitus, ill-advised to choose this moment to flout the King. He told him that he owed all his glory to his soldiers, and taunted him with the fact that he had saved his life at the Granicus, although he pretended to be son of Ammon; and above all the clamour that burst out over his head, he shouted that if free men might not speak their minds, Alexander "had better live and converse with barbarians and slaves who would not scruple to bow the knee to his Persian girdle and his white tunic." Alexander, unable any longer to restrain his rage, threw at him one of the apples that lay on the table, and looked about for his sword. Some one had hidden it, and others tried to hold him while he called aloud in the Macedonian dialect, which he only used when very perturbed, for his guard. The trumpeter dared to neglect the order, and friends forced Clitus out of the room. Clitus, however, rushed back, and, hfting the curtain hanging over another exit, cried out a bitter line from Euri- pides. Snatching a spear from one of the soldiers standing near, Alexander hurled it at the curtain, and Clitus gave a cry and fell dead. The King Alexander the Great came suddenly to himself and saw the table where a short space before they had been carousing and laughing, his companions looking at him with white, startled faces, and, lying dead in the doorway, his old foster-mother's brother, Clitus. Seizing the pike with which he had slain Clitus, he sought to take his own life, of which he suddenly sickened, but his guards prevented him; and for three days he lay moaning and refusing food, calling ever on Clitus and Lanice, and saying he had made a noble reward for all her care in rearing him, since she had lived to see her sons die fighting in his behaK, and her brother slain by his hand. At last he put away his grief; in dreamy Maracanda it was easy to persuade him that this thing, like all others, was appointed by the gods, and a sophist was found to teach him that the King, being the fountain of justice, can do no wrong. Alexander's deepest conviction about this affair came to be that he was not responsible for his own action. He had been incited to crime by a god. Like Orestes, he was hunted for a while by the Erinyes, and they sat evermore on his threshold waiting to avenge. He had now twice tasted the blood of his friends, and at Bactra, Callisthenes the Olynthian, Aristotle's nephew, who had followed Alexander in order to chronicle his deeds, fell into disgrace. He seems to have treated Alexander to the same sort of snub which Solon dealt out to Croesus, and Alexander in these days was little likely to enjoy it; Aristotle had said of Callisthenes that he was an excellent speaker but had no judgment. There was a great deal of nobility in his character, and he died like a martyr for THE MURDER OF CLITUS Alexander in Central Asia a worthy cause, the right of free speech and action in an Asiatic court such as Alexander's had become. He was ardently opposed to the custom of prostration, and at a wine party, where the subject was specially brought up by Alexander, he made an impassioned speech against it. At the close of the feast, Alexander drank the health of the circle of guests, and handed the golden goblet first to those who were in sympathy with him in the attempt about to be made. They drank, prostrated themselves, and received a kiss from the King. Persian and Macedonian followed each other until it came to the turn of Callisthenes, who drank, summoned up his courage, and did not prostrate himself. The King thereupon refused him the kiss, and he left the feast, saying lightly, "I have but lost a kiss. " The occasion chosen to destroy this churlish courtier was the Conspiracy of the Pages. The corps of pages was a school of generals, and several boys who were to be kings after Alexander's death were then of this band, and they had deter- mined to murder Alexander because he had caused one of their number to be whipped. There seems to have been no evidence against Callisthenes, who was charged with inciting them and put to death. The King seems to have absorbed the new lesson of Maracanda that he was fountain of justice, and that all his deeds were consequently just. There had been much in Callisthenes' conversation to enrage him; he was very sore at the talk against him in Athens, and at this time he even vaguely threatened Callisthenes' kinsman, his own old teacher Aristotle. Alexander was again forced to cross the Oxus, but after some more hard fighting the last opposition 123 Alexander the Great sank. In the spring of 327 B.C. lie captured tlie Sogdian Rock, from the dizzy heights (18,000 feet) of which the defenders called jeeringly to ask him if he could fly. Choosing a hundred men who had been mountain shepherds, he offered rewards of from one to ten talents to the first ten to reach the top, and otherwise incited their valour. They climbed the rock in the most precipitous and therefore unguarded place, in the night, fixing their iron tent pegs in the earth or hard-frozen snow as they mounted and tying strong ropes to the pegs. Thirty perished in the climb, and, buried in the snow, were never seen again. The rest reached the summit at dawn and managed to stand and wave their white linen flags to the King watching anxiously below. The barbarians gathered round them and imagined that they had indeed some arrangement for flying, and, in their fear and amaze- ment, surrendered. Alexander, to whom the terms Greek and Barbarian were becoming more and more mere words, married Roxane, the beautiful daughter of the Bactrian chief, Oxyartes, by the simple Mace- donian ceremony of slicing a loaf and eating one-half while she ate the other. Oxyartes' influence and this marriage reconciled the Sogdianians and Bactrians to the rule of the foreigner, and Alexander might at length leave the district. The head of the last rebellious chieftain was brought into the camp by his wife, whom Alexander caused to be driven away in disgrace. 124, CHAPTER X: The Conquest of the Punjab (327-326 b.c.) PERHAPS owing to his early death Alexander left no abiding impression on Turkestan or Afghanistan, and now he was going to do an equally ephemeral work in India. It is only fair to remember that he would have known how to control this conquered territory, and that had he left a son of full age Macedonia might have remained the head of the wealthiest empire the world has ever seen. East and West, had Alexander lived, would have been united in the bonds of trade as they were under the Romans, while eastern countries that never bowed to the Roman came under the yoke of the Macedonian. In the light of actual events, however, all Alexander's labours beyond the Euphrates seem vain. In the late spring of 327 B.C. thi^ little western torrent rolled out of Afghanistan and with its accre- tions made for a country even more alien than Sogdiana to the land where it took its rise: Indian sages were to try to discourage Alexander by telling him that every man possessed as much of the earth as he stepped on, and that in the end he possessed no more than he could lie down upon. Alexander set forth more like a sultan than a Greek king; he con- tented himself with an army of 120,000 men, at the most exaggerated computation, and probably only half that number, but the most gorgeous raiment was worn ,and the horses were trapped with gold and silver. The Greeks knew nothing of India, but believed that the Indians surpassed the Persians in magnificence; hence, probably, this show. The 125 Alexander the Great proud soldiers must almost all have been in Eastern dress by this time, since their Macedonian clothes were long ago in rags. Crossing the Hindu-Kush by the Khawak and Kaoshan passes, Alexander advanced to the Kabul (then the Kophen) and sent a herald to Ambhi (Omphis), known to the Greeksas Taxiles, from the country he governed, and to other chiefs dwelling on the farther side of the Indus, bidding them submit to the lord of the world. Taxiles at once offered submission, and remained on Alexander's side throughout his sojourn in India. He and some other chiefs wished for Alexander's aid against the great Indian chief, Porus, of whom we shall hear later, and they did very well for themselves by aiding the Macedonian. Alexander was one or two days' jour- ney from the Khyber Pass, by which Jenghiz Khan, Tamerlane, and so many other foreign conquerors were to descend in future ages into the rich valleys of India, but, it is thought, this pass was not used in Alexander's time. He divided his army, and sent half forward under Hephsestion and Perdiccas to fight its way up the Kabul valley across the mountains and prepare a bridge for his crossing of the Indus. Many months were spent by the remaining force in this wild district in fighting even more desperate than that in Sogdiana and Bactria, before Alexander was ready for the entry into India. He as well as Ptolemy and Leonnatus were several times wounded, despite the fact that whole villages were destroyed in order to daunt the ardour of the warhke inhabitants. Once he had encamped in a forest near the city of Nysa, now lost, in the Suwat, bordering the slopes of the Koh-i-Mor, and, on account of the cold, huge 126 The Conquest of the Punjab fires were made. The cedar-wood monuments of the Nyssean dead in the forest caught fire, the flames spread, and the distant glare woke the citizens to the knowledge that the enemy was at their gates. Noth- ing could have saved them, had not the Macedonians, to whom Dionysus was most dear, learned the name of their city. Dionysus had been hidden in the thigh of Zeus on a mountain which he named Nysa after his nurse; and on Mount Mhos ('thigh'), now Koh-i- Mor, near by, the Macedonians found the god's sacred vine and ivy. The war-worn soldiery, ever emotional as children, went wild in a Dionysiac frenzy. After the manner of the Bacchanals of their native land they covered themselves with ivy, crowned their heads with the vine, danced the mystic dances, and sang the sacred hymns. Those who stood by, at first wondering, quickly imitated their example, and for ten days India saw the foreigners engaged in a ritual sympathetic to her own manners, and perhaps truly derived from her before the memory of man. Nysa was allowed to re- tain her independence, though it was understood that Alexander might call for a contingent of soldiers. At last all the remaining inhabitants of the district abandoned their cities and took refuge on Mount Aornus ('The Birdless'), most probably Mahaban, near the Indus, about 7000 feet high and 23 miles in circuit, and possessing arable land and abundance of water. There was but one means of ascent and that a difficult one; the early conqueror identified by tradition as Heracles had found this natural citadel impregnable, and Alexander solemnly pro- ceeded to outdo Heracles. Some of the natives offered to guide him up for a reward, and he readily 127 Alexander the Great offered the large sum of eighty talents. Ptolemy and a small force were sent with the guides and estab- lished themselves where an assault could be made, building a stockade in front of them and lighting a beacon as a signal to the King; but before Alexander could join Ptolemy both forces were simultaneously attacked by the Indians. At last Alexander got a letter carried to Ptolemy by an Indian deserter, and managed to join forces with him, but their joint attack failed. Multitudes of trees were hewn down to make an enormous mound whence to project missiles from the military engines, and the Mace- donians then captured a small eminence on a level with the citadel. As the mound approached the rock the natives determined to retreat by stealth. They sent with offers of surrender to beg for a truce, and com- menced their flight. Alexander, as usual, had intelli- gence of their doings, and as they deserted their citadel he entered it, and then dispatched troops to chase the fugitives. Many were slain, and the rest perished by leaping in their panic down the precipices. We can estimate Alexander's intrepidity by remembering that portions of this country remain unsurveyed to this day on account of the fierceness of the inhabitants. By this time the bridge over the Indus was ready. Alexander and the Romans after him usually passed over wide streams by means of bridges of boats, formed by mooring a suflScient number of vessels in place by anchors of stones, lowered in wicker baskets from the prow of each vessel, and laying planks and cross planks on them until they were firmly bound together, strong gangways being placed at each end of the bridge. When the King arrived at the Indus, the The Conquest of the Punjab river b ank was crowded with cattle and elephants sent as a gift from Taxiles, who surrendered his city Taxila to him. Alexander crossed the Indus (probably at Ohind) at daybreak in March 326 B.C., almost a year after his departure from Bactria. The permanent boundary of his empire he in all probability intended to be the Indus, and was now merely exploring, imagining that he was near the Eastern Ocean; but he was thwarted in his Indian schemes, and we are really ignorant as to what may have been his original aims in entering India. India, where no European traveller had ever ven- tured before in human record, was a great surprise to the Macedonians. They found a people blacker than any other Asiatic race, tall, simple and frugal in habit, and more warlike than any people with whom they had come into contact. Its marvels of vegetation, its brilliantly coloured birds and strange beasts threw them into amazement, and the tropical rains through which they had to march for their first battle in the Punjab plunged these hardened veterans into the deepest misery. Taxila is probably com- memorated by the vast ruins near Rawalpindi, a city which was a famous centre of Hindu culture. Alex- ander rested and held sacrifices and games, and then left a garrison there to hold the Indus. From the Indus the army marched in the sultry April weather to the Hydaspes (Jehlam), the next great river of the Punjab. Here its further progress was opposed by the heroic king Porus, who ruled from the Hydaspes to the Acesines (Chenab), the district of which Lahore is now the centre. Porus was, we are assured, four cubits and a span high, and, mounted upon an elephant of the largest size, appeared to have as suit- 129 Alexander the Great able a mount as another man upon a horse. He stood on the farther brink of the Hydaspes with a force of foot-soldiers and cavahy not half so large as that of the Macedonians, but possessing a large number of chariots and a host of loudly roaring elephants. All the fords of the stream were guarded by his troops, and never had Alexander met a braver, more deter- mined or more skilful foe. On the other hand, an Indian prince, however brave and skilled was pre- destined to fall before a master of every sort of war- fare and expert in stratagem like Alexander. The latter sat down as if to wait for the subsidence of the stream, swollen with incessant rains, and at the same time made a pretence of night surprises. For many nights Porus, hearing noises and seeing moving lights on the farther bank, kept his men in readiness for battle, but as night after night nothing happened, he ceased to take notice of these alarms. This was Alexander's aim. He had perceived at a bend in the Hydaspes, about seventeen miles from his camp, a projecting headland covered by a dense grove, with a well- wooded island in front. Here he determined to cross, while at the same time a feigned attempt at crossing was to be made by Craterus from the camp. Under certain conjunctures, Craterus was really to cross. With Perdiccas, Lysimachus, Seleucus and other generals, the Companions and a picked force of infantry, Alexander made a secret march at night, going for some way inland and returning to the stream at the chosen place of crossing, where an ex- temporized fleet was collected. A furious thunder- storm and the heavy rain aided the attempt, and the army was not perceived by the sentinels of Porus until 130 The Conquest of the Punjab it was beyond the island. They flew off on the long ride to Porus, but the Macedonian had time to com- plete his crossing and draw up his army. His boat was the first to touch land, but he soon discovered to his dismay that he was not on the mainland but on another island, and it was some time before the ford was found. The stream was so high with the rains that only the heads of the infantry and horses were to be seen above the water, and as he climbed up the slippery shore Alexander is reported to have cried, "O Athenians, would you believe what dangers I incur to merit your praise?" He might have made such a speech at the Granicus, but hardly now, al- though he may have hoped that when his schemes were one day perfected Aristotle would at last under- stand that they were great, and wonder, like all the world, at the man who had the strength to carry them out. Directly after the Macedonians' landing the son of Porus rode up with a hastily gathered force, but was repulsed and slain. The news was borne to Porus, who was torn with doubt as to the fitting course to take. Opposite him was Craterus, seem- ingly prepared to cross, above was Alexander slaying his subjects. He determined to take the risk of leav- ing Craterus opposed by a small force with a few elephants which he thought would prevent his cross- ing. When he came to a fitting battle-ground, he halted and drew up his forces, placing in front, as he saw that the Macedonian horse was approaching, a line of two hundred elephants, standing one hundred feet apart, to frighten the horses; behind and beyond the elephants he placed infantry, flanking the in- fantry with cavalry. The chariots arranged in front 131 Alexander the Great of the cavalry on each side were of no use on account of the muddy ground. When Alexander heard the tambours and saw this novel array, he waited for his infantry to come up, but wished it, despite the ele- phants, to be a cavalry battle, and Porus was unable to prevent his making it so. Alexander himself led the cavalry charge against the enemy's left front, while he sent Coenus round to attack the same force in the rear. The Indian left had to face both ways, and speedily fell into confusion. They fled for shelter behind the elephants, who stood solid and massive like towers in a wall. The elephant drivers sought to urge their beasts against the Macedonian cavalry; the phalanx intervened, and the animals made fearful inroads into their serried ranks, raising the combatants with their trunks and handing them to the Indians. The Macedonians, however, with axes and swords chopped at their trunks and limbs, and, at last, mad with the pain of arrows and spears, the huge creatures began to trample under foot friend and foe. They injured the Indians more than the Macedonians, until those which had not been slain began to back out of the battle, facing the enemy and littering a shrill, pathetic, piping sound. Alexander then surrounded the foe with his cavalry, and at his order the phalanx with linked shields pressed the Indians back, and cut down all who did not succeed in flying through the gaps between the masses of cavalry. When Craterus perceived that Alexander was win- ning, he brought over the rest of the army, and his fresh troops slaughtered the flying foe. Rarely had the soldiers inflicted such carnage, and among the twenty odd thousand Indians lying in the thick mud 132 THE PHALANX ATTACKING THE CENTRE ON THE HYDASPES The Conquest of the Punjab round their dead elephants and broken chariots, were two sons of Porus. Porus, richly armed and accou- tred, still sat, a gigantic figure on his great elephant. He had fought on until all were slain or fled, and now, having received a new wound, turned his beast about to depart from a lost field. Alexander sent Taxiles to bring the King to him, but he tried to slay this old foe. Alexander, moved with admiration, took some pains to get the valiant chief to return, sending his friend Meroes, and at last Porus rode slowly back, while Alexander came out to the front to meet him and admire at close quarters his handsome figure and lofty stature. Porus greeted him as one brave man would another, and when Alexander asked him how he expected to be used, he answered: "As a king," a reply which struck the strongest chord in Alexander's breast. Not only was he magnanimous enough to confirm Porus in his rule, but he added to his terri- tories. Thus was fought the great battle of the Hydaspes in June or July 326 b. c. Two cities were founded near each other, one, Nicsea ('Victory'), now Mong, where the battle took place, south of the Karri plain, the other, Bucephala, on the opposite bank of the Hydaspes, in memory of Bucephalus, which died at this point, worn out with age and toil. Bucephala became a great city, and has been identi- fied with the modern, Jhelum, where an ancient road terminates in an ancient ferry. Somewhere Alexander founded a city to the memory of his dog Peritas. After a month's halt on the shores of the Hydaspes for rest, games, and sacrifices, Alexander left Craterus to superintend the building of the new cities, and went on his way across the Punjab. Populous towns Alexander the Great and large villages surrendered as lie approached. He crossed the Acesines at a point where it was nearly two miles wide and as tempestuous as a mountain torrent. Those who went over in skins had an easy- passage, but many of those who went in wooden boats perished, as the skiffs were dashed to pieces on the rocks. Porus, nephew of the defeated king, was still in revolt, and Hephaestion was sent against him, while Alexander went on over the Hydraotis (Ravi), where he had much trouble with the Kathseans and other tribes. The city of Sangala, which stood on a hill, was protected by a triple palisade of wagons and a large force of Indians. The Indians mounted on the wagons and shot at Alexander's cavalry as it advanced, and Alexander saw that it was not suitable warfare for this arm, so he dismounted and led the phalanx against the wagons. After a hard struggle he captured the palisade and besieged the city. At night a flight took place as he expected, and he cut to pieces the small party that left the city; then he formed a double stockade, surrounding Sangala except at one point where there was a lake, and at the open part he placed a strong guard. He was preparing his battering-engines when a deserter told him that a second attempt at flight was to be made on the following night at the lake. Here Ptolemy was accordingly stationed, with orders to give the signal if anything happened. In the middle of the night the gates were opened and the Indians stole out. Ptolemy blew his bugle and drove them back with great slaughter, while the army partly threw down, partly scaled, the wall. In the fight Lysimachus was wounded and many other officers were slain. 134 The Conquest of the Punjab The city was razed to thegroundby the Macedonians. Still the King pressed on, and now came to the river Hyphasis (the Beas) ; but here the over- wearied army refused to march farther. In vain Alexander represented that the distance from the Ganges and the Eastern Sea was not great, and pleaded with his soldiers to follow him onward. "Glorious," he told them in the eloquent way that had so often nerved them in the moment of danger and inspired them to bear extraordinary hardships, "Glorious are the deeds of those who undergo labour and run the risk of danger; and it is delightful to live a life of valour and to die leaving behind immortal glory." All their conquests were thrown away if they went back now; he and his soldiers had shared their toil and danger and also their rewards, and when they had traversed the whole of Asia, he himself would lead them back to Macedonia, giving them gifts to exceed their hopes; and, he concluded, thinking of his colonies, "those who remain here I will make objects of envy to those who go back. " For once the King's harangue left the army ,unmoved. A long silence followed, for the soldiers dared not speak. Several times he asked the opposition to express its views, and at length Coenus, after an artful preamble, thus stated the case: "O King, you see yourself how many Macedonians and Greeks started with you, and how few of us are left. Of our number you did well to send back the Thessalians, because you saw that they were no longer in the mind for new labours. Of the other Greeks, some have been settled as colonists in the cities which you have founded, and not all of them remain there of their own free will. The Mace- 135 Alexander the Great donian soldiers and the other Greeks who still con- tinued to share our labours and dangers, have either perished in battle, become unfit for war on account of their wounds, or been left behind in diJfferent parts of Asia. The majority, however, have perished from disease, so that few are left out of many; and these few are no longer so vigorous in body as of old, while they are still more exhausted in spirit. All those whose parents still survive feel a great yearning to see them once more; they feel a longing for their wives and children and for their native land itself, surely pardonable with the honour and dignity they have acquired from you, returning as great men, whereas they departed small, and as rich men instead of being poor. Do not lead us now against our will ; for you will no longer find us the same men. Let the King carry to the home of his fathers these victories so many and so great, and then set forth afresh with fresh young troops and go to the uttermost parts of the earth. " At this cheering broke forth, and the more broken down of the old troops wept as Ccenus touched on their wretched condition. Weak voices prayed Alexander as their king, chieftain, and father to lead the army back to Macedonia. Alexander, annoyed at his general's freedom of speech, but more at the temper of the troops, dismissed the conference, and on the following day played his last card. He announced that he was going on, that he did not intend to insist on their accompanying him, and that those who wished were at liberty to go back and say in Macedonia that they had left their King alone among his enemies. Then he retired to his tent, where he remained until the third day, not admitting 136 The Conquest of the Punjab even the Companions, and expecting hourly the sub- mission of the army. He was to receive it in similar circumstances later at Opis, but at this time the soldiery simply awaited his reappearance in silence and resentment. At last the King reappeared. He must have resolved to go back, but he caused the auspices to be taken for the crossing of the river. They were said to be evil, and announcement was made to the army that, as the gods were unfavourable to further progress, the King had decided to return. A shout of joy rose from the radiant troops; they rushed in crowds to the royal tent and blessed Alex- ander because he, the unconquered, had allowed him- self to be conquered by them. It was one of the bitterest moments in his life, but he showed no sign. As a jest or an advertisement, Alexander caused enormous camps to be traced, with gigantic beds for men and preposterous mangers for horses, when he left the Hyphasis, in order that stories might grow up in India of thevisit of some giant race; and twelve great altars were erected, and sacrifices made to the twelve Olympians. The Macedonians bade a solemn farewell to this far-away In lian stream, and Alexan- der, having 'rounded the goal of his course,' turned westward in September 326 B.C. from a land to which he was never to return with the fresh young troops suggested by Coenus. Three more years and this rest- less life was to be over. It is of some interest to the idle to speculate on what would have happened had Alexander continued his onward march. What would have happened to the King '^ And what would have happened to his Western empire.'^ Would he have lived if he had not gone back to Babylon? 137 CHAPTER XI: The Return to Susa (326-324 B.C.) THE Alexandrian Empire was now sketched out as far as extent went, and Alexander turned his marvellous energies for the short remaining portion of his life to its organization, although vast schemes of commercial expansion and geographical discovery were on the stocks when he died. The cities he established were from the first as much trading centres as garrisons, and were prob- ably intended by him to be so. When he finally returned to Pella — if he ever intended to return to that unattractive spot, after seeing so many wonderful cities — the riches of the East were to roll naturally in,to Macedonia through the conduits he was laying down. Western commerce with India was for the first time to be possible, and Alexander was about to make a determined effort to circumnavigate Africa when he died. His decision to avoid wearisome land marches for his army by sea voyages must have led in itself to the acquirement of new geographical knowl- edge. He was also building a fleet for exploration of the Caspian. By the side of schemes like these, the picture of his ignorant soldiers struggling along under the sacks of booty which were to them all that war meant, is a pitiable one; but King and common soldier fared much the same in the long run. The King passed away with all his schemes unfinished, and the men either lost their booty on the way or perished before arriving home with it. Porus was made viceroy of the country as far as the Hyphasis. The Hydraotes and Acesines were X38 The Return to Susa recrossed by the army, rejoicing in the thought that in a few months' time all their labours would be over, and they might settle down as rich and famous men for life. On the shore of the Acesines, Ccenus fell ill and died, and the monarch, who buried him magnifi- cently, in his usual way, could not refrain from say- ing that the return toward Macedonia for which Coenus had pleaded had not done him much good. Nor did Alexander intend the army to march home by the quickest route. Besides draggin,g part of the force through the wilds of Gedrosia, it is thought that he meant to lead the army home to Macedonia via Syria, Egypt, Africa, Spain, and Italy, and there are signs that for himself he intended to make Susa his permanent capital. At the Hydaspes Alexander stayed some time to superintend affairs at his two new cities and prepare for the heroic expedition which was to prove one of the heaviest labours of the long-suffering army. Men of his time speculated, as modern men have specu- lated, about the sources of the Nile, and Alexander must have thought that river of extraordinary extent, as he at first imagined that the Indus was the same stream. The natives, however, told him that the Hydaspes and Acesines united and joined the Indus, which then flowed southward and formed a delta at its issue into the ocean. He also learned for the first time that by traversing this ocean westward, keeping near the coast, vessels would arrive at the mouths of the Euphrates and Tigris (which did not un,ite at that time) wheuce it was a short march to Susa. The King had never seen the ocean, and like every other Greek had heard plentiful stories of its perils, the chief 139 Alexander the Great of which were its supernatural horrors; nevertheless there opened before his mind's eye the vast possi- bilities of ocean travel, and he caused this new route to be explored. The whole army went southward toward the ocean, down the Hydaspes and on its banks. With its barbarian accretions it fwas npw a huge force. Craterus rode along the right bank of the stream at the head of one contingent; Hephsestion on the left bank at the head of another with two hundred elephants, while the fleet, amounting to nearly two thousand craft, was under Nearchus, Onesicrates, who wrote an unreliable account of the King's tr^vdls, being pilot of _the royal ship. At the approach of dawn of an October day in 326 B.C., as the last troops were embarking, Alexander offered sacrifices to the rivers Hydaspes, Acesines, and Indus, to Poseidon, Amphitrite, the Nereids, and Ocean, as well as to Zeus Ammon. and Heracles. When he had embarked he poured out a hbation to the river deities from a golden goblet, and ordered the signal for starting seaward to be given by the trumpet. The In lians accompanied the army for a considerable distance along the banks of the stream, dancing and singing their native songs. The cries of the boat- swains and the plash of the oars reverberated long after the last Macedonian boat had passed out of sight down the river. At the juncture of the Hydaspes with the Acesines several vessels were wrecked by the roaring, dashing waves, and Alexander might have felt that he had fought with these streams as Achilles had striven with the Scamander. When the fleet had again reached calm water, the King went on an inland ex- 140 The Return to Susa pedition against the Mallians and nearly lost his life in a momen,t of reckless valour. He marched sixty- miles through waterless country, captured the chief city and slaughtered all the inhabitants, while Per- diccas took another town from which the barbarians had fled. Then, chasing the fugitives before them, the soldiers sped on to the Hyarotis, forded it, and rushed onward, slaying, till they came to a stronghold of the Brahmins and drove its defenders from their walls. As the Indians withdrew into their citadel, a few Macedonians rushed in with them, but fought their way out again. Alexander then brought up his siege engines and ordered scaling ladders to be placed against the walls of the citadel. He himself was the first man to leap down among the enemy. The soldiers quickly followed, and nearly the entire body of defenders, about five thousand, were slain. Other sieges and battles followed, and one day Alexander, again the first to mount a scaling ladder when besieging a Mallian stronghold, was left alone with Peucestas, Abreas, and Leonnatus, through the ladder breaking with the weight of climbers beneath. Aloft in his glittering armour, a mark for every missile, there seemed to be only one thing for the King to do, and that was to slip down among his friends as they called to him to do. Instead, he leaped suddenly down over the wall into the hostile city. It was magnificent, but was it war? It seems almost im- pertinent to put such a question to such a warrior, but his army did not hesitate to ask it when they had got him safely out again; they seem, indeed, to have feared that he had become indifferent to life, for, in their remonstrance, they laid the greatest stress 141 Alexander the Great on his responsibilities. Meanwhile, like some myth- ical Norse hero, Alexander was fighting below, single- handed, against a host. A tree, as he had no doubt calculated before leaping down,, gave him a certain amount of cover. The Indians thronged round him, eager to dispatch the dragon that had devoured Asia, but he slew those who approached. They were forced to draw back, and from a distance threw missiles; thus he stood, with his back to the wall, surrounded by a little heap of corpses, when the three who had climbed up behind him sprang down to his assistance. Abreas was instantly transfixed by an arrow and fell dead, and Alexander was now pierced through the breast-plate. He fought on though dizzy with loss of blood until he fell swooning over his shield. Then Peucestas leaped in front of him, holding over him the sacred shield brought from Troy, while Leonnatus guarded him on the other side. Both were wounded, and still no help came. The Macedonians outside were so eager to get up to help their King that all the ladders were broken, and they only mounted in the end by driving pegs into the wall or climbing in stages on each others' shoulders. When at last they leaped down on the inside, a loud cry of lamentation rose, for they saw their King lyyig on the ground as though dying. A desperate con- flict followed around his fallen body until the city gate was forced and the whole body of soldiery poured into the town. While some bore off the King on his shield, others turned to the congenial work of revenge, and not a man, woman or child in that city escaped death. When the arrow was removed from the King's wound, after an operation borne with Spartan forti- 142 The Return to Susa tude, he bled copiously and swooned again, and it was some time before he was sufficiently recovered to return to his fleet and army at the junction of the Hyarotis and the Acesines, where Nearchus and Hephsestion exercised their respective rules. A report had been carried that he was dead, and after the first lamentations for their beloved leader, the soldiers were struck with fear in contemplating their own position without Alexander in the midst of hostile nations. There was no one of Alexander's generals whom they thought for a moment of comparing with the King, and they may have shrewdly guessed that men like Hephsestion and Craterus, already bitter rivals, would have gone to war with each other rather than have accepted the other's superiority. Their direst forebodings at this time were fulfilled less than three years later, when Alexander actually died. A letter from the King arrived at the camp, but it was believed to be a forgery, and Alexander, hearing of all that was going on, and fearing a revolution, rose from his sick bed. He was carried to the Hydraotis and placed in a boat. The oars were muffled as he was too ill to bear their noise, and the usual cries of the boatmen were silenced in the long, slow journey down the Hydraotis to the Acesines. As he ap- proached the camp, the tent covering was removed so that the army might see the sick king with its own eyes. But the soldiers were incredulous, believing that Alexander's corpse was being brought to them, until they saw his hand feebly waving. Then a great cheer rose from the crowd and many wept. A litter was brought, but, ill as he was, Alexander was lifted on to a horse and rode amid shouts of joy 143 Alexander the Great toward his tent. At the entrance he dismounted, so that he might be seen walking, and the men crowded round him; some touched his hands or knees or clothes to be quite sure that he was really there and alive, while others threw the garlands and flowers of India. Afterward, severely chidden for his wanton recklessness, an old Boeotian replied for him, to the tune set by both Alexander and his father, in a line from ^schylus, "Who does must suffer." Neigh- bouring nations, including the Mallians, now sent in their submission. Sailing down the Acesines to its junction with the Indus, Alexander there founded another great city of Alexandria, with a large dockyard, and created a new province stretching from this point to the coast. Another Alexandria with another dockyard was founded as he sailed down the Indus to the sea. He sent Craterus with the worn-out soldiers to march back to Persis by the Bolan Pass and Sistan, and then spent some time in reducing the cities and sovereigns of Sind, again coming into conflict with the Brahmins, whom he learned to respect as deep philosophers. The scanty reports indicate a fierce resistance: cities were razed to the ground, and their inhabitants sold into slavery. At Patala, the ancient capital of Lower Sind, near the apex of the Indus delta, Alexander established a third great city with harbour and dockyards, for he had made a correct estimate of the wealth and importance of India. It is almost certain that he would have organized permanent trading relations between this country and the West, although he would perhaps never have found his way round by the Cape. Of 144 The Return to Susa that, even, we cannot be sure, since he usually suc- ceeded in what other people thought to be impossible. He only reigned for thirteen years, and we can never cease to wonder how far the world would have been changed had his life been of the normal span. When his third city in the new province was well on its way, he sailed down the right branch of the Indus (the Buggaur) to the sea. At a certain point, natives with primitive notions informed the Macedonians that if they sailed on for three days they would come to bitter water which spoiled sweet water, and thus they knew that the ocean was near. Most of the inhabitants fled far away, and Alexander could not even find a pilot, while a storm damaged nearly all his vessels. He was forced to send troops into the interior to capture some Indians to guide them out of the river, and finally the Macedonian fleet anchored in the last roadstead before the open sea. The JSgean, with its many islands and consequent cross currents can be as rough as the ocean, so it was not on account of its tossing that the Greeks looked forward to their coming experience with dread. Be- sides its supernatural terrors, the limitless character of the ocean appalled them. Moreover, as they came to the mouth of the Indus, they were alarmed by the phenomenon of the tide of which they knew nothing. The water came in and out like a living thing, softly raising the ships anchored on the mud, but doing serious damage to those on hard ground. After the first attack and retreat, soldiers were placed to give warning if it should happen again, and prepa- rations were eventually made on the strength of the ocean's regular hours. Alexander again made 145 Alexander the Great solemn offerings to those gods to whom, he said, Ammon had bid him render especial honour, and sailed out to inspect and to perform his priestly duties. On the open ocean for the first time in his life, he sacrificed to Poseidon and cast the golden goblet and bowls used for the libation into the sea as an offering for the safety of the fleet, which he was sending thence to the Persian Gulf on an errand of discovery of the utmost importance to his future schemes, and perhaps little thought to see again. Then he returned to the shore. Nearchus, his child- hood's friend, was to command the fleet, while Alexander marched along the desolate shores of the Mekran, an infinitely more foolhardy journey in modern eyes, digging wells and leaving stores of food for the sailors at various points of the coast. Nearchus was compelled to wait for fit weather, as the southerly monsoon was then prevailing, and early in the autumn of 325 B.C. the King bade him farewell and started on a journey that no European was to make again for over two thousand years. Indeed it is thought that it cannot have been quite so dreadful in Alexander's time as it is to-day, or his army could never have arrived alive at the other end. At first the soldiers were delighted by the myrrh trees, the odoriferous roots of nard and the exotic flowers, and another city of Alexandria was founded among the warlike Oritians; but soon the Macedonians entered a waterless waste. A few fisher-folk only were met within this desolate coast region of Gedrosia. Both Alexander and Nearchus came into contact with the Ichthyophagi ('Fish-eaters'), who lived in huts made of mussel-shells, with roofs of the backbones 146 The Return to Susa of fishes. A whale offered great architectural possi- bilities to these simple, briny people; they had dis- covered that its jawbones made a perfect pointed doorway. Their drink was sea- water filtered through gravel. The army became gradually more and more wretched, while all their King seemed to think of was catering for the fleet. They came one day to some settlement in the waste, with fields of corn standing round it, and these were harvested for Nearchus and sent with sheep and dates, all fastened together and sealed with the King's seal, to the water- side to await the ships. So hungry were the sol- diers, however, that they broke the seals and fed, nor did Alexander, when he came to hear of it, dream of punishing them, for he knew that only despair had led them to do it. No army had ever passed by this route before, unless it was that of Cyrus, said to have been destroyed in an attempt to traverse Southern Gedrosia; and the legendary Semiramis had gone this way when she had fled from India. Nothing that the army had undergone before came up to its suffer- ings here. The heat and drought destroyed the greater part of it and most of the beasts of burden. The scorching sand being intolerable, the marches were usually made in the night time, but owing to the scarcity of water they were often of inordinate length, and had sometimes to be continued during the day. The soldiers in their hunger sometimes killed the beasts of burden for food and then lied about it. Then, for lack of animals to carry them, the sick had to be abandoned on the route, and no one was left to tend them, as the safety of the whole army was at stake. Those whom they deserted cursed them as 147 Alexander the Great they went, and all their precious objects, won with blood, had to be dropped on the desert. When they found water, many of them drank themselves to death. Looking back in after-days this journey seemed like some terrible nightmare. It was in the Mekran that Alexander performed one of the most notably generous acts of his life — and it was seldom that he was not ready to make some generous sacrifice for a friend. He cared so much for big things that he was more ready than St Martin to give away his merely personal possessions, and would take a wonderful amount of trouble to do some little service for any- body. He was now leading his army on foot, so as to encourage the infantry, and was in great distress from thirst, when some soldiers came running up with a little water which they had collected in a helmet from an exhausted spring. In the sight of the whole army, looking at him with wolfish faces, the King poured out the water on the ground, and the army felt as refreshed as though each man had received a draught of it. The whole route, however, was strewn with their dead bodies, the pest coming to the aid of hunger and thirst. One night the swelling of a brook swept away most of the women and children who followed the camp. One awful day arrived when the guides confessed that they had lost trace of the route, and Alexander made for the left without knowing how far he might be from the sea. Advancing with a few horsemen, he soon came to the coast, where he found some fresh water, and the guides were again familiar with the way. At Pura, the capital of Gedrosia, the army arrived in the late autumn of 325 B.C., and rested and 148 The Return to Susa refreshed itself, its fearful labours now indeed over. Here Alexander came again into touch with the West, which he had left so long ago. Viceroys and generals with their armies arrived from the various satrapies of Asia to pay their court and bring the King fresh supplies and troops. Accusations of tyranny and extortion flowed in against these viceroys, and those against whom wrong-doing was proved were put to death, for Alexander was determined that the con- quered races should be contented under his rule. He heard also that one of the governors whom he had left in India had been murdered by the natives, but that the rising had been put down. Through Kirman, by a route of about four hundred miles in length, the Macedonian army now proceeded in a very different fashion from that in which it had painfully crossed Gedrosia. Ptolemy and Aristob- ulus, the two best historians of this period, made no mention of Bacchic revehy, but tradition said that Alexander and his friends lay prone in richly be- dizened coaches; the soldiery, merry with wine, like the officers, played the flute and danced along in garlands; while the towns through which this Diony- siac procession passed wore the gayest decorations. Craterus met the party and soon they entered the home province of Persis. Susa was still five hundred miles away, but the Macedonians might consider that they were back once more in the realms of civilization. In Persis Alexander found that revolts had broken out, and the execution of a few magnates was neces- sary. At Pasargadse the King was angered by the damage done to the tomb of Cyrus, whom, after Achilles, he honoured. Guarded by Magi, Cyrus 149 Alexander the Great lay buried in a golden coffin, with purple raiment and precious stones piled on a rich couch in the tomb, but the tomb had been pillaged and the corpse cast out of the coffin. Torture extracted from the Magi no information as to the malefactors, and Alexander was forced to content himself with commissioning Aristobulus to restore his hero's grave. He caused the old inscription to be cut again in Greek char- acters below the old one. It ran : " O man, whosoever thou art, and from whencesoever thou comest (for I know thou wilt come), I am Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire; do not grudge me this little earth that covers my body." The ruins of this simple edifice are still to be seen on the plain of Murgab, where a winged effigy of Cyrus exists on one of the pillars. The viceroy of Persis was hanged, and the valiant and faithful Peucestas was made viceroy in his stead. Peucestas even better than Hephsestion understood and liked the Persians. He preferred the Median to the Greek dress, and spoke Persian like a native. As the King approached his capital Harpalus, the Treasurer, fled, hiring a band of six thousand soldiers and taking with him to Greece, where he thought he would be safest from Alexander, five thousand talents of the public money left in his charge. From Pasargadse and Persepolis Alexander went on to Susa, where he arrived in the spring of 324 B.C. Nearchus, meanwhile, had set sail from the mouth of the Indus in October, and hugged the shore, land- ing at various places along the coast, and suffering severely from lack of water and provisions, but keep- ing in touch with Alexander and arriving safely at 150 The Return to Susa the journey's end, although he narrowly escaped missing the Persian Gulf and passing out of ken down the coast of Africa. He landed at the fertile Ormuz (Harmozeia) and, dirty and starving, his men were rejoicing in the fruits of the earth when they met a Greek who proved to be one of Alexander's soldiers. Nearchus and Archias in their rags went inland to visit the King, who could scarcely recognize them, and was overjoyed at the success of a voyage to which he attached so much importance; among other things he would be able to avoid many of the terrible land marches, which were so costly in lives, in future. He warmly commended the fleet and bade it continue its course along the Persian Gulf and up the river to Susa, a task which Nearchus success- fully accomplished. 15^ CHAPTER XII: The Last Two Years (324-323 b.c.) T[E city of Susa lies in the fruitful plain of Elam, bordered by low, bleak hills. It was from fifteen to twenty miles in circumfer- ence and rich and populous. In the columned halls of Darius, with its quaint capitals and the richly treated lotus of its enamelled bricks, Alexander held his great Marriage-Feast. At last he definitely refused to be a Macedonian conqueror and took up the position of an Asiatic king; and in the same way as he had adopted Ammon as his father to conciliate the Egyptians, and married Roxane to win over the Bactrians, so now he wedded Statira (also called Barsine), the eldest daughter of Darius, and would, it was to be hoped, become ancestor of a king of Asia in whom the Achsemenid blood should flow. His favourite, Hephsestion, married Statira's sister; Craterus took a daughter of Oxathres, brother of Darius; Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Eumenes, Nearchus, Seleucus and other Companions to the number of eighty received wives from noble Persian or Median houses. The weddings were celebrated at Susa in 324 B.C. in the Persian manner. Seats were placed in a row for the bridegrooms, and, after the banquet, the brides came into the hall and seated themselves, each one near her own husband. The King took his bride by the right hand and kissed her, and all the other bridegrooms followed his example. Then each led his bride away, and to each Alexander gave a dowiy. Ten thousand Macedonians of lower rank followed this example set them from above, married Asiatic women, and received presents from the King. 152 The Last Two Years Imitating Persian customs, Alexander, who had now two wives, married a third, Parysatis, daughter of Ochus. These mixed marriages caused no unfavourable comment in the army. On the contrary, they are said to have been the most popular thing Alexander ever instituted. At Susa, too, the soldiers who had suffered so much received splendid rewards. They had lost or squandered their booty, and a large number of them had got heavily into debt. This came to the King's ears, and he ordered that a list should be made of how much each man owed, an- nouncing that he would pay it. At first only a few gave these unpleasant statistics, as many imagined that the King was merely trying to find out about their manner of living. When Alexander learned this fact and its reason, he reproached the army for its mistrust of him, caused tables heaped with gold to be placed in the camp, and allowed debtors to receive the amounts of their debts without registering their names. Money to the amount of three or four million pounds was distributed in this way, besides large sums now given to each soldier according to the ser- vices he had performed in the King's wars. Those who received golden chaplets for personal gallantry were Peucestas, who held the shield over Alexander when he was wounded among the Malli, and Leon- natus who had distinguished himself on that and other occasions; Nearchus, who had successfully conducted the ocean voyage; Onesicritus, the pilot of the royal ship; Hephsestion, the favourite; and the remaining body-guards, increased in number from seven to eight by the inclusion of Peucestas. 153 Alexander the Great Puffed up with pride and their pockets full of money, the Macedonians now received a severe blow. They had not understood the tendency of the marriages, never looking a yard before them, but the King's next act was clear for all to see. Alexander had realized that the Persians and Asiatics generally were not bad fighting material; he may have suspected that these long-suffering fatalistic peoples could rise when led by a commander like himself to a warlike excellence that would leave even Macedonians be- hind. When he had left Persis in 330 he had set in hand the training of the boys of the conquered races, who were to be drilled in military discipline after the Macedonian fashion and armed in the Macedonian way. Now thirty thousand youths, the first-fruits of the new system, were brought by the viceroys to swell the Macedonian army. These smart soldiers excited the jealousy of the veterans, and their wrath knew no bounds when Bactrian, Sogdian, Areian, Arachotian, Drangian, and Parthian horsemen, dis- tinguished for stature, strength, skill or courage, were admitted into the Companion cavalry, the head- quarters of the Macedonian aristocracy, and Asiatic grandees were made officers in the army on an equal footing with Macedonian officers. The Macedonians whispered that the King thought as much of the Asiatics as of his own old troops, and went about nursing their grievance; but worse was to follow. After a short stay at Susa, Alexander sent He- phsestion with the main body of the infantry by land to the Persian Gulf and followed by river, sailing down the Eulseus (the Kara Su) to the sea, that stream, which now enters the Shat-el-Arab, then 154 The Last Two Years jBowmg independently to the ocean. Thence he sailed along the coast to the Tigris, which he had caused to be made navigable as far as Opis. The Persians had made weirs in the stream to prevent a naval invasion, and Alexander caused them to be destroyed, calling them base precautions — a reason as childish as the one he gave for not attacking Darius by night at Gaugamela. The ease with which he demolished the precautions suggests that he deemed them a false security. He went up the Tigris as far as Opis, where he left the stream for the land journey to Ecbatana, but before striking eastward he assembled the Macedonians and declared his intention of sending back to their homes the aged and disabled, promising to enrich them so as to make them the envy and object-lesson of all. The veterans must have suffered a cruel blow when they knew that they were not to march back to their homes under the King's standard, and perhaps Alexander was not surprised when those who had raised the loudest cry of *'Home!" along the route, now burst out into bitter reviling of him when he set them free to go, and was ready to have them conducted back to Macedonia. But besides their wish to wait for the King at this point, this seemed the final act of Macedonian supersession by Medes. ''Discharge us all," the Macedonians cried in the fury of their wrath, "and go and fight with your father Ammon's help!" Easily roused as Alexander had become, this speech stung him in his turn to fury. It showed how the soldiers who had accompanied him over the world misunderstood him and his position; and as they could not comprehend, so he would not allow them 155 Alexander the Great to question. He at once leaped down from the plat- form on which he stood, pointed to the chief rebels, and ordered their arrest. His guards seized the mutineers, thirteen in number, who were led away to execution. A terrified silence had fallen, and Alex- ander, remounting the platform, made an eloquent and touching speech. His father Philip, he told them, had found the Macedonians vagabonds and destitute, most of them clad in hides, feeding a few sheep on the mountain sides, and constantly dreading the incursions of the Illyrians, Triballians, and Thracians. Instead of hides he gave them cloaks to wear. He led them down from the mountains into the plains, instructed them in the arts of war and life and made them rulers over the very barbarians whom they had hitherto feared. He had added the greater part of Thrace to Macedonia, seized ports and secured the gold mines to the Macedonians. He had conquered Thessaly and humbled Greece. "These were the advantages which accrued to you from my father Philip; great indeed if looked at by themselves, but small if compared with those you have obtained from me. For though I inherited from my father only a few gold and silver goblets, and there were not even sixty talents in the treasury, and though I found my- self charged with a debt of five hundred talents owing by Philip, and I was obliged myself to borrow eight hundred talents in addition to these, I started from the country which could not decently support you, and forthwith laid open to you the passage of the Hellespont, though at that time the Persians held the sovereignty of the sea. Having overpowered the viceroys of Darius with my cavahy, I added to your 156 The Last Two Years empire the whole of Ionia, the whole of yEolis, both Phrygias, and Lydia, and I took Miletus by siege. All the other places I gained by voluntary surrender, and I granted you the privilege of appropriating the wealth found in them. The riches of Egypt and Cyrene, which I acquired without fighting a battle, have come to you. Coelo-Syria, Palestine and Meso- potamia are yoiu' property. Babylon, Bactra, and Susa are yours. The wealth of the Lydians, the treasures of the Persians, and the riches of the Indians are yours; and so is the External Sea. You are vice- roys, you are generals, you are captains. What then have I reserved to myself after all these labours, except this purple robe and this diadem .f* I have ap- propriated nothing myself, nor can anyone point out my treasures, except these possessions of yours or the things which I am guarding on your behalf. . . . I feed on the same fare as you do, and I take only the same amount of sleep. Nay, I do not think that my fare is as good as that of those among you who live luxuriously; and I know that I often sit up at night to watch for you, that you may be able to sleep. But some one may say that, while you endured toil and fatigue, I have acquired these things as your leader without myseK sharing the toil and fatigue. But who is there of you who knows that he has endured greater toil for me than I have for him? Come now! who- ever of you has wounds let him strip and show them, and I will show mine in turn; for there is no part of my body, in front at any rate, remaining free from wounds; nor is there any kind of weapon used either for close combat or for hurling at the enemy, the traces of which I do not bear on my person. For I have been 157 Alexander the Great wounded with the sword in close fight, I have been shot with arrows, and I have been struck with missiles projected from engines of war; and though oft- times I have been hit with stones and bolts of wood for the sake of your lives, your glory and your wealth, I am still leading you as conquerors over all the land and sea, all rivers, mountains and plains. I have celebrated your weddings with my own, and the children of many of you will be akin to my children. Moreover, I have liquidated the debts of all those who had incurred them, without enquiring too closely for what purpose they were contracted, though you receive such high pay, and carry off so much booty whenever there is booty to be got after a siege. Many of you have golden crowns, the eternal memorials of your valour and of the honour you receive from me. Whoever has been killed has met with a glorious end and has been honoured with a splendid burial. Brazen statues of most of the slain have been erected at home, and their parents are held in honour, being released from all public service and from taxation. But no one of you has ever been killed in flight under my leadership. And now I was intending to send back those of you who are unfit for service, objects of envy to those at home; but since you all wish to depart, depart all of you! Go back and report at home that your king, Alexander, the conqueror of the Persians, Medes, Bactrians, and Sacians; the man who has subjugated the Uxians, Arachotians and Drangians; who has also acquired the rule of the Parthians, Chorasmians and Hyrcanians, as far as the Caspian Sea; who has marched over the Caucasus, through the Caspian Gates; who has crossed the 158 The Last Two Years rivers Oxus and Tanais, and the Indus besides, which has never been crossed by anyone else except Dionysus; who has also crossed the Hydaspes, Acesines and Hydraotis, and who would have crossed the Hyphasis if you had not shrunk back with alarm; who has penetrated into the Great Sea by both the mouths of the Indus; who has marched through the desert of Gedrosia, where no one ever before marched with an army; who on his route acquired possession of Kirman and the land of the Oritians, in addition to his other conquests, his fleet having in the meantime already sailed round the coast of the sea which ex- tends from India to Persia — ^Report that when you returned to Susa you deserted him and went away, handing him over to the protection of conquered foreigners. Perhaps this report of yours will be both glorious to you in the eyes of men and devout for- sooth in the eyes of the gods. Depart!" This speech, or the words that have come down to us in the form of this speech, was the nearest Alexander ever came to a justification of his life. At its close he leaped down quickly from the platform and entered the palace, where he remained in seclusion as on the banks of the Hyphasis, not admitting the Com- panions and paying no heed to the adornment of his person. On the third day he summoned the chief Persians and distributed the commands of the army among them. Persian "Kinsmen" — a Persian title of special honour, — a Persian f ootguard, Persian foot Companions, a Persian regiment of Argyraspids, Persian cavalry Companions and another cavahy regiment, were all armed in the Macedonian way. To these soldiers Alexander spoke of the recent inter- 159 Alexander the Great marriage of Persians and Macedonians, and praised the Asiatic soldier as a brave and desirable subject. *' Henceforth," he said, "consider yourselves members of my people, not only of my army. Asia and Europe are one and the same kingdom, and I give you Mace- donian armour. I have abolished all distinctions and you are both my citizens and my soldiers. Shades of race have been obliterated and Macedonian may freely imitate Persian and Persian Macedonian: for those who live under the same king ought to be under the same law." Statesmanship, tolerance, a Roman fairness of mind, appear in Alexander's treatment of the subject peoples, and seemed to promise a fair future to the world over which he ruled. His wars, like those of the Romans, seemed to be the inaugura- tion of a long peace. But just when the world was ceasing to be restive under its new ruler, he was taken away, and there was no one to maintain his empire. Meanwhile the Macedonians, too abashed to run after the King as he left the hall, were gathered mourning at the palace gates, where they had cast down their weapons as a token of submission and supplication. Shame had fallen on them as he spoke, for they had a sudden insight into the aims of a greater nature than their own, and they remem- bered that he had suffered far more than they had. They besought to be allowed to enter, offered to give him scapegoats, and called out that they would die if the King persisted in his resentment; for no ruler has ever inspired stronger personal attachment. When he heard his soldiers' cries, Alexander at once appeared and found them humbly prostrated on the ground, lamenting loudly; and he also wept. Their 1 60 The Last Two Years entreaties against his new arrangements drowned the words he attempted to speak, and he allowed CalUnes, captain of the Companion cavahy, to become their spokesman. Callines was instructed to tell the King that the only thing that grieved them was the creation of Persian Kinsmen, who had the honour of saluting Alexander with a kiss, whereas none of the Mace- donians had yet received this honour. "But," interrupted Alexander, "I consider you all my kinsmen, and so from this time I shall call you.'* Thereupon, Callines advanced and saluted him with a kiss, and all those who wished to do so followed his example. Then they picked up their weapons and returned to the camp, shouting and singing a hymn of thanksgiving to Apollo, the god of recon- ciliation. Alexander made special sacrifices and gave a public banquet, where the Macedonians sat n,earest to him, the Persians next, and great men of other nations afterward. The King and his guests drew wine from the same bowl and poured out the same libations, religious matters being seen to by Greek priests and Magi equally. Alexander solemnly prayed the gods to establish concord among the many nations represented under his roof, and, after apsean of thanks- giving to Apollo, the nine thousand guests, drawn from nearly all the tribes of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, streamed out in friendship into the night. The disabled and outworn Macedonians returned home of their own free will, to the number of about ten thousand, receiving as viaticum one talent each beyond their pay, and that seems to have been all, except that the King gave them a recommendation to Antipater that when they came home, at all public i6i Alexander the Great shows and in the theatres, they should sit in the best seats, crowned with garlands; and the children of those who had lost their lives in his service were to have their father's pay continued to them. They were not allowed to take home their Asiatic wives and children for fear of the anger of the Macedonian women. The King, to whom boys were a future army, was glad to have the chance of bringing them up in the camp, for the children of the camp always made the best soldiers, and became responsible for these children, promising to bring them to Macedonia when they grew up. It is to be hoped that this army of infants was not thrown helpless on the world at his death. Alexander kissed and wept over the depart- ing soldiers, whom he sent home under Craterus, ap- pointed to supersede Antipater as governor of Mace- donia, Thrace, and Thessaly, and President of Greece. Antipater, who had been regent in Macedonia all this long time, had quarreled bitterly with Alex- ander's mother, Olympias, whom nobody could sup- port; and, perhaps, Alexander thought that Antipater had enjoyed royal power at the nominal seat of empire too long. Craterus, an old-fashioned Macedonian, was well suited to the task of ruling at home, and was, moreover, no longer strong enough for the camp. Antipater was to join Alexander, bringing with him ten thousand fresh Macedonian soldiers to make up for the ten thousand sent home. On the way back Craterus was directed to obtain a large fleet in Phoenicia for an expedition against Carthage and other Libyan powers, to raise various temples of large size and to transplant certain European and Asiatic peoples, as Americans of our own time have dealt 162 The Last Two Years with the Red Indians. Craterus had only got as far as CiKcia on the return journey when Alexander died, and these great schemes were never carried out. Alexander, as the Persian kings were accustomed to do, spent the late summer and autumn of 342 B.C. at Ecbatana, and took his fill of festivity; wine parties and gymnastic, musical, and theat- rical shows occupied day and night. Engaging too much in these pursuits, Hephsestion, the young Adonis of the army, fell sick of a fever. He was loved by the King as men of Doric race, like the Argives of Homer's time or the young Spartans described by Plato, loved their friends, and his loss was the greatest sorrow of this kind in Alexander's life. It was on the seventh day of Hephsestion's ill- ness, when the King was watching the contest of some boys in the stadium, that news was brought to him that his general was dying. He hastened to his bedside, but Hephaestion had passed away, and Alexander threw himseK upon the corpse in an agony of grief. It was a long time before he could be dragged away, and he lay on the ground for three days, refusing food or the bath, and bewailing his dead comrade. Many thought his abandonment un- kingly, but Alexander had modelled his character as far as he might on the character of Achilles, and this was the way Achilles had behaved upon the death of Patroclus. Like Achilles, Alexander shaved his head, and strewed his locks upon the tomb of his friend, and, like Achilles, he revenged himself upon the au- thors of his friend's death, the physician and Ascle- pius. The physician was hanged and the god's temple at Ecbatana razed to the ground, while the Cossseans, 163 Alexander the Great who rebelled at this time, formed a convenient offer- ing on a grand scale to his comrade's shade. Perhaps the tales of the extravagances of his sorrow owe something to popular invention. Universal mourning was, however, decreed in the empire, and two million pounds were spent on the pyre erected at Babylon. Little did Alexander imagine that the three thousand players he engaged to perform in Hephaestion's honour would serve for his own funeral games. While Peucestas took the corpse to Babylon, Alexander, accompanied by Ptolemy, made his last campaign, in the depth of the winter, against the revolted Cossseans. The Persian kings used to bribe these wild tribes of the hills to the north-east of Susiana to leave the empire in peace, but Alexander drove them away from their strongholds for ever in his six weeks' progress. As he turned his face southward toward Babylon, am- bassadors met him from various nations of the West. His troops were awaited in fear by the Scyth- ians, Iberians, and Celts of northern Europe and Spain, by the Etruscans, Bruttians, and Lucanians of Italy, by the Ethiopians and Carthaginians of Africa; and representatives from all these peoples appeared in Asia to seek his alliance. An untrust- worthy tradition relates that Rome sent envoys, but we do not even know if the future conqueror of the world had heard of Alexander. The King then sent shipwrights to Hyrcania to build a fleet for exploring the Caspian, which he thought might turn out, as the Persian Gulf had, to be an arm of the ocean, for its northern shores were quite unknown. For himself he was busily preparing the Arabian expedition. 164 The Last Two Years As Alexander approached Babylon, something occurred which damped the spirits of the army and was not pleasant to the King. The Chaldaeans (the seers and prophets of Babylon) came out to meet him with the warning that his entry into this city would be fraught with the greatest disaster to him. Alex- ander replied with a scoffing line from Euripides, but consented when the Chaldaeans prayed him that he would at least enter the city by the western gate. Like many another brave soldier, Alexander probably believed in omens and portents, but it was considered cowardly by the best Greek and Roman leaders to retreat when the auspices were unfavourable. The King nevertheless turned about and advanced along the Euphrates, with the stream on his right hand, but coming to rough and marshy ground, over which it was impossible to proceed, he abandoned the attempt to reach the western gate. He had begun to wonder whether the Chaldaeans were tools in the hands of a party who wished to keep him out of the city, or had been tampering with the funds which he had given for the building of temples. Bel's, however, was far from being a solitary voice. Shortly before the death of Hephsestion, a Macedonian diviner had predicted his death and the King's from the absence of a lobe on the liver of a sacrificial victim offered in reference to each. The same man afterward acted as diviner for Perdiccas and for Antigonus, and the same evil omen preceded the deaths of those commanders. Then, again, when Calanus, an Indian philosopher who had accompanied Alexander back to Susa, per- sisted in ending his infirmities, and was burned alive in great state, he refused, before the assembled army. Alexander the Great to say farewell to Alexander. He should soon meet and greet him, he said, in Babylon. Into the fatal city, with his face in an unlucky direction, Alexander entered in February or March 323 B.C., and for long it seemed as if nothing would happen. Ambassadors from Greece were given audience; they congratulated and crowned the King, and were allowed to take back to Greece all the objects which Xerxes had carried away, including the bronze statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the Athenian Liberators. Not only did the King find at Babylon the fleet of Nearchus, the hero of the hour, but there had arrived also Phoenician ships which had been taken to pieces and conveyed overland through Phoenicia to Thapsacus, there reconstructed and brought down the Euphrates to Babylon. Dock- yards were built, and other vessels were made from the abundant cypress trees of Babylonia. A harbour large enough to hold a thousand men-of-war was formed near Babylon. Phoenician purple-fishers and multitudes of other sea-faring men from that coast were brought over to the Persian Gulf, the shores of which were to be colonized with a nautical population, an,d, it was believed, would speedily equal Phoenicia in commercial activity. Few statesmen have shown the aptitude for remoulding a nation that Alexander showed for remoulding the world. His next step would have been to subjugate Arabia, whence there had come no embassy to seek his friendship. Various pilots were sent to coast Arabia until they arrived at Egypt, but all returned after cruising in fear for various distances along the Arabian coast. The tales of Araby still enjoyed too much credence in the Greek i66 The Last Two Years mind; moreover, the fleets of that time had no idea of provisioning for any long period, and so dared not proceed far along the shore of the Arabian desert. They must by this time have got from the natives some idea of its extent. Alexander was now to leave Babylon for a short time, and as nothing had yet happened to him, he was persuaded that the oracles of Bel had been terrifying him vainly. The business that drew him away was the affair of the Pallacopas Canal. This canal had been constructed to receive the overflow of the Euphrates after the melting of the Armenian snows in the spring-time, but when the river sank back into its bed the purpose of the canal was served and there was a danger of the drying up of the stream. The water had therefore to be turned back from the canal into the river, a task which sometimes occupied ten thousand Assyrians for three months. Alexander had determined to bestow a great boon on his Asiatic subjects. He readily discovered that if the canal joined the river at a different point the water could easily be sent back into its channel, and he now set the work going. He then sailed down the canal toward Arabia and established a new and strongly fortified 'Alexandria' in that direction, colonizing it with outworn veterans and such Greek mercenaries as were willing to stay. He returned to Babylon lighter at heart than he had been for some time, but a new evil omen befell him before he entered the city. As he sailed through the marshes by the tombs of the old Assyrian kings, a gust of wind blew into the water his broad-brimmed hat, and his fillet fell on a reed. These were evil signs in themselves, but worse 167 Alexander the Great followed. A Phoenician sailor leaped into the water and seized the fillet, and to avoid wetting it swam back with it on his own head. The sailor received a double reward, a talent for his service and a scourg- ing for assuming the royal head-dress. Legend said that it was Seleucus, the greatest of Alexander's * Successors,' who thus secured the fillet, but the symbol did not fit so exactly. All that men thought at the moment was that a very bad portent had befallen the King. At Babylon Peucestas and other commanders with new levies awaited Alexander; the new soldiers were drafted into the Macedonian ranks, and reviews of the fleet and naval tournaments were held on the river. One day, when engaged in military arrange- ments, for he was making some fundamental changes in the art of war at the moment of his death, Alex- ander, feeling thirsty, left the room. His Council, sitting on couches with silver feet round the Great King's throne, rose as he rose and attended him, and during their absence a man of low condition walked through the line of eunuchs who guarded the throne and sat down on it. By Persian law he might not be touched in that sacred place, and the horror-struck oflScials stood watching him while they rent their garments and beat their breasts. Alexander also was enraged when he returned, for in the East the thing seemed most evil, and the man's motive was eagerly sought, but even torture elicited no other answer than that it came into his mind to do it. A few days later Alexander gave a banquet at which Nearchus was the guest of honour, and all drank far into the night. The King wished to withdraw atone i68 The Last Two Years point, but his new intimate, Medius the Thessalian, successfully pressed him to go on to a further feast at his own house. Here they continued to revel, and on the following night Medius continued the feast. Again they roistered far into the night, and after a bath and a little food Alexander slept at the house of Medius, as he already felt a little feverish. He was carried out on a couch in the morning to make the sacrifices according to his daily custom, and then lay down in the banqueting hall at the palace until dusk, issuing orders for the great expedition southward on which he had been about to start. The foot-soldiers, he commanded, were to leave on the fourth day, and he himself would sail with the fleet on the fifth day. He was carried on a couch to the brink of the Euphrates and in a boat to the royal park. On the following day he again bathed and offered the sacrifices, lay down, chatted with Medius, ordered the officers to meet him at daybreak, ate a little and went to bed, only to toss all night with fever. All these details of the last days of the conqueror's life were preserved in the court diary, now lost, but used by early historians. On the follow- ing day Alexander directed that the fleet should be ready for the third day, and bathed and sacrificed, and this he did the next day, but became worse in the evening, and on the following day was conveyed to the house near the swimming-bath, where he could better carry on his priestly rites. The day after he could scarcely be borne out to the sacrifices, but he heard Nearchus' narrative of his voyage and attended carefully to his maritime observations, for he still issued orders for the new voyage, apparently not 169 Alexander the Great recognizing until the end that his course was finished, that the only voyage awaiting him was the one for which the halfpenny fare would be put in his mouth. On the following day he was carried back into the palace, and the officers were summoned; but although he knew them, he was speechless, and for the two following days and nights tossed in a high fever. When they heard that he was no longer able to speak, the Macedonians came to the palace gates and forced their way into the room where he lay, to find out if he were dead and it was being hidden from them, or to see him once more if he lived. As they marched one by one past his bedside, he greeted each with his right hand, raising his head with difficulty, and making a sign of recognition with his eyes. Python, Seleucus and others went to the temple of Serapis to inquire if they should bring him there, but the god answered that they should not remove him, and on the evening of the thirteenth of June 323 B.C., he died. Extraordinary scenes of mourning followed in Babylon, and not only his Macedonian subjects, but all the peoples of his empire, recognized that there had passed away one of the greatest men who have walked this earth. Some years later the story arose that Alexander was poisoned with poison procured for the purpose by Aristotle, and sent to Babylon by Antipater by means of his son Cassander, while his younger son lollas, the royal cup-bearer, actually administered it. Others thought that Medius and loUas carried out the deed. There is nothing very improbable in the idea of Alexander being poisoned. Some of the 170 The Last Two Years best kings have been assassinated, and it was a normal fate for a Macedonian ruler. Nor are we in a position to say that Antipater and his sons or Medius would not have done such a deed if it had suited their own ends. It was one of the times in which such things are freely and naturally done. Modern doctors, however, have agreed that Alex- ander's symptoms were not those of poisoning but of malaria. It must, in any case, have been a very slow poison, and, had he taken it, Alexander's body could hardly have remained free from corruption for seven days, as we are told it did; indeed, it is said, it under- went no change before it was embalmed. His body, taken to Egypt, according to his wishes, by Ptolemy, was ultimately placed in his city of Alexandria. Tradition relates that the Companions asked the dying King to whom he left his sceptre, and that he replied, "To the best man." His ring he had left with Perdiccas. A wit invented a sarcastic prophecy of Alexander's to the effect that he knew there would be a great funeral contest held in his honour, meaning the year-long wars of his * Successors' for his realms. vn CHAPTER XIII: Alexander's Character and Place in History ARRIAN concludes his Anabasis of Alexander with an excellent summary of his qualities. He was of distinguished beauty of person; he was devoted to work, active in mind, heroic in courage (more so than professional bravoes, remarks Curtius), fond of danger, tenacious of honour, stead- fast in keeping agreements, strictly observant of his duty to the gods; of perfect self-control with regard to the pleasures of the body, for Aristobulus asserted that, though he used to hold long drinking parties, it was not for the purpose of enjoying the wine but for the mildest conviviality; he always saw what ought to be done and understood a situation at a glance, and was not liable to be taken in by im- postors. He was very skilful in marshalling, arming and ruling an army, and renowned for his power of rousing the courage of his soldiers. He always fore- stalled his enemies. Arrian judged that in the things of the mind Alexander was only insatiable of praise. He committed many errors from the quickness of his temper, but allowances were to be made for his youth, his uninterrupted success, and the evil advisers that always strive to corrupt kings; moreover, Alexander was the only ancient king of whom repentance, due to his nobility of character, was recorded. Tracing his origin to a god was perhaps a device to make his subjects show him reverence, nor did he seem less renowned than Minos, Ajax, Rhadamanthus and others who had done the same — it was merely a Greek national failing. His assumption of the 172 Character and Place in History Persian dress was a political device. Let the de- tractor, says Arrian, in words that are as useful for life as they are for historical criticism (perhaps more so), turn his eyes on himself and consider on what petty objects he spends his own life, not effecting them petty as they are. Arrian never seems to consider the chief point that arises in the modern mind. The modern question has become: What was Alexander's excuse for troubling the world? He has sometimes been con- sidered as a vulgar freebooter who *'did mischief enough to be called a great man," sometimes like a madman, the madman who destroyed the temple at Ephesus, crazed by his vanity. His invasion of Asia has often been treated in this light, and the Mace- donian subjugation of Greece has often been regarded as if it were analogous to Turkish rule there. It is only in the last few decades that justice has been done to Alexander as a man and a statesman, although in 1857 Freeman raised an eloquent voice for him. His vindication depends on the motives which under- lay his actions, since he did not live long enough for those actions to justify themselves; and it seems probable that Philip and Alexander understood the political situation of Greece better than we can do after the lapse of over twenty-three centuries, and that if they considered the unification of Greece and the conquest of Persia a political necessity, it was one — at the worst, it was one for Macedonia. Alexander especially had a grasp of a situation given to few mortals. People are fond of represent- ing Persian power as in its decline when he led his army over the Hellespont, but Alexander considered 173 Alexander the Great Persian soldiers as good as Greeks; after his conquest was completed he enrolled the so-called 'effeminate Asiatics' in his choicest regiments in place of veteran Macedonians, and informed them that he had found them in every way equal to his best and bravest fellow-countrymen. It was merely training and leadership that they required, and Philip and Alexander probably realized that if another Cyrus or Darius the Great arose in Persia, Macedonia and Greece would become at one blow a Persian satrapy. It was all very well for the southern Greeks to sit secure, but Macedonia had known the disgrace of Persian conquest. Greece, moreover, was no longer the country which had repelled Darius and Xerxes at Marathon and Salamis. The ease with which she was overrun by the Macedonians demonstrates her danger from any strong and determined foe. It was decided, therefore, to choose this moment when the Persian Empire, weakened by years of internal dis- sension and now under no outstanding leader, was vulnerable, and crush it under the heel of Greece. An invasion of Greece by Persia might never have taken place, but other great peoples were to pour over Greece. If the political prophet had looked far enough forward he might have seen the Celtic in- roads of the third century B.C. and the Roman domination of the second century B.C. Macedonia, thanks to Philip and Alexander, was some bulwark against the Celts, although Alexander's early death was fatal to the work which Macedonia had started. As to Macedonian destruction of the Greek city- state system, and with it the best life of Greece, Athens herself had twice wronged this institution 174 Character and Place in History by the formation of empires; and other Greek cities had established federations in which they tampered with individual independence. Pericles, prime min- ister in the day of Athens* greatness, bade her preserve her empire at whatever cost of injustice toward the cities over which she tyrannized. Nor had Athens sinned only against the city-state; her democracy had often shown itself unworthy of its great citizens. Nor in the time of Philip and Alex- ander were her citizens so great as they had been; at the worst the Macedonians seem to have hastened the end of what was in its decline. From our modern vantage point we see that the nation was bound to come; that it needed a foreign invader at the gates of Thermopylae to bring about any concerted action in Greece; and that unity from within meant too long a process for the world to wait for. Again and again the brilliant peoples of Greece had refused to submit to each other's hegemony, so at last the yoke was imposed by one whom they considered a foreigner. The strong Macedonian state which Alexander and his father established on the north of Greece saved Greece from barbarian conquest until the Romans were ready to take the place of Macedonia as pro- tectors of civilization. Through Alexander's journeys early Christian literature was enriched with Greek thought, and Christianity spread over the world more quickly through his work. He was a great cosmopolitan influence, the first in history, and, despite the strangeness of the idea to the men of his time, he did not labour entirely in vain to unite East and West. To his Egyptian province we owe much 175 Alexander the Great of our knowledge of the Greeks. He is the link between the modern and the ancient world, the hinge on which European history turns, as well as a brilliant figure in the pageant of history. No sooner was Alexander the Great dead than his 'Romance' began to be spun; indeed his life as it stood constituted both romance and history. From the romantic point of view it is a story of wars and wanderings that make it a second Iliad and Odyssey, of which Alexander is the Achilles and Odysseus. If there had been a second Homer, as Alexander some- times vainly wished, to sing of this greater attack on Asia, he would have found many points of resemblance in his new hero to the 'best of all the Greeks.* The characters of the Iliad always enter with some de- scriptive epithet, such as * white-armed Hera,* *Menelaus of the Loud War Cry'; and Alexander, the swiftest runner of his time, would have been the new 'fleet-footed Achilles.' His obstinate seclusion at the Hyphasis and at Opis on the two occasions when the army revolted, compare poorly with the long sulking of Achilles in his tent, but the wrath of Alexander fell little short of the 'wrath of Achilles.' In the year of the conqueror's death, when his great friend Hepheestion fell sick and died, the revenge which Alexander is supposed to have taken and the funeral celebration he arranged recall Achilles' dragging of Hector round the walls of Troy, and the funeral pyre of Patroclus. This, although his 'Successors* and the Romans studied Alexander's doings as matters of importance to every general and adminis- trator, the story of his life soon seemed to most people no more than a tale. Already by the second century 176 Character and Place in History of the Christian era the Greeks had created the Romance of Alexander, which was very speedily- translated from Greek into Latin and from Latin into all mediaeval tongues. With the Roman de Troie, the story of Alexander formed the chief part of the French Classical Cycle of mediaeval romances, among which are the famous Li Romans d' Alexandre, from which the term 'alexandrines' in prosody takes its name, and Le Roman de toute chevalerie, the parent of the English King Alisaunder, a rougher and cruder precursor of Spenser's Fairy Queen. In this wonderful fairy story King Philip sat in his hall Among earls and barons all, and dubbed Alexander knight. In the wilds of the East, a palmer brings Alexander a herb to heal the sickness of his army: It was an angel, so saith the book. That the king the herbe took. Finally, Alexander and Porus, wandering over plains, dales, wildernesses and mountains to the world's end, come to Paradise, guarded by dragons, Where God Almighty, through His grace. Formed Adam our father that was. To consummate this entire neglect of any historical background in Alexander's story, the poets picture him, with the consent of his barons, intending to attack Germany, France, England and Ireland when he was diverted by a providential monster. With the Renaissance, however, all these delightful ideas about Alexander took their wing; it was some 177 Alexander the Great centuries before the romances were to be read again, and when at last they did come back, it was that they might be read for their own sakes rather than for their historical value. But until this day men have been occupied in getting rid of the legendary matter that still, in spite of every effort, clings to his name. 178 CHAPTER XIV: The Alexandrian Empire WHEN news of the King's death was borne out of the sick room, the ancient palace, built by Nebuchadnezzar's slaves and trodden by so many mighty kings since his time, was filled with the sound of mourning; but gradually a deep silence fell on the great generals and statesmen who, at the dead King's orders, had taken up their quarters there. Each began to ponder on what would befall next. Who would govern the earth in the place of the monarch who had just passed away? If any of them had already cast their eye on the supreme rule, they must have been planning in the deepest anxiety the next move in the game. The common soldiers remained under arms all through the dark night, no one daring to light a torch, and when eventually the Body Guards called the generals to a council, the soldiers all crowded round and tried to force their way in, determined on knowing their future fate. In vain a herald summoned those not invited to retire; an eager crowd of plebeian Mace- donians thronged to the door of the great hall in which the important dignitaries had met to decide the fate of the empire. Perdiccas, therefore, caused the throne to be carried out of the palace and placed in full view of the assembly, and on it were displayed the diadem, royal robe and armour. To this little heap he added the ring which the King had given him, and then turned to the multitude hanging breathlessly on his movements. "I restore to you," he said briefly, "the ring with 179 Alexander the Great which the King used to seal his commands and which he delivered to me. No greater misfortune can ever be sent us by the gods than the one we have suffered; but the gods only lent a man like Alexander for a short space and, his fate accomplished, they have carried him back to his own race. Since nothing is left to us but his mortal remains, let us pay what honour we can to his dust and name. But let us not forget that business of the most urgent nature awaits us. We need a head; whether one or more is for you to decide." All the generals then declared their opinions on the succession, and a stormy meeting followed. Perdiccas and the greater number wished to wait for the birth of Alexander's child by Roxane, and, if it was a boy, accept him as king. This child was Alexander *iEgus,' born a few months later. Nearchus, however, had a suggestion to make which stirred up the most violent anger. He proposed that Heracles, the son of Alexander and Barsine, a Persian woman (but not his new wife, the daughter of Darius), should receive the kingship. The crowd raised a great clamour of disapprobation, striking their lances on their shields, and Nearchus' proposal seemed so monstrous to nearly all his colleagues that the affair threatened to lead to blows. Ptolemy then raised his voice; perhaps he had already a design on a throne, and wished to stir up popular feeling against the whole royal house. "Does the issue of either Roxane or Barsine," he said, "seem worthy to rule over the Macedonian people? Could we mention their base names, those of slaves, in Europe? Why did we conquer the 1 80 The Alexandrian Empire Persians, if we are to obey their descendants? Darius and Xerxes, at the head of thousands of soldiers and with enormous fleets, in vain sought to bring us to such servitude. Let us place the throne in the palace, hold a council, vote for our futiu-e ruler, and abide by the voice of the majority." This speech fell flat, and the majority had declared for the plan of Perdiccas, when somebody called out that Alexander had bequeathed his throne to 'the best man, ' and by giving his ring to Perdiccas had pointed out Perdiccas as the best man. This was greeted with enthusiasm by the crowd, who called to Perdiccas to take the ring again, but it did not commend itself to the nobility. The Macedonian army must vote on the matter, Meleager declared menacingly, and a common soldier called out that Alexander's half-brother Arrhidaeus should be elected. Meleager, who was a demagogue, took up this idea, and the army elected this youth with the title of Philip III. Perdiccas and Ptolemy thereupon departed from the city, taking with them nearly all the Companion cavalry, who would not recognize the new king, wasted the surrounding country, and threatened Babylon with famine. Philip Arrhidaeus made a sorry king after Alexander, and the soldiers were absorbed in sad reflections when fresh disasters happened. The foreign population of the surround- ing country, in a dangerous temper through the ravaging of their lands by the cavalry, flocked into the city, which could not feed its own mouths, and threatened the Macedonians. They fell to quarrel- ling among themselves, and the young King, unable to i8i Alexander the Great cope with the situation, begged them with tears to take the kingship from him. An embassy was sent to Perdiccas and he returned, but he did not trust Meleager and his party, and caused three hundred of them to be trodden under foot by elephants in pres- ence of the whole army. This was the beginning of a deep feeling of hatred toward Perdiccas. For the moment all seemed well, but the Alexandrian Empire was not yet consolidated and soon toppled over like an uncompleted building. In 323 B.C. the first partition of the empire was made in Babylon, and although the generals among whom it was divided were at first nominally ministers of the Macedonian king, they were practically in- dependent, and from their viceroyalties three per- manent kingdoms were ultimately evolved, those of the Seleucidae in Asia, the Ptolemies in Egypt, and a new Macedonian kingdom. The history of the last kings of the old royal house is briefly told: Philip Arrhidseus, the simple tool of a faction of the nobility, was murdered at the instigation of Olympias in 317 B.C.; the aged Olympias and her young grandson, Alexander iEgus, were murdered by Cassander, son of Antipater, in about 310 b.c; and with the mm'der of the conqueror's son, Heracles, by Polyperchon, the rival of Cassander, in 309 B.C., the royal Heraclid line of Macedonia came to an end in the male line. By the settlement of 323 B.C. the King was nomin- ally supreme ruler, with Perdiccas as regent and Seleucus as his assistant or *chiliarch.' Antipater, still in Macedonia, and Craterus, who had now arrived there, were to continue in control of Macedonia and Greece. Ptolemy was to be satrap of Egypt and 182 The Alexandrian Empire Macedonian Libya; Lysimaclius was to rule over Thrace and the neighbouring districts of the Euxine (soon to be overrun by the Celts); Antigonus and others divided Asia Minor; Python had Media, while the existing satraps were left in Sogdiana, Bactria, the Punjab, Gedrosia, etc. Antipater, although nearly eighty years of age, was very angry that Perdiccas and not he should have received the chief position in the empire, and speedily began to intrigue with Ptolemy and Anti- gonus against him, but Perdiccas was soon removed from the great scramble, being murdered by his soldiers in 321. A second arrangement was then made by which Antipater became regent, while Seleucus was appointed viceroy of Babylonia. Anti- pater, however, died two years later, having be- queathed the regency to Polyperchon, not, as would have been more natural, to his own son Cassander. This caused a war which resulted in Cassander de- feating his rival, clearing all claimants to the throne* out of his path by murder, and ultimately assum- ing the title of king. He made Macedonia his headquarters and exercised practically uncontested rule there. He married Thessalonica, half-sister of Alexander the Great, and built Salonica, which he named after her. With his accession Macedonia relapsed from its position as head of an empire and became a simple kingdom again. The house of Antipater ruled over Macedonia until 294 B.C., when it was overturned by Demetrius, son of Antigonus; from 277 to 149 B.C. the Antigonids reigned; and in 149 B.C. Roman intervention culminated, after the battle of Pydna, in the annexation of Macedonia 183 Alexander the Great by Rome. Thenceforth Macedonia was a Roman province. After the death of Perdiccas, and bitter wars, Antigonus, whose descendants were to rule in Macedonia, made himself predominant in Asia, and threatened Cassander in Macedonia and Ptolemy in Egypt. Seleucus, whom he drove out of Babylonia, took refuge with Ptolemy, and a general coalition was formed against Antigonus. In 312 B.C. Seleucus was restored to his rule, and in 301 B.C. Antigonus (aged eighty-one) was defeated and slain at Ipsus. He had been the first of the * Successors' to assume the title of king (in 306 B.C.), and it was in imitation of him that Cassander, Ptolemy, Seleucus, and Lysimachus promptly did the same. After the death of Antigonus, Lysimachus was the chief opponent of Seleucus in Asia, and Lysimachus, too, was slain in 281 B.C., leaving him without a rival; and he soon established his rule from the yEgean Sea to the Jaxartes and Indus. He founded the great dynasty of the Seleucidae, who maintained Greek influence in the East for over two centuries. Their realm was not equivalent to the Asiatic kingdom of Alexander the Great; India never permitted Greek troops to recross her streams, and Bactria and Sogdiana asserted their independence in a few genera- tions after the death of Alexander; Asia Minor and other provinces gradually fell away; the great power of Parthia arose in the North, and only Syria re- mained to Antiochus XIII, the last Seleucid king, when the Romans annexed his realm in 64 B.C. Still, for a long period the Seleucidae had held up the torch of Greek civilization in Asia. The Romans then took 184 The Alexandrian Empire up the cosmopolitan work of Macedonia, and the West gained infinitely by this continuous contact with the East. Greek continued to be spoken in those distant countries, and became the commercial tongue and the common language of educated people in the Roman world of that day. The Romans, although they despised the Greeks of their own time, took all their notions of literature and art from Greece, and were prepared to listen to a new religion which came to them in a Greek dress. Apart from any other gain to the world's spirit the Hellenism of Asia helped the spread of Christianity. From the first there was an important exception to the Seleucid rule in Asia Minor, and that was Per- gamum. This place, which Lysimachus had made his capital, developed into an independent state, of small extent, but a brilliant centre of Hellenic culture right down to Roman times. We are all familiar with its name from the fact that it has be- come corrupted into our 'parchment,' which was manufactured there in the days of its greatness. The last king of Pergamum bequeathed his kingdom to Rome in 133 b.c. The third of the three larger kingdoms which rose in the Alexandrian Empire was that of the Ptolemies, whose base was in Egypt. Egypt, with which the Ptolemies very soon learned to be satisfied, abandon- ing extravagant pretensions to the whole Macedonian Empire, retained its independence of Rome longer than either Macedonia or the kingdom of the Seleu- cidas, though it came ultimately to the same end. It was founded by Ptolemy (son of Lagus), one of the most distinguished of Alexander's generals and his i8s Alexandef- the Great biographer; and, besides firmly establishing a great kingdom, Ptolemy commenced its literary glory, probably founding the most famous library of the world at Alexandria, and making his court there a centre of light and learning. The wealth of India and Arabia flowed into Alexander's great city, and the most brilliant men of the last period of Greek in- tellectual influence — the 'Hellenistic age' — ^gathered together in the court of the Ptolemies. Rome took advantage of the quarrels of the last members of this house to interfere in Egypt, and on the death of the last sovereign of the line, Cleopatra, in 30 B.C., this wealthy and famous realm also became a Roman province. At the coming of the Romans Greece followed the fate of Macedonia and was, despite its political in- significance, the most important conquest the Romans ever made, both from the point of view of their own intellectual development and thatof the many nations of whom they were to be the teachers. We have said little about its history since Alexander made his final descent upon it in 335 B.C. The yoke of Macedonia had been an extremely light one, but the Greeks were unhappy under it. Sparta alone had refused to submit to Alexander, and when he had departed to Asia its king, Agis, started to preach a crusade against Macedonia, Demosthenes was over- joyed and longed to help him, but Athens would take no part in the rising; Alexander heard of it and laughed at "the battle of mice in Arcadia"; Agis was slain and his party was crushed by Antipater, whom Alexander had left in charge in Macedonia. Demosthenes was a great hero in Athens at this time, 1 86 The Alexandrian Empire for although the citizens were little more inclined to follow his advice than they had been in the old days when he warned them against King Philip, they recognized that whatever he had predicted had come true. Sadly enough he was to end an honourable life in a tragic way and leave a stain on his name. When Harpalus, Alexander's treasurer, fled from Asia at Alexander's return from India, he bore his stolen gold to Greece, calculating on being able to buy protectors even if no one would help him out of ill-will toward Macedonia. When he arrived at Athens, with seven hundred talents still remaining to him, the party of prudence at first carried the day against those who were frankly for taking the money. It seemed too risky to have anything to do with this object of Alexander's wrath. Covetousness, how- ever, prevailed in the end, and the citizens were per- suaded to vote that Harpalus should be arrested and detained until Alexander returned to Greece, and that his money should be placed for safety in the public Treasury. The next thing that the people knew was that Harpalus had mysteriously disappeared and that half the money had gone from the Treasury. There was at once a great outcry against Demos- thenes, who had had chief control of the matter. After making an impressive speech against having anything to do with Harpalus, it was said he had been led by a heavy bribe to change his mind. He was followed about the streets and interrupted in his speeches by hooting, jeering crowds, and at last the matter was brought before the court of the Areopagus, noted throughout Greek history forits just judgments. By this great court Demosthenes was declared 187 Alexander the Great innocent of bribery but responsible for the disappear- ance of the money from the Treasury. He was sentenced to pay the enormous sum of fifty talents, and, being unable to do so, was thrown into prison. The severity of this punishment was no doubt partly owing to a desire to curry favour with Alexander, who might be expected to return to Greece at any time. He escaped, probably like Harpalus, by con- nivance, and bitterly upbraided the great city which had reared him as he stole away: *'0 Athena," he cried, "what is it makes you take delight in three such noxious beasts as the owl, the snake and the people?" Then came the news of Alexander's death, which seemed to the Greeks too good to be true. There had been many false reports which they had believed only too readily, and now that the event had actually befallen it found them sceptical. Alexander had come to seem lifted above mortal chances and changes, and they expected at least that his death would be preceded by fearful portents. The orator Demades said that he could not be dead or the whole world would have smelled of his corpse. They waited until the report was confirmed in the most definite fashion and then they rose in revolt against Macedonia as they had done on the death of Philip, thirteen years before. Demosthenes once more roamed over Greece preaching a new fight for freedom. Athens pardoned him, not remitting the sentence of the sacred Areo- pagus, but giving him money to pay his fine, and he re-entered the city amid scenes of the wildest enthusi- asm, every house being emptied of its inhabitants to meet him. It was a short-lived happiness. Anti- i88 The Alexandrian Empire pater and Craterus marched south from Pella, de- feated the Greeks at Crannon in 322 B.C., and were approaching Athens when Athens hastened to submit. Demosthenes had often raised a jeer when he had mentionedMarathonandSalamistohisfellow-citizens, and now an outsider might have smiled at the efforts of the orator who sought to kindle the old fire in them. Without striking a blow they agreed to receive a Macedonian garrison into Attica and to put to death the orators who had stirred up the revolt. Demosthenes and his fellows managed again to escape, but this time the officers of Antipater were on their track. They separated, therefore, the better to elude them, and Demosthenes took refuge in the temple of Poseidon, in the island of Calauria. The Macedonian captain who had charge of the pursuit crossed in a light vessel with some Thracian spear- men, and tried to lure Demosthenes from his sacred asylum. Antipater, he said, meant him no harm. Demosthenes, knowing full well what were the Macedonian intentions with regard to him, replied by requesting the captain to wait a while and allow him time to write a letter to his family. Then he withdrew into the temple, took a scroll and a reed pen, put the reed into his mouth and chewed it pen- sively as was his custom when composing. After a while he bowed down his head and covered it. *'Look at that coward!" the soldiers exclaimed impatiently, and at last the captain approached and again bade him fear nothing from Antipater. The orator, how- ever, uncovered his head and showed the Mace- donians that he was dying, having used the brief delay to drink poison from his pen. He strove to 189 Alexander the Great totter out of the temple, so that he might not pollute it by his death, but staggered and fell lifeless before the altar. They raised a bronze statue to him in Athens, where his end was considered glorious, and inscribed on it that if his might had equalled his wisdom, Macedonia would never have conquered Greece. Antipater practically abolished the democratic institutions of Athens, and reduced her to slavery indeed, but the continued wars of Alexander's * Successors' and the invasions of the Celts into Macedonia allowed the Greeks gradually to win back their independence. The famous Achaean and iEtolian Leagues, formed for this purpose, had great histories, but these Greek federations came too late, and Greece was soon at the feet of a new master. Under the Romans Athens won a new importance, not political but literary and artistic, and, once merely the 'school of Hellas,' became the school of Rome and of the world. 190 MAP TO SHOW EMPIRE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT Alexander's Empire IVIAP TO SHOW ^^/^ EMPIRE OF __,^^ ALEXANDER THE GREAT Alexander's Empire ^^mAllied States Alexander^ Route '^-\ (A SOURCES Arrian's Anabasis (English translation and notes by Chinnock, 1884); Indica and Voyage of Nearchus (translated by Vincent, 1809). The above history is mainly an adaptation of Arrian's account of Alexander. He took it chiefly from lost histories written by Alex- ander's generals, Ptolemy and Aristobulus, and not only is his version now accepted as in the main correct, but modern judgment of Alex- ander's character has veered round to the judgment of this experienced general and administrator and learned scholar of imperial Rome. In reading his works it is sufScient to remember that the speeches that he occasionally puts into the mouths of his characters cannot be word for word as they made them, and that the material from which he had to produce his work was so multitudinous and contradictory that he was forced to reject an enormous amount, some of it possibly true. The value of his work lies largely in the fact that he alone of all compe- tent critics who have dealt with Alexander, read the perished contem- porary histories of the conqueror's Ufe. He was a Greek and wrote in Greek, in the second century, a.d. QuiNTUS CuRTius RuFUs, De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni (English translation by Pratt, 1821). Curtius wrote in Latin in the middle of the first century a.d. — that is, a century before Arrian, but his history cannot be compared with that of Arrian. He was so intent on dramatic and literary eflFects that he often strayed a long way away from facts. His anecdotal work enjoyed a greater popularity formerly than now. It was one of the first classical books to be produced (c 1471) by the printing press, and it suggested to Racine his play Alexandre. Plutarch's Lives of Alexander, Demosthenes, and Eumenes (trans- lated by Dry den and others). All the fragments remaining of contemporary histories have been collected by Carl Mliller in the edition of Arrian of 1877. Various facts are preserved in the works of ancient writers like Strabo, Justin, and iEUan. Herodotus, Histories (English translations by Rawlinson and Macaulay). The modern authorities chiefly used above have been: Burt's History of Greece (1902). Hogarth's Philip and Alexander of Macedon (1897); The Army of Alexander (in the Journal of Philology, xvii). Mahafft's Greek Life and Thought (1887) ; Problems in Greek History (1892); Alexander's Empire (Story of the Nations, 1887); Progress of Hellenism in Alexander's Empire (1905). IQI Alexander the Great Niese's Geschichte der griechischen und makedonischen Staaten aeit Chaeronea (1893-1903). Beloch's Griechische Geschichte (1893-7). Kolster's Alexander der Grosse (1890). Keller's Alexander der Grosse nach der Schlacht lei Issos zu seiner RUckkehr aus Aegypten (1904). Janke's Auf Alexanders des Grossen Pfaden (1904). Tozer's History of Ancient Geography (1897). The Public Orations of Demosthenes (English translation by Pickard- Cambridge, 1912). Gilbert Murray's translations, with notes and introductions, of the plays of Euripides. Pater's Plato and Platonism. Barker's Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (1906). Aristotle's Politics. Maspero's Histoire ancienne des peuples de I'orient classique (1899). Hall's Ancient History of the Near East (1913). Rawlinson's Bactria (1913). Rickmers' The Duab of Turkestan (1913). M'Crindle's Invasion of India by Alexander the Great as described by Arrian (1896), V. A. Smith's Early History of India (1904). Meyer's Alexandre le grand dans la litter ature frangaise du moyen dge (1886). _ L'Histoire du bon roi Alexandre (1903), a description by Count Paul Durrieu of the superb Flemish manuscript of this name made in the fifteenth century for Philip the Good of Burgundy, with photographs of some of its miniatures. The Alexander Romance (Early English Text Society, Extra Series, Many articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica (eleventh edition), especially "Alexander," "The Macedonian Empire," "Geo- graphy," and "India." Wheeler's Alexander the Great (Heroes of the Nations, 1900). Dodge's Alexander (Great Captains Series, 1890), Histories of Greece by Thirlwall, Grote, etc. Freeman, Historical Essays (Second Series). ^ 192 R D - 6 e. ^ffg' [^^^'^'^'''ed using the Bookkeeper process ' ^ Treatment Date: -^ f^ v> .^ PreservationTechnoiogiS H *^ **°''^''^"°"''' PAPER P«ESE«VAT.ON {Jj 111 Thomson Part; Drive ;^ CrartbKTy Townshie. 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