.# ■->, -# H -Kl < - A/. » ■> so : ^ V * O- «. » • 7 *2* \- c** ^ ^ o ; v -^ ^ A\ V ■fi ■■ o ,0o. v^> , V^ v '* «xv ^> •* ^ A *** '\ ^ V *■ 4> ^ **>. * 8 , \* -'° X \V ^ . . . % O0 v <->. /.. •>, ^ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from The Library of Congress http://www.archive.org/details/alexandergreatmeOOwhee Ibeu'vS of tbe IRations EDITED BY Evelyn Kbbott, !fo.l\. RLLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD FACTA DUCIS VIVENT OPEROSAQUE GLORIA RERUM. — OVID, IN LIVIAM 265. THE HERO'S DEEDS AND HARD-WON FAME SHALL LIVE. (HI . 8" ALEXANDER i HEAD OF ALEXANDER. OBVERSE OF ONE OF THE GOLD MEDALLIONS OF TARSUS. REVERSE OF ABOVE MEDALLIOC ALEXANDER i THE GREAT THE MERGING OF EAST AND WEST IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER PRESIDENT OP THE UNIVERSITY OK CALIFORNIA G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK T TWENTY-THIRD STREET LONDON 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND &bz |\niciurbochcr frees 1900 TWO COPIES RECEIVED, L it) racy of Congress;, Office of the Ft* 3 33 B -C - • • 266 CHAPTER XVII. BATTLE OF ISSUS, ^33 B - C 2 ^° CHAPTER XVIII. FROM CILICIA TO SYRIA, 333~332 B.C. . . . 294 Contents. vn CHAPTER XIX. PAGE THE SIEGE OF TYRE, 332 B.C 3II CHAPTER XX. ALEXANDER IN EGYPT, 332-33 1 B.C. . . . 328 CHAPTER XXI. VISIT TO THE TEMPLE OF AMMON, 332-331 B.C. . 344 CHAPTER XXII. THE BATTLE OF GAUGAMELA, 331 B.C. . . 356 CHAPTER XXIII. THE FRUITS OF VICTORY: OCCUPATION OF PERSIA — DEATH OF DARIUS, 331-330 B.C. . . 369 CHAPTER XXIV. IN AFGHANISTAN, 330-329 B.C 382 CHAPTER XXV. IN BOKHARA AND TURKESTAN, 329-327 B.C. . 398 CHAPTER XXVI. THE INVASION OF INDIA, 327-326 B.C. . . 415 CHAPTER XXVII. THE BATTLE OF THE HYDASPES, 326 B.C. . . 433 CHAPTER XXVIII. COMPLETED CONQUEST OF THE PENJAB, 326-325 B -C . -447 CHAPTER XXIX. RETURN TO PERSIA, 325-324 B.C. . . . 463 viii Contents. CHAPTER XXX. PAGE AT SUSA AND OPIS, 324 B.C. .... 473 CHAPTER XXXI. THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER, 323 B.C. . ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE head of Alexander * . . . Frontispiece [From one of the gold medallions of Tarsus.] MAP OF ANCIENT GREECE AND ASIA MINOR . . 12 REVERSE OF HEAVY EUBCEAN OR SOLONIAN DEKA- DRACHM, SHOWING THE ATHENIAN OWL . . 22 SILVER COIN OF PHILIP II. OF MACEDON (FATHER OF ALEXANDER) . . . • • .22 [Head of the Olympian Zeus. Coin probably struck, as the horse of reverse indicates, in com- memoration of victory in the Olympian games.] TETRADRACHM OF ALEXANDER, BEARING THE HEAD OF HERCULES 2 2 ARISTOTLE 3 6 [After the statue in the Spada Palace, Rome.] MAP SHOWING ALEXANDRIA A CENTURY BEFORE . . . . 46 . 70 [Obverse of one of the gold medallions of Tarsus.] * See note on p. Illustrations. GOLD STATER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT, THE HEAD BEING THAT OF ATHENE ... 78 [From the original in the British Museum.] SILVER TETRADRACHM OF LYSIMACHUS (KING OF THRACE, B.C. 323-281) * .... 78 [From the original in the British Museum.] SILVER COIN OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT . . 78 [Supposed to have been struck during his lifetime. Obverse, head of Hercules. Reverse, Zeus hold- ing the eagle, seated. From the original in the British Museum.] PHILIP II., FATHER OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT . 82 [One of the gold medallions of Tarsus. Obverse, the head of Philip II. Reverse, Victory in a quadriga.] TETRADRACHM WITH HEAD OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT WEARING THE LION-SKIN OF HERCULES. 88 [Obverse and reverse. This extraordinarily per- fect coin is the property of Hon. Eben Alexan- der, formerly U. S. Minister to Greece.] MAP OF THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ERATOSTHENES. $8 DEMOSTHENES . . . . . . . 120 [From the statue in. the Vatican, Rome.] jESCHINES ........ 146 [From the marble statue in the Boston Museum.] PART OF THORWALDSEN'S " TRIUMPH OF ALEX- V ander" 180 [From a frieze in the Villa Carlotta, Lake Como, Italy.] THE PERSIAN EMPIRE ABOUT 500 B.C., AND THE EM- PIRE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT, 323 B.C. . 192 * See note on p. xiv. Illustrations. xi ACROPOLIS OF SARDIS ...... 196 PLAN OF THE BATTLE OF THE GRANICUS AS AR- RANGED BY THE AUTHOR .... 220 ALEXANDER AT THE BATTLE OF THE GRANICUS* . 224 [From a statuette now in the National Museum, Naples.] HEAD OF ALEXANDER RONDANINI IN THE GLYPTO- THEK AT MUNICH f 228 From Koepp's Ueber das Bildnes Alexanders des Grosseni\ MOSAIC OF THE BATTLE OF ISSUS (FROM POMPEIl) . 230 HEAD OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT f 232 [From a tetradrachm of Lysimachus.] FACE OF ALEXANDER f . . . . . . 238 [From the Pompeian mosaic representing the Bat- tle of Issus. From Koepp's Ueber das Bildnes Alexanders des Grossen.] SCENE ON THE COAST OF ASIA MINOR, NEAR AN- AMOUR ........ 242 THE GYGEAN LAKE AND THE PLACE OF THE THOU- SAND TOMBS, ASIA MINOR .... 246 PLAIN OF ISSUS (PRESENT CONDITION) . . . 288 [The ancient course of the Pinarus followed the river channel next to the north.] PLAN OF THE BATTLE OF ISSUS, AS ARRANGED BY THE AUTHOR 290 ALEXANDER THE GREAT f 322 [From the bust in the Louvre.] * See note on p. xiv. f See note on p. xv. xii Illustrations PAGE BUST OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT .... 350 [From the British Museum.] battle of arbela 380 Alexander's crossing of the hydaspes and battle with porus ..... 440 NOTES TO ILLUSTRATIONS. Head of Alexander. (One of the gold medallions of Tarsus.) Reverse of medallion : Alexander and the Lion, after the statuary group by Lysippus, called Alexander's Hunt, in commemoration of a fact in Alexander's life. Alexander followed the example of Oriental monarchs in cultivating this exercise, and Lysippus that of Oriental artists in depicting it. Map showing Alexandria a century before and after Christ. This map, based on the map in Brockhaus's Conversations- Lexicon, showing Alexandria a century before and after Christ, which follows the plan of Mahmud Bey, shows also by the cross- and-dash lines the present wide extension, now thickly built upon, of the Heptastadium, which originally connected the mainland with Pharos Island. At the east end of the island is shown the site of the famous Pharos, or lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world. The site of the ancient Pharos, after its destruction, was occupied by a fort. The breakwater extending on the right hand from the mainland to complete the "Great Harbour" no longer exists. Alexander the Great. (One of the gold medallions of Tarsus.) The reverse is the same as the medallion on frontispiece, which see. The obverse shows Alexander as a descendant of Hercules, wearing the lion's scalp. The Hercules figuring on the silver coins of Alexander as his ancestor is of the same type as this Tarsus Medallion and the Tyrian Hercules. In many specimens the resem- xiii xiv Notes to Illustrations. blance to Alexander is marked ; and the "Alexandre d' argent" so to speak, of Ptolemy, on which Alexander's head wears an elephant's scalp, is good evidence, in default of trustworthy literary traditions, that Alexander's contemporaries regarded the lion's-scalp profile of his own coins as the king's profile ; in fact, the Sidon sarcophagus confirms the ancient tradition that Macedonian kings wore the lion's scalp as a badge of their house and office. The lion's-scalp profile of the gold medallion of Tarsus would seem to confirm the portrait theory in regard to the silver coins. Magical virtues were ascribed to Alexander's portrait in the days of the Roman emperors. The presence of the medallion of Alex- ander Severus, with the Philip and Alexander medallions, would seem to indicate that the Roman emperor had given them, in reward for services, to the person in whose grave they were found at Tarsus. These invaluable medallions would appear to be older than the reign of Severus, but the script shows them to be later than Alexander himself. Silver Tetradrachm of Lysimachus (King of Thrace, b.c. 323-281). Obverse : Head of Alexander the Great with Horns of Ammon, as the deified son of the god. The profile is supposed to be taken from the statue-portrait by Lysippus, or the gem-portrait by Pyrgoteles. Reverse : Pallas holding Victory. Alexander at the Battle of the Granicus. This bronze statuette was found in the middle of the eighteenth century at Herculaneum, and is now in the National Museum, Naples. A few ornaments of the bridle and collar are of silver in- crusted upon the dark bronze. This antique is almost certainly a copy after the life-size principal figure of an equestrian encounter, presumably ordered of Lysippus by Alexander himself in commem- oration of his own narrow escape in this battle. This group, set up at Dium, Macedonia, contained fifteen portraits of Macedonian champions. It was copied by Euthycrates of Sicyon, a son and pupil of Lysippus, and was afterward taken to Rome by Metellus Macedonicus. A badly mutilated bronze horse in the Museum of the Conservatori, Rome, has been conjecturally pronounced a rem- nant of the original group. The vigorous action of the present figure is repeated in a Smyrniot terra-cotta described by M. Reinach in the Notes to Illustrations. xv Melanges Graux. In the encounter at the ford of the Granicus, Alexander's helmet was slashed by a Persian scimitar, and he was forced to borrow a lance, his own being shattered. Head of Alexander Rondanini. The bust represents a youth from eighteen to twenty years of age, and may well be regarded as an authentic portrait of the Prince Alexander as he appeared at about the period of the battle of Chseronea (338 B.C.). It has, indeed, been argued with considerable probability that we have in this statue a copy of the gold-ivory statue which Leochares, after the battle of Chaeronea, was commis- sioned to make for the Philippeion at Olympia, as part of a group in which Philip was the central figure. Head of Alexander the Great. Lysimachus, King of Thrace (323-281 B.C.), was one of the suc- cessors of Alexander. As usual on these coins, Alexander is repre- sented with the Ammon horns, in his character as son of Jupiter Ammon and universal king. The coins of Lysimachus are of widely various artistic excellence, but they offer beyond a question the most accurate profile-portraits of Alexander, and the one here presented, published in Imhoof-Blumer's Portratkopfe, Taf. I, is one of the noblest products of the Greek mints. Face of Alexander. Though the face is elongated, as compared, for instance, with the coin portraits, the characteristic features of the " leonine" hair, the forehead, the full eye, and particularly the lips and chin are faith- fully preserved. Alexander the Great. (From the bust in the Louvre.) This marble, called the Herjnes Bust of Alexander, was dis- covered in 1795 on the Tiburtine estate of the Cavaliere d'Azara, afterward Spanish ambassador to France, and by him presented to Napoleon I. This bust, inscribed " Alexander, son of Philip (King of the Macedonians)," in Greek characters of the Augustan age, was long the only means of identifying any other portrait of the con- queror. It has been mutilated by long immersion in the wet soil, and has been subjected to modern restoration in places. ALEXANDER THE GREAT. CHAPTER I. PARENTS AND HOME. 359-356 B.C. NO single personality, excepting the carpenter's son of Nazareth, has done so much to make the world of civilisation we live in what it is as Alexander of Macedon. He levelled the terrace upon which European history built. Whatever lay within the range of his conquests contributed its part to form that Mediterranean civilisation which, under Rome's administration, became the basis of European life. What lay beyond was as if on another planet. Alexander checked his eastward march at the Sutlej, and India and China were left in a world of their own, with their own mechanisms for man and society, their own theories of God and the world. Alexander's world, to which we all be- long, went on its own separate way until, in these latter days, a new greed of conquest, begotten of 2 Alexander the Great. [359 B.C.- commercial ambition, promises at last to level the barriers which through the centuries have stood as monuments to the outmost stations of the Macedon- ian phalanx, and have divided the world of men in twain. The story of the great Macedonian's life, insepar- able as it is from history in its widest range, stands none the less in stubborn protest against that view of history which makes it a thing of thermometers and the rain-gauge, of rivers and mountains, weights and values, materials, tools, and machines. It is a history warm with the life-blood of a man. It is instinct with personality, and speaks in terms of the human will and the soul. History and biography blend. Events unfold in an order that conforms to the opening intelligence and forming will of per- sonality, and matter is the obedient tool of spirit. The story of the times must therefore be told, if truly told, in terms of a personal experience. When and where the personal Alexander was absent from the scene, history in those days either tarried or moved in eddies; the current was where he was. This will be excuse enough for making this narrative of a great historic period peculiarly the story of a man, and not merely of a conqueror. Plutarch says that King Philip of Macedonia, shortly after the capture of Potidaea, received three different pieces of good news. He learned that " Parmenion, his general, had overthrown the Illyr- ians in a great battle, that his race-horse had won the course at the Olympian games, and that his wife had given birth to Alexander. ' ' Another story tells 356 B.C.] Parents and Home. 3 how on the very night of the birth an ominous calamity fell upon Asia: the temple of the great Diana of the Ephesians went up in flames. So events tend to swarm together in history — at least, in the telling of history. The year was undoubtedly 356 B.C., and the best combination of all the indi- cations we have makes the month October, though Plutarch, in deference to the horse-race, says it was July. Philip had been three years on the throne of Macedon. The year before he had occupied Amphi- polis, and so opened for his little state a breathing- place on the ^Egean ; at the same time he introduced it to the long struggle with Athens. Athens herself, two hundred miles off to the south, was in the midst of a war that was to cost her the most of her island empire in the ^Egean. This or the following year marked, too, the publication of Xenophon's pam- phlet On the Revenues, and of Isocrates's essay On the Peace. Demosthenes, twenty-eight years old, was just entering on his career as statesman and public orator. ^Eschines was thirty-four. Aris- totle, the future tutor of Alexander, was twenty- eight. Plato, seventy-one years old, had nine years more to live ; Xenophon had one, Isocrates eighteen. An old order for which Athens and Sparta had made the history was just dying out, and a new order, with new men and new motives, was coming in. The child whose destiny it was to give this new world its shape was born outside the pale of the older world, and in his blood joined the blood of two lines of ancient Northern kings. Alexander's 4 Alexander the Great. [359 B.c.- mother was Olympias, the daughter of Neoptole- mus, King of Epirus, who traced his lineage back through a distinguished line to Neoptolemus, the son of the hero Achilles. So it was said, or, as Plutarch puts it, " confidently believed,' ' that Alex- ander was descended on his father's side from Hercules, through Caranus, and on his mother's from yEacus, through Neoptolemus. Plutarch does not even withhold from us a story of Philip's falling in love that constitutes a fair parallel to what we know of his prompitude and directness of action in other fields. " Philip is said to have fallen in love with Olympias at Samothrace, where they happened to be initiated together into a religious circle, he being a mere stripling, and she an orphan. And having obtained the consent of her brother Arym- bas, he. shortly married her." Refreshing as it is to read of a marriage for love in these old Greek times, it must be reported that the match was never a happy one. They were both persons of decided individuality, and in both the instinct of self-preservation was strongly developed. Both were preeminently am- bitious, aggressive, and energetic; but while Philip's ambition was guided by a cool, crafty sagacity, that of his Queen manifested itself rather in impetuous outbursts of almost barbaric emotion. In her joined a marvellous compound of the mother, the queen, the shrew, and the witch. The passionate ardour of her nature found its fullest expression in the wild ecstasies and crude superstitions of her native re- ligious rites. 356 B.C.] Parents and Home. 5 "Another account is," says Plutarch, "that all the women of this country, having always been addicted to the Orphic and the Dionysiac mystery-rites, imicated largely the practices of the Edonian and Thracian wo- men about Mount Haemus, and that Olympias, in her abnormal zeal to surround these states of trance and in- spiration with more barbaric dread, was wont in the sacred dances to have about her great tame serpents, which, sometimes creeping out of the ivy and the mystic fans, and sometimes winding themselves about the staffs and the chaplets which the women bore, presented a sight of horror to the men who beheld." While it was from his father that Alexander in- herited his sagacious insight into men and things, and his brilliant capacity for timely and determined action, it was to his mother that he undoubtedly owed that passionate warmth of nature which be- trayed itself not only in the furious outbursts of temper occasionally characteristic of him, but quite as much in a romantic fervour of attachment and love for friends, a delicate tenderness of sympathy for the weak, and a princely largeness and generos- ity of soul toward all, that made him so deeply be- loved of men and so enthusiastically followed. His deep religious sentiment, which, wherever he was, carried him beyond the limits of mere respect for the proprieties of form and mere regard for political expediencies, and held him at temple and oracle in awe before the mysteries of the great unseen, stamped him, too, as the son of Olympias. In Philip there predominated the characteristics which mark in modern times the practical politician. 6 Alexander the Great. [359 B.C. He was sagacious and alert of mind. His eye fol- lowed sharply and unceasingly every turn of events that might yield him an advantage. The weakness, the embarrassment, the preoccupation, of his oppon- ent, he always made his opportunity. He was a keen judge of character, and adapted himself readily to those with whom he came in contact. He knew how to gratify the weaknesses, ambitions, lusts, and ideals of men, and chain them to his service. Few who came in contact with him failed to be captivated by him. He was perfectly unscrupulous as to the methods to be employed in attaining an end. Nothing of the sort ordinarily known as principles ever impeded his movement. He was an opportun- ist of the deepest dye. Flattery, promises, bene- ficence, cruelty, deceit, and gold he used when and where each would avail; but bribery was his most familiar tool. He allowed no one to reckon with him as a constant quantity. His ultimate plans and purposes were concealed from friends and foes alike. In announcing his decisions and proclaiming his views, he followed the ordinary politician's watch- word : " We will not cross the bridge till we come to it." As success was to him the only right, and availability the only justice, radical changes of atti- tude and plan in the very face of action involved no difficulty. They rather served his purpose, and were his wont. He remained, as he wished to remain, a puzzle to his foes, and a mystery to his friends. His character was full of apparent contradictions. Perhaps, after all, it was only his extraordinary versatility that was responsible for them. At one 356 B.C.] Parents and Home. time he appears as a creature of passion enraged by anger or lust, again he is cool, deliberate, calculat- ing, when others are carried away with excitement or prejudice; now he is a half-savage, again he is a smooth, subtle, temperate Greek ; now he is pitilessly brutal, again he is generous and large-hearted ; now he gives himself, body and soul, to some petty aim of lust or envy, again he is the prophet and preacher of a national ideal. In everything he was, however, a strong individuality. His personality dominated every enterprise in which he was concerned. He was a natural leader of men. He could organise as well as lead. He not only made himself absolute master of Macedon, but he so organised its force that it became of permanent value and could be transmitted to his successor. His organising talent was, however, military rather than political. He lacked that fine sense for the civic and religious in- stincts of other peoples which developed in his son the capacity for founding empire as well as leading armies. And yet without him Alexander's achieve- ments would have been impossible. Philip's great permanent achievements are two: the first is the organisation of a power which Alex- ander was able, after him, to use for the founding of an empire ; the second is the formulation and practi- cal initiation of the idea of uniting Greece through a great national undertaking. These two are enough to set upon him the stamp of greatness. He was certainly great — great in personal force, in practical alertness, in organising talent, and in sagacious in- telligence. Theopompus says well: " Taking all 8 Alexander the Great. [359 b.c- in all, Europe has never seen such a man as the son of Amyntas. " So much for the parents of Alexander. How truly he was their son the story of his life will tell. The improvement which he made upon their record, particularly in point of greater self-restraint, of higher and more ideal interests, and of nobler ideas of life and duty, this is to be traced, at least to some degree, to his excellent training and education. Alexander was born at Pella, the city which his father, in place of ancient ^Egae, had made the cap- ital of Macedonia. Hard by a vast swamp lake, and on the banks of the sluggish Ludias, it stood near the centre of the plain which formed the nucleus of the little kingdom. The sea, the modern Gulf of Saloniki, was twenty miles away. Twenty miles to the east or west or north brought one to the foot- hills of the highlands that raised their amphitheatre about the plain. One great river, the Axius, modern Vardar, came down through the northern hills and trav-ersed the plain. The Ludias was a lesser stream a little to the west. From the west, draining the mountain-locked plain of Elimea, came the Haliac- mon. Philip's ancestors from their old citadel at ^Egae, near the modern Vodena, had long ruled the plain, and various tribes in the highlands behind had recognised a more or less stable allegiance to their power. Such were the Elimiotae of the Haliac- mon valley, the Lyncestae of the Erigon valley, and the Paeonians on the upper courses of the Axius. The congeries of tribes which made up this loosely jointed Macedonian state covered a territory, ex- 356 B.C.] Parents and Home. g eluding Paeonia, about the size and shape of Con- necticut and Rhode Island. The sea-coast in Philip's early days was occupied by a fringe of Greek settlements, and the early history of Mace- donia is that of an inland state. Not until it acquired a sea-coast did it figure as an international quantity. The people themselves were a plain, hardy, peas- ant population, preserving the older conditions of life and the older institutions of the kingship and the tribal organisation — much, indeed, as they appear in the society of Homer's times. Only among the Spartans, the Molossians, and the Macedonians, says Aristotle, had the form of the ancient kingship survived, and only among the Macedonians the full exercise of its prerogatives. The consolidation of the classes into a strong opposition, which in the other states had first, in the form of an aristocratic opposition, throttled the kingship, and later, in the form of a democratic opposition, throttled the aris- tocracy, was in Macedonia prevented by the pre- dominance of peasant life and the persistence of tribal unity. The state consisted of tribes and clans, not divided into orders and classes. The kingship belonged always in one and the same family, but definite rules for the succession within the family seem not to have been fully established. Seniority alone was not enough to determine a se- lection among the princes. In the turmoils that almost certainly followed the death of a king, force, daring, and leadership often asserted, by a species of natural right, their superior claim. io Alexander the Great. [359 B.c- The larger landed proprietors owed to the king a military allegiance as vassals and companions-at- arms, and constituted a body known as the hetairoi (companions), not unlike the comitatus of the early Germans. The army consisted entirely of the free landholding peasantry. Mercenaries were unknown. It was this force that the stern discipline and careful organisation of Philip raised into the most terrible war-machine that ancient Greece had ever yet known, in firmness and energy the equal of the Spartan, in size, organisation, and suppleness im- measurably its superior. That the Macedonians were Greek by race there can be no longer any doubt. They were the northernmost fragments of the race left stranded behind the barriers of Olym- pus. They had not shared the historical experience of their kinsmen to the south, and had not been kneaded with the mass. If isolation from the ^Egean had withheld them from progress in the arts of civilisation, still they had kept the freshness and purity of the Northern blood better than those who had mixed with the primitive populations of Greece and were sinking the old fair-haired, blue-eyed type of the Northmen in the dark-haired type of the South. It is the experience of history that force and will must be continually replenished from the North, and the Macedonians were only waiting for their turn. Their language, mere patois as it was, and never used, so far as we know, in written form, has left evidences of its Greek character in stray words that have crept into the glossaries, and from soldiers' 356 B.C.] Parents and Home, 1 1 lips into the common speech.* There exist, besides proper names, a large number of glosses in the lexicon of Hesychius and a considerable number of words that became incorporated into the common Greek of the Macedonian period. Thus, Berenice is known to be the Macedonian form corresponding to an Attic Pherenice, as Bilippos was the Mace- donian name of Philip. Correspondingly the Attic word ophrns (eyebrows) had its counterpart abrntes in Macedonian. It is evident that the dialect was regarded as so base a patois that even when Mace- don rose to world-power no attempt was made to elevate it into use as a literary language. The higher classes, presumably, all learned Attic Greek, much as the children in the Tyrol to-day are taught Hochdeutsch, which is to them a half-foreign tongue. Plutarch reports that Attic Greek was the medium of intercourse at Philip's court. It is a significant fact that while as late as 214 B.C., a Macedonian king, Philip V., is known to have issued a proclama- tion to a Thessalian community in bilingual form, i. e., in Thessalian Greek and common Greek, there is no likelihood that any such use of the Macedonian dialect was ever attempted. Macedonian was, how- ever, the common spoken language of the Mace- donian soldiery. Thus Plutarch f reports a scene in the camp before Eumenes's tent: " And when they saw him, they saluted him in the Macedonian dialect, and took up their shields, and, striking them with their pikes, gave a great shout." That Alex- * See A. Fick, Kuhri 's Zeitschrift, xxii., i^ff. \ Plutarch, Eumenes, ch. xiv. 12 Alexander the Great. [359 B.C.- ander himself usually spoke Attic Greek may be in- ferred from the statement of Plutarch * that when he did speak in Macedonian it was interpreted by his attendants as indicating unusual excitement or perturbation. That the Macedonians were a rude, half-civilised people is sufficiently attested. Alexander in a speech attributed to him by Arrian f says to his army: " My father, Philip, found you a roving people, without fixed habitations and without resources, most of you clad in the skins of animals, pasturing a few sheep among the mountains, and to defend these, waging a luckless war- fare with the Illyrians, the Triballans, and the Thracians on your borders. But he gave you the soldier's cloak to replace the skins and led you down from the mountains into the plain, making you a worthy match in war against the barbarians on your frontier, so that you no longer trusted to the security of your strongholds so much as to your own personal valour for safety. He made you to dwell in cities and provided you with wholesome laws and institutions. Over those same barbarians, who be- fore had plundered you and carried off as booty both yourselves and your substance, he made you instead of slaves and underlings to be masters and lords." The warlike character also of the people is attested by Aristotle's % remark that " it was once the usage among the Macedonians that a man who had not * Plutarch, Alexande?-, ch. li. \ Arrian, Exped. Alex., vii., 9. % Aristotle, Politics, vii., 2, 6 (1324.3). te \ 356 B.C.l Parents and Home. 13 yet slain a foe should wear a cord about his body." They were passionately fond of the chase and given to the most barbarous excesses in strong drink, in which latter particular at least Philip, and, as some think, Alexander, too, proved themselves true sons of Macedonia. But none of these characteristics affords the least warrant for excluding them from the list of Greek tribes. Like the inhabitants of Epirus, who were also often classed as " barbarians," they represented the outer rim of the Greek race, while the Illyrians to the west of them were of another race, probably the same as the modern Albanians, and their lan- guage, as we know from an incident related by Poly- bius,*was totally unintelligible to the Macedonians. Rude people as the Macedonians were, we have no reason to think that the Greeks generally classed them as" barbarians." When Demosthenes seeks to arouse political antipathy against Philip by call- ing him and his people barbarians, we shall interpret his words as we do ante-election editorials, and not as a sober contribution to ethnology. Bitterest is his expression in a passage of the Third Philippic: Philip — a man who not only is no Greek, and no way akin to the Greeks, but is not even a barbarian from a respectable country — no, a pestilent fellow of Macedon, a country from which we never get even a decent slave." If this tirade contains any basis of fact, it is that the Macedonians were rarely found in slavery, a testimony, on the one hand, to their own manliness, and, on the other, to their * Polybius, xxviii., 8, 9. 14 Alexander the Great, [359 B.c.~ general recognition as Greeks. There is no evidence that Demosthenes's detestation of the Macedonians was commonly shared by his Athenian countrymen, though the two peoples surely had very little in common. In institutions, customs, and culture, they represented the extreme contrast afforded within the limits of the Greek race. Whatever may have been the current opinions in Greece concerning the Macedonian people, there can be no doubt that their royal family had been for generations regarded with great respect. They claimed to be descended from the ancient royal family of Argos, a branch of which, tradition said, had in the early days of Grecian history taken refuge in the north. Though it is impossible for us to test the reliability of this tradition, or to determine whether the name borne by the family, the Argeadae, is to be regarded as evidence to the truth of the tradition, or merely as the deceptive cause of its origin, certain it is that it was generally accepted among the Greeks, and had received the most de- cisive official verification from the highest Greek tribunal. When Alexander, a Macedonian king of the earlier part of the fifth century (498-454 B.C.), presented himself as a competitor at the Olympian games, Herodotus says that the other" competitors undertook to exclude him, saying that barbarians had no right to enter the competition, but only Greeks. But when Alexander proved that he was an Argive, he was formally adjudged a Greek, and on participating in the race, he came off with the first prize." 356 B.C.I Parents arid Home. 1 5 It was this same king who, during the invasion of Xerxes, showed himself so firm a friend of the Greek cause as to win the title " Philhellene." The mem- ory of his action on this occasion became an heir- loom in his family. The espousal of Hellenic interests as against the power of Persia remained the policy and the ideal of his successors. It was left to his namesake, a century and a quarter after him, to realise the ideal in its fullest sense. How- ever the other Greek states might vacillate in alter- nately opposing Persia or paying court to her, according to the momentary advantage, the Mace- donian kings always remained firm in their hereditary aversion to the effeminate empire and civilisation of the East ; and in this we may find one of the strong- est grounds of their popularity with the Greeks at large, as it surely also gave a certain moral basis for the claims of their ambition to lead the united force of Hellenism against the East. Another family tradition that took its rise with Alexander the Philhellene, or perhaps even with his father, Amyntas (540-499), associated itself with the cultivation and patronage of the higher elements of Greek civilisation. It was a natural tribute which the lesser pays the greater, but it was none the less a credit to have discerned the greater. Alexander's eagerness to participate in the Olympian games was part of a general desire to be recognised by the Greeks. He showed himself highly sensitive to their opinions about him. He sought the acquaint- ance and society of their eminent men, and brought it about that Pindar, then the first literary name of 1 6 Alexander the Great. [359 B.C.- Greece, should celebrate his Olympian victories in verse. The efforts to introduce Greek culture into Mace- donian society, which began with Alexander the Philhellene, were continued under his successors. History gives us no connected account — only stray hints, but they are broad enough to follow. Greek settlers were welcomed. Men eminent in letters and in art were induced to visit the country and re- side at court. Thus Alexander's immediate succes- sor, Perdiccas II. (454-413 B.C.), entertained at his court Melanippides, the dithyrambic poet of Melos, who was regarded as one of the foremost lyric com- posers of his day; and tradition, which was ever busy with the half-mythical career of Hippocrates, did not fail to report that the great physician had once been called to practise his art at the palace of the same king. In the reign of the next king, Archelaus (41 3-399), the Philhellenist tendency, which had become almost a craze of imitation, reached its climax, and by de- veloping a nationalist party drew after it a reaction. Archelaus sought to make his court a Weimar. Though Sophocles and Socrates declined his invita- tions, Euripides spent the last years of his life in Macedonia, dying there in 406. The tragedian Agathon, the epic poet Chcerilus, the musician and poet Timotheus, and the artist Zeuxis all resided there for longer or shorter periods, finding under the hospitable roof of the king a welcome refuge from the turmoils that the long course of the Pelopon- nesian war was bringing to the Greek states. Great 356 B.C.] Parents and Home. 1 7 progress was made in all the arts and practices of peaceful civilised life. Thucydides says of Arche- laus: " He built the fortresses now existing in the country, and built direct roads, and, among other things, regulated the military system with provision of horses, equipment, and the like, doing more than all the eight kings before him put together.' Though the progress of the country toward civil- isation was seriously retarded by the ten years of anarchy that followed this reign, and the various wars that intervened to disturb the succeeding reigns of Amyntas (389-369 B.C.), Alexander II. (369-368), Ptolemaeus (368-365), and Perdiccas III. (365-359), the trend of events was ever toward bringing the country into closer, though often hostile, contact with central Greece. It was an occurrence of no slight significance for the history of the land which he was afterward to rule when Philip, the son of Amyntas, was held three years (368-365) a hostage at Thebes — at a time, too, when Thebes, at the height of its politi- cal importance, was the leading military power of the day, and the home of Epaminondas, the greatest leader and military strategist that Greece had yet produced. The tendency of Macedonian politics for a century and a half before Philip had followed, as we have seen, the twofold inclination of the kings, first, to raise Macedonia to the rank of a Greek state and secure it participation in Hellenic affairs and Hellenic culture, and, second, to antago- nise orientalism as expressed in the power of Persia. With Philip the course of events brought it about 1 8 Alexander the Great. [359-356 3. c. that these two inclinations naturally blended into one. After a peculiar combination of occurrences in the year 352 had given him a foothold in Thessaly and made him a party to the controversies of central Greece, he saw his way to a larger ambition, which combined all the ambitions of his predecessors, and more than fulfilled them. He and his people should become Greek in leading Greece, and in leading it against the East. CHAPTER II. BOYHOOD AND ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. 356-340 B.C. ^> PHILIP ascended the throne in 359 B.C. Three years later Alexander was born prince and heir. We have seen the soil and the root from which he sprang. All his life is true to its source. In fresh, wild vigour he is a son of Mace- don, in impulsive idealism the son of Olympias, in sagacity and organising talent the son of Philip. But he was born to a throne, and, in his father's foresight, to a greater throne than that of little landlocked Macedonia, with its shepherds and peas- ants and country squires. Philip doubtless prided himself on being a " self-made " man; but his boy was to have an education that no Greek could despise. While it would be evidently amiss in estimating the influence of Alexander's education upon his character to compare inherited traits as subtrahend against the finished product as a minuend, the data which we fortunately possess concerning his early 19 20 Alexander the Great. [356 B.c- training, and our knowledge of the ideas and system of his later teacher Aristotle, afford, when combined with the clear picture history has left us of our hero's personality, an opportunity unparalleled in all the story of olden time of seeing what education can do for a man. Let the plain story of his boy- hood yield its own lesson. As was usual in all well-to-do Greek families, Alexander was first committed to the care of a nurse. Her name was Lanice, probably the familiar form of Hellanice. The first six years of his life were spent under her care, and a feeling of attach- ment developed toward her that lasted throughout his life. " He loved her as a mother," says an ancient writer. One of her children, Proteas, whom she nursed and brought up in company with the young prince, remained in after life one of his most intimate associates. All her sons afterward gave their lives in battle for him, and her one brother, Clitus, who was also a faithful friend, and at Granicus rescued him from death, was killed by his hand in a pitiful quarrel at a drinking-bout, a deed which brought him instant regret and fearful re- morse. As he lay in his tears on the bed of repent- ance, the graphic account of Arrian tells how " he kept calling the name of Clitus, and the name of Lanice, Clitus's sister, who nursed and reared him — Lanice, the daughter of Dropides. ' Fair return I have made in manhood's years for thy nurture and care — thou who hast seen thy sons die fighting in my behalf ; and now I have slain thy brother with mine own hand ! ' ' 340 B.C.] Elementary Education. 2 1 During these first six years we have no reason to suppose that our young hero's education differed essentially from that of other Greeks. The methods of the nursery are usually those of plain tradition, and are the last strongholds to be reached by the innovations of any newfangled systems of education. He grew up in the retirement of the women's quarters, in the company of other children, and with the customary solace of top and hoop, puppet and riding-horse, cradle-songs and nurse's tales. Of men he saw little, least of all during those militant years of his father, Philip. He was, through and through, a mother's boy. To her he had the strongest attachment, and from her he inherited the predominating traits of his spiritual character. With the beginning of his seventh year a Greek boy of the better class was usually intrusted to the care of a special male servant, called the paidagogos, or pedagogue. He was usually a slave, not neces- sarily one of much education, but a trustworthy, respectable, and generally elderly person, capable of teaching boys their "manners" and keeping them out of mischief. He accompanied the boy wherever he went, attended him to school, carrying his cither, or little harp, his books, tablets, etc., and remained there in waiting until the schoolmaster, the didaskalos, was through with him. In Alexan- der's case more than this was done. The general oversight of his education was intrusted to a man of distinction ,and royal birth, one Leonidas, a relative of Alexander's mother, who, though he did not spurn the title " pedagogue " in so good a cause, 22 Alexander the Great. [356 B.c- was properly known as " educator" or" professor." He was, in reality, what we should call the prince's tutor. The position of pedagogue proper was held by an Acharnanian named Lysimachus, a man whose witless mediocrity has been rescued from total ob- livion by one happy " classical allusion." " Be- cause," says Plutarch, " he named himself Phcenix, and Alexander Achilles, and Philip Peleus, he was esteemed and held the second rank [i. e.> among the educators of Alexander]." Leonidas was essentially a harsh, stern disciplin- arian. Alexander received under his tutelage an excellent physical education, and was trained to endure hardships and privations, and to abhor luxury. A passage in Plutarch's life of Alexander is in point here: " He was extremely temperate in eating and drinking, as is particularly well illustrated by what he said to Ada — the one whom he dignified with the title ' mother,' and established as Queen of Caria. She, as a friendly atten- tion, used, it seems, to send him daily not only all sorts of meats and cakes, but went so far, finally, as to send him the cleverest cooks and bakers she could find. These, however, Alexander said he had no use for. Bet- ter cooks he had already — those which his pedagogue Leonidas had given him ; namely,. as breakfast-cook one named All-night-tramp, and as a dinner-cook one Light- weight-breakfast. ' Why, sir,' said he, ' that man Leon- idas would go and unlock my chests where I kept my blankets and clothes, and look in them to see that my mother had not given me anything that I did not really need, or that conduced to luxury and indulgence." REVERSE OF HEAVY EUBOEAN OR SOLONIAN DEKADRACHM, SHOW- ING THE ATHENIAN OWL. SILVER COIN OF PHILIP II. OF MACEDON (FATHER OF ALEXANDER). HEAD OF THE OLYMPIAN ZEUS. COIN PROBABLY STRUCK, AS THE HORSE ON REVERSE INDICATES, IN COMMEMORATION OF VICTORY IN THE OLYMPIAN GAMES. TETRADRACHM OF ALEXANDER, BEARING THE HEAD OF HERCULES. 340 B.C.] Elementary Education. 23 Another reference to Leonidas (Plutarch, chap, xxv.) harmonises reasonably with the foregoing. It again represents the tutor as a rigid inspector of details, and gives to his sternness a complementary shade of the petty economical. This is the story { " As he [Alexander] was sending off to Olympias and Cleopatra and his friends great quantities of the booty he had taken [from the sack of Gaza], he sent along with it, for his pedagogue Leonidas, five hundred talents of frankincense and a hundred talents of myrrh, in memory of a boyish dream of his youth. For it so happened once at a sacrifice that, as Alexander seized both hands full of the incense and threw it upon the fire, Leonidas called to him, and said : ' Sometime, if you get to be master of the land of spices, you can throw incense on lavishly like this, but for the present be economical in the use of what you have.' So now Alexander took the occasion to write him : ' We send you frankincense and myrrh in abundance, so that you may make an end of econo- mising with the gods.' " We may do the old tutor an injustice in attribut- ing to him, on the basis of this incident alone, any- thing like smallness or meanness in character. The tendency of Alexander was naturally toward lavish- ness and recklessness. Leonidas sought, doubtless, to check this, and was remembered most distinctly by his former pupil in his favourite role of brakeman. And yet Leonidas cannot escape wholly the charge, which later opinion laid at his doors, of having car- ried his severity and martinetism too far, and of being thus in some measure responsible for certain faults, particularly of harshness, imperiousness, and 24 Alexander the Great. [356 b.c - arbitrariness, which showed themselves later in the bearing and temper of his pupil. Philip early recog- nised that a character of such strength as Alexander's was not to be controlled and trained in the school of arbitrary authority. He needed guidance, and not authority. He must be convinced and led, not driven. Thus Plutarch says: " Philip recognised that while his was a nature hard to move when once he had set himself to resist, he could yet be led by reason to do what was right. So he always himself tried to influence him by argument rather than by command, and as he was unwilling to intrust the di- rection and training of his son to the teachers of music and the culture-studies, considering this to be a task of extraordinary importance and difficulty, or, as Sophocles has it, 'a job at once for many a bit and many a helm,' he sent for Aristotle, the most famous and learned of the philosophers, to come to him." It does not by any means necessarily follow from what Plutarch says, that Leonidas was dispossessed of his position as supervisor of the prince's educa- tion by the coming of Aristotle. He probably re- mained in at least nominal control, but it is certainly to be inferred from all that we hear about the later course of training that the all-important personal factor in it was Aristotle. The pedagogue proper, i. e., Lysimachus, undoubtedly continued to act in the function of personal attendant, and we hear of him as still in the company of Alexander during the campaign in Syria, and when the latter was over twenty-three years old. The story which Plutarch 340 B.C.] Elementary Education. 25 tells about him in the Vita illustrates not only his amiable eccentricity of temper, but also, at the same time, the tenderness, generosity, and unselfish loy- alty to friendship which were such marked features in Alexander's character. " During the progress of the siege of Tyre, on a foray- expedition which he made against the Arabs dwelling by Antilibanon, he came into great danger through his pedagogue Lysimachus. Lysimachus, namely, had in- sisted on following him everywhere, claiming that he was no less fit and no older than Homer's Phoenix. When now, on entering the mountain regions, they were obliged to leave their horses and go afoot, Lysimachus became exhausted and was unable to advance. The rest of the company was far in advance, but Alexander could not bring himself to leave his old friend there alone, with the night coming down and the enemy close at hand. So he stayed by him, and kept cheering him on and try- ing to help him forward, until, without its being noticed, he, with a few attendants, became separated from the army, and found himself obliged to bivouac there in the darkness and the bitter cold, and that, too, in a grimly disagreeable and dangerous position. After a while he descried at some distance from him various scattered camp-fires of the enemy. Relying upon his fleetness of foot, and with his usual fondness for encouraging his people by personal participation in toil and peril, he made a dash against the company at the nearest watch- fire. Two barbarians who who were sitting there by the fire he despatched with his knife, and then, seizing a fire- brand, made off with it to his own people. Then they built a great fire, so that some of the enemy were fright- ened and fled. Others who essayed to attack them they 26 Alexander the Great. [356 B.C.- repulsed. Thus they spent the night in safety. This is the story as Chares tells it." To return now to the boy Alexander. We have good reason to justify the opinion of his father, Philip, that the training of such a fellow demanded the best cooperative steering endeavours of " many a bit and many a helm." He was not at all what is ordinarily called the " bad boy " — rather the con- trary. But he was restless, energetic, fearless, head- strong, and self-willed, though his self-will was that of an intelligent, inventive independence, rather than pure stubbornness. The famous story of the taming of Bucephalus contains a full body of doc- trine on this subject, and, as its accord with later developments in the character of Alexander is too unmistakable to admit of any doubt as to its au- thenticity, we give it in full as Plutarch tells it. From the context in which the narrative appears, we infer with reasonable certainty that Alexander at the time was about twelve years old. " Philonicus of Thessaly had offered to sell Philip his horse Bucephalus for thirteen talents. So they all went down into the plain to try the animal. He proved, however, to be balky and utterly useless. He would let no one mount him, and none of the attendants of Philip could make him hear to him, but he violently resisted them all. Philip, in his disgust, ordered the horse led away as being utterly wild and untrained. Whereat, Alexander, who was present, said : ' That is too good a horse for those men to spoil that way, simply because 340 B.C.] Elementary Education. 27 they have n't the skill or the grit to handle him right.' At first Philip paid no attention to him, but as he kept insisting on being heard, and seemed greatly disturbed about the matter, his father said to him : ' What do you mean by criticising your elders, as if you were wiser than they, or knew so much more about handling a horse than they do?' 'Well, this horse, anyway, I would handle better than anyone else, if they would give me a chance.' 'In case you don't succeed,' rejoined his father, 'what penalty are you willing to pay for your freshness ? ' ' I '11 pay, by Jove, the price of the horse ! ' Laughter greeted this answer, but after some bantering with his father about the money arrangements, he went straight to the horse, took him by the bridle, and turned him around toward the sun. This he did on the theory that the horse's fright was due to seeing his own shadow dance up and down on the ground before him. He then ran along by his side a while, patting and coaxing him, until, after a while, seeing he was full of fire and spirit, and impatient to go, he quietly threw off his coat, and swinging himself up, sat securely astride the horse. Then he guided him about for a while with the reins, without striking him or jerking at the bit. When now he saw that the horse was getting over his nervousness and was eager to gallop ahead, he let him go, driving him on with a sterner voice and with kicks of his foot. In the group of onlookers about Philip there prevailed, from the first, the silence of intensely anxious concern. But when the boy turned the horse and came galloping up to them with pride and joy in his face, they all burst out into a cheer. His father, they say, shed tears for very joy, and, as he dismounted, kissed him on the head, and said : ' My son, seek thee a kingdom suited to thy powers ; Macedonia is too strait for thee.' " 28 Alexander the Great. [356 B.C.- Bucephalus became from this time the property and the inseparable companion of Alexander. He accompanied him on his campaigns, " sharing many toils and dangers with him," and was generally the horse ridden by him in battle. No one else was ever allowed to mount him, as Arrian says, " be- cause he deemed all other riders unworthy." He is reported to have been a magnificent black charger of extraordinary size, and to have been marked with a white spot on the forehead. Some thought his name " ox-head " to have been given him on account of this resemblance of his head to that of an ox. Others said it was because he was branded with the mark of an ox-head. This reminds us of the name Koppatias applied to the famous Corinthian horses, which are said to have been branded with the letter koppa (?), probably in allusion to the koppa as initial of the word Korinthos (Qorinthos) which always stood upon the Corinthian coins under the device of the horse Pegasus. Alexander's affection for the animal is illustrated by two stories, one told by Arrian (v., 19, 6), the other by Plutarch {Vita, ch. lxi.) as well as by Ar- rian. Arrian' s story is this: " This horse once disappeared from Alexander's hands in the country of the Uxians (a tribe of robbers east of Mesopotamia), whereupon he sent out a proclamation throughout the country, to the effect that if they did not bring him back his horse, all the Uxians would be put to death. In response to this proclamation the horse was brought back immediately. This shows how great was Alexander's interest in the horse, and also in- 340 B.C.] Elementary Education. 29 cidentally how great was the barbarians' dread of Alexander." Plutarch's story is as follows: " Shortly after the battle with Poros [the battle of the Hydaspes] Bucephalus died, as the vulgate report has it, while being treated for wounds he had received, but as Onesiscratus, however, says, worn out with old age. For he says he was thirty years old when he died. Alexan- der was overwhelmed with grief at his loss. It was for him as if he had lost an old companion and friend. So he founded a city on the Hydaspes, and named it in his honor Bucephala." From boyhood on, nothing is more characteristic of Alexander than his restless passion for reshaping and subduing. We shall very greatly misunderstand him if we attribute this to an empty desire for fame and glory. It was not the desire for fame, but the desire to act. It arose from the promptings of an active, ready will, that shrank from no responsi- bility, and never shunned the pains of decision. He bore no marks of indolence of will. Action was almost a mania with him. A naive remark of his boyhood shows how the child was father to the man. " Whenever news was brought of Philip's victories, the capture of a city or the winning of some great battle, he never seemed greatly rejoiced to hear it ; on the con- trary, he used to say to his play-fellows : ' Father will get everything in advance, boys ; he won't leave any great task for me to share with you.' . . . He delib- erately preferred as his inheritance, not treasures, not luxury and pleasures, but toils, wars, and ambitions." 30 Alexander the Great. [356 b.c- By nature he was fervently passionate and im- pulsive. His attachments to his friends were strong. He loved warmly and loyally. He was often swept by storms of anger, though hatred was foreign to him. It was only a magnificent force of will that enabled him to hold rein upon his passions. The struggle for self-control began in his boyhood. " Even in boyhood," the ancient biographer says, " he showed a tendency to moderation and self- control, in that, though naturally violent and easily swayed by passion, he was not readily inflamed in the enjoyment of bodily pleasures, and handled them mildly." Self-subduing was only a mani- festation of the supreme passion for bringing his environment under the control of his personality ; he merely treated self as part of his environment. Appetites fared with him much as Bucephalus did. This greed of achieving early showed, however, its bent toward things political. " He had not," Plutarch says, " like his father, Philip, an undiscriminating fondness for all kinds of fame. Thus Philip, for instance, used to plume himself on his cleverness in oratory, as much as if he had been a pro- fessional rhetorician, and his chariot-race victories he commemorated on his coins. Alexander, however, when his companions were trying to find out whether he would be willing to compete in the foot-race at Olympia, for he was swift of foot, said : ' Yes, certainly, if I can have kings as antagonists.' " We should do Alexander great injustice if we interpreted this remark as monarchical snobbish^ 340 B.C.I Elementary Education. 3 1 ness. Alexander, our author implies, was no lover of fame in itself and for its own sake. The winning of a foot-race, for instance, would have little value for him, except he could win it from a prince, i. e., except as the victory could take on a political colour and assume a political meaning. Not that he felt it unbecoming to his station or beneath his dignity to contend with common men, but that a mere athletic victory would be to him only a sham victory, a meaningless achievement. This interpret- ation of our passage is supported not only by the context, but by all that we know else of the boy's character. It is in harmony with this earnestness of purpose, and the tendency of his ambition to concentrate itself upon a single aim, that we find him, while yet a stripling, profoundly interested, with a naively boyish seriousness, in everything which concerned the imperial dreams and plans of his house. Once when, in his father's absence, a body of special am- bassadors from the Persian Shah came to the capital, he is said to have attracted much remark by the skill with which he entertained them, and by the sober craft with which he exploited the opportunity of their presence. He showed them such distin- guished attention and kindness that he directly placed himself upon a confidential footing with them. The questions he asked them were, to their surprise, not about trifling topics such as a boy would be expected to be interested in, but " about the length of the roads, and the methods of in- 32 Alexander the Great. [356 B.c- land travel ; about the Shah, and what sort of a man he was in a military way ; how strong the Persian army was, and what constituted the strength of their empire. With such queries, as well as such demeanour, he so aroused their admiration that they came to think that, after all, the cleverness of Philip, about which they had heard so much, counted but little in comparison with the energy and the nobility of purpose they discovered in his son." The life of Alexander affords an unusually satis- factory opportunity of measuring the influence of education upon character. Ancient history scarcely offers another such. Alexander's natural endow- ments of character, as we have already seen from the story of his boyhood, and shall further see in the unfolding of his later life, include certain traits so pronounced and well defined that there can be no mistake concerning them. The character of the natural man Alexander is well in evidence. On the other hand, we are afforded an unusually accurate means of gauging the method and spirit of his edu- cation through the circumstance that, from his thir- teenth year on, Aristotle was his tutor, and Aristotle's ideas about how to teach and why to teach and what to teach are better known than those of any one of the ancients who ever practised pedagogy. Alexander, especially in some of the tendencies of his later career, unquestionably offended seriously against the doctrine of his master, and many of his ideas, particularly regarding politics, were at vari- ance therewith. A superficial judgment might, therefore, pronounce that all evidence of Aristotle's 340 B.C.] Elementary Education. 33 influence was lacking in Alexander's career. Such a judgment fails, on the one hand, to take into sufficient account the abnormal conditions consti- tuted by Alexander's sudden and enormous success, and on the other to take in complete review the in- cidents of his life in the light of his natural instincts and of his power and opportunity. Wherever we see in him a high, imperious, fitful temper and a restless, energetic, selfish will curbing themselves to the rein of reason, reflection, and large humane con- siderations, there the influence of the teacher is to be discerned. Alexander was between twelve and thirteen years of age when Aristotle, then a man of forty or one- and-forty, took him in hand. Aristotle's birth- place, Stagira, was in Thrace, very near Macedonian soil, and his father, Nicomachus, had been the court physician of Amyntas, Alexander's grand- father. He was certainly, therefore, well enough known to Philip. There is a letter reported to us by Aulus Gellius {Noct. Attic, ix.) which purports to be Philip's announcement to Aristotle of the birth of his son : " Philip to Aristotle, greeting. Be it known that to me a son is born. I am thankful therefore to the gods, but not so much at the birth of the child as that he is born in thy time. For I hope that, trained and educated by thee, he will prove himself worthy of us and of the succession to the throne." It is altogether improbable that Aristotle in the year 356, when but twenty-eight years old, and nine 34 Alexander the Great. [356 B.c- years before the death of his master, Plato, had at- tained a repute such as to justify an address like this. The letter rather belongs to the rhetorico- sophistic compositions of a later date, but testifies to the classical importance which the union of the two great names, Aristotle and Alexander, had as- sumed in the mind of antiquity. It was indeed a most significant fate that brought the two in this relation together. In the words of Zell : " The one had the power and the call to master and rule the world. The other had discovered and subjugated a new world for the human mind and for science." In recognition of Aristotle's services and as a species of higher remuneration therefor, Philip, to quote Plutarch's word's, " caused the city of the Stagirites, where Aristotle had been born, and which he [Philip] had laid waste (348-347 B.C.) to be rebuilt, and he recalled to their homes the citi- zens of the same who were living in banishment and slavery." As a seat for Aristotle's school the city of Mieza, in the Macedonian province of Emathia, southwest of the capital city Pella, near the boundaries of Thessaly, was selected, and there in the Grove of the Nymphs, hard by the town, the place where he taught, with its great chair of stone on which the master sat, and the shady paths in which he was wont, as in later years in the peripatoi of the Lyceum at Athens, to walk with his pupils, was shown as a " chief attraction " to visitors even in the days of Plutarch, five centuries later. Aristotle remained here in all about eight years, 340 B.C.] Elementary Education. 35 i. e., from 344~43 to 335 B.C. Shortly after Alexan- der ascended the throne (336 B.C.) Aristotle removed to Athens, and there, more or less aided by the favouring current of Macedonianism, established his famous school in the Lyceum in the eastern suburbs of Athens. Of his eight years in Macedonia not more than four could have been given to the immediate personal instruction of the prince. From his seventeenth year on, Alexander became too much absorbed in military and political interests to admit of further exclusive attention to study, but no particular date, prior to 336, marked an abrupt cessation of his relations to his tutor, whom he con- tinued to respect and heed, and whose instruction he doubtless from time to time still enjoyed. To his father, he said, he owed his life, to Aristotle the knowledge of how to live worthily. In Aristotle's school at Mieza, Alexander was by no means the sole pupil. Such an arrangement would have been inconsistent with one of the funda- mental principles of the master's pedagogic system, for he held that education, and particularly moral education was largely to be attained through per- sonal association, and that the cultivation of noble friendships among the young was a most potent means of forming in them cleanliness and healthi- ness of character. A considerable group of young men, composed in part, if not entirely, of noble- men's sons and princes, made up the school. We have no means of judging of the number further than that the language of those writers who allude to it certainly contains the implication that the 36 Alexander the Great. [356 B.C.- number was not small. Among other allusions of the kind an anecdote preserved in Pseudo-Callis- thenes shows that Alexander was taught in company with others, and rather unconsciously illustrates the advantage of class instruction over private coaching in the incidental sharpening of wits by rivalry. The story runs as follows: " As Aristotle had with him once in his school a lot of boys, several of whom were sons of kings, he said to one of them : ' When, some day, you become king in your father's stead, what favor do you think you will show me, your teacher ? ' The boy replied,' You shall dine at my table, and I will make everyone show you honour and respect.' Then turning to another the teacher asked the same question, and this one answered, ' I will make you my chief treasurer, and will consult you as adviser in all that is brought me for decision.' Then he turned to Alexander with the question, ' And now, my son, what do you propose to do with me, your old teacher, when you come to sit upon the throne of your father, Philip ? ' And Alexander answered, ' What right have you to ask me such questions about that which the future has yet to bring ? As I have no assurance of the morrow, I can only say that, when the day and hour is come, then I will give you answer.' 'Well said,' ex- claimed the master ; ' well said, Alexander, world-mon- arch ! for thou wilt one day be the greatest king of all.' " Alexander's personal relations to his teacher in after life are unfortunately rendered somewhat ob- scure by the contradictory and to some extent evid- ently unauthentic statements of our authorities. ARISTOTLE. AFTER THE STATUE IN THE SPADA PALACE, ROME. 340 B.C.] Elementary Education. 37 When the invasion of Asia was begun, Aristotle evidently preferred the quiet of philosophic teach- ing at Athens to the turmoil of the camp, and declined his pupil's solicitations that he should ac- company him. For a time at least they remained in constant communication with each other, and a series of letters of doubtful authenticity constituting a supposed correspondence between them during the earlier years of the campaigns in Asia were known and much read in antiquity. Two of Aris- totle's existing tractates, viz., that On Colonisation t and that On the Monarchy were written as advice to Alexander during his campaigns in Asia, and were evidently influential in directing the policy of the conqueror. We have it on good authority, too, that he in various ways and at different times gave aid to Aristotle in the prosecution of his scien- tific work, having at one time given him no less a sum than eight hundred talents for the purchase of books and for defraying the expenses of his in- vestigations connected with the preparation of his work on zoology. At another time he placed at his disposal the services of a thousand men throughout Asia and Greece with instructions to follow out the directions of Aristotle in collecting and reporting details concerning the life-conditions and habits of fishes, birds, beasts, and insects. These outlays, gigantic as they seem, were in reality not disproportionate to the difficulty of the work, and the vastness of Aristotle's undertaking, especially when we consider the absence of prior investigations, the vast stretches of country in- 38 Alexander the Great. [356 B.C.- volved, and the difficulties of communication. Aristotle's work stands to-day as a monument and a voucher to the money and means afforded through the thankfulness of the pupil. In course of time, it appears that the two became in some way and to some extent estranged from each other. In the long separation, under radically different conditions, they naturally grew apart. The later tendencies of Alexander's life, especially his inclination to oriental manners, and his supposed assumption of divine honours, could not fail to be distasteful to his master, and on Alexander's part it became notice- able, as Plutarch puts it, that " his kindly disposi- tion toward Aristotle lost with time somewhat of its earlier heartiness and of its warmly affectionate character." Alexander's unfortunate experience with Callis- thenes, the nephew of Aristotle, undoubtedly helped to raise a barrier between them during the last few years of Alexander's life. This man, distinguished above all things for his tactless effrontery of speech and general lack of good sense, had accompanied Alexander on his campaigns in the character of chronicler. After having fallen from favour through his exquisite obnoxiousness, he was discovered in complicity with a treasonable plot and died in im- prisonment, 327 B.C. It is impossible that Aristotle should have been greatly surprised at his fate, for he had himself warned him earlier that his tongue would some day be the ruin of him, but some of the historians would have us believe that Alexander ex- tended his suspicion of Callisthenes to his uncle. 340 B.C.] Elementary Education. 39 This is however highly improbable. We have no reason to believe that Alexander ever entertained any positive suspicion or even dislike of his old teacher, but the fact that Alexander had taken up with Callisthenes on Aristotle's recommendation un- avoidably threw some of the responsibility for his conduct upon his uncle. That Aristotle avvays stood in some sense under the protection of royal favour, even though in the last years it came to him mostly through the per- sonal friendship of Antipater, is shown by the fact that after the death of Alexander he was forced to quit Athens on the distinct ground that he was a Macedonian favourite. Having thus reviewed the history of Alexander's relations to the great philosopher, it remains for us now to gain some impression of the nature of the instruction which he received from him. In the absence of connected statements on the subject in the biographers and historians, we are left to recon- struct a picture of it out of occasional allusions, out of our knowledge of Alexander's literary and scien- tific interests in his later life, and, best of all, out of the well-known pedagogical as well as scientific ideas of the master himself. Before coming under Aristotle's influence, the young prince had evidently learned what by that age a boy had usually learned from the ordinary grammatist and paidotribe, i. e., he could read and write, could draw a little, had some knowledge of the flute and harp, and had been trained in the usual physical exercises. In regard to all these 4> J3 B .,"0 ,S o 8 , ilS 8 5Xu O-^n ^5± o i2 J5 .. p <->" c 3^-b re . ■a " ft-S.- = M?C go o.2 art ftl-3 8! dT3 <0fl r- ^ ^ .i-l M* TO 3 *** w 11 V O « * >>« S °-BxX oLo^EEggH^H 334 B.C.] Carrying the War into Asia. 221 their way in, and the light-armed infantry mingled with the cavalry served a good purpose, too. Alexander, upon his horse, was in the thick of the fight. His lance was shattered. So was that of Aretis, his aide, to whom he had called for another. Then Demaratus, the Corinthian, gave him his " No sooner had he taken it than, seeing Mithridates, the son-in-law of Darius, riding up at the head of a squadron of cavalry arranged in the shape of a wedge, he rode forward and, striking the Persian full in the face, threw him to the ground. Thereupon Rhoisakes charged upon Alexander and smote him a blow on the head with his scimitar. A piece was broken from the helmet, but it held against the blow. Then, in turn, Alexander threw him to the ground, driving his lance through his breastplate into his chest. And, just then, as Spithridates had swung his scimitar aloft to bring it down upon the head of the King, Clitus, the very one whom Alexander six years later in his anger slew, antici- pating the blow, smote him through the shoulder, cutting off arm, scimitar, and all." The Persians maintained a vigorous resistance, but the heavy cavalry of the Macedonians kept coming in from the ford, striking blow after blow on the already disordered centre of the enemy. Once an entrance had been effected into their mass, the opening in their centre grew greater and greater. The retreat began first in the centre, where the first blow had been struck. Soon the retreat turned to * Arrian, Anabasis, i., 15. 222 Alexander the Great. [334 B.C. a rout, and the wings, finding the centre broken, joined in the retreat, and speed turned into furious haste. Little attempt to pursue them was made; hence the cavalry loss, considering the decisive de- feat, was relatively slight, not much exceeding a thousand, or about five per cent, of those en- gaged. As the field cleared itself from the rout, the Greek mercenaries were disclosed still holding sturdily their place on the highland beyond. Thus far they had had no part in the battle. It was as if they had not been consulted. The solid strength of the Per- sian force, and what perhaps might have been its rescue, had been stupidly relegated to uselessness, and now, abandoned utterly by their employers and lords, were left dazed by the sudden turn of affairs, and were at the mercy of the Macedonians. The cavalry swept down upon their flanks ; the phalanxes of infantry attacked them in front. They were sur- rounded, overwhelmed, annihilated. Two thousand were taken prisoners, but none escaped, except — to give it in Arrian's grim phrase — " such as hid them- selves among the dead bodies." The defeat was overwhelming. An important feature of it was the eminence of the Persians who fell. Among these were Arbupales, prince of the royal blood, grandson of Artaxerxes; Spithridates, satrap of Lydia ; Mithrobuzanes, governor of Cappadocia; Mithridates, son-in-law of Darius; Pharnaces, brother-in-law of Darius; and Omares, commander of the mercenary infantry. Arsites, the governor of Phrygia, committed suicide after 334 B.C.] Carrying the War into Asia. 223 the battle, because of his responsibility for the re- jection of Memnon's advice. The Macedonians had suffered a surprisingly small loss. Twenty-five of the hetairoi, or knights, the heavy cavalry that had carried the weight of the battle, and sixty of the other cavalry had lost their lives, making probably less than three per cent, of those actively engaged. The fact that the loss of the infantry in killed was only thirty shows how helpless had been the Greek mercenaries, against whom alone the heavy infantry had been engaged. They had evidently become a mere disorganised mob, and were simply massacred. The Macedonian dead were buried next day with distinguished honours, wearing their arms and decorations to their graves. Their parents and children were granted freedom from all property- taxes, as well as from imposts on the produce of their fields, and relieved from all obligation to per- sonal service. The court statuary, Lysippus of Sicyon, was ordered to make bronze statues of the twenty-five companions who fell, and these were afterwards set up in the Macedonian metropolis of Dion. Those who had been wounded received the per- sonal attention and solicitude of the King. He went from one to the other, looked at their wounds, inquired particularly as to how they had been re- ceived, and allowed them — what is dear to the soldier's heart, and especially to that of the Greek soldier — ' ' to tell their tales and brag of their deeds. ' ' Incidents like this betray in a striking way the 224 Alexander the Great. [334 B.C. extent to which Alexander's leadership and his em- pire were a personal thing. The prisoners taken in the battle were sent away in chains to till the soil of Macedonia. They were Greeks fighting against the Greek cause, upon which the Congress of Corinth had set its seal of legitimacy, and though this had been so far, even to an almost ludicrous extent, matter of theory rather than of practice, it was time now to vindicate the seriousness of the theory. Some of these captives were Athenians, and the desire of the Athenian state for their release ex- pressed itself in repeated official requests. An em- bassy sent to the King the next year at Gordium was refused. Not until three years after the battle, in 331 B.C., was the petition finally granted. The rich booty of the victory Alexander divided among his allies. To Olympias, his mother, he sent some of the Persian rugs and ornaments, and the golden goblets which he had found in the enemy's tents. Three hundred full suits of armour were sent to Athens to be hung up in the Acropolis as a votive offering to the goddess Athene, and the following inscription was to be displayed above them: "Al- exander, son of Philip, and the Greeks, excepting the Lacedaemonians [dedicate this spoil], from the barbarians dwelling in Asia." Where this offer- ing was placed in the Acropolis we are ignor- ant ; certainly not on the outside of the Parthenon, as was once supposed. The traces of letters on the eastern architrave, formerly believed to repre- sent the inscription dictated by Alexander, have been recently shown by an American student to 334 B.C.] Carrying the War into Asia. 225 belong to an inscription in honour of the Emperor Nero. Alexander's act, in sending the offering to Athens and the form in which the inscription was couched, speak for his generosity of temper, and his persistent kindly feeling toward Athens and admiration of her greatness. A smaller man might well have resented in the moment of brilliant success the indifference and the slights shown him in the time of his need, and Alexander might well have been excused from naming the Greeks as copartners in his victories. The question may be raised whether it was not a mere act of policy on his part, with a view to win- ning the cooperation of the Greeks, and especially of the Athenians. His need of a fleet might be mentioned in support of this view. A consideration of Alexander's character as a whole, however, and of his general course of action in achieving cooperation, does not admit of an interpretation of this act which would make it an ordinary politician's bid for an exchange of favours. His desire to be regarded and to be a real leader and champion of Hellenism had passed from the range of dream and fancy and theory into that of fixed purpose and a practical plan of life. He wished the sympathy and, in a large way, the co- operation of Greece, but he had no idea of purchas- ing or beguiling specific favours. The coldness and the aloofness which the Athenians displayed toward one who, in his embodiment of all that was most characteristic of the Hellenic spirit, in his passion for the beautiful, in his respect for Greek institu- 226 Alexander the Great. [334 B.C. tions, in his enthusiasm for the great things in Greek history and tradition, as well as in the brilliant charm of his person, might seem the very fulfilment of the Greek desire and the satisfaction of the national de- mand, can be explained only on the basis of a blind- ing political envy and a love of small things and narrow issues. Any fear that Athens might right- eously have entertained for the security of her local institutions and the maintenance of her autonomy ought, after the experience of the preceding four years, in which both Philip and Alexander had re- peatedly declined to avail themselves of good excuses for interfering in local matters, to be now entirely annulled. The world was moving. A new order was coming in. Athens saw, but she did not com- prehend. So the world's history moved on thereafter without Athens. CHAPTER XIV. IN LYDIA AND CARIA. 334 B.C. TO say that Alexander had now the absolute confidence of the army would be too little; men trusted him, loved him, adored him. And no wonder. Men of any time would. He emerged from the battle-dust of Granicus a person- ality in which all was combined that inspires men's enthusiasm and commands their allegiance. In his twenty-second year, the flush and vigour of splendid youth upon him, no one called him a stripling; he wore the crown of success that genius, and not luck, had won him, and that age might envy. His char- acter was as frank and open as the sky ; indirection of every sort he abhorred. He could plan, organise, think; to will and to do he was quick and strong; in business affairs he was definite and orderly: but he had a heart, was loyal to friends, loved much, and was much beloved. Generous to a fault, and unconscious of self, meanness and fear were un- known to him. His respect for woman and his 227 228 Alexander the Great. 334 B.C.] moral cleanliness made him an exception to his times. Practical-minded as he was, he was swayed by ideals. He loved music and song, and the con- versation and association of men ; knew the charm of letters, and gave to the gods their due. What- ever his failings, these were his virtues. Of the physical man Alexander, biographers and artists have left us a reasonably distinct picture. Lysippus portrayed him in bronze, the painter Apelles in colour, the engraver Pyrgoteles on gems ; but the portraits made by Lysippus, men said, were the most lifelike. Through copies and imitators the portrait type passed on to the after-world, and sur- vives to-day in a few such works as the Alexander bust of the Louvre, the Alexander Rondanini of the Munich Glyptothek, the Alexander in the Pompeiian mosaic representing the battle of Issus, but best of all, perhaps, upon the tetradrachm coinage of Lysimachus. Alexander was of good stature and muscular, well- proportioned figure. He had the blond type of the old Northman Aryans, blue eyes and golden hair, which survived latest in Greece with the old aristo- cratic families. His skin, as Plutarch particularly emphasises, was clear and white, with ruddy hue on cheek and breast. A characteristic feature were the massy locks that rose up mane-like from above the centre of his forehead, and coupled with deep-set eyes and heavy brows, gave his face the leonine look to which Plutarch refers. The upward glance of the eyes, which had the soft, melting, or, as the Greeks called it, " moist" expression, that artists 334 B.C.] In Lydia and Carta. 229 gave to the eyes of Venus and Bacchus, the strong, finely shaped, almost aquiline nose joined high to the forehead, the sensitive, passionate lips, the prominent chin — these complete the picture that pen and chisel have left. That he was beautiful to look upon all accounts agree. All the portraits represent him as smooth-shaven, except the Pompeiian mosaic, where a light growth on the cheeks perhaps serves to indicate youth, in accordance with Roman-Alexandrian usage. It is noticeable that the Capitoline bust commonly named Helios, but which at least has the Alexander type as a basis, and shows also an incipient beard, is a work of the second century B.C. But, after all, the Pompeiian mosaic may be a faithful copy of Helena's painting made directly after the Issus battle (333 B.C.), and so be a proof that Alexander began the practice of shaving later than that, and at some time during the Asiatic campaigns. We know that the fashion of shaving the face clean took its rise in Greco-Roman civilisation from imitation of Alexan- der. The Hellenistic kings always appear without beards, and in the third century B.C. barbers and shaving made their way into Rome. The Roman emperors down to Hadrian followed the style thus set by their archetype. Alexander had a habit, too, of carrying the head slightly inclined toward the left shoulder, and this, they say, all his generals and suc- cessors, consciously or unconsciously, imitated, and many would-be heroes after them. The battle at the Granicus (May, 334 B.C.), in- significant as it seemed to be on the score of the 230 Alexander the Great. [334 B.C. relatively small Persian force (from thirty-five to forty thousand) engaged, had now become a fact of great significance. It was one of the three great battles fought by Alexander in open field for the conquest of the Persian Empire. As its immediate result, the whole of Asia Minor north of the Taurus range — that is, north of Pisidia and Cilicia — was placed at the mercy of Alexander. No large Persian force and no competent Persian authority existed within that territory. After appointing Calas, a young Macedonian who had commanded the Thessalian cavalry in the battle, governor of Phrygia, and sending Parmenion with troops to occupy Dascylium its capital, eighty miles to the east of the battle-field, he himself advanced into Lydia, toward its capital, Sardis. This city, from its central inland position, was an important point, as well as from its wealth, the strength of its citadel, and its command of the trade routes. Nine miles outside the city gates the Persian command- ant, Mithrines, accompanied by the leading citizens, came to meet the conqueror and offer the surrender of the city. On entering its gates, Alexander assured the citi- zens of their freedom, restored to them their ancient constitution and laws, which Persian occupation had set aside, and, as an honour to the city, announced his determination to erect a temple of the Olympian Zeus upon its citadel. In this connection an incident is related characteristic of the ancient meteorology. While Alexander was debating concerning the prop- er location of the temple there suddenly appeared in 334 B.C.] In Lydia and Carta. 231 the sky — an unusual thing in the dry, placid climate of June — a heavy mass of clouds attended by thun- der and lightning. There came, however, with the clouds only a few drops of rain, but what fell, fell upon that part of the citadel rock where in ancient times the palace of the kings of Lydia had stood. This was accepted as an intimation of the divine will, and the temple was located on that spot. The government of the province of Lydia was not left in the hands of a single man, as under the Per- sian regime, but the former functions of the satrap were distributed among three different officials — one who attended to the collection of tribute and im- posts, one who commanded the garrison, and one who conducted the government and had the title and honours of governor. All three were made directly responsible to the throne. This model Alexander followed in organising the government of other provinces as they fell into his hands. It was an important modification of the Persian system in the interest of solidifying and centralising the imperial authority. The wisest thing about it all was that the organisation of the army was thereby kept undivided. Having so disposed of matters in Lydia, Alexan- der set out toward Ephesus, sixty-five miles to the southwest of Sardis, and so came again within the confines of Hellendom ; for the true Hellas, as the habitat of the Greeks, was then, as it is to-day, not a tract of land, but the ^Egean and its fringe of shores. The Asiatic Greeks were a third of all there were. In the most central position on the Asiatic 232 Alexander the Great. [334 B.C. shore, directly opposite Athens, stood Ephesus, at the head of a bay along the shores of which, within a radius of thirty miles, were ranged at least ten prosperous Greek cities. Chios flanked the northern entrance to the bay, Samos, twenty miles away, the southern. Accessible to the inland by the Cayster valley, Ephesus formed the natural meeting-place for the Carian, Phrygian, and Lydian population of the interior with the Greeks and others who plied the sea. Long before there were any Greeks in these lands it had been a busy mart, and now, like the cult and the sanctuary of its famous Diana, herself a Hellenised Asiatic, it had become the most cosmo= politan of all the communities wearing the Greek guise, and, with its population of a quarter of a million, was the largest, wealthiest city of Asiatic Greece, Miletus being its only rival. The Asiatic Greece of which Ephesus was the foremost representative inclined in general to the oligarchic form of city government and to a placid acceptance'of the mild Persian sway. The young hero who bore the lofty title of captain-general of the Greeks surely found some disappointments to face. The cities of European Greece looked on with indifference as he toiled, and awaited the opportunity of some reverse openly to oppose him. The Asiatic Greeks he came to rescue did not wish to be rescued. The war for the present was Greek against Greek. On the fourth day from Sardis Alexander was at the gates of Ephesus. The news of his approach had developed a panic within the city. Indeed, since the battle of Granicus the city had been in HEAD OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT. FROM A TETRADRACHM OF LYSIMACHU3. 334 B.C.] In Lydia and Carta. 233 continuous political turmoil. The Greek mercenaries who constituted, evidently in Persian interest, the garrison of the city, on the first news of the battle, in which the summary treatment accorded the Greek mercenaries must have particularly interested them, had seized two triremes and set off in flight. This was a serious blow to the oligarchic government which at that time, under Syrphax's leadership, was in control of the city. This government had sought to sustain itself by admitting into the city, after the battle of Granicus, the fugitive remnants of Mem- non's army, an act which had been sorely resented by the popular party. The oligarchy was thus identified more closely than ever with the fortunes of Persia, and the retreat of the garrison, and Mem- non's withdrawal to Halicarnassus, made it difficult for Syrphax and his associates to hold in check the rising tide of democratic revolt. These internal conflicts apparently made all thought of resistance to Alexander impossible, for on his approach Ephesus was thrown open to receive him. He immediately identified himself with the democracy, recalled the political exiles, broke up the oligarchy and established a government of the demos, and directed that the tribute heretofore paid to Persia should be transferred to the goddess Diana. The moment the populace was relieved of its fear of the " first families" through Alexander's recognition of the demos, riot broke loose. The mob undertook to pay off a long list of old scores. The men who had let Memnon into the city, and those who had pillaged the temple of Diana, and thrown down a 234 Alexander the Great. [334 B.C. statue of Philip standing within it, and others who had desecrated the grave of Heropythus, a former leader of the democracy — all these must now receive summary attention. First on the list came Syrphax, whom, together with his sons and his brother's sons, the mob had already dragged from the altars of the temple and stoned to death, when Alexander, to his great credit, interfered and reestablished order by military force. Magnesia and Tralles, cities in the Maeander val- ley, twenty and forty miles to the south-east, now sent deputations to announce their submission. The coast cities to the north in Ionia and ^Eolis, by overthrowing the oligarchies, testified their sym- pathy with the cause of Alexander. It is probable that Alcimachus, who was at this time sent out with a detachment of troops among the northern cities, aided in bringing these results to pass. The city of Smyrna, which since the days of the Lydian monarchy had lain in ruin or existed only in scattered hamlets, the King now ordered to be rebuilt. The Greek cities of the neighbourhood, such as Teos and Clazomenae, seem to have welcomed the Macedon- ians. The first opposition came at Miletus, the next im- portant maritime city to the south of Ephesus. The commander of the Persian garrison, Hegesistratus, had at first written a letter to Alexander offering to surrender the city, but later, learning that the Per- sian fleet was in the neighbourhood, he took courage and determined to make a defence. The fleet, how- ever, through its dilatoriness, disappointed his hopes. 334 B.C.] In Ly dia and C aria. 235 Three days before it appeared, the Macedonian fleet of 160 triremes had sailed into the harbour of Mile- tus, and anchored off the island Lade, which com- manded to the west the principal portion of the harbour, and which Alexander immediately pro- ceeded to occupy with a strong detachment of his army. The trireme of those times was preeminently a great ramming- or bumping-machine. Naval tactics were principally addressed toward disabling the op- posing ship by shattering its oars and dashing in its sides. The development of speed was therefore a chief consideration, and, as sails could not be de- pended upon and steam-power was unknown, oars and man-power were the only recourse. Of the 200 men who constituted the normal complement of an Athenian trireme, 170 were oarsmen, and only from ten to fifteen armed fighting men. The oarsmen were arranged in three tiers or banks, in such wise, for economy of space, that the corresponding oars- men of the next lower bank sat a little lower and a little behind. The vessel itself was long, narrow, and of light draft. The normal length appears to have been from 120 to 150 feet, the breadth from 15 to 18 feet, and that the draft could not have been much over three feet appears from the fact that cavalrymen have been known to participate in a sea- fight by riding out into the water among the ships. Xenophon, in the Hellenica, refers to such an occur- rence off the beach at Abydus. In long voyages the trireme could avail itself of a favouring wind by hoisting sails on its two masts, but these masts were 236 Alexander the Great. [334 B.C. lowered in clearing the ship for action. It appears that a speed of seven or eight miles an hour could be attained by the oars alone. The serious burden entailed by the maintenance of a fleet is apparent when it is seen that the 300 triremes regularly con- stituting the Athenian fleet demanded the service of 60,000 men, and the expenditure for rations and pay, to say nothing of the ships themselves and their outfit, from $250,000 to $350,000 per month. Im- perial ambitions came too dear for most states. For a little state like Attica, with a population of per- haps a third of a million, at least half of whom were slaves, it would have been impossible without the tribute from its dependencies. The Persian fleet, four hundred strong, shortly appeared and anchored at the opposite side of the bay, off the promontory of Mycale, six or seven miles away. Parmenion was desirous of risking a battle. They had everything to win and nothing to lose, he said; for the Persians, as it was, had the supremacy at sea. Alexander was of different mind. The loss of a naval battle would annul the prestige they had achieved by their victo- ries on land, and would encourage the anti- Macedonian elements in the Greek cities to attempt revolt. The chances in a sea-fight, furthermore, were all against them. They were greatly outnum- bered, and the Phoenicians and Cyprians were skilled watermen, while the Macedonians were relatively novices. He therefore wisely decided to keep his fleet on the defensive, and trust, as he had in the past, to his army for his conquests. The fact 334 B.C.] In Lydia and Carta. 237 that the Macedonian fleet already held the harbour constituted in itself a great advantage, for as long as it kept within the close harbour the Persians could bring aid to the city only by attacking the Macedonians at a great disadvantage, and where their superiority of numbers would not count. The readiness with which omens could be inter- preted so as to harmonise with one's wishes and views is rather fitly illustrated by a competitive ex- ercise in augury in which Alexander and Parmenion indulged on this occasion. An eagle had been sit- ting on the shore behind the Macedonian ships. Parmenion found in this a convincing indication of the gods that victory was with the ships. Alexan- der pointed to the fact that the eagle perched on the land, not on the ships, giving thereby the evid- ent intimation that it was only through the victory of the troops on land that the fleet could have value. Alexander being the commander-in-chief, this was evidently the orthodox interpretation. On his first arrival before the city, Alexander occupied the portion lying outside the walls, and established a close blockade of the inner city. Just as the decision had been reached to continue the siege without risking a naval encounter, there came to Alexander from the city one of its leading citizens, Glaucippus, bringing the proposal that he should raise the siege on condition that the Milesians should thereafter make their harbours and their walls free alike to him and to the Persians. Gener- ous as Alexander was by nature, such good-lord, good-devil attitudes as this were always abhorrent 238 Alexander the Great. [334 B.C. to him. Peculiarly exasperating was this notably academic proposition in that it implied the possi- bility of a Greek community assuming in this life- and-death struggle between Greek and barbarian a neutral position. He therefore informed the emin- ent citizen that he had not come thither to accept what men chose to grant him, but to accomplish his own will, and bade him get back into the city with all speed, and warn his people to expect an attack at daybreak. They had broken their word with him, and might count on punishment. The use of siege-engines and artillery, which took its rise in Greek lands with Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse (in power 405-367 B.C.), before whom sieges had been mere blockades, was taken up by Philip of Macedon in his siege of Perinthus (340 B.C.) and Byzantium (339 B.C.), and rapidly extended during the wars of Alexander, especially in connection with the siege of Halicarnassus, Tyre, and Gaza, coming to its fullest development at the end of the century under Demetrius, who received therefrom his surname Poliorcetes, " the Besieger." Among the engineers who accompanied Alexander as experts were Diades and Charias, said to have been pupils of the Thessalian Polyeides, who assisted Philip at Perinthus. Others were Posidonius and Crates. The most important types of siege-engines were already in use in Alexander's time — the battering- ram, the siege-tower, the borer, the movable shed for protecting the besiegers, known as the chelone, or tortoise, and also the various devices for under- R£-' : * ~ k-» V' • ^B »*.-'"' .Bra :~~M ■ '~SM& SBgHB^rJ&^a^SB 'Jn KSiraf- w*l"'~~ ' V '^ IpT'' ~'"- : ^jfflB K* ' ffgv" -~'v" ' AwJ WHpT>. n ^^Sfc : ~'- ; :^ ^jjfc^ i* *>8i&*igHPll ^R^H JlliPi &9effl*J Bi^^M FACE OF ALEXANDER. FROM THE POMPEIAN MOSAIC REPRESENTING THE BATTLE OF ISSUS. (From Koepp^s " Ueber das Bildnes Alexanders des Grossen") 334 B.C.] In Lydia and Carta. 239 mining the walls. The battering-ram was an enor- mous beam, or composite of beams, provided with a ponderous metallic head or knob, which was either hung in a vertical frame and swung against the wall, or mounted on wheels and rolled against it. The dimensions of one of these ancient mechanisms, which has been described for us in detail, were as follows: length of the beam, one hundred and eighty feet ; diameter of each of the eight wheels on which it was mounted, six and a half feet ; thickness of wheels, three feet ; weight of the whole, over two thousand hundredweight. A hundred men were needed to operate it. While this was undoubtedly more massive than the ordinary ram (commonly from sixty to one hundred feet long), it is evident that an effective mechanism for opening a breach in a stone wall from ten to eighteen feet thick required solidity and weight. The borer was an engine not unlike the ram, but with pointed head and mounted on rollers. The siege-tower was a mighty structure, mounted on wheels or rollers, which could be advanced before the city walls and afford opportunity for the be- siegers distributed through its various stories to face the defenders of the wall on equal or higher level, and to reach the battlements by bridges. These towers reached a height, according to necessity, of from one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet, and contained from ten to twenty stories. The monster tower which Demetrius built in the siege of Rhodes had a breadth on the ground of seventy-two feet. The outside of the towers was usually protected 240 Alexander the Great. [334 B.C. against weapons and firebrands by a coating of hides or of sheet-iron. Various devices for undermining the walls were employed, the commonest being to approach by underground passages, excavate the foundations, and support the wall by beams which afterward could be burned away. Though the various forms of the catapult, or mechanism for hurling arrows, stones, and bullets, had not reached their full development in Alex- ander's time, it is certain that he made use of the mechanical bow, or bow-gun, and he was probably also acquainted with the method of developing pro- jectile power from the recoil of twisted ropes. Great arrows from four to six feet long, ponderous mis- siles, and fire-balls were in this way thrown to con- siderable distances, cases of from four to six hundred yards being cited. The next morning after the visit of the embassy the assault upon the walls began. The battering- rams were set in action, and soon a great breach ap- peared, and a large portion of the wall tottered to its fall. As soon as Nicanor, the Macedonian ad- miral, saw the assault begun, he moved over from Lade, and sailing into the harbour and hugging the shore, moored his vessels close together in the nar- rowest part of the channel, with their prows facing the sea. They thus interposed an absolute barrier between the city and the Persian fleet. The naval superiority of the Persians was thus cancelled out of the situation, and Miletus became, so far as that factor was concerned, an inland town. 334 B.C.] In Lydia and Carta. 241 Through the breach in the wall, the Macedonians pressed in. The citizens and mercenary garrison took to flight. Some swam out upon their wicker- framed leathern shields to an island off the city ; some in skiffs tried in vain to evade the Macedonian ships; but most of them were cut down within the city. Those who escaped death during the attack were given their life and freedom. The three hun- dred mercenaries who had taken refuge on the island were just about to be surrounded, and were prepar- ing to sell their lives as dearly as possible, when Alexander, shrinking from the useless butchery, offered them their lives if they would serve in his army, a condition which they readily accepted. There now appeared the first practical illustration of Alexander's plan of isolating the Persian fleet by robbing it of its harbours. The fleet lay yet off My- cale, but every day pushed out into the bay, hoping to tempt the Macedonians to an engagement. Their anchorage was inconvenient for the Persians, as they were obliged to go at least ten miles to the east, to the mouth of the Mseander, for their water-supply. To make their position still more uncomfortable, Alexander sent Philotas around the shore toward Mycale with a force of cavalry and three regiments of infantry. This made it impossible for the Persian sailors to land at all, and they found themselves cut off entirely from supplies of food and water, and as good as " besieged in their ships." They were therefore obliged to sail over to Samos, twenty-five or thirty miles away, and reprovision the fleet. Again they returned to Miletus and renewed their 242 Alexander the Great. [334 b.c. former tactics, sailing up to the very entrance of the harbour, in hope of luring the Macedonians out. Finally five of their ships ventured into the har- bour between the island of Lade and the shore, thinking to surprise the Macedonian seamen, who were believed to be absent on shore collecting fuel and provisions. Many of them were absent, but enough were there quickly to man ten triremes and put out into the harbour. On seeing this, the re- connoitring squadron put about and fled; but a Carian ship from Iassus, being slower than the rest, was captured, men and all. This slight loss seems to have completed the discouragement of the Per- sians, and the whole fleet shortly sailed away. Alexander now decided to disband his fleet. His policy of conducting, handicapped as he was on the sea, exclusively a land campaign had been thus far brilliantly vindicated. As he moved to the south along the coast, his fleet, had it followed him, would have gone farther and farther from its base and entered waters where the Phoenicians were at home. The summer was now coming to its close, and the fleet would soon at best be obliged to seek winter quarters. The cost of maintenance was also a seri- ous item for his slender exchequer. One hundred and sixty triremes implied a force of over thirty thousand men to man them, and this matched or nearly matched the numbers of his army, without giving hope of accomplishing any results at all com- parable with those of which the army had demon- strated itself capable. The money required for the pay of the men, reckoning this at two or three obols I 334 B.C.] In Lydia and Caria. 243 per day and double pay for officers, must have amounted to from sixty to ninety thousand dollars per month, and, if provisions could not be obtained without purchase, to as much more. Alexander's conquests had not as yet effected any vast increase of his permanent revenues. The cities of Asia Minor had not been subjected to extraordi- nary tribute; many had been freed altogether. His decision was made, therefore, on the basis of reasons that can be appreciated. However, the decision was probably a mistake, — for it soon proved itself necessary to reorganise a fleet, — yet not a fatal mis- take. It was an undue application of logic. But the most weirdly solemn thing about it all was, — and it must have been humiliating to the enthusiasms of the young leader who fought in the name of the Greeks, — that the Greek states offered no aid with their fleets, but left him to confess his helplessness on the seas. The autumn was now beginning, but there re- mained one more stronghold on the coast, Halicar- nassus, the old capital of the Carian kings, at the extreme south-eastern tip of Asia Minor. Here the forces of the opposition had assembled for a des- perate stand. The Greek Memnon, ablest leader among the Persians, had recently been appointed by the Shah commander-in-chief of all his forces in Asia Minor, both by sea and by land, as well as governor of the country, and he was now in com- mand within the city. With him were collected the relics of the Persian army. As Alexander advanced, the cities of Caria hast- 244 Alexander the Great \ [334 B.C. ened to submit to him. Ada, the widow of Idrieus, a former king of Caria, who had been robbed of the throne, to which Carian law gave her the right, by her brother Pixodarus, came to meet him and offer her support. The present king, Othontopates, a Persian by birth, had within the preceding year suc- ceeded to the throne of his father-in-law, Pixodarus. The kings of Caria, as important and almost inde- pendent tributaries of the Persian Empire, had for the preceding half-century developed great power and wealth, and had made their chief city a mart and stronghold of prominence. Mausolus, who had died two decades before, and who had been suc- ceeded by his queen, Artemisia, had become at one time an important factor in Greek international politics, and was chief instigator of the Social War (357-355 B.C.), which more than anything else had wrecked the Athenian Empire. The city was fortified on three sides by massive walls protected by a moat forty-five feet wide and twenty-two feet deep. On the fourth side it faced the sea. It contained three strong fortresses or citadels : the acropolis, or citadel proper, the fortress Salmacis, at the south-west, directly on the sea, and the king's castle, on a small island at the entrance to the harbour. Alexander halted and encamped half a mile out- side the city, and prepared for a systematic siege. On the first day of the siege a sortie from the city was easily repulsed. A midnight _ attack upon Myndus, a town some miles west of the city, im- pulsively attempted by Alexander a few days later, 334 B.C.] In Lydia and Carta. 245 signally failed. Then he set about the siege of the city proper with vigour. He first filled up the moat, in order to furnish a foundation for the movable towers from which the walls and their defenders were to be attacked, as well as for the heavy ma- chinery used in battering the walls. Repeated sallies were made by the enemy, with the design of setting fire to the towers and engines, and after one of these there was found among their dead the body of Neoptolemus, the Lyncestian prince who, two years before, had fled from Macedonia on account of his supposed connection with the murder of King Philip. The siege was continued day after day with vary- ing fortunes, but gradually the force of the rams made itself felt. Two great towers and the wall between them had fallen ; a third tower was totter- ing. Behind the breach the Persians had hastily built a crescent-shaped wall of brick, joining the two broken ends together. The Macedonians ad- vanced their engines over the debris of the first wall, to make assault on the new inner wall. Alexander was superintending the work in person. Suddenly there was a movement from within. Masses of men came pouring out through the breach, and off at one side, where no one was ex- pecting it, by the gate called the Triple Gate, an- other rushing mass of soldiery appeared. Those who issued forth at the breach came stumbling on over the ruins, pelted by great stones and by jave- lins from the high wooden towers of the besiegers, at the base of which they now stood. The fight was 246 Alexander the Great, [334 B.C.- hand to hand, in the midst of ruins and falling walls. Men were continually pushing their way out of the city, but the breach was too small for the struggling mass to pass. The first-comers were cut down. The sally turned to flight, but the breach was clogged with men, and those who were already out- side were caught as in a trap. Those who had issued out at the Triple Gate, met by a strong force under Ptolemy, were soon put to rout. The narrow- bridge over the moat proved too slight for their weight. Hundreds were piled into the moat, to be trampled to death or slain by the Macedonians with javelins and stones from above. In the panic the gates were shut to, and hundreds more were left at the mercy of the besiegers. The loss of the defenders had been terrible. One onset now through the breach, and the city would have been captured ; but out of the din of the last struggle issued the trumpet sound recalling the Macedonian troops and ending the battle. Alex- ander was still unwilling to give the city, a Greek city of noble traditions, over to the fate of capture. The regrets of Thebes were still upon him. He hoped yet that better counsels would prevail and that the city would offer its surrender. Within the city that night a council of war was held. The situation was seen to be hopeless. For Memnon the thought of capitulation was impossible. It was decided to withdraw to the fortress, set fire to the city, and leave it to its fate. In the second watch a temporary wooden tower by the wall was set on fire, also the storehouses and arsenals and the houses 333 B.C.] Lycia, Pamphylia, Pisidia. 251 along the coast through a populous district, he re- ceived in turn the submission of Telmissus, Pinara, Xanthus, Patara, and about thirty other lesser cities. Then turning up the valley of Xanthus, toward the north, he entered, though it was now the depth of winter, the mountainous country called Milyas. Here he received deputations from most of the Lycian cities, offering submission, and found it sufficient, in the case of most, merely to send officers who should assume formal possession ; but Phaselis, a considerable city fifty miles to the east, the deputies of which presented him with a golden crown of honour, he visited, and made the oppor- tunity of the first rest he had taken since leaving Macedonia in the spring. Here he took occasion, after his own way, to pay respect to the memory of the rhetorician Theodectes, a son of the city, and pupil of his own teacher Aristotle. Plutarch nar- rates it in this wise : " While he was here, too, he saw a statue of Theo- dectes, recently deceased, standing in the town square, and one day after dinner, when merry with wine, he went out and danced about it, decking it with garlands in mass, thus honouring not ungracefully, in the form of sport, the pleasant association he had had with the man on the score of Aristotle and philosophy." It was also while here that he obtained word from Parmenion of a plot against his life undertaken by the" Lyncestian prince Alexander, the son of Aeropus. This young man, who had once been suspected of complicity with his two brothers, 252 Alexander the Great. [334 B.c- Heromenes and Arrhabaeus, in the assassination of Philip, had at the time so effectually demonstrated his loyalty to Alexander that he had been entirely acquitted and afterward honoured with positions of responsibility. He had now, since Calas was made governor of Hellespontine Phrygia, been promoted to the command of the Thessalian cavalry, at pre- sent connected with Parmenion's army. The evid- ence of the plot was the following: Darius had received a communication from the young cavalry commander indicating a possible inclination to treachery. He thereupon sent one of his courtiers, Sisines, to communicate, if possible, with the young man, and offer him a prize of one thousand talents and the throne of Macedonia if he would make way with King Alexander. Sisines, and with him his secret, fell into Parmenion's hands. A council, im- mediately called, advised the King to have the young prince arrested at once. Loath as Alexander was to believe the treachery, the evidence was such, and the danger so great, that the decision was confirmed. So great was the peril regarded to be that the order was not even committed to writing. A trust- worthy officer, dressed as a peasant of the country, made his way incognito three hundred miles to Par- menion's camp, and conveyed the order by word of mouth. The prince was immediately seized and put under guard. Four years later we find him still a prisoner with the army in Afghanistan. Lack of proof of his guilt, or deference toward his father-in- law, Antipater, had spared him thus far; but the excitement attending the discovery of Philotas's 333 B.C.] Lycia, Parnphylia, Pisidia. 253 plot called his case again to attention, and a jury of officers before whom he was given a hearing, less merciful than the King, deemed his stammering defence a confession of guilt, and ran him through with their spears. After a long rest, interrupted only by an excursion to help break up a nest of Pisidian robbers in the mountains, who had been a perpetual thorn in the sides of the Phaselites, Alexander set out for Perge, in Parnphylia. The western boundary of this dis- trict is Mount Climax, which at the shore pushes itself out as a rugged headland into the very waters of the sea. Only at times when the strong north wind was blowing was it possible to make one's way around at its foot. Otherwise a steep path by a long circuit constituted the only means of commu- nication between the two districts. Alexander sent his army over the mountain, but determined himself, with his body-guard, to face the elements and force his way along the shore. It was winter-time, and the sea was rough, but he pushed his way through, sometimes up to his eyes in water, and always at great peril. The news of the successful passage set great stories afloat. The ac- count we have given is that of Strabo, and probably the correct one. Alexander's own report of it, as quoted by Plutarch from one of his letters, says no more than that he " made his way through." But other stories made him go through dry-shod. Plu- tarch says that many historians speak of it as if it were no less than a miracle that the sea should retire to afford him passage. Even the sober Arrian tells 254 Alexander the Great. [334 B.c- that the wind changed from south to north, " not without divine interposition, as indeed both he and his men explained it. ' ' The rhetoric of Callisthenes, the would-be biographer of the King, takes fire over the incident, and reports how the sea bowed low and did him homage. Even Menander's allusion shows that the matter was sufficiently subject of common talk to be used as illustration in the comedy: " But see how Alexander-like is this: if I want anybody, lo ! there he stands, as if by magic ; if I need to pass through the sea at any place, lo ! presto change, it is open to my feet." The differ- ent forms of the story have, at any rate, their inter- est as betraying the beginnings of the Alexander romance. In Perge Alexander again joined his army. From this point he went only about forty miles farther to the east, far enough to reach and occupy Aspendus and Side, and then, as the winter was now coming to an end, returned to Perge, and started northward toward Phrygia. Syllium, a garrisoned fortress near Perge, he was obliged to leave undisturbed, as it showed no sign of yielding, and he was by the nature of his expedition not equipped for a siege. His way took him through the narrow mountain defiles of Pisidia, up on to the great central Phrygian plateau, which lies from thirty to thirty-five hundred feet above the sea-level. The Pisidians were a people of independence, fond of war, and much occupied with feuds among themselves. Alexander had no ambition, especially at this time, to accomplish in cjetail a conquest of all these petty tribes and towns, 333 B.C.] Lycia, Pamphylia, Pisidia. 255 but all he wished for was passage through the coun- try. Even this the Pisidians seemed inclined to deny him. The first opposition was met with shortly after he had left the great amphitheatrical terraced plain nearly in the centre of which Perge stands. He chose the western exit from the plain, the highway leading to the modern Istanoz. Why this particular route was chosen does not appear, as a somewhat directer road to his goal, which was to pass behind Sagalassus, would have been found at the north- western exit. It is not unlikely that the western route offered a better road. Arrian says only, " His way led him past the city of Termessus." The Termessians now were a troublesome people. Arrian takes pains to say they were " barbarians," which means that they clung to the native language and customs and had not been assimilated into the Hellenism, or rather Hellenistism, of the plain. Their city was located near a pass which easily con- trolled the road. Count von Lanckoronski, in his Stddte Pamphy liens tmd Pisidiens, confirms Arrian's description of the city's unusually strong position, and says of it: " It holds the most unique and the grandest position of any city in Pisidia which we visited." Alexander stormed the pass, taking ad- vantage of a temporary withdrawal from a position of the full force guarding it, and encamped before the city. While here, a deputation came from Selge, a rival and hostile city well to the east, and claimed the friendship of the King on the score of their common enemy. A treaty made with these 256 Alexander the Great. [334 B.c- people proved satisfactory then, and in later years as well, for they became faithful allies. Termessus was now left undisturbed, and the march continued over the mountain-ridge, and then up a long valley toward the mountain-slopes form- ing the southern frontier of Phrygia and commanded by Sagalassus, the modern Aghlasun. " This was also a large city, inhabited likewise by Pisidians; and warlike though all the Pisidians are, the men of this city are deemed the most warlike of all," says Arrian. After a sharp action in front of the city, the Sagalassans were driven in and the city was taken by storm. After capturing several mountain strongholds and accepting the capitulation of others, Alexander passed over the watershed into Phrygia, not crossing the high range (eight thousand feet) to the north, which way, if passable for an army, would have taken him directly to Baris (Isbarta), but turning to the west and entering the landlocked basin of Lake Askania. This lake (the modern Lake Buldur), twenty miles long and five wide, and situated three thousand feet above the sea-level, has bitter, brackish waters, but they scarcely yield, as Arrian asserts, salt by crystallisation. In point here are the observations of Professor Ramsay : * " That excellent traveller and observer, Hamilton (vol. i., p. 494), observes about Buldur Lake that it is impossible that this can be the Lake Askania mentioned by Arrian. His argument is that the lake is not ' so * Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, p. 299. 333 B.C.] Lycia, Parnphylia, Pisidia. 257 strongly impregnated with salt as to enable the inhabit- ants to collect it from the shores after the waters had dried up.' But I myself have seen the shores, as they dried up, covered with a whitish incrustation, and the inhabitants scraping it together into great heaps and carrying it off. I thought the substance was salt, and when I inquired I was told that it was saltpeter. Either Arrian's account is founded on the report of an eye- witness in Alexander's army, who had made the same mistake as I at first did, and did not inquire so minutely into the facts, or Arrian has erroneously applied to As- kania the description of the neighbouring Lake Anava, whose salt was used by the inhabitants." Passing around the eastern end of this lake, the army traversed thirty miles of level land, then with a rise of from eight hundred to one thousand feet passed over another mountain saddle, and arrived on the fifth day from Sagalassus near the large and prosperous city of Celsense, at the very sources of the Maeander River. Here, sixty-eight years before, the young Cyrus had reviewed his troops when just starting out upon his march toward Babylon. The citadel of Celaenae, built by Xerxes on his return from the unfortunate expedition into Greece, was now occupied by a force of one thousand Carians and one hundred Greek mercenaries, who had been left there in the lurch by the fleeing satrap Atizyes. Nothing short of a prolonged and systematic siege could have captured the citadel, and for this, in his anxiety, now that the spring (333 B.C.) was already opening, to meet his troops at their rendezvous in the north, Alexander had no mind. He therefore 258 Alexander the Great. [334 b.c- was fain to avail himself of the businesslike proposi- tion of the garrison that if expected aid did not reach them within a certain time they would sur- render. Leaving fifteen hundred soldiers to fulfil his part of the contract, after a delay of ten days, he marched without further incident directly to Gordium, where he had directed Parmenion to meet him. Antigonus, who was destined in the later division of the empire to become king of all Asia Minor, he appointed governor of Phrygia, promot- ing Balacer, the son of Amyntas, to Antigonus's former position as commander of the Greek allies. Gordium (Gordeion), probably called in later times Eudoxias, was situated at the site of the modern Yurme. The importance of its location was determ- ined by its position on the Sangarius River, but more particularly by its position on the ancient road leading from Sardis to Susa, which, in its de- veloped character as a Persian " royal road," we have previously described. It was also readily ac- cessible from Byzantium. On arriving, Alexander found Parmenion awaiting him, and the men who had been allowed the winter's furlough in Mace- donia also joined him, bringing with them a freshly recruited force of 3000 Macedonian infantry, 300 Macedonian horsemen, 200 Thessalian horsemen, and 150 Eleans. It was here, too, that the King cut the Gordian knot. The incident is not without its value as in- terpreting the character of the man and explaining his prestige. Soon after arriving, Alexander ex- pressed his desire to go up into the citadel, not only 333 B.C.] Lycia, Pamphylia, Pisidia. 259 to visit the palace of Gordius and his son Midas, but also quite as much to see the waggon of Gordius and its famous yoke-cord, about which he had heard so much talk in the country round. And this is the story of the waggon, essentially as Arrian tells it : Among the ancient Phrygians there was a poor farmer named Gordius. He tilled a small plot of ground, and had two yoke of oxen. One of these he used in ploughing, the other to draw the wag- gon. Once, while he was ploughing, an eagle settled upon the yoke and stayed there till he unyoked the oxen. Seeking an interpretation of the omen, he drove in his waggon to the village of the Telmis- sians, all of whom, men and women alike, were gifted with the mantic power. Arriving there, a maiden he met at the fountain bade him go sacrifice to Zeus, in particular, upon the spot where the mys- tery occurred. This he did, and afterward married the maiden. A son, Midas, was born to them. Years after, the Phrygians, being in civil discord, consulted an oracle, and were told their trouble would end when a waggon should bring them a king. Just then Midas arrived, driving with his father and mother in the waggon, and stopped near the assembly. The people thereupon made Midas their king, and he, putting an end to their discord, dedicated his father's waggon, yoke and all, to Zeus, as a thank-offering for the sending of the eagle. Then the saying went forth concerning the waggon that whosoever should loosen the cord which, wound around the yoke-pin, bound the yoke to the pole, was destined to gain the empire of all Asia. 260 Alexander the Great, [334 B.c- The cord was made of cornel-bark and was so tied that neither end could be seen. As Alexander, after looking at the knot, could find no way to open it, " and yet was loath to leave it unloosed, lest even this should start some disturbance among the masses, he, as some say, smote the knot with his sword and cut it asunder, and called that loosing it; but, as Aristobulus tells it, he drew out the pin of the pole, which was a peg driven right through the pole, serving to hold the knot together, and then drew the yoke off the pole. Exactly how Alexander managed it with this knot, I cannot with confidence affirm, but, at any rate, they left the waggon, both he and his associates, as if the oracle about the loosing of the knot had been fulfilled." While Alexander had been making his way north- ward from Pamphylia in the early spring, the Per- sians, under Memnon, had been preparing a new and vigorous movement. Their plan was reason- ably conceived, and contemplated nothing less than cutting Alexander entirely off from his connection with Europe and isolating him and his army in Asia Minor. A chief factor in this plan was the acknow- ledged predominance of the Persians on the sea. The Macedonian fleet, indeed, had been entirely disbanded. The crafty Memnon was well aware of the partisan divisions existing in the Greek cities, and also of the wide-spread, though now slumbering, aversion to the Macedonian hegemony throughout all Greece. If he could detach from Alexander the allegiance of some of the cities of the Asiatic coast, 333 B.C.] Lycia, Parnphylia, Pisidia. 261 particularly of the islands, which were more at his mercy, and then, in the glamour of success, appear off the Greek shores with his powerful fleet, he might, under the leadership of Sparta, which had persistently held aloof from all participation in Alexander's doings, call out the entire force of anti- Macedonianism to revolt. Leaving his post at Halicarnassus, Memnon ad- vanced first with his fleet and a considerable army of mercenaries to Chios, a hundred miles to the north. Here the leaders of the oligarchic party, playing the part of traitors, betrayed the city and the island into his hands. The government of the oligarchy was then restored. It is significant how, throughout all the Greek cities in Asia Minor and on its coast, the party lines between the oligarchic and the democratic tendencies had been made to conform to those dividing the Persian sympathisers from the Macedonian. The old party lines were the real and permanent facts. The new situation, which, one might have supposed, would, at least for a time, beget new interests and obscure the old lines, was merely utilised by the old, rooted partisan feeling to gain partisan success. The practical politician of all times is wedded to his party beyond the power of issues or principles to dislodge him. In the cities of European Greece the oligarchic factions or those with oligarchic tendencies had, in general, constituted the pro-Macedonian party, while the democratic party had been the chief means of resisting Philip's advance. That the exact oppos- ite came to be the case among the Greek cities of 262 Alexander the Great. [334 B.C.- Asia was due to the circumstances there existing. The Persians had uniformly favoured the interests of the oligarchies. When a city came under their control, they generally placed its government in the hands of the few. When Alexander appeared in the country it was the democracy which hailed him as a deliverer, and hence it was the democratic leaders who became his partisans. Macedonian in- terests were therefore safer in the hands of the demos, and consequently this form of government was incidentally favoured by Alexander. His en- thusiasm for democracy was purely a matter of business interest, somewhat as certain trusts in the United States are Republican in one State and Democratic in another. From Chios Memnon proceeded to Lesbos, where all the cities except Mitylene surrendered to him. This, the leading city of the island, relying upon its Macedonian garrison, dared to refuse submission. A vigorous siege was begun. The city was com- pletely shut off from the land side by a double stockade extending from sea to sea, and invested by five military stations. On the side toward the sea the fleet maintained an absolute blockade, inter- cepting all the trading-vessels that sought to make the port. The city was thus reduced to severe straits. The news of Memnon's success spread rapidly through Greece. Embassies came from some of the Cyclades Islands, proposing alliance. The cities of Eubcea were in consternation because of a report that they were to be taken in hand next. Persian money had found its way again into Greece, 833 B.C.] Lycia, Pamphylia, Pisidia. 263 and there were many already who expected over- turnings in the cities. The Spartans were believed to be ready to welcome the Persians. Just at this crisis the Persian cause met with a serious disaster through the death of Memnon, which occurred during the siege of Mitylene. The operations were continued in Lesbos, after his death, by Pharnabazus, his nephew, to whom, in dying, he had committed the supreme command, pending the Shah's further orders. Pharnabazus was assisted by Autophradates, probably in the ca- pacity of admiral of the fleet. The siege of Mitylene was finally brought to a successful conclusion. It capitulated on the conditions that it should restore the banished to citizenship, destroy the slabs upon which its treaty with Alexander was recorded, and be confirmed in the status which it formerly pos- sessed as a dependent of the empire under the treaty of Antalcidas (387 B.C.). This latter condition the Persians, after gaining the city, disregarded, for they established Diogenes as tyrant, placed a gar- rison in the citadel, and laid the community under tribute. After accomplishing this, Pharnabazus, taking with him the Greek mercenaries, who had been of great service in effecting the reduction of Mitylene, sailed for the Lycian coast, probably with the pur- pose of recovering the districts which Alexander had traversed the preceding winter. Autophradates remained with the most of the fleet in the neigh- bouring islands. Meantime the Shah, having heard of Memnon's death, had found himself forced to 264 Alexander the Great. [334 b.c- assume active measures in meeting Alexander's ag- gressions in Asia. Memnon's plan was evidently regarded as having died with its author. A mes- senger from the Shah met Pharnabazus in Lycia, announcing to him his appointment as Memnon's successor, and directing him to send his mercenaries to join the main army now being formed in Persia. This decision, robbing the western expedition of its support in land forces, ended once for all the pros- pect of any large success on the line originally planned by Memnon. Nevertheless, Pharnabazus, on his return to the fleet, proceeded as if the plan were intact. He sent Datames with ten ships to reconnoitre among the Cyclades, and himself, in company with Autophradates, sailed with a hundred ships to Tenedos, about thirty miles north of Lesbos, and forced it to yield on terms similar to those of Lesbos. Tenedos was only a dozen miles from the entrance to the Hellespont. The aim of the Per- sians was evidently directed at this. Even before matters reached this pass, Alexander had come to regret his impulsive action in disband- ing his fleet five months before. Memnon's activity had given him great solicitude, and while still at Gordium — for it was after leaving there that he heard of Memnon's death — he had commissioned Hegelochus and Amphoterus to go to the Helles- pont and collect a provisional fleet, even by pressing trading-vessels into service, if necessary, a proceed- ing which, as a breach of the treaty guaranteeing free passage of the Hellespont, called forth later a protest from Athens, and nearly occasioned a 333 B.C.] Lycia, Pamphylia, Pisidia. 265 rupture. Antipater, also, the regent in Macedonia, had received moneys from Alexander for a like pur- pose, and had sent Proteas to collect ships in Eubcea and the Peloponnesus to use as a protection for the Greek coast. This Proteas, hearing now of the ten Persian triremes under Datames as moored off Siphnus, set out by night from Chalcis with fifteen ships, in hope of surprising them. Arrian says he was " at the island of Cynthus at dawn." As it was a run of ninety miles, this implies a speed of at least eight miles an hour, not an impossibility with a favouring wind, such as Proteas would likely have taken ad- vantage of for a sudden descent. Spending the day there, in the following night he sailed over to Siphnus, thirty-five miles farther, and just before dawn fell upon the Persian ships, capturing eight of them. The Persian fleet continued to operate in the neighbourhood of Chios, ravaging the Ionian coast, but no further movement against Greece was made until autumn. When Alexander heard of Memnon's death, as he did shortly after leaving Gordium, all his solici- tude seems to have been at an end, and sharply turning his back on Europe and its affairs, he pushed out into his larger world. CHAPTER XVI. FROM PHRYGIA TO CILICIA. 333 B.C. IT was now the spring of 333 B.C. Alexander, in the middle of his twenty-third year, had been two and a half years on the throne. One fifth of the short period allotted him to reign was past. Of his first year as sovereign, the first half had been occupied in establishing title to his father's estate in Greece at the south, the second half in doing the same thing among the tribesmen at the north. His second year opened with the return to Greece and the destruction of Thebes (September, 335 B.C.). In March, 334 B.C., he set out into Asia. In May he had won the battle of the Granicus; in June had occupied Sardis, capital of the Lydian satrapy, and chief of the inland cities of Asia Minor; between July and November had swept down the coast and occupied the three chief cities of the Asiatic Greeks — Ephesus, Miletus, Halicarnassus ; in December and January he had traversed the turn of the coast by Lycia and Pamphylia, and cut a return swath 266 333 B.C.] From Pkiygia to Cilicia. 267 back inland to Phrygia. In one year he had thus subjugated a tract of country about two hundred and fifty miles square, and added to his dominion an area about equal to that of New England and about double that of European Greece. The experience of the year had amply displayed the general indifference of the Greek states to his enterprise. So far from laying upon them any of the burdens of the war, he had left them free from tribute and all other forms of imperial taxation, and was thankful enough if they could be kept from open opposition. Every question which concerned them was regarded as sensitive and was handled with gloves. The shields captured at Granicus had been sent as a present to Athens, in the hope of in- fusing some warmth into the stony heart ; but there was no response, and when, nine months later, an Athenian embassy asked for the return of some Athenian captives taken among the mercenaries at Granicus, they found the King in wary mood, and were bidden to call again. The prisoners were as good as hostages, and the situation made the hold- ing of hostages convenient. Yet Alexander was ostensibly captain-general of the Greeks, and claimed to be fighting as their " liberator." At Miletus he had rejected Parmenion's advice to risk a sea-fight, lest in case of a defeat " the Greeks might take heart and start a revolution." Greece and Greek opinion still loomed up large in his horizon. A year later, as his new standing-ground broadened, they dwindled, and soon passed almost out of view. During the winter of 334-333 B.C. the movement 268 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. of the Persian fleet under Memnon's command up into the ^Egean had given him great solicitude. Well it might. It menaced the Dardanelles. Once he was cut off from Europe, who could vouch for the loyalty of the Greeks ? Sparta was already wait- ing to join openly in cooperation with the Persian fleet. The death of Memnon (February, 333 B.C.) was, therefore, a severe blow to the Persian cause and a veritable deliverance for Alexander. It pro- duced a radical change in the plans of the Shah. Up to this time he had relied upon the Greek aver- sion to Macedonia, and the Persian and Greek con- trol of the sea, ultimately to foil and smother the military strength of Alexander. His plan had been that which Memnon represented in the council of generals before the battle of the Granicus, namely, to avoid a battle and by skilful retreat to draw the young adventurer across devastated countries until his strength was spent, but on the sea to take the aggressive. The plan was wise, but Memnon's* shrewd counsel had been overruled by the military arrogance of the Persian princes who accompanied him, and the colossal mistake of fighting at the Granicus had been committed. After that there was no hope for any plan on land, and Memnon's death palsied the plan by sea. So Persia herself was forced to intervene with her own armies led by the Shah ; and this gave the second year of Alexander's campaigns in Asia a new char- acter, and led up to the battle of Issus. This year and the results of this battle open a new phase in the young conqueror's career. Thus far he had 333 B.C.] From Phrygia to Cilicia. 269 been the son of Philip, inheritor and executor of his father's plans. He was a Macedonian leading Macedonians to war against Persia in the name of Greece. His ideals and ambitions were still in ac- cord with those of the simple country folk he led ; he belonged still to their little world. But after his eyes had once beheld the magnificence of Persia itself, as they saw it in the pomp and state of Da- rius's army and camp, a new world opened before him, infinitely grander and richer and wider than that in which he, plain son of poverty and simplicity, had been reared ; and behold, he had eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Then the ways be- gan to part between him and his Macedonians, be- tween the new Alexander and the old. It was merely the beginning: no one remarked it; it did not show itself in specific acts ; years elapsed before men really knew that they knew it. The change came on as slow as it was inevitable, but as we look over the whole life-story of the man, and mark the trend of motive that lay behind the outward form of act, we cannot fail to see the impulse to the new departure in the experiences of this second year in Asia. These experiences came, too, just at a time when Greece, by persisting in her indifference de- spite his achievements, and sinning thus against love, had, as it were, finally cast him adrift, and brought the ideals of his youth to their first disap- pointment. If Athens, Corinth, Argos, and Sparta had gone with him in heart and hand, if Greece had adopted him as her own, surely history would have been written differently, and more of the real Hellas 270 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. would have been embodied, whether for good or ill, in the empire which he left ; but, be that as it may, when we note in his later years an absence of all in- clination to return to Greece, and find him ready to adopt Oriental manners and become a half Oriental, we see why we need not wonder. The only wonder is that we find in his later attitude toward Greece and Greek things so little of that bitterness which comes to men whose motives have been miscon- strued and whose help has been disdained. When Darius, after hearing of Memnon's death, saw that nothing was now likely to prevent Alex- ander from attempting to push his conquests farther, even into the heart of the empire, and that a serious effort to resist him must now be made, he is said to have summoned a council of war and laid before it the question, Shall the Shah take command in per- son ? Most of his advisers urged him to raise a large army, and, leading it himself, to make short, quick work of annihilating the upstart invader. In earlier days the Shah had always been expected to lead the army in war, but now, with the establishment of peaceful, luxurious life, it had become the excep- tion. For the Shah to go indicated that a supreme issue was at stake. But there was present in the Persian council a Greek, of better military judgment than all the courtiers, and who knew whereof he affirmed. It was the crafty old Charidemus of Eubcean Oreus, the most experienced professional soldier of his day. For thirty years or more he had been continually in evidence in Greek affairs, as pirate, freebooter, 333 B.C.] From Phrygia to Cilicia. 271 mercenary soldier, and general, or diplomatic agent. He had been in the service now of the Persian satraps, now of Thracian princes, now of Athens, for a time perhaps of Philip himself; often he had been in business on his own account, but in his later years he had been mostly with Athens, and had done no small mischief to Philip's cause. It was through him that the first news of Philip's death had been sent to Demosthenes, and either from sus- picion that this indicated complicity in the deed, or on account of some of the man's many military sins, Alexander could never forget or forgive him ; and when, in 335 B.C., he forgave Athens and withdrew the black-list of politicians he had at first assigned to punishment, he made exception alone of Chari- demus. So the old man had taken refuge in Persia, and was serving now as military expert and general adviser at the court of Susa. When now the question came to him what had best be done, he gave advice that differed radically from that of all the rest. The Shah, he said, ought not to stake his empire on a single throw. This he would do, however, if he took command in person. An army of one hundred thousand, one third Greek mercenaries, under the leadership of a competent general, was large enough. It was not wise to give the Macedonians battle at the first; better retreat slowly before them until they became ensnared in the vastness of the country. The King at first inclined to accept the advice, but his courtiers stoutly opposed. They suspected Charidemus of desiring the command for himself, 2J2 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. and perhaps they were right. They went so far as to accuse him of treacherous designs, and savagely resented his insinuation that the Persians were not a match for the Macedonians. Charidemus lost his temper, and proceeded to express without further use of diplomatic language his high estimate of the Persian cowardice. Therewith his doom was sealed. The Shah " seized him by his girdle," and he was led forth to death. As he left the royal presence, he exclaimed: " The King will rue this, and that soon. My revenge is at hand. It is the overthrow of the empire." The action of the Shah was fol- lowed by quick but still too tardy regret. Such is the story of Charidemus as Diodorus and Curtius Rufus tell it, and though Arrian knows no- thing of it, there is no reason on that account to re- ject it. The official Macedonian sources from which Arrian draws his materials seem to belittle the dan- ger that menaced Alexander, not only in Memnon's plans, but in all that the Greek opposition, passive or active, involved. Darius sought in vain for the man competent to fill Memnon's place. He finally decided to take command himself and follow the advice of his coun- sellors. A mighty army was forthwith assembled at Babylon, and without delay the march into Upper Syria began. Hope ran high. The proudest em- pire of the earth marshalled its strength in all the pomp and circumstance of ancient warfare. Sixty thousand native soldiers, the Cardaces, formed the nucleus of the host ; one hundred thousand horse- men were there, the pride of Asia; four hundred 333 B.C.] From Phrygia to Cilicia. 273 thousand foot-soldiers, Persians, Medians, Armen- ians, Babylonians, and hardy soldiers from the far North-east, made up the mass. Princes and chiefs, vizirs and satraps, men great in fame and high in station, were the leaders. It was as if the nation itself, not its army, were gathered together in grand review ; and all had its centre in the person of the Shah himself. His court, with all its state — queen, daughters, harem, hordes of attendants — forms, luxury, paraphernalia, and pomp, attended him, as if to remind that it was the empire itself, and not a mere machine of war, that went forth to meet the invader. Babylon itself, from the gates of which they issued forth, was a standing witness to the stability and might of the empire. It was the grand old wicked Babylon. For twenty centuries it had been the great mart and imperial city of the river-plain. For three centuries the great structures with which Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar had endowed it had made it the talk and wonder of the world. Its walls of brick, seventy-five feet high and thirty-two feet broad, — so broad that two four-horse chariots could pass each other in the roadway that followed the top, — inclosed an area ten miles square. Almost diagonally across the square plan of the city flowed the Euphrates. Xenophon reports its width as two stades (nearly a quarter of a mile), though at present it is scarcely five hundred feet. Canals diverged from it in various directions, to serve, in addition to the broad thoroughfares, as highways through the city. In the north-western quarter of the city, on both banks of the river, were the royal palaces and 18 274 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. the citadels. On the east bank were two vast palaces, each built on a half-artificial elevation, and made to serve as a citadel, one the work of Nabopo- lassar, the other of Nebuchadnezzar. Hard by the former and to the south rose the mighty pile of E-sag-il, the temple of Belus, a lofty, tower-like structure lifted irf eight gigantic terraces from a foundation six hundred feet square. Across the river was the great royal park, in the midst of which stood another tall mass of palace structures, within which, ten years later, Alexander was to find his death. Adjoining at the north and close by the river were the famous " hanging gardens," lifted on piers of brick and rising in terraces to a height of seventy-five feet. The whole area within the walls was not, at least in Alexander's time, closely built and populated. Curtius Rufus somewhere found the statement, which he reports to us, that part of the land in the outskirts was farmed, and that the compact city had a diameter of eighty stades, not the whole ninety (ten miles) of the walled inclosure. The great mounds of ruins that to-day cover the plain for five or six miles to the north and to the south of Hillah testify to the essential correctness of the singularly accordant statements which ancient writers have left us concerning the city's extent, and yield at the same time a sad comment on the hopes and confidence of nations that, like those of Baby- lon, stay themselves in bricks and bigness. When, sometime in midsummer, 333 B.C., the news of Darius's advance reached Alexander, he was still in northern Asia Minor. He had chosen Gor- 333 B.C.] From Phrygia toX^ilicia. 275 dium as his spring rendezvous, in part because of its situation in relation to the great roads leading into Mesopotamia. At Ancyra, sixty miles farther east, the two great routes diverged, the one, the northern route by the " royal road," leading through southern Armenia, the other leading through Cilicia. Until Alexander received news of the Shah's advance, and an indication of his route, he remained in the north, keeping Ancyra as his base of action. From this point he subjugated the western part of Cappadocia, and received there the embassy from the Paphla- gonians to the north, offering their submission and begging him not to invade their land. When finally word came — probably in the form of information concerning the appointed rendezvous of mercenaries employed for the Persian fleet — that Darius was be- lieved to be advancing into Syria, Alexander took the southern route, leading between Lake Tatta and the Halys direct toward Cilicia. He moved with tremendous rapidity, forcing the marches by day and by night. All forms of opposition melted away before him, and almost before the enemy knew he was in motion he swept down from the mountains into the city of Tarsus. He had passed without striking a blow the famous Gates of Cilicia — a pass so narrow that a camel must unload in order to get through, and which, from Cyrus's times to Ibrahim Pasha in this century, has been regarded as the key to the country, — and the Taurus range, the great outer wall of defence for Mesopotamia and Syria, was now behind him. A severe illness befell him at Tarsus. Aristobulus, 276 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. one of his companions on the expedition, who after- ward wrote his biography, — a work now lost, except for the abundant citations, preserved especially in Arrian, — attributed the illness to the fatiguing toils of the march and of war. Other authorities to which Arrian had access attributed it to a bath taken while overheated in the cold waters of the Tarsan river Cydnus. Not improbably both authorities were right, the one reporting the cause, the other the occasion. The illness was characterised by high fever accompanied by convulsions and inability to sleep. All the physicians despaired of him except Philip the Acharnanian, who proposed to check the course of the disease by administering a purgative draught. While Philip, it is said, was preparing the medicine, a letter came to Alexander's hand from Parmenion, the first general, warning him of Philip, who, he claimed to have heard, had been bribed by Darius to poison him. Parmenion was a trusty old officer, a rock-ribbed Macedonian of the old-fash- ioned type, narrow-minded and suspicious, especially when it concerned his master's dealings with the Greeks. This incident, where his jealousy of non- Macedonians who found favour with the King first comes to light, has been recorded by the associates of Alexander, and was, as other references to Par- menion tend to show, probably intended to bear its part in explaining the later estrangement between the two. We cannot, however, believe that Par- menion invented the story. Such suspicions were common in those days, and Parmenion's temper made him easy prey. When Philip passed Alexander the cup containing 333 B.C.] From Phrygia to Cilicia. 277 the medicine, Alexander handed him the letter, and while Philip was reading it, drank the potion. This action expressed his desire to banish from his en- vironment that atmosphere of small personal sus- picion which haunts the presence of autocrats, and to replace it with a generous spirit of friendly con- fidence. How hard it was for him to carry the de- sire consistently into effect, the story of his stormy life will tell ; but behind all the mistakes of his im- pulsiveness and the constraints and temptations of his unnatural position there can always be seen as a permanent background of character, as the true Al- exander, a yearning for loyal, trustful friendship, and an ambition to be worthy of it. Cilicia, a strip of land about two hundred and fifty miles long and from thirty to seventy-five miles broad, shut in by the Taurus range on the north, the Amanus on the east, and the Imbarus on the west, is really the vestibule to Mesopotamia and the East. It is naturally divided into two portions, the mountainous, rough Cilicia (Isauria) to the west, and Cilicia of the plain to the east. The lat- ter contains much open land, the extreme southern part of which constitutes the famous Aleian plain, where legend, in deference to a folk-etymology which made the name mean " the plain of wander- ing," had placed the forlorn roamings of Bellerophon after he fell from Pegasus's back. It is watered by three rivers, the largest of which is the Pyramus. In summer its heat is excessive. After sending troops under Parmenion to occupy the passes of the Amanus Mountains on the east, Alexander made an excursion to the westward, 278 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. occupying first the city of Anchialus, and later Solce, a city the people of which spoke a Greek so bad as to earn in our modern word " solecism " a lasting monument. The Greek element in these cities probably constituted only a small proportion either of the population or of the blood. A fine of two hundred talents of silver which Alexander imposed upon the citizens because of their Persian leanings was afterward in part remitted. News came here of the success of the Macedonian forces left in Caria and Lydia in an encounter with the Persian commander Othontopates, who still held the citadel of Halicarnassus. A thousand of his men had been taken prisoners, and seven hundred and fifty killed. In celebration of the victory, as well as in recognition of his own restoration to health, Alexander arranged a great fete, including athletic sports, a torch-race, a musical contest, a re- view of the troops, and offerings to the gods — a genuine Hellenic festival. When things went well with the Greeks, they knew no better way to signalise it — and perhaps no better way has yet been found — than to give the gods, as first citizens of the state, a banquet and invite themselves, and then provide for the gods an entertain- ment such as their own tastes pronounced the most delectable — contests of skill and strength and craft and art, in which man was pitted against man, and the best man won the crown. No scenic or festal display that did not stir the blood with the zest of competition was worthy of men and gods. 333 B.C.] From Phrygia to Cilicia. 279 After the games were over, seven days were occu- pied in a raid upon the mountain tribes in the neigh- bourhood. Then marching back by way of Tarsus, Alexander sent the cavalry through the Aleian plain, while he, accompanied by the infantry and the guards, moved along the coast by way of Magarsus to Mallus. Here he found Greek traditions, for the inhabitants claimed to have been originally a colony from Argos. As his family also made a great point of claiming an Argive root for their family tree, the opportunity of welding a friendship was not neglected, all the more in view of the sentimental nature of the claim. At Mallus he learned that the Persian army was camped only two days' march from the other side of the mountains. A council of war, immediately called, decided to advance directly to attack Darius where he was. The next morning the march was begun, and the army proceeded along the coast to Issus. From here two routes led into Syria — one to the north by the so-called Amanic Gates (the modern Topra Kalessi), a pass two thousand feet above the sea-level, and another, apparently the more usual, though the longer, by way of the coast as far south as Myriandrus, and then through an opening in the mountains into Syria. Alexander chose the southern route, and, after passing the so- called Cilician Gates, advanced as far as Myriandrus. Just as he was about to cross the mountains, he was fortunately detained by a heavy autumn storm, for before he was again ready to move, important tid- ings came, which changed all his plans. CHAPTER XVII. BATTLE OF ISSUS. 333 B.C. MEANWHILE Darius, who had chosen a plain in the neighbourhood of Sochoi as suitable for the operations of his army and so a favourable place for a meeting with Alexander, had become impatient at Alexander's delay. Already his courtiers began to suggest the welcome theory that Alexander was afraid to face the might of the great King. He probably was appalled at having heard that the great King was there in person. He surely would never dare to cross the mountains. It would be necessary for the Shah to go over and de- stroy him. The theory was speedily quickened into faith. Surely against so mighty an array as this the handful of Macedonians would have no chance or hope. Under the prancing feet of the vast squadrons of the world-famed Persian cavalry the little band would be trampled into destruction. Confidence ran high. All over the Greco-Persian world it was the same. 280 333 B.C.] Battle of Issus. 281 The word went out that the disturber of the world's peace was now safely locked up within the mount- ains of Cilicia, and that he would soon be buried beneath the Persian avalanche. Demosthenes at Athens only voiced the hope and the expectations of all enemies of Alexander when he read to his friends the letters he had just received from the East, and confidently predicted the speedy downfall of Alexander. It made the great orator, to be sure, easy prey in after days for the taunts of ^Eschines * : " But when Darius came on with all his force, and Alexander, as you [Demosthenes] claimed, was locked up in Cilicia and in sore straits, and was going to be, as your phrase had it, ' speedily trampled underfoot by the Persian horse,' then, with the city not big enough to hold your swagger, you pranced about with epistles dangling from your fingers, pointing people to my coun- tenance as that of a miserable, despairing wretch, and called me a bull ready for the sacrifice, with gilded horns and garlands on the head, the moment anything happened to Alexander." New courage, as the autumn months came on, had been inspired into the Persian fleet off Chios. A hundred of the best ships had been sent over to Siphnus. Here Agis, King of Sparta, came to parley with the leaders, asking for money to begin a war, and urging the Persians to send an army and a fleet to the Peloponnesus. All this was going on in Greece just at the time when Darius, in November, 333 B.C., was halting before the mountains of Ama- nus and querying what had become of Alexander. * iEschines against Ctesiphon, sec. 164. 282 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. There was at least one man in Darius's camp who did not lose his good judgment. This was Amyn- tas, a Macedonian noble, who, for some reason not known to history, had fled the court at Pella a few years before, and whom we hear of as being with the Persians at the battle of the Granicus, and after- wards as fleeing from Ephesus before the approach of Alexander's troops. He was now in command of the Greek mercenaries, and we shall hear of him again. He advised Darius most earnestly to remain where he now was, on the Assyrian side of the mountains. He need have no doubt that Alexan- der would come to him. The narrow defiles and uneven land of Cilicia offered no favourable oppor- tunity for the Persian army, with its cavalry and its great masses of troops, to utilise its strength. But, as Arrian has it, " the worse advice prevailed, for- sooth because it was for the moment the pleasanter to hear." Having sent all the unnecessary baggage, the treasure, and the harems of himself and his satraps to Damascus, 250 miles to the south, Darius crossed the mountains, and came to Issus on the same day that Alexander arrived at Myriandrus, scarcely thirty-five miles away. They had missed each other by less than a day, for Arrian says that Alex- ander arrived at Myriandrus on the second day from Mallus, and Issus was far beyond the half-way point. Plutarch even reports that the two armies passed each other in the darkness of the night, a statement which is, however, quite improbable. Darius's army, coming down through the hills at the north, 333 B . c.] Battle of Issus. 283 would not have been seen from Issus until within four or five miles of the town. The haphazard methods of obtaining information concerning the movements and position of the enemy, which made it possible for the Macedonians thus placidly to march out of the plain just as the enemy, from five to six hundred thousand strong, was entering it close behind them, offer a striking contrast to the methods of reconnoissance employed in modern warfare. That Alexander should have taken the risk of marching off to the south and leaving the way open for the Persian to come in at the north, without even seeking to inform himself concerning the possibility of such a movement, reflects, how- ever, no discredit on his strategic insight. There was nothing he presumably desired more than that Darius should enter Cilicia, and it was in hope of enticing him in that he had tarried so long. The narrow plains of Cilicia were his chosen field for battle, not the open land of Syria. A vast army, too, like that of Darius, would find slender chance of subsistence once it had crossed the mountains. Alexander's only mistake was in not rating high enough his opponents' folly. When Alexander heard that his enemy was close by him and in his rear, he could scarcely believe the news to be true ; so he embarked some of his guard in a thirty-oared boat and sent them back along the coast to reconnoitre. Without going the whole dis- tance to Issus, the reconnoitring party was able to de- scry the camp of the Persians. Alexander then called together his chief officers, and, aware that a supreme 284 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. moment in his affairs was at hand, reviewed the whole situation with them, summing up the grounds of confidence that a victory was now in their hands : They were to meet a foe whom they had met before and vanquished. They were themselves used to toil and danger; their enemy were men enervated by luxury and ease. They were freemen; their enemy were slaves. There was, finally, evidence that God was on their side, for he had put it into Darius's mind to move his forces to a place where his vast multitude would be useless, whereas the Macedonian phalanx had room enough to display its full power. The rewards of victory, too, were great. The whole power of Persia was drawn up against them, led by the Shah in person. In the event of victory nothing was left for them to do but to take possession of all Asia and make an end of their toils. He reminded them of their many brill- iant achievements in the past, both as an army and as individuals, and recounted their deeds, mention- ing them by name. With due modesty, too, he told of his own deeds, and ended by telling the story of Xenophon and his famous ten thousand, who, with- out Thessalian or Macedonian horsemen, without archers or slingers, had put to rout the king and all his forces close before the walls of Babylon itself. The word was that of a Greek to Greeks. The en- thusiasm of battle laid hold on them all. They thronged about him, clasped his hand, begged him to lead them forthwith against the foe. His army was consolidated on one thought and ambition, and that was the thought and ambition of its leader. 333 B.C.] Battle of Issus. 285 Alexander then ordered his soldiers to take din- ner, for evening was now approaching, and sent a few horsemen and archers back to occupy the Cilic- ian Gates, the narrow passage eight miles north of Myriandrus, between the sea and the hills, through which he had passed only a few hours before, and which he would be obliged to repass in returning to the plain. After nightfall he led his whole army to the pass, and encamped there at the southern limit of the plain of Issus. The Persians, on entering Issus, had found some wounded Macedonian soldiers in the lazaretto, and forthwith massacred them. The prevailing opinion was at first that Alexander was avoiding battle and was now caught in a trap, shut off from retreat. The Persian host stood full in the way between him and Greece; behind the only escape was the enemy's land. Darius evidently thought at first that his enemy had passed over into Syria, for we learn from Polybius (xii., 17), who cites the authority of Callis- thenes, that when Darius, after his arrival in Issus, l had learned from the natives that Alexander had gone on as if advancing into Syria, he followed him, and on approaching the pass encamped by the river Pinarus. ' ' This would account for the position of the Persians nine miles beyond and to the south of Issus. Darius, however, soon saw, as Plutarch says, that he was in no position for a battle. The mountains and the sea hemmed in his army, and the river Pinarus divided it. He planned, therefore, to withdraw as soon as possible; but this Alexander sought to prevent, by forcing an immediate battle. 286 Alexander the Great. [333 b.c. He saw at a glance his advantage. A field had by fortune been given him in which the tremend- ous preponderance of the Persian army counted for little. Early the following morning — it was about the beginning of November, 333 B.C. — Alexander led his army on toward the Persian position, twelve or thirteen miles distant from the pass where he had spent the night. The plain of Issus stretches along the shore of the sea, which bounds it on the west, for a little over twenty miles, gradually widening from the Cilician Gates, at its extreme south, to the neighbourhood of the city of Issus, which lies some five miles from the present coast-line in its northern extreme. The Persians had encamped on the north bank of the river Pinarus, which flows across the plain in a westerly or southwesterly direction, about nine miles south of the city. We have it on the authority of Callisthenes that the width of the plain at this point, reckoned from the foot-hills of the mountains to the sea, was, at the time of the battle, fourteen stades, i. e., somewhat over a mile and a half. Since then the alluvium of the mountain streams has carried the shore out until the plain is nearly five miles wide. A similar change has made the battle-field of Thermopylae unintelligible to the modern visitor. What was anciently a narrow path of fifty feet between sea and cliff is now a marshy plain two or three miles in width. The harbour of Miletus, in which the naval movements we have lately recounted took place, is now a plain in which the island of Lade is lost as a knoll. 333 B.C.] Battle of Issus. 287 As long as the plain remained narrow, Alexander, as he marched forward, kept his troops in column ; but as it opened, he gradually developed his column into a line filling the whole space between the hills and the sea. Gradually the order of battle took shape. It was always his usage, so far as possible, to march upon the battle-field in the order to be there assumed. His caution in filling the width of the plain was due to his fear of being outflanked by the superior numbers of the enemy. Slowly the battle-line spread itself out. The infantry battalion swung up from the column to the front. The cavalry, which had held the rear, moved out to the wings. Upon the right, next the hills, were placed the Thessalian and Macedonian heavy cavalry, flanked by the lancers and Paeonians and the light- armed Agrianians and bowmen; next came the hypaspists, or light infantry, and their ag^ma y or picked squad; in the centre the phalanx; on the left were the allies, the Cretan bowmen and the Thracian troops of Sitalces. The left wing was placed, as usual, under the command of Parmenion, who was specially instructed to keep close to the shore in order to prevent any attempt to outflank him. Opposite was now visible the line of Darius's army. All told it is said to have contained from five to six hundred thousand fighting men. Against this the little Macedonian army of perhaps thirty thousand men, led by a stripling twenty-three years old, seemed hopelessly lost. They were shut off from their own world by the hordes of the Persians, 288 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. locked into the narrow plain, with the only line of retreat, in case of defeat, leading into the enemy's country. Darius had thrown a body of thirty thou- sand cavalry and twenty thousand light-armed in- fantry across the river as a shield while his army was assuming battle order, but before the battle began they were slowly withdrawn to the wings. His centre was composed of the thirty thousand Greek mercenaries, his best fighting troops, which were thus offset against the Macedonian phalanx. At each side of these he set his best native troops, the Cardaces, as they were called. His left wing, stretching out along the hills, the line of which curved about to the south, overlapped the Greek right, and menaced its flank. His right wing was composed of the mass of the cavalry, for the ground along the shore offered the greater freedom for cavalry action. The great multitudes were arrayed line behind line to an unserviceable depth, the front being too narrow to give effectiveness to the mass of the army. After inspecting the arrangement of the enemy's line, and appreciating the superior strength which the enormous masses of superb cavalry gave to its right wing, Alexander gave orders to transfer the Thessalian cavalry from his right to the left wing. This change was quietly made, the squadrons mov- ing rapidly across behind the phalanx, and taking their position beside the Cretan bowmen and the Thracians. Before the battle opened, Alexander sent a body of light troops — Agrianians, bowmen, and some . , SOLE or MILES ( I )[:fil 3 \>#, Pillar of JonS^fc^ 5V'^ PLAIN OF ISSUS (PRESENT CONDITION). THE ANCIENT COURSE OF THE PINARUS FOLLOWED THE RIVER CHANNEL NEXT TO THE NORTH. 333 B.C.] Battle of Issus. cavalrymen — to dislodge the force which was men- acing his right on the foot-hills to the east. The movement succeeded, but as a permanent protection to this wing he detached two squadrons (three hun- dred men) from the companion cavalry, posting them far out upon the right. For a while the two armies faced each other in quiet. Darius planned to use the river bank as a defence. Where the bank was not abrupt, stock- ades had been placed to make it so. Alexander was glad of an opportunity to rest his troops, and was determined to advance very slowly and keep his line in perfect order. With mechanical precision every arrangement was effected and every movement made. There was no nervous bustle or disorder. When everything was ready, Alexander rode down the line, briefly exhorting his men, appealing to each regiment in terms of its own peculiar ambition and pride. To the Macedonians he named their battle-fields and victories; to the Greeks he spoke of another Darius their forefathers had met at Mara- thon. Tumultuous cheers greeted his words wher- ever he went. The fervour of battle was on. " Lead us on! Why do we wait ?" they cried; and the dogs of war tugged at the halter. Then with meas- ured step, in close array, the advance began. As soon as they came within range of the darts, how- ever, the double-quick was ordered. On ahead galloped the magnificent squadrons of the com- panion cavalry, twelve hundred strong, with Alex- ander at the head to open the attack, and drove itself, a compact body, into the Persian left. This 290 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. yielded at once to the tremendous onset. No military force had ever yet proved able to check the dash of the Macedonian heavy cavalry. On the Macedonian left the Persian cavalry had the advantage. Vastly superior in numbers, and the flower of the Persian army, it found to oppose it the scanty squadrons of the Thessalian cavalry, supported by the infantry allies. The Persian line here crossed the river, and, with charge after charge in fearful struggle, slowly forced their opponents back. In the centre the phalanx had found rugged opposition. It was here Greek against Macedonian. The line of the phalanx had been broken in crossing the river, and Alexander's sudden advance with the heavy cavalry had left its right unprotected. High on the river bank before them the Greeks held their vantage-ground, driving their weapons down into them, pushing them back as they clambered up. Even the long sarissas failed to open a way. The tremendous mass of the Persian centre stood like a rock. The Macedonian phalanx was for once held in check. The battle threatened to go against them. But Alexander already held the key to success. The rout of the Persian left had brought him round upon the flank of the Greek mercenaries, who formed the centre. He tore in upon it, rending it asunder. The Shah, seated in his four-horse chariot in the centre of the host, became his goal. The story of the combat waged at this point is graphically told by Curtius Rufus, and as its chief details are con- firmed by Diodorus, it probably was drawn from Clitarchus (second century B.C.): 333 B.C.] Battle of Issus. 291 " Alexander was doing the work of a soldier no less than that of a leader. For there stood Darius towering aloft in his chariot, a sight that prompted alike friends to shield him and foes to assail him. So then his brother Oxathres, when he saw Alexander rushing toward him, gathered the horsemen of his command and threw them in the very front of the chariot of the king. Conspicuous above all the rest, with his armour and his giant frame, peer of the best in valour and loyalty, fighting now the battle of his life, he laid low those who recklessly surged against him ; others he turned to flight. But the Mace- donians grouped about their King, heartened by one an- other's exhortations, burst in upon the line. Then came the desolation of ruin. Around the chariot of Darius you 'd see lying leaders of highest rank, perished in a glorious death, all prone upon their faces, just as they had fallen in their struggle, wounds all in the front. Among them you would find Atizyes and Rheomithres and Sabaces, the satrap of Egypt, all generals of great armies; piled up around them a mass of footmen and horsemen of meaner fame. Of the Macedonians, too, many were slain, good men and true. Alexander him- self was wounded in the right thigh with a sword. And now the horses attached to Darius's car, pricked with spears and infuriated with pain, tossed the yoke on their necks, and threatened to throw the King from the car. Then he, in fear lest he should fall alive into the hands of the enemy, leaped out, and was set on the back of a horse which was kept close behind against this very need. All the insignia of the imperial office, with slight respect for form, were thrown aside, lest the sight of them beget a panic. The rest is scattered, and melts away in its terror. Wherever a way is open, there the fugitives of the army burst through. Their arms they throw away — 292 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. the very arms which they a little while before had taken up to shield their lives. Such is fear, it shrinks even from the means of rescue." The battle was now soon over. The Persian cavalrymen on the right, seeing the centre in flight, left their success and joined the rout. The very mass of the Persians became their destruction. The horsemen jostled and threw one another. Thou- sands were trampled to death. Men ran against one another's naked swords. They stumbled in the descending darkness. Heaps of writhing bodies filled the ditches. Ptolemy tells how Alexander in his pursuit crossed a ravine on a dam of corpses. The night alone stopped the pursuit. Alexander, contrary to the usage of those before him, always pressed his success to the utmost. Only when he and his men could no longer find their way through the gathering darkness did they relent and turn back over the field of ruin they had made. A hundred thousand Persians had fallen. Three victims were counted for each one of Alexander's men engaged. The mountain-sides were full of scattered fugitives making their way over into Syria. Others fled into the mountains of Cilicia, to become there the prey of the mountain tribes. Eight thousand Greek mer- cenaries, under the lead of Amyntas, were the only ones to preserve a semblance of order in retreat. They crossed the mountains into Syria, and made for Tripolis, the port where they had landed when brought to the country. Here they found the ships in which they came still in the harbour, and seizing what they needed, and burning the rest, they sailed 333 B.C.] Battle of Issus. 293 away as soldiers of fortune to Cyprus, and thence to Egypt, where they made themselves a terror until overwhelmed and slain, leader and all, by the Egyp- tian troops. The Shah, pushing on with rapid changes of horses, did not stay his flight till he had passed the mountains and reached Sochoi, in the Syrian plain beyond. From his whole army only four thousand fugitives assembled here with him. They quickly moved on to Thapsacus, to put the Eu- phrates behind them. Upon the field was left all the equipment of the camp — the luxurious outfit of the court, four mill- ions of treasure, precious things in robing, fabrics, utensils, armour, such as these plain Macedonians had never seen before ; and the Shah in his hasty flight had left behind him not only his chariot and his bow, but, most pitiful of all, his mother, wife, daughters, and little son, all at the rude mercy of the victor. The Macedonian loss had been not over 450 killed — 150 from the cavalry, 300 from the infantry. No battle more decisive in its issue was ever fought. In its historical results it ranks among the world's few great battles. It shut Asia in behind the mount- ains, and prepared to make the Mediterranean a European sea. CHAPTER XVIII. FROM CILICIA INTO SYRIA. 333-33 2 B.C. DURING the four months which intervened between Alexander's hasty departure from Ancyra (July, 333 B.C.) and the battle of Issus (November), the old world of Greece and the iEgean, upon which he had so coolly turned his back, went on its way and even essayed to construct a play of its own, with Hamlet left out. As sum- mer passed into autumn and the consciousness quickened that the ambitious young Storenfried was now well out of sight and reach behind the Taurus, opposition took breath again and began to gather its strength and lay its schemes in hope of the final disaster that Darius' s overwhelming arma- ment might well be counted to have in store for the harebrained intruder. The ^Egean was still in control of the Persian fleet. Alexander had not ignored the fact or its significance. He knew well enough that the em- bers of the opposition slumbering behind the ashes 294 333-332 B.C.] From Cilicia into Syria, 295 of temporary defeat waited only for encouragement to burst again into flame, and that some decided action or some striking success on the part of the fleet might furnish such encouragement ; but when, early in the spring, the news came to him at Gordium of Memnon's death, he recognised, with his quick power of summarising a situation, that no central personal force was left to give coherence to the elements opposed to him, and so he took his risk and turned eastward, determined to win what further recognition he was to receive at home by quick and decided success in the far outer world. The various movements of the Persian fleet which began in midsummer and were continued throughout the autumn we have referred to incidentally in the foregoing, but it is well to summarise them here, so far as the scattered references of the historians, made without much suggestion of chronology, per- mit it to be done. The siege of Mitylene in Lesbos, continued after Memnon's death (February, 333 B.C.), resulted in the capture of the city, and Tene- dos, an island off the entrance to the Hellespont, soon after submitted to superior force. There was no land force cooperating with the Persians, and so their field of action was limited to the islands, ex- cept that here and there a descent upon some coast town served their purpose for foraging, plunder, and destruction. Nowhere, however, did they gain, or apparently seek to gain, a foothold on the mainland. An expedition of ten ships under Datames's com- mand, which during the summer had slipped across the sea and anchored by Siphnos, as if to test the 296 Alexander the Great. [333 B.c- temper of the Greeks and give some chance encour- agement to the anti-Macedonian elements in the coast cities, or perhaps enter into dealings with the Spartans, who through it all had remained open op- ponents of the league with Macedon, had come to grief, and eight of the ships had been captured by a Macedonian squadron organised at Eubcea, to the north. Hegelochus was by this time getting to- gether a Macedonian fleet in the Hellespont, and when a portion of the Persian fleet ventured to ex- tend its operations in this direction it was driven back. The Macedonians could not afford to have the main route cut that led from Macedonia into Asia. In the early autumn Hegelochus and his fleet grew bolder, and venturing out of the Hellespont, recaptured Tenedos; but when, in their assurance, they assumed so much control of the waterway as to lay embargo on Athenian freighters that brought the precious cargoes of grain down from the Black Sea, they drew forth a storm of resentment from Athens that for the moment menaced outright war. It had been already voted to send a hundred ships to defend Athenian interests in the Hellespont, and a rupture that would have cost the Macedonian inter- ests sore and given the Persian fleet its perfect op- portunity was all but completed, when diplomacy and worldly wisdom prevailed, and Hegelochus re- leased the ships in question. How near at hand the materials for an explosion lay, this incident, coupled with minor indications afforded by stray allusions in anecdotes and speeches of the time, amply sug- gests. These were the days when ^schines and his 332 B.C.] From Cilicia into Syria. 297 partisans of Macedonian sympathisers were " jol- lied " about their long faces and their gloom as they strolled among the gossipers of barber-shops and market-place, and when men of the other persuasion felt fine and fit, and looked at one another with mysterious, knowing looks; for had they not got the straight tip from their leader, the grave and reverend Demosthenes, who always had " inside " news and knew it as it was, and now had letters to show, that told how Darius was on his way from Babylon with a force so mighty that Alexander's little band of marauders would be trampled out of sight under the horses' hoofs ? And the " water- drinker " himself had relaxed somewhat from his owl-like seriousness, and had taken on a buoyant, jaunty air, yes, even joined a bit in the jests of the market-place at ^Lschines's expense. In the midst of it all news came that a hundred ships of the Persians had crossed the sea and lay in the harbour of Siphnos, ninety miles to the south, ready to take advantage of the expected event. Agis, the wily old Spartan king, sailed over to them with a single trireme, and laid before them, like many a Spartan king before him, a plan for saving Greece, themselves, and sundry other things, by giving him much gold and many ships. No one may say in what the conference might have ended, for while it still was pending came hurrying across the seas the grim tidings from the field of Issus. Instantly the whole scene changed. Complicity with Persian interests lost all charm. The Athen- ians might well deem themselves fortunate that they 298 Alexander the Great, [333 B.C.- had gone no further toward the brink of revolt. For the Persians it was only a question whether they could save what they now had, and Pharnabazus, taking with him fifteen hundred mercenaries, hast- ened back with ten ships to head off a possible re- volt at Chios. The rest of the fleet soon followed, distributing itself among various stations on the coast of Asia Minor, — Agis, of whom and of whose mischief-making we shall hear more later on, going with it, — then with the spring it began to melt away. The Cyprians and Phoenicians belonging in the fleet could not be retained after Alexander's advance down the Syrian coast once began directly to threaten their own homes. Thus step by step Alexander was winning the ^Egean by fighting his way on land around its coasts. On the night of the battle of Issus, Alexander, returning from the pursuit, found the luxurious camp of Darius awaiting him, and in the Shah's tent he dined and made ready to pass the night. The booty left behind was far less than it would have been, had not the march over the mountains caused the Persians to discard much of their para- phernalia. All the grandees except the Shah had sent their harems to Damascus, where also a vast mass of treasure had been collected, together with the heavy baggage. Still, there was left enough of the luxurious appointments of the camp to dazzle the eyes of Macedonians and Greeks, and three thousand talents of gold, found with the rest, was not the least acceptable surprise. Plutarch tells this story : 332 B.C.] From Cilicia into Syria. 299 " Here when Alexander beheld the basins and water- pots and bath-tubs and ointment-flasks, all of gold, won- drously wrought, and smelled the divine odours with which myrrh and spices filled the room, and from thence passed into a pavilion marvellous for its height and breadth and for the magnificence of its couches and tables and the feast that was spread, he turned to his companions, and said: ' Well, this, I take it, is royalty.' " Darius, too, in his haste, had left behind in his camp wife, mother, and children. The various stones of Alexander's treatment of them, as told in the different ancient accounts, are all of one tenor, different as they may be in detail. The considera- tion shown the women and the self-restraint ex- hibited by the young soldier were novel things in those days, but they were sure marks of a nobility which all contemporary opinion united in recognis- ing. The simplest account is that given by Arrian, as embodying the statements of his highest orthodox authorities, Ptolemy and Aristobulus: " Some of the biographers of Alexander say that on the very night when he returned from the pursuit, after entering Darius's tent, which had been apportioned to his use, he heard the wailing of women and other like noise not far from the tent. On inquiring who the wo- men were, and how they happened to be in a tent so near, he received the following answer: ' King, the mother and the wife and the children of Darius, since it was told them that thou hast the bow of Darius and the royal mantle, and that the shield of Darius has been brought back, are lamenting him as slain.' When Alexander heard this he sent Leonnatus, one of the companions, 300 Alexander the Great. [333B.C.- with a message to them: ' Darius is living; in his flight he left in his chariot his arms and his mantle: this is all that Alexander has.' Leonnatus entered the tent and told them the message about Darius, and added that Alexander would allow them to retain the retinue be- coming their rank, and other forms of state, as well as the title of queens; for not out of personal enmity had he made the war against Darius, but he had conducted it in a regular manner for the empire of Asia. These are the statements of Ptolemy and Aristobulus." Plutarch gives essentially the same account, with his usual moralising embellishments, subsidiary to which the following is added : " Nevertheless, Darius's wife is said to have been far the most beautiful of all princesses, just as Darius him- self among men was the handsomest and tallest; and the two daughters were worthy of their parents. But Alex- ander, as it seems, esteeming it more kingly to govern himself than to conquer his enemies, neither touched these women, nor indeed had intercourse with any other woman before marriage, except with Barsine, Memnon's widow, who was taken prisoner at Damascus." Arrian adds with some hesitation another story, which with greater profusion of details is also told by Diodorus and is referred to by Curtius Rufus and Justinus. This represents Alexander as having visited the tent of the women on the following day, in company with Hephaestion, and given them per- sonal assurance of his protection. Diodorus goes so far as to give his professions the somewhat aggress- ive form of a promise to see the queen's daughters better married than if Darius had attended to it 332 B.C.] From Cilicia into Syria. 301 himself. Darius's little son, only six years old, he is said to have noticed ; he kissed him and gave him the time-honoured assurance that he was a fine boy. But Arrian's doubt about all this seems well founded. Plutarch quotes from a letter of Alex- ander to Parmenion, written later, in which he says that he had " not so much as seen or desired to see the wife of Darius, no, nor suffered anyone to speak of her beauty in his presence." Hansen's, and even more particularly Pridik's, careful examination * into the authenticity of these frequent citations from letters of Alexander has tended to give them en- hanced authority, and the fact that it is not until later in Alexander's career that Hephaestion appears as his intimate, serves to confirm Plutarch's quota- tion by throwing suspicion on the story of the visit to the tent. The day after the battle was devoted to burying the dead with full honours of war. The loss Diodorus gives as 450 killed; Curtius Rufus, 452 killed and 504 wounded; Justinus, 280 killed. Arrian tells only that in the struggle between the Macedonian phalanx and the Greek mercenaries opposed to them in the Persian line 150 Mace- donians fell. This lends confirmation to the figures given by Diodorus. The number of wounded, 504, as it stands in the present text of Curtius, appears small, and a slight correction would enable us to read, as the editor Hedicke has done, " 4500." This figure is in itself more reasonable, but the next * R. Hansen, Philologus, xxxix., 295 ; E. Pridik, De Alexandri Magni epistolarum commercio (1893). 302 Alexander the Great. [333 B.c- sentence of Curtius is discouraging: "At so small expense was a mighty victory won." Ancient statistics regarding the number wounded in battle are rarely given, and must, in the nature of the case, be incomplete and unreliable, as there was no regularly organised hospital service. The ratio of wounded to killed in modern battles General Dodge gives as about seven to one, and the ratio in ancient battles he believes to have been considerably higher, perhaps ten to one. Though this is, by reason of the weapons used, inherently probable, it must be confessed that the scanty data we have are inde- cisive. Thus, during the night sortie at Halicarnas- sus, the Macedonians lost 16 killed and 300 wounded ; in the siege of Sangala, 100 killed and 1200 wounded. In both cases, however, the conditions were probably abnormal. In the battle of Paraetacene, on the other hand, Eumenes lost, according to Diodorus, 540 killed and 900 wounded, while Antigonus, who was defeated, lost nearly as many killed as wounded. In respect to the number killed, the loss of the defeated army was, in ancient battles, out of all proportion to the victors' loss, on account of the massacre which followed the unprotected retreat. At Granicus, Alexander lost 115 killed in an army of 35,000, while the Persian cavalry of 20,000 lost 1000 men, and the division of Greek mercenaries, 20,000 in number, was entirely scattered and de- stroyed. At Arbela, Alexander, from an army of from 45,000 to 50,000 men, lost from 300 to 500 killed, while the loss of the Persians was so enormous as to leave room only for the wildest estimates. 332 B.C.] From Cilicia into Syria. 303 Curtius sets it at 40,000, Diodorus at 90,000, and Arrian reports a hearsay estimate of 300,000! Their army numbered, by concurrent testimony of Arrian and Diodorus, about 1,000,000. Of the 600,000 Persians engaged at Issus 100,000 were slain, against 450 of the 40,000 or 50,000 Macedonians. In the battle of Megalopolis, two years later (331 B.C.), the defeated Spartans and their allies lost 5300 of their 22,000 men, while the victorious 40,000 Macedonians lost only 1000 (Curtius). A loss of one man in four, such as the Spartans there suffered, is a terrible ratio, but one to be expected among Spartans, if defeated. At Leuctra they lost from four battalions, numbering about 2400 men, 1000 killed, and of 700 Spartiatae — i. e.> genuine Spartan citizens — 400 were killed. So at Lechaeum they lost 250 out of 600. While ancient battles, therefore, contrast a loss of from one to two and a half per cent, among the victors with one of, say, from ten to twenty-five per cent, among the conquered, modern battles with their completer organisation show a much closer relation of loss. Thus, for instance, at Gettysburg, the Union army numbered about 93,500 men, of whom about 89,000 actively participated in the fighting. The Confederate force was about 70,000. The former lost 3072 killed, 14,497 wounded, 5434 missing ; the latter, 2592 killed, 12,709 wounded, 5150 missing, making the proportion of killed for the Union forces three and five tenths per cent., for the Confederates three and seven tenths per cent. At Waterloo the French and the Allies each lost about five per cent, in killed. 304 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C. - Among the dead, after the battle of Issus, was Ptolemy, son of Seleucus, commander of one of the infantry divisions. Alexander himself had been slightly wounded in the leg. He was, nevertheless, able, the day after the battle, to pay his visits of sympathy to the wounded, and of congratulation to the victorious camps of his troops. Gifts of money were distributed among those who had distinguished themselves in battle, the dead received heroes' burial, and as monuments to their sacrifice and memorials of victory altars were erected on the river-bank to Zeus, to Hercules, and to Athena. Without attempting to pursue Darius, Alexander adhered to his original plan of campaign and kept to the coast, for the ^Egean was still controlled by the Persian fleet. He sent Parmenion, however, with the Thessalian cavalry and other troops, around behind the mountains to occupy Damascus, two hundred and fifty miles to the south, and seize the royal treasure deposited there. His own march led him first to Marathus, on the coast opposite Cyprus. While Alexander was here, Darius sent ambassadors to him, asking for the return of his wife, his mother, and his children, and offering him his friendship and an alliance. He reminded him of the friendship which had existed between the two countries under Philip and Artaxerxes, and of the way in which that friendship had been gratuitously broken by Philip after Artaxerxes's death, and how now without any reason Alexander had entered his domain with an army and wrought much damage to his people, stating that his own appearance in the field against 332 B.C.] From Cilicia into Syria. 305 him had been merely in defence of his country and for the preservation of the empire of his fathers. Without making oral answer, Alexander sent the following letter, the authenticity of which there is no good ground for calling in question : " Your forefathers came into Macedonia and other parts of Greece, and did us harm, without any previous injury from us. Now I, having been appointed leader of the Greeks and having a mind to punish the Persians, have crossed over into Asia, after hostilities had been commenced by your people. For you and yours sent aid to the Perinthians [on the Sea of Marmora], who were dealing unjustly with my father, and Ochus sent an army into Thrace, which was under our sway. My father was killed by conspirators whom your people instigated, as you yourselves have boasted to everybody in your let- ters; and after you, Darius, had slain Arses with Bagoas's help, and wickedly and in defiance of all Persian law seized the throne, yes, and wronged your subjects, you go on to send unfriendly letters about me to the Greeks, urging them to make war upon me, and send money to the Spartans and to other Greeks as well, though none of them took it, except the Spartans. Then, as your agents had corrupted my friends, and were trying to dis- rupt the peace which I had secured for the Greeks, I took the field against you — you who had begun the hos- tilities. Now that I have conquered in battle, first your generals and satraps, then you and your army, and am by gift of the gods in possession of your country, I am giving protection to those of your men who escaped from the battle and have taken refuge with me, and they of their own accord stay with me and have joined my army. As, therefore, I am lord of all Asia, come to me; but if 306 Alexander the Great. [333 b.c- you are afraid you may be harshly treated in case you come, send some of your friends to receive pledges of safety from me. Come to me, then, and ask for your mother and your wife and your children, and anything else you will. You shall have it. Nothing shall be de- nied you that is just. And for the future, whenever you send, send to me as the King of Asia, and do not address me as an equal; but if you have need of aught, speak to me as one who is lord of all your possessions. Other- wise I shall conduct myself toward you as an evil-doer. But if you dispute my right to the kingdom, stay and fight on for it; do not play the runaway, for I shall march against you, wherever you may be." While at Marathus he learned of the success of Parmenion's mission to Damascus. He had taken the city and overhauled the fugitive Persians under Kophen, who were carrying off the baggage and treasure of Darius. Curtius Rufus reports that there were captured 2600 talents in coined money, 500 talents of silver, 30,000 men, 7000 beasts of burden, besides masses of valuables and fair women without number. Athenaeus quotes from a letter of Parmenion to Alexander on the occasion: " I found flute-girls of the king, three hundred twenty and nine; men who plait crowns, six and forty; cooks, two hundred seventy and seven ; boilers of pots, twenty and nine ; makers of cheese, thirteen ; mixers of drinks, seventeen ; strainers of wine, seventy; makers of perfumes, forty." This serves as an expression of the wonderment which filled the eyes of the victors. From Marathus the army proceeded to Byblus 332 B.C.] From Cilicia into Syria, 307 and Sidon, which gladly surrendered, in hatred of the Persian. Their hereditary kings, in accordance with Alexander's principle of local government for cities, were left in power. At Tyre a determined resistance was met. At first the city offered to sur- render, but when Alexander expressed his desire to enter the city in order that he might worship in the temple of Hercules (Melkart), whom he claimed as ancestor, the answer was returned that the city would obey any other command of Alexander, but would admit within its walls neither Macedonian nor Persian. It was the pride of the city, and one that its position had made it possible to assert, that it had never admitted foreign troops at its gates. Twice for long periods (701-697 B.C. and 671-662 B.C.) the Assyrians had beset the city in vain, and a century later Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian had for thirteen years (585-573 B.C.) maintained a fruit- less siege. Securely placed on a rocky island a little over two miles in circuit and less than half a mile from the mainland, it had, from the earliest dawn of history down to the time when Greek energy in the seventh century B.C. asserted its right, controlled the trade of the Mediterranean. When in the twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C. the first Greek settlers came to the Asiatic coast and to Cyprus, it was with Phoenician traders who had been there at least three centuries before them that they came in competi- tion, and it was from them that they learned trade, seamanship, arts, and even the art of writing. Greek competition in the ^Egean drove them out into the wider field of the Mediterranean. Sicily, southern o8 Alexander the Great. [333 B.C.- Spain (Tarshish), and the northern coasts of Africa became their markets. Their roamings marked the wanderings of their national god Melkart (Hercules), and at Cadiz (Gades) were the " Pillars of Hercules." Utica, Leptis, and Carthage, in Africa, were their colonies. Throughout all the period of the Phoenic- ian bloom, from 1200 B.C. to 700 B.C., Tyre was the Phoenician metropolis. Sidon, though the older city, played the second role. All the commodities of the world tributary to the Mediterranean passed in those days through the hands of the Tyrian traders as distributing agents. Though writing in the days of Tyre's decline, the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel (586 B.C.), who, like the other Hebrew prophets, forgetting the old-time friendship between Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre (969-936 B.C.), now looks upon Tyre, the world's Vanity Fair, with all the aversion that the man of the prairie can in this day spend on the bankers of Wall Street, tells in his curse the story of its greatness: 4 ' O thou that dwellest at the entry of the sea, which art the merchant of the peoples unto many isles, thus saitk the Lord God: Thou, O Tyre, hast said, I am per- fect in beauty. Thy borders are in the heart of the seas, thy builders have perfected thy beauty. They have made all thy planks of fir-trees from Senir: they have taken cedars from Lebanon to make a mast for thee. Of the oaks of Bashan have they made thine oars; they have made thy benches of ivory inlaid in boxwood, from the isles of Kittim [Kition in Cyprus]. Of fine linen with broidered work from Egypt was thy §ail> that it 332 B.C.] From Cilicia into Syria. 309 might be to thee for an ensign; blue and purple from the isles of Elishah [coast of northern Africa] was thine awning. The inhabitants of Zidon and Arvad [Sidon and Aradus] were thy rowers: thy wise men, O Tyre, were in thee, they were thy pilots. . . . Tarshish [Spain] was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded for thy wares. Javan, [Ionia, Greece], Tubal, and Meshech [modern Armenia], they were thy traffick- ers: they traded the persons of men and vessels of brass for thy merchandise. . . . And in their wailing they shall take up a lamentation for thee, and lament over thee, saying, Who is there like Tyre, like her that is brought to silence in the midst of the sea ? " This twenty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, from which we cite, contains among all the records of the past the fullest and most accurate account of the trade and the trade relations of the famous city. It was written during Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Tyre, and while Ezekiel was a captive at Babylon. The doom which the prophet saw impending over the city was fulfilled, not through the hosts of Nebu- chadnezzar, but by the arms of Alexander, and more yet by the city which he built to be its rival and suc- cessor, Alexandria in Egypt. Though Nebuchad- nezzar's siege had not resulted in the capitulation of Tyre, a compromise had been made by which the city retained its entire autonomy while recognising the supremacy of Babylon. Thus the nominal rela- tion of vassal to the Babylonian Empire, continuing after that empire passed into the hands of the Per- sians, had made the fleets of Tyre and of the other 310 Alexander the Great. [333-332 B.C. Phoenician coast cities a main dependence of the Persians in asserting their Mediterranean influence. The relation had been, on the other hand, of great advantage to the trade of Phoenicia, particularly of Tyre, which during recent years, and especially since the downfall of the Athenian maritime empire, had stood in trade as mediator between the great domain of Persia behind it and the open Mediterranean before it. Alexander's theory of his campaign came here to the test. To attempt the capture of Tyre seemed, in the light of historical experience, quixotic. To leave it behind untouched meant to leave the Persian fleet its best rendezvous and, in the Phoenician ships, its central strength. The capture of Tyre would disable the Persian fleet, throw Cyprus into Alex- ander's hands, and make the occupation of Egypt an easy sequel. The Mediterranean would then be Macedonian, and the hope of sedition represented in Greece by Sparta would lose its last support. Secure thus in the rear, the army could then turn with con- fidence to its final work, strike into the heart of the continent, and march toward Babylon. It was de- termined, therefore, cost what it might, to take this city by force. CHAPTER XIX. THE SIEGE OF TYRE. 332 B.C. THE time was now January (332 B.C.). The siege lasted until August. Of the ten brief years which Alexander had allotted him for his conquests in Asia, more than half of one was thus devoted to the capture of a single city. If it had meant the city alone, it would not have been worth while, but the result proved the wisdom of his general plan, and brought the reward to his patience and thoroughness. The island upon which the city was built was separated from the mainland by a channel about twenty-five hundred feet wide, near the shore shal- low and swampy, but over by the city reaching a depth of eighteen feet. Being without ships, Alex- ander proceeded to build a dam, or mole, across the channel by driving piles and filling in with earth and stones. Diodorus claims to know that the mole was given a width of two hundred feet. It remains to this day, broadened out by the silt of the sea into 311 312 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. the isthmus that joins the little modern city of Tyr to the mainland. The story goes that the King himself carried and threw in the first basketful of earth; then amid shouts of enthusiasm the Mace- donians, men and officers, laid hand to the work. The abandoned houses of old Tyre, situated on the mainland opposite the island, provided a convenient quarry, and the hills of Lebanon, hard by, furnished timber for the piles and the siege machinery. At first the work went on well, until it came into deep water and closer under the walls of the city, and so within range of its artillery. The ships of the Tyrians, too, had now become a factor. Manned with archers and slingers, they swarmed about the head of the pier, driving the labourers from their work. Battle took the place of building. The work went slow. Barricades were built to shelter the workmen. Great towers, filled in all their stories with catapults and mechani- cal bows, and protected against missile and torch by thick layers of hide, were set to hold the ships at bay; but against these the fertile devices of the Tyrian seaman found resource. A monster scow, which had served as a transport for horses, was fitted out as a fire-ship. It was filled with dry twigs pruned from the vines and with fagots of pitch, and its bow, boarded up high, was loaded with bundles of straw and shavings and fagots mingled with masses of brimstone and pitch. Two derrick-like masts mounted on the bow carried long yards upon which hung caldrons filled with oil and molten pitch. Then loading the stern heavily down with ballast so 332 B .c.] The Siege of Tyre. 3 1 3 as to throw the bow high out of water, they pushed it in before the favouring west wind by vessels made fast to the after-sides, and running it well up on to the mole, set fire to its load, swung the yards out forward, emptied the caldrons upon towers and stockade, and made off in boats or by swimming as best they could. The Macedonians who essayed to check the flames were a helpless target for the fire poured in upon them from the ships that hung about the pier. In an hour the whole work of weeks and months was undone. Towers and stockade were destroyed, the head of the pier dis- mantled and scattered, and the hope of the builders dismayed. But Alexander's energy was undaunted. He saw only the need for larger and more determined effort. First of all, he planned to lay a wider mole capable of supporting larger works of defense, but without the aid of a fleet he saw that even this was vain. So leaving his engineers to begin the larger work and rebuild the towers, he hastened off with a body of guards to see what could be done at Sidon toward collecting a fleet. Fortune favoured him. Spring was just opening, and the Phoenician ships that had been with the Persian fleet in the iEgean were beginning to desert, and taking advantage of the weather, were finding their way back home. Issus was beginning to bear its fruit on the sea. First came to Alexander's standard the ships of Aradus and Byblus and Sidon, cities that had long before opened their doors to the conqueror. Then came ten from Rhodes, three from Solce and Mallus, Cilician towns, and ten from 314 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. Lycia; but best of all came sailing into the port of Sidon a little later one hundred and twenty ships with which the kings of Cyprus expressed their anxiety to get upon the winning side. " Unto him that hath shall be given," and Alexander found himself now suddenly possessed of a superb fleet from two hundred to two hundred and fifty strong. From this time on the siege of Tyre became a differ- ent undertaking. Heretofore Alexander could ap- proach it only by land, and even that he had to make. Now he could outmatch Tyre in ships and could blockade it, chief city of ships as it was. While the ships and the engines of war were being prepared for the new campaign, Alexander utilised the time for a ten days' raid through the mountains of Antilibanus, which lay between Sidon and Da- mascus, and which, stretching for eighty miles in a line parallel to the Lebanon range from Mount Hermon, source of the river Jordan at the south, commanded the highways leading from Ccele-Syria to the sea. The Ituraean tribes who inhabited the region, and who, under the name of Druses, have maintained a distinct existence down to the present day, readily submitted to the Macedonian sway, and assured it thus a widened hem of conquered coast. Minor enterprises like this show not only how unremitting was his zeal, but how methodically thorough his conquests were. In a picture of the whole the brilliancy of hazard and hap yields homage to a central scheme on which the genius of plan and forethought has set its stamp. On his re- turn to Sidon a welcome surprise awaited him. 332 B.C.] The Siege of Tyre. 3 1 5 Cleander, who more than a year before had been sent off to the Peloponnesus to enlist mercenaries, had arrived with four thousand soldiers, a timely- reinforcement for the little army of invasion. The day on which Alexander set forth from Sidon with his newly acquired fleet marked for him a new era in warfare. Thus far he had reached in conquest only what his footing on the solid land allowed; now he stood upon the seas as well. A few hours' sail brought the fleet off the northern harbour of Tyre. There it halted, drawn up in full array, chal- lenging to battle. The Tyrians had been preparing to meet it, but when from the battlements they counted the number of the ships, they saw, to their surprise and dismay, for they had not reckoned on the accession of the Cyprian ships, that they were outmatched. Then it became for them merely a matter of defending their harbour, and they has- tened to block the mouth with triremes set closely side to side and facing the sea. Three of these that protruded beyond the rest were rammed and sunk in the onset of Alexander's ships, but that was all. The newcomers now withdrew to moorings along the shore of the mainland on each side of the mole. Tyre had two harbour, two almost circular pools with narrow entrances, one at the north called the Sidonian harbour, the other at the south called the Egyptian. The Cyprian ships of Alexander were moored now by the shore to the north of the mole to watch the northern harbour, and the rest of the fleet to the south to guard the other. Meantime the preparations for the siege were 3 16 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. pressed forward with renewed vigour and on a vastly greater scale. Mechanicians and engineers had been summoned from all Phoenicia and Cyprus; great engines of war of every description and device were in construction; the mole was widening and pushing up closer and closer toward the city walls. Under protection of the fleet the workmen were safe from attack by sea, and the work throve. Al- ready they were coming almost under the shadow of the massive eastern wall; its battlements lifted themselves in dizzy height one hundred and fifty feet above the water's edge; above these rose the mighty towers. The walls were of hewn stone set in cement. Thousands of armed men swarmed the top and manned the towers. Engines of war, the crude artillery of the time, were set to hurl their missiles of death — great stones, iron-shod shafts, balls of fire — down upon the workmen and their works. Now the besiegers began to ply the rams, great, metal-weighted beams that swung out across the water-gap and thudded against the solid masonry. Every day the battle drew closer its lines. Not only from the head of the pier were the siege-engines brought against the beleaguered town ; great scows and transport-boats were used as floating foundations for siege-towers and engines. These the Macedonians tried to push close to shore under the walls,but great boulders pitched down from the walls blocked the channel and forbade approach. Ships with wrecking apparatus, lifts, and derricks were sent to remove them, but Tyrian triremes, covered with leather screens to protect their men 332 B.C.] The Siege of Tyre. 317 from missiles, slipped in and cut the cables, leaving the ships to drift away before the wind. Then the Macedonians set a line of like leather-armored ships as a barrier before those that were clearing the channel, but still the Tyrians found a way. Divers swam under the barricade of ships and cut the cables. Then chains of iron were used instead of cables, and slowly the work went on. One by one the boulders were lifted with cranes and discharged into the deeper water, and finally an anchorage was cleared close under the walls. At a dozen places now instead of one the wall was beset. Every day the zeal of battle grew, every day the hope of the beleaguered sank. In vain they strained their eyes each morning to see against the western horizon the sails of the promised Carthaginian fleet of rescue. At last came only one ship bringing the thirty com- missioners who were to offer the annual sacrifice in Melkart's temple and pay the honours due the mother-city — vain honours now, when help was needed. But Carthage had her excuse : her hands were full at home. She was beginning to feel the competition of Sicilian Syracuse, which two decades later was to become a peril. As thus one by one every hope and device failed before the persistent energy of the besieger, the Tyrians determined in last resort to try issue with the fleet. Their ships, divided between the two harbours at extreme ends of the city, could not be massed for united action, neither could they, except at great disadvantage, venture out through the nar- row mouth of either harbour. They awaited, there- 3 18 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. fore, an opportunity when the enemy were off their guard. One noonday, when the Cyprian ships that guarded the northern harbour were moored over by the mainland north-east of the city, and many of the sailors had gone ashore in quest of water and pro- visions, and off to the south of the mole, as men could see from the city wall, Alexander had retired to his tent, no doubt to enjoy his siesta, it seemed clear that the Tynans' chance had come. Thirteen of the best ships — three quinqueremes, three quad- riremes, seven triremes — manned with the pick of the oarsmen and the best-armed fighting men, lay ready at the harbour's mouth. Smoothly, silently, without boatswain's pipe, they glided out in long single file straight to the north. Not till they had swung about toward the east in battle front, and, scarcely more than half a mile distant from the Cyprian ships, broke the silence with creak and splash of hurrying oars, and shriek of the pipes, and shouts of the men who cheered the rowers on, did the men by the shore take the alarm. Five minutes and they were there. At the first onset the Tyrians bored through the great five-banked galley of Pny- tagoras, King of Cyprian Salamis, and sank An- drocles's ship and that of Pasicrates of Curium. Others were driven ashore against the rocks. Some of the one hundred and twenty ships were entirely empty of men. The Tyrians scurried over the sides of their ships to slash and batter and scuttle their helpless prey. The work of destruction went mer- rily on. But quickly the sailors who were left with the fleet rallied to hold them in check ; others came 332 B.C.] The Siege of Tyre. 319 hurrying back from the land, and help, too, was already coming — the fleet on the south. Alexander, after retiring to his tent, had not, it seems, remained there long, but for some reason, and contrary to his wont, had returned to the ships by the shore. When the alarm was given he was ready to act. With a few quinquiremes and five triremes he immediately pushed out upon the sea, ordering others to follow as fast as they could be manned. The mole inter- vened between him and the scene of action. So he sailed out to the west to make the circuit of the city, determined at the least to cut off the retreat of the enemy. He had about two and a half miles to go before reaching the mouth of the northern harbour. In twenty minutes he could do it. The Tyrians, who crowded the battlements of the city walls to behold the spectacle, saw the movement of Alexan- der's ships and appreciated its purpose. They saw, what they had not expected, that Alexander was in person present. Exultation turned to dismay. Hundreds of voices were raised to warn the Tyrian ships of their danger and call them to return, and " as their shouts could not be heard for the din of those engaged in the fight, by various signs and signals, first this, then that, they urged them to come back " (Arrian). Too late the men saw their danger. They hurried back toward the harbour, but Alexander caught them off the entrance. Many of the ships were shattered or sunk by ramming; their crews jumped overboard, and most of the men escaped by swimming ashore. A few of the ships slipped by into the harbour, but one quinquereme 320 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. and one quadrireme were captured outright in the very mouth of the harbour. All of this happened within an hour, inside a petty area scarcely two miles wide, and immediately under the eyes of be- sieged and besiegers; but it was the last dying struggle of the Phcenico-Persian power in the Medi- terranean, and it was Alexander's only sea-fight. He made on land his conquest of the sea. With nothing longer to fear from the Tyrian fleet, the besiegers now more boldly than ever pushed their attack upon the walls. The engines on the end of the mole still made poor headway against the massive walls which there confronted them ; the walls at the north-eastern corner proved equally in- vulnerable against the transport-engines concen- trated there : but a weak spot was found one day in the southern wall hard by the " Egyptian harbour," a narrow breach was opened, and an attack was made by a storming-party, only, however, to be sharply repulsed. The breach had not been wide enough ; the attack had been made on too small a scale. The Tyrians hurried to cover the breach from within, but the vulnerable spot had been found, and Alexander awaited only the opportunity of fair weather and a quiet sea to renew the on- slaught, and this time to support it by a general attack at every vulnerable point in the circuit of the wall. On the third day the opportunity came. The main attack was directed against the southern wall. Here the engines soon tore and raked a wide, yawn- ing gap. The moment their work was complete two 332 B.C.] The Siege of Tyre. 321 great ships crowded with armed men pushed their way in to displace the engine-transports. In one was Alexander himself and the light guards called the hypaspists, whom Admetus commanded ; in the other were picked men from the phalanx. Long bridges like gang-planks were thrown across from the decks to the debris of the ruined wall. In an instant they swarmed with hurrying men. Admetus was the first to reach the wall, and, transfixed with a spear, the first to die. Sharp and bitter was the struggle. From a handful the intruders grew to scores and hundreds. They fought to avenge their slain captain, and the presence of their King inspired them. The Tyrians fought for the last hope of their homes. Never before had foemen set his foot on the island soil of Tyre. Step by step the besiegers won their way. Some scrambled up the ruin and gained the battlements of the wall at the right; others followed, and with them Alexander, at the head, pushed on along the rampart platform toward the north, till, reaching the palace, which communi- cated with the wall, they found a way down by its stairways into the heart of the city. Meanwhile the city had been attacked on every side. Vessels equipped with artillery and filled with bowmen and slingers had sailed up to close range under the walls, and poured their fire in upon the defenders of the walls, distracting their attention and dividing the defense. Simultaneously also the entrance of both harbours had been forced by the fleets, and the Tyrian ships shattered, scuttled, driven ashore. From the northern harbour, where 322 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. the defense was weaker, the approaches to the city had been captured, and here a force of soldiery entered to join those now pouring out through the palace doors into the narrow alleys of the town. The Tyrians, who had now forsaken the wall, ral- lied for their last stand before the shrine of Agenor, and here the battle resolved itself into massacre. The rest of the story may follow in Arrian's own words : " The main body of the Tyrians deserted the wall when they saw it in the enemy's hands, but rallied opposite what is known as the Agenor shrine, and there faced the Mace- donians. Against these Alexander advanced with his hypaspists, slew those who fought there, and pursued those who fled. Great was the slaughter also wrought by those who had already entered the city from the har- bour, as well as by the detachment under Ccenus's com- mand; for the Macedonians spared nothing in their wrath, being angry at the length of the siege, and par- ticularly because the Tyrians, having captured some of their men on the way from Sidon, had taken them up on the top of the wall where it could be seen from the camp, and there had slaughtered them and thrown their bodies into the sea. About eight thousand of the Tyrians were slain; of the Macedonians, besides Admetus, twenty of the hypaspists fell during the assault, and in the whole siege about four hundred." The city was at the end captured more easily and quickly than the Macedonians had expected. This is evident from an anecdote of Plutarch's: " One day when Alexander, with a view to resting the ALEXANDER THE GREAT. FROM THE CUST IN THE LOUVRE. 332 B.C.] The Siege of Tyre. 323 great body of his army from the many hardships recently incurred, was bringing only small bodies of troops against the walls, and that more to keep the enemy busy than with any prospect of advantage, it happened that Aris- tander, the soothsayer, was engaged in sacrificing. After inspecting the entrails he announced to the bystanders with all assurance that the city would be surely taken within that month. This produced considerable merri- ment and derision, for the day happened to be the last day of the month. The King, seeing the embarrassment of the soothsayer, and being always anxious to maintain the credit of the predictions, gave orders to set the calen- dar back one day, and sounding the trumpets, made a more serious attack than had been originally planned. So brilliant was the assault that the other troops in the camp could not deny themselves joining in; whereupon the Tyrians gave way, and the city was taken that day." Though many of the inhabitants had left the city, a great many — according to Diodorus more than half the population — escaping to Carthage, there was left a great mass of old men, women, and children to pass into the hands of the slave-dealer. Diodorus says thirteen thousand; Arrian, who reck- ons men and mercenaries too, and who also omits mention of two thousand men-at-arms, put to death, as Diodorus says, by hanging, gives the number of those sold into slavery at about thirty thousand. The entire population of the city before the siege was probably not less than from seventy-five to one hundred thousand. Those who had taken refuge in the temple of Her- cules, including the King and the magistrates, as well 324 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. as the Carthaginian envoys, were given their free- dom. After sacrificing to Hercules, and dedicating to the god the engine with which the wall had been battered down, and the Tyrian sacred ship, which had been captured, Alexander celebrated his victory with a grand military parade and naval review and with the inevitable athletic sports and torch-race — all this in honour of Hercules (Melkart), Tyre's patron saint, an old friend of Greeks and Mace- donians, now found again, and this time on his native heath. Some time before the capture of Tyre, Darius had sent a second embassy to Alexander, making more attractive propositions than the first. They in- cluded offers to cede all territory west of the Eu- phrates, to pay the sum of ten thousand talents, to give the hand of his daughter in marriage, to be- come an ally and friend, while all that was asked was the return of his wife, mother, and children. When these proposals were first announced in the council of the companions Parmenion is reported to have been greatly impressed and to have said: " If I were Alexander, I should be glad to secure peace on these terms and end the continual risk." To this Alexander replied: " So should I, if I were Parmenion; but as I am Alexander, my answer is what it is." When Darius received the answer, which was virtually a repetition of the former one, he saw there was no hope of coming to terms, and so began fresh preparations for war. Alexander, however, continued his plan of keep- ing to the coast, and advanced into Palestine. Here 332 B.C.] The Siege of Tyre. 325 all the cities readily submitted except Gaza, which prepared for determined resistance. This city, one of the five ancient cities of the Philistines, about one hundred and fifty miles south of Tyre, was located about two miles back from the sea, on the old trade-route between Syria and Egypt, and was, as it is to-day, one of the most important points in Syria. It was garrisoned by a body of Arabian mercenaries, and provisioned for a long siege. Built as it was upon an elevation in the plain, its walls rising from an artificially prepared foundation sixty feet above the level of the adjacent terrain, it appeared impossible to bring the siege-engines to bear. Alexander's experts informed him that on this account it would be impossible to take the city by force. The conqueror of Tyre and candidate for the world-empire could not afford to recognise an im- possibility. He therefore proceeded to construct on the south side, where the wall appeared weakest, a gigantic mound from which to operate the siege- engines. This mound was carried to the astonish- ing height of two hundred and fifty feet, to support which a breadth of twelve hundred feet was given it at the base. During a sally made by the defenders in order to destroy the siege-engines, Alexander was severely wounded by an arrow from a catapult, which passed clean through his shield and his cuirass, and penetrated his shoulder, but spared his life. Gradually the wall was battered down or undermined. Three assaults were repulsed, but finally, after two months of siege, the city was 326 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. taken. Nearly the entire male population perished fighting to the death. The women and children were sold into slavery. The city was repeopled from the neighbouring population, and made a per- manently garrisoned fortress. While Alexander was at Gaza he received notice of the action of the council of the Greek States at Corinth, held on the occasion of the Isthmian games of that year, which had voted to send to him by fifteen special commissioners a golden crown in recognition of the victory at Issus — a recognition tardy enough, and almost too late to be longer of consequence or value to the conqueror of Tyre and lord of the ^Egean, or for the Greeks themselves a testimony to aught but their own fickleness. The Jewish writers, particularly Josephus, report that after the capture of Gaza Alexander went to Jerusalem, was received by the high priest, and offered sacrifice in the temple. The absence of all allusion to this in any of the historians of Alexander, as well as of any mention of the Jews either by them or the historians of the next century, coupled with the self-contradictions and improbabilities of the narrative, makes it unlikely that the story is any- thing more than an invention of the Hellenists of the first century B.C., who sought to establish in this way, as in others, an early connection with Greek history. It was November (332 B.C.) when Alexander set forth along the coast to enter Egypt. An entire year since the battle of Issus (November, 333 B.C.) had been spent in Phoenicia and Palestine. The 332 B.C.] The Siege of Tyre, 327 task of isolating Persia from the Mediterranean was advancing, however, toward its completion. At Sidon and Tyre he had dammed the ancient channel by which the trade and civilisation of the Euphrates valley, following the reverse of the river course, had found an outlet into the western sea. The ALgea.il had become almost an inland sea of Alexander's Macedonian empire — a Greek sea instead of a Greek boundary. CHAPTER XX. ALEXANDER IN EGYPT. 332-331 B.C. SINCE the conqueror had entered Asia two and a half years had elapsed. One-third of his brief reign was spent, but the land area of his conquests included yet scarcely more than a tenth part of what they were to be. It was not, however, land that he was now conquering: it was. the sea — the sea included between Greece, Asia, Egypt, which the fates of geography had made to be the central mart and meeting-place of all the civilisations which his world could know. To it were tributary the two great river valleys in which had shaped them- selves the two types of ordered life that summarised the beginnings of human civilisation. Egypt found its natural outlet with the Nile ; Mesopotamia, re- versing the currents of the Euphrates, poured in its influences through the broad delta of Tyre and Sidon, or let them slowly sift through the sands of Asia Minor. In this sea the culture of Egypt and Assyria, as the passive element, met the aggressive 328 332-331 B.C.] Alexander in Egypt. 329 will of occidentalism, which was to shape and apply it, and out of the union was begotten the history which up to the present century, neglecting the world-half of India and China, we have been wont to call the world-history. It is because Alexander conquered first this sea and then its tributaries that his career is the navel of history. As far as the land is concerned he had thus far traversed three areas of human life and habitation : first, the western hem of Asia Minor (from May to November, 334 B.C.), where the Greek spirit, lan- guage, and blood were predominant; second, the central and southern districts of Asia Minor (from November, 334 B.C., to November, 333 B.C.), where, with all variety of tribe and tongue, Carian and Phrygian elements predominated, but no na- tional unity existed or ever had, except such as the Lydian Empire of two centuries before achieved ; third, the narrow coast selvage of Syria (from No- vember, 333 B.C., to November, 332 B.C.), where the Semitic spirit and the Semitic tongue were in full sway, and the name of Phoenicia set the standard. Next in his way lay Egypt. The march of his phalanx took thus in review, one after the other, the nations and civilisations of men. Hitherto he had seen, though, only the middlemen who were hand- ing on what they had received ; now he was coming to a fountain-head. If an established order of civilised life anywhere in the wide world can be identified as born alone of the soil where it abides, that can be claimed most confidently for the 330 Alexander the Great. [332 b.c- civilisation which clings to the banks of the Nile. 44 Egypt is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt," and the long experience of generations of men, whose lives the hungry desert bound to the river-line, as to a life-line in the waste of waters, had taught these men to tolerate one another, and created for them a scheme and polity of existence so well confirmed that innovation found no hope. By virtue of its very longness Egypt could not be rid of itself. So it tolerated itself and abode stable. The real Egypt, the fertile Nile valley from the first cataract to the sea, though stretching out in a length equal to the distance from Richmond, Vir- ginia, to Portland, Maine, is in area scarcely one fourth the size of Pennsylvania, and of this area more than half is included within the Delta. Above Cairo it is merely a strip of verdure, rarely more than from four to eight miles broad, sharply bounded by the bluffs which bear the desert. Within this narrow band Egyptian life took its shape, coming to a focus now at Memphis, the old metropolis of Lower Egypt, across the river from modern Cairo, now at Thebes in Upper Egypt. Long centuries of almost undisturbed isolation fixed it in moulds of custom, thought, and religion firmer, perhaps, than human life has ever elsewhere known. It was an intensely practical life. Realism coloured all its thought. The solidity of its religious institutions, guaranteed by a powerful priesthood which swayed society and state and held the reins of the Nile, was no product of imagination or of fervour, but a wit- ness merely to its unfaltering conservatism. Even 331 B.C.] Alexander i7i Egypt. 331 the yearning for the life beyond expressed itself in crude practical device, not in visions or in specu- lations. The typical Egyptian was then, as he is to-day, a man of peace, averse to rudeness and brutal- ity, courteous, patient, practical, and prudent. The Greek thought him effeminate, and, from Herodotus on, the Greek writers refer with abhorrence to a de- velopment of " women's rights" in Egypt which made men the subjects of the women. It is indeed a fact that under Egyptian law married women had independent property rights and rights of contract. Wealth, too, it appears, was often largely in the hands of women. Egyptian history persistently refuses to speak in terms of dates, but sure it is that the civilisation into which Alexander was here to be introduced represented an antiquity before which all that he had seen, had heard of, and had read of in his native Macedonia or Greece, or in the lands through which his march had brought him, was paltry modernity itself. Even the Trojan days, with which Homer had inspired his youthful ideal- ism, reached back at the best but a fourth or fifth of the way to the building of the Pyramids, and of the centuries that looked down from those hoary heads upon Napoleon and his men two out of every three were there to look down upon Alexander. It was not likely that a man of Alexander's temper and of his keen susceptibility to all that spoke, whether in the language of religion, art, or custom, with the authority of antiquity and through the forms of ancient culture, should pass by this all un- moved and unchanged. He was a youth fresh from 332 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C.- the New World, alert-minded and sensitive; here was his London and Rome. From Gaza the one way leading into Egypt was the old caravan route along the shore, by which through the ages Palestine and Egypt had been joined. In seven days it brought Alexander and his army to Pelusium, the " key of Egypt," a strongly fortified city near the easternmost mouth of the Nile. A few miles to the west of its site passes now the track of the Suez Canal, approaching its exit at Port Said. The city opened its gates to the conqueror. Nowhere, indeed, in all the land was opposition awaiting him. The Persian satrap Masakes, who had been appointed successor of Sabakes, slain a year before in the battle of Issus, found himself utterly without resource in fleet, army, or good-will, for a defense. The people of the land with one accord hailed the coming of Alexander as the coming of a liberator. For almost two centuries they had borne the detested yoke of Persia, and the victor of Issus they had esteemed to be their own avenger. Masakes, therefore, hastened to offer surrender of the land, and so without the striking of a blow Alexander added to his empire a domain almost equal in extent to all his previous conquests. With this act the long, strange history of ancient Egypt was closed. Egypt was merged in the world-all, and a new Egypt began its life. From Pelusium the Macedonian army proceeded in triumphal march along the east bank of the Pel- usian arm of the Nile. The fleet which had been in waiting at Pelusium attended it. Most of the 331 B.C.] Alexander in E^ypt. 333 way led through the " land of Goshen," Israel's place of sojourn a thousand years and more before, and brought the army, after a march of a little over one hundred miles, to the famous old Heliopolis (On), the " City of the Sun," whence tradition says that Joseph had his wife, Asenath, daughter of Poti- phera, a priest of the sun (Gen. xli., 45). Here were still standing, as they had been for thirteen hundred years, along with others of their kind, doing honour to the god as guards about his temple, the two obelisks which three centuries later were transplanted by Augustus Caesar to Alexandria, and now in these latest years, following the track of em- pire, have come to find Northern homes, the one on the Thames Embankment in London, the other in Central Park, New York. A few miles beyond Heliopolis Alexander was at the site of modern Cairo, the apex of the Delta. Then crossing the Nile, now the undivided river, he approached Memphis, the capital. On the terraced bluffs which marked the sharp frontier between the life of the plain and the desert of death were arrayed in stately order, relieved against the sands and the western sky, from Gizeh southward fifteen miles to Dahshur, the Pyramids, which, mingled with countless humbler habitations, marked the world's greatest city of the dead. Be- low in the plain stretching itself out in miles of con- tinuous streets and homes, was Egypt's greatest city of the living. Its focus was found in the temple of its local deity, the god Ptah, the world-builder, who was worshipped in the form of a living bull called 334 Alexander the Great. [332 b.c- Apis. In the life of a bull chosen by his priests Ptah found his ever-recurring incarnations, and re- ceived the most distinguished honours. At death the bull was buried with most elaborate and costly obsequies, and the Serapeum, constructed for the tombs of the long succession, still remains in mon- strous vaulted ruins, where no less than three thou- sand monuments of different wearers of the Apis honour have been found. The city of the dead has far outlived the city of the living, and Memphis, enormous as it was, has yielded to centuries of spoilers, and all but vanished off the face of the earth. The founding of Alexandria marked the beginning of its decline. On entering the city, Alexander hastened to pay the honour of special sacrifice to Apis. Nothing was more likely to win him the sympathy of the people, especially as his action stood in severest contrast with the traditions of Persian sacrilege — of Cambyses, who with his own hand had wounded to the death a sacred bull, and of Darius Ochus, who had caused one to be slaughtered. Diodorus says: " The Egyptians, in view of the fact that the Per- sians had violated their holy rites and had domin- eered rudely over them, welcomed the Macedonians gladly."* In this action Alexander was thoroughly consist- ent with himself. Wherever he went he treated with respect the local religion. He was evidently by his practice a believer in home rule — in matters of religion. In this he was not acting merely the^ * Diodorus, xvii., 49. 331 B.C.] Alexander in Egypt. 335 part of a clever politician. His attitude toward faith was never that of easy unconcern. He was no agnostic. A vein of deep religious mysticism, perhaps inherited or learned from his mother Olym- pias, ran through his nature and coloured all his conduct. He stood with awe and respect, though never with terror, in the presence of supernatural power controlling a realm of which the world of ordinary things was only a feeble part, and control- ling it with foresight and intelligence, though by ordinary men but feebly discerned. He was no eclectic in matters of religion. The foresight and purpose of the power outside and beyond betrayed itself through many a rift in the veil, and he had learned no canons of criticism, not even the com- mon one called prejudice. He had too much emo- tional insight to be an agnostic, and had in a short life seen too much of the world to be a bigot. Nowhere in the world has the religious factor played a larger part in the life of a people than in ancient Egypt. No wonder that even the four months of Alexander's stay exercised so powerful an influence in shaping and stimulating his religious sensibilities. He was, as it were, in a great temple, always in the presence of the religious expression, and the weird issue of his visit to the sanctuary of Jupiter Ammon must be judged and interpreted in the light of this experience. The mass of the army, which could not have numbered altogether much above twenty thousand men, was left in winter quarters at Memphis. Alex- ander, accompanied by the hypaspists, the archers, 336 Alexander the Great, [332 b.c- the Agrianians, and the age'ma of cavalry, in all perhaps four or five thousand men, sailed down the river to Canopus (modern Abukir), at the mouth of the westernmost branch of the Nile. From here he passed into the Mareotis Lake, then a large body of water fifteen miles wide, navigable for the largest vessels, but now little more than a swamp. In Strabo's time it was fed by numerous canals from the Nile, and was the all-important means of com- munication with the inland. Now, cut off from the Nile, its waters are salt, and the fertility which in antiquity lined its shores and yielded the wines which Horace and Virgil extol is displaced by sandy dunes. At a spot about thirteen or fourteen miles south-west of Canopus, on the long, narrow strip of sandy land separating the Mareotis Lake from the sea, Alexander went ashore, and, being deeply im- pressed by the favourable location, decided to build a city. The place seemed to be the meeting-point of the whole Nile region with the Mediterranean world. On one side was the lake-harbour connected with the Nile ; on the other were two sea-harbours, sheltered from the open sea by the island Pharos, four-fifths of a mile offshore, the one opening to the west, the other to the east. Here was to be equip- ped the only safe harbour open for ships on the six- hundred-mile stretch of Asiatic and African coast from Joppa to Paraetonium. The neck of land itself was about a mile to a mile and a half wide. A city built upon it would be reasonably protected from land attack and yet accessible from the land. Through the Nile and the old canal of Pharaoh 331 B.C.] Alexander m Egypt. 337 Necho, connecting it with the Red Sea, the com- merce of Egypt, Arabia, and India could here be brought to meet the commerce of the Mediterranean. There are no indications that Alexander set out on this particular excursion through the lake with a view of seeking a city site, but there can be little doubt that the idea was more than the impulse of a moment. Tyre was destroyed. The coast of Egypt offered no convenient harbour suitable to intercourse on a large scale. The encouragement of intercourse and mutual understanding between the nations was already developing as his dominant idea. The Greek element had long since come to make itself felt in the Delta, and Naucratis, a thriv- ing Greek settlement tolerated by Amasis in the sixth century B.C., was only fifty miles to the south- east. The custom introduced in the seventh century B.C., by Psammetichus I., of employing Greek mer- cenaries to do the fighting, toward which, with the decay of the warrior caste, the Egyptians themselves had become so averse, had served to bring Greeks into the land. What more probable than that Alexander had already framed the plan, and that unexpectedly the discovered site fitted it ? In any case, his selection was a good one, as the event proved. The Alexandria which rose on the spot became speedily a great city, and not by artificial stimula- tion, though it certainly was most fortunate in its first ruler, Ptolemy Soter, who succeeded Alexan- der, but through the operation of natural conditions. It proved a convenient exchange for the joint use 338 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C.- of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Hence it naturally became the metropolis of the great world of free and open markets which Alexander's conquests created, the capital of the Hellenistic civilisation which for three centuries passed current as Greek, and an amalgamation point for the peoples such as the con- queror's dream had desired. Seventy-five years after Alexander's death it had become, after Carth- age and Antioch, the greatest city of the Western world. By the year 60 B.C. it had grown to a popu- lation, as Diodorus tells us, of three hundred thou- sand freemen, — that is to say, reckoning the slaves, of approximately half a million, — so that it was commonly regarded the greatest city of the world. In the first century after Christ its population was undoubtedly far greater — perhaps three quarters of a million or more — but for this definite data are lacking. Rome, which in Augustus's time had at least, according to Beloch's conservative reckoning, from eight hundred thousand to one million inhabit- ants, was the only city which had outstripped it. Up to Alexander's time there had been no mon- ster cities. The city population of Athens proper, together with its harbour town, was probably about 175,000. Syracuse, in the fourth century B.C., was only a little larger. Corinth at the same time had, according to Beloch, who, however, reckons the slave population certainly far too low, about 70,000; Sparta, Argos, and Thebes, from 40,000 to 50,000; Selinus, from 20,000 to 25,000; Tyre and Sidon, not over 40,000 each. By the first century B.C., a time whose literature 331 B.c.i Alexander in Egypt. 339 affords us, through stray allusions, the first means of forming an estimate, the international trade of Alexandria had grown to enormous proportions. From the interior of Africa, from Arabia and India, caravans and fleets of merchant ships brought hither the rarest and most precious products which the new luxury of the West was demanding of all the lands — the spices and perfumes of Araby, gold-dust, precious stones, and fine fabrics from India, pearls from the Persian Gulf, silk from China, gold and tor- toise-shell from the coasts of the Red Sea, ivory from Africa, and grain from Egypt. Annually 120 ships, on an average, left the inner harbour for the long voyage by canal and sea to India. This was but a fragment of the commerce. The industries too of Alexandria were spurred to their utmost to provide wares for the return cargoes. Foremost were the pro- ducts of the loom, for which the city was famed, and which were distributed far and wide over the world, even to far Britain. Especially were sought the fine linens from the famous native flax, and the many- coloured textures of wool, wrought in artistic pat- terns and with figures of animals and men — rugs, portieres, and tapestries. The manufacture of paper from the native papyrus almost monopolised the trade of the world. Then there were the glass- blowers, whose artistic products commanded a price like that for cups of gold, and perfumers, and makers of toilet-oils and essences, whose repute matched that of the Parisians of to-day. No one in this busy city, so wrote Hadrian in 134 A.D., was without a craft and occupation. Even the blind 34-0 Alexander the Great. [332 b.c- and the gouty were busy. " Money is their god; him worship Jews, Christians, and all alike.* ' It was a centre of learning and culture, as well as of industry and trade. About the university, called the Musaeum, and its famous library, a foundation of the wise Ptolemies, was assembled the best learn- ing of the world. The savant, or philologos, is in- deed, so far as Western civilisation is concerned, a distinctive and original Alexandrine product. It was through Alexandrine learning, and chiefly in Alexandrine guise, that Rome, and so the European world, received the wisdom and culture of Greece. Letters, philology, philosophy, mathematics, as- tronomy, music, law, medicine, received here their professional mould as branches of skilled and learned activity, and in such mould were transmitted and kept, until the Renaissance brought fresh life from the fountainhead. But we must return to the days of the beginnings. Alexander, after conceiving his scheme, immedi- ately proceeded to mark out the plan of the city, including the sites for market-place, streets, public buildings, temples of the different deities, each of them being especially assigned, and the circuit of the wall. The basis of the plan was made two main streets crossing each other at right angles, each, so says Strabo, one hundred feet wide, and lined with colonnades. Other streets, running parallel to these, laid out the whole in regular squares covering a length of about three miles and a width of about one. The excavations and investigations conducted by Mahmud Bey and completed in 1867 found the 331 B.C.] Alexander in Egypt. 341 city plan essentially as Strabo describes it. The two broad central avenues — that running east and west called the Canobus avenue, that north and south the Dromos (Corso) — were found with traces of the splendid colonnades which lined them. In the centre of these avenues was found still in place a pavement of grey granite blocks forty-six feet wide, which served as the carriage-way. In the parallel streets this pavement was only half this width. The private houses were low, flat-roofed, and of stone. The circuit of the city proper was found to be a little less than ten miles. For definite knowledge regarding the location and character of the great public buildings we must await the further revelation of the spade. Meantime we must be content with Strabo. Near the centre of the city lay the royal buildings, occupying, with their gar- dens, a fourth of the city's area. Here, besides the palaces, were the Musaeum and the Sema, the latter the great mausoleum in which lay inclosed in its alabaster coffin the body of Alexander. The site of the Paneum, " an artificial circular mound re- sembling a rocky hill, to which a winding way as- cends," and from which a commanding view of the whole city and its harbours was obtained, can now be identified with the knoll, 112 feet above the ordinary city level, which carries the reservoir of the modern Alexandria. Near by, on the Dromos, lay the Gymnasium, stretched out, with its pillared porches, in a length of a stadium (one-ninth of a mile). The island of Pharos was joined to the mainland by a wide mole, called the Heptastadium, 342 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C.- about three quarters of a mile long, in which were two bridges over channels communicating between the eastern and the western harbours. This mole has now widened out into a neck of land almost a mile in width, on which stands the greater part of the modern city. At the eastern end of the island was built by Ptolemy Soter and his son, and com- pleted about 282 B.C., the famous Pharos, one of the " seven wonders," which became the prototype of all the world's lighthouses. A story of the first rough planning, given by all the sources, may best be presented in Plutarch's statement: " As chalk-dust was lacking, they laid out their lines on the black loamy soil with flour, first swinging a circle to inclose a wide space, and then drawing lines as chords of the arcs to complete with harmonious proportions something like the oblong form of a soldier's cape. While the King was congratulating himself on his plan, on a sudden a countless number of birds of various sorts flew over from the land and the lake in clouds, and set- tling upon the spot, devoured in a short time all the flour; so that Alexander was much disturbed in mind at the omen involved, till the augurs restored his confidence again, telling him the city he was planning was destined to be rich in its resources, and a feeder of the nations of men." The work of founding the city he left in the hands of workmen under the direction of the architect Dinocrates, who was certainly not a man of small ideas. He is the same man who once proposed to 331 B.C.] Alexander in Egypt. 343 carve Mount Athos, the peak which rises abruptly sixty-five hundred feet out of the Thracian Sea, into a colossal statue of Alexander, which should bear in one hand a city of ten thousand inhabitants, and from the other should pour in bold cascade a great mountain stream into the sea beneath. Another plan of his, to build in memory of Philadelphus's queen, Arsinoe, a temple with ceiling of lodestone, so that the iron statue of the goddess-queen might hang suspended in the air, we learn, to our regret, failed of fulfilment through his inopportune death. CHAPTER XXL VISIT TO THE TEMPLE OF AMMON. 332-331 B.C. AT about this time — it was midwinter of 332-331 B.C. — Alexander was visited by Hegelochus, the commander of his fleet in the north, who brought welcome intelligence concerning the final dispersion of the Persian fleet and the recovery of the island cities lost during the spring of 333 B.C. The Tenedans had revolted from the Persians and returned to Macedonian rule. Mitylene had been wrested from the hands of Chares, and the other Lesbian cities had voluntarily submitted. Another revolution in Chios had placed the democracy, friendly to Alexander, at the helm, and Cos had surrendered to a fleet of sixty ships sent to it at its own suggestion. Pharnabazus was a fugitive. The ^Egean was therefore clear, and entirely in Alexan- der's control, as was also, with one sole exception, the complete circuit of lands contributing to its waters, the entire world with which Greece and the Greeks had dealings east of Italy and Sicily. 344 332-331 B.C.] Visit to the Temple of Amnion. 345 Sparta alone remained incorrigible. We have seen how, four years before, she answered Alexan- der's summons to accept his leadership, " It is not tradition with us to follow others, but ourselves to lead others/' Ever since she had been waiting for opportunity to lead revolt. Spartan ambassadors were all the time at the court of Darius. When the tidings of Issus reached Greece (November, 333 B.C.) we remember that the Spartan King Agis was in conference with the Persian admiral at Siphnos. While the Persian power in the ^Egean was steadily melting away, Agis's stubbornness, fed upon des- peration, lifted itself into aggression. During the months that Alexander was busy at Tyre, Agis and his Spartans were making Crete a stronghold of the opposition, in hope of contesting through that the control of the sea. Some of the Greek mercenaries who had escaped from Issus found their way into Crete, and gave him the nucleus of an army. Dur- ing the winter of 332-331 B.C. Agis raised openly the standard of revolt in the Peloponnesus. The Eleans, the Achaeans, and, excepting Megalopolis, the Arcadians, joined him. A small Macedonian force that sought to quell the revolt was annihilated. Through the summer of 331 B.C. the movement grew. A revolt of the Illyrians kept Antipater, the Macedonian regent, busy at the north, and from week to week his much-needed coming was de- layed. The flame threatened to become a con- flagration. When news of the trouble reached Alexander he was far away in Mesopotamia. ' While we are here conquering Darius," he said, 346 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. " it seems they are having a war of the mice in Arcadia." The composure of his faith received its reward. The next tidings told how Antipater had at last appeared, had found the Spartans besieging the walls of Megalopolis, and there on the plain before the city, in a fearful battle which left fifty- three hundred of the enemy, among them King Agis, lying on the field, had utterly broken and humbled all resistance (October or November, 331 B.C.), and received at last the submission of Sparta. This was a blow from which the Spartan state never recovered. But our story has carried us almost a year beyond the point where we left Alexander just committing the building of his city to his architect's hands. From the site of Alexandria the King turned his face suddenly toward the west, and began a march along the African coast. The Western world, which now lay before him — a world in whose history Sicily now occupied the central post — has thus far oc- cupied none of our attention, and will not hereafter, for it was as yet a world by itself, engaged with problems of its own, into which Alexander's brief career was destined not to intrude. Sicily was just recovering from its struggle to hold the Carthaginians at bay, and the Greeks of Italy were now beginning to feel the pressure of Rome from the north. In 326 B.C. Naples passed into Roman hands. Carthage had been too seriously occupied in the effort to maintain herself in the western Mediterranean even to bring help to her mother-city Tyre, or to take any part in the great 331 B.C.] Visit to the Temple of Amnion. 347 conflict now going on between the Greek and the Oriental, direct as her natural interest was. This fact kept her outside the range of Alexander's notice, and left her to be dealt with later by- Rome (first Punic War, 264-241 B.C.). Alexander's present movement westward had no designs on Carthage; that, for the time, belonged in another world. For two hundred miles he followed the dreary coast, until at Parsetonium he came to the domain of Cyrene, a Greek city four hundred miles farther on. Here met him a Cyrenian embassy offering presents and asking alliance, and this marked the western limit of his conquests. He was now left free to indulge his sense for the romantic. The necessities of war, for the present, no longer claimed him. He turned suddenly aside upon an errand he could hardly have planned from the first, as the route he had taken may fairly prove, and took his way across the desert toward the famous sanctuary of Ammon, nearly two hundred miles away. It was a difficult task he had undertaken; " for there were no landmarks along the road, nor mount- ains anywhere, nor any trees, nor any elevation of any sort by which a traveller might shape his course as sailors do by the stars " (Arrian), and often the wanderers seemed to have lost the way. Memories of the hardships and risks, the strange experiences, the uncanny surroundings, the unexpected deliver- ances, grew in later days into stories of the miracu- lous. One tells that two serpents glided in front of the line, showing it the way; another, that two 348 Alexander the Great, L332 B.C. ravens flew before them " and waited for them when they lingered and fell behind ; but the most marvel- lous thing is what Callisthenes tells, that if any went astray by night, they would call to them and keep up a croaking until they brought them back on to the trail again." These are samples of that atmos- phere of the marvellous which came to surround this whole adventure. On arriving at the oracle, which was situated in the oasis of Siwah, a tract four or five miles wide, blessed with olives and palms in abundance, a spring of water, and the refreshment of dew, Alexander hastened to show his respect for the oracle, and at the same time to gratify his curiosity by asking certain questions. He first asked, so report has it, whether any of his father's murderers had escaped punishment, whereupon the priest is said to have rebuked him and charged him to speak with more respect, seeing that his father was not a mortal being. Changing his question, he then asked if Philip's murderers had all been punished. Being assured that they had been, he then inquired whether he was to gain the empire of the world. Of this he also received assurance. " This," Plutarch says, " is what most authorities give concerning the responses of the oracle; but Alexander himself, in writing to his mother, says there were certain secret responses, which he himself would tell her alone on his return. Some say the prophet, wishing, by way of courtesy, to address him in Greek, and intending to say ' paidios ' (' my boy '), made a slip on the last sound, and said ' fiat Did s' (' son of Zeus '). Alexander, they 331 B.C.] Visit to the Temple of Amnion. 349 say, welcomed the blunder, and the word went out that the god had addressed him as son of Zeus." Diodorus and Curtius Rufus report much the same, without indulging in the grammatical reminiscence. Arrian keeps on solid ground with the simple re- mark: " Having heard what was, as he said, agree- able to his desire, he set out on his way back to Egypt." In all probability the older authorities, Aristotle and Ptolemy, whom Arrian follows most closely, reported nothing concerning what passed between Alexander and the priest. Callisthenes, indeed, says that Alexander was entirely alone when he consulted the oracle. The later authorities prob- ably dressed out the incident with various ornament- ation, and all that remains of solid material seems to be the tradition that the priest addressed him as " son of Ra," or " son of Amnion," which really meant no more, in the language of the place and time, than " king." The famous response of the Delphic Pythia to the Spartan King Lysander,* " I know not whether to call thee god or man," illus- trates how even in the Greek sense the heroic blended into the divine. Modern historians have given to this incident a great importance in estimating the development of Alexander's character. Grote f speaks of it as marking " his increasing self-adoration, and inflation above the limits of humanity," and the same writer credits him from this time on with a belief that Zeus * Herodotus, i., 65. f See also Kaerst, Historische Zeitsckrift, hqdv. (1895), pp. iff., i 93^"m who follows in the track of Grote, 350 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. was his real father — " a genuine faith, a simple ex- aggeration of that exorbitant vanity which from the beginning reigned so largely in his bosom." With this it is customary to connect a deliberate purpose, maintained throughout his life, of establishing the worship of himself as a god, and a number of inci- dents are cited in support of such a view. It is, furthermore, claimed that the trip to Siwah was undertaken with the premeditated purpose of ob- taining the sanction of the oracle for his ambition. While we are unquestionably dealing here with the folly of an abnormally successful and very young man, it is still worth while to seek an exact deter- mination of the limits of this folly. This surely cannot be done if the subject of it is isolated from all connection with his own traditional conceptions and his own peculiar prejudices, and treated as an absolute, sterilised specimen. The confidence in an ultimately divine origin was an essential part of every family tree among the noble families of the older Greece. All the great heroes were sons of gods. If Minos was the son of Zeus, Theseus must needs, as Bacchylides's paean (xvii.) shows it, prove himself Poseidon's son. The gods were, as ancestors, dignified to be the citizens of honour in the state. That was what made the state and gave it its dignity. It was a fraternity in which great immortals known as gods, were mem- bers — as we should call the, " honorary members." Alexander had always traced his origin, with pardon- able pride, to Hercules and Perseus. He had not, on that account, felt himself less human than other BUST OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT. IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 331 B.C.] Visit to the Temple of Ammon. 35 1 men. He had probably thought himself more " select." His fondness for the stories of Homer, and his choice of Achilles, who was goddess-born, as a pro- totype, quickened his fancy for the marvellous in genealogy. He was now in Egypt, subject to the profound religious impressions its sturdy faith and plodding piety were likely to beget. Its Pharaohs had always, on ascending the throne, presented themselves at the temple of Amun-Ra (Ammon) to receive his recognition : Alexander was now a Pharaoh, and he would do the same, choosing not the sanctuary at Thebes, but the one at Siwah, to which his great ancestor Hercules had gone. His mother, the fanatical, corybantic Olympias, had always been haunted with the delusion that her son was begotten of a god. That Alexander gave himself to such a whimsical vagary with any real or practical faith in sober moments is certainly to be doubted. It was a satisfaction to his mother that he visited the oracle and received such a response. The words of the priest made an impression, too, on his mind, sensitive as it was to the mystical, and under the glamour of his marvellous success meant some- thing to him in a mystical way — but how much in practical substance ? Plutarch's remarks are in point here: " He is said, in listening to the philosopher Psammon in Egypt, to have been most pleased with this remark of his : ' Every man is ruled by a god, because that which is at the head and which has the strength in each man is ipso facto divine.' Even more profound was the teaching 352 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. which Alexander himself laid down on this point, to the effect that, though God is the common father of all men, in a particular way does he claim the noblest as his own." He tolerated and even demanded among the Per- sians the adoration ( proskynesis) characteristic of their court etiquette, and at times even committed, it appears, the odious folly of asking it from Mace- donians, and that, too, when it was given him as a divine being. Yet this was no settled plan with him ; it rather appears as an occasional vagary, though one that provoked much irritation and dis- gust among those who were his most loyal friends. It was the old Macedonians, not the Greeks, who made the chief protest against these notions of the King. The Greeks, accustomed to such mytho- logical conceits, could understand how little was really meant by them; to the Macedonians they were bold, prosaic claims of fact. It is furthermore, to be noted that the Macedonians' protests arose in connection with their jealousy of the King's lean- ings toward a new cosmopolitanism, which, in their view, threatened to alienate him from them and rob them of the fruits of victory. Plutarch says of him : " Toward the barbarians he conducted himself alto- gether with sternness, as one fully persuaded of his divine origin, yes, and parentage too, but toward the Greeks more reasonably and with less affectation of divinity. . . . Once, being wounded with an arrow and suffering much pain, he said: ' This which is flowing 331 B .c.] Visit to the Temple of A mmon. 353 here, my friends, is blood, not ichor,' and, citing a verse of Homer: ' Ichor, such as flows from the immortal gods.' At another time, when there was a heavy clap of thunder and everybody was frightened, Aristarchus the professor, who was by, said to him: 'Whether you could n't do something of the sort, seeing you are the son of Zeus ? ' With a laugh he answered: ' I have no mind to be a terror to my friends, as you would have me, who despise my table for being provided with fish instead of with the heads of satraps.' . . . From what I have said it is evident that Alexander was not mentally affected or insanely puffed up, but was merely seeking to maintain authority over others through the claim of divinity." The idea that he undertook to establish a formal cult of himself, and to impose it upon the nations under his rule, particularly upon the Greeks, lacks all foundation. The story that after his return to the West he issued a decree demanding of the Greek cities the payment of divine honours to himself has been carefully examined by Mr. Hogarth,* and found to rest upon no sound basis. f That after his death he was recognised widely as divine is un- doubted. It is noticeable that it is not during his life that his portrait appears upon the coinage to displace the traditional representations of the gods. After his death he appears on the coins as the genius of the Macedonian Empire, the personified bond of unity. * English Historical Review, 1887, p. 322^. f A like result is reached by Benedictus Niese, Historic he Zeit- schri/t, lxxix. (1897), p. I ff. 2 3 354 Alexander the Great. [332 B.C. That the Alexander cult, which is found in various places and survived down into the Roman imperial age, was not a creation of Alexander's lifetime could not be more distinctly demonstrated than by the fact that its institution at Alexandria itself is due to a successor, Ptolemy II. , fifty years or more after the hero's death. The notion that Alexander utilised the doctrine of his divinity as a fundamental and constitutive principle for his empire is so utterly at variance with the plain historical facts, so utterly lacking in support from any known facts, as to pos- sess no interest except for its absurdity. It is a mere nightmare of some schematising historians. After making rich gifts to the temple, Alexander returned to Memphis, where he found various dele- gations from Greece awaiting him. There were Chians and Rhodians to ask withdrawal of the gar- risons from their cities, delegates from Mitylene to seek reimbursement for their expenditures in resist- ing the Persians, Cyprians and Athenians and many others to bring congratulations and ask this or that remission or favour. All of them he sent away satisfied. Recruits for his army began, too, to come in from Antipater, and others were to meet him on his out- ward march at Pelusium. The month left him in Egypt he devoted to the organisation of its govern- ment. Repeating the plan he had applied in other provinces, the first illustration of which we saw in Lydia, he divided the administration among differ- ent departments, carrying, however, the division, as was suited to the greatness and complexity of 331 B.C.] Visit to the Temple of Amnion. 355 Egyptian population and resources, much further than in any previous case. The administration of Egypt and the government of its native population was separated from that of the Greeks and other resident foreigners. Libya and Arabia were made distinct administrative districts. The military and the financial administrations were also kept distinct. Garrisons were left in Pelusium and Memphis. Early in the spring (331 B.C.) he returned with his army into Phoenicia, and made halt at Tyre to effect the last governmental arrangements before turning his back on the West. Here came to greet him and pledge anew the loyalty of their city Athenian am- bassadors, borne in the sacred state trireme, the famous old Paralos. Their renewed request for the release of their countrymen taken prisoners while serving the Persians at Granicus was finally granted. At the end a great athletic and musical fete was inaugurated. Singers and actors came from various Greek cities. The Cyprian kings supplied the chor- uses. Stately sacrifices were offered to Hercules, the god of the place. A genuine Hellenic festival ; in reality the funeral games of the old Hellas! When they were over, Alexander's army turned its back upon the Grecian sea, the hem of which had hitherto been its battle-ground, and plunged into the heart of Asia. CHAPTER XXII. THE BATTLE OF GAUGAMELA. 331 B.C. THERE is no record of the time at which Alex- ander's army left Tyre, but it must have been in June or July (331 B.C.), for not until late in July was the Euphrates crossed at Thapsacus, nearly 350 miles to the north-east. Curtius Rufus trespasses on credulity, and claims that the actual march from Tyre to Thapsacus occupied only eleven days. A company of engineers had been sent in' advance to construct bridges over the river, probably light, temporary structures of wood, or pontoons; and when Alexander arrived at Thapsacus, he found two bridges nearly complete, but they had not been carried entirely to the farther shore, because a Per- sian force of five thousand men was posted there on guard. At the approach of Alexander, these troops, however, fled, and the bridges were speedily finished. Thapsacus, near the modern Rakka (Nicephorium), where the Euphrates is to-day about 750 feet wide, was in antiquity a usual place of crossing; nowadays 356 331 B.C.] Battle of Gaugamela. 357 the caravans cross the stream a little farther up, at Bir, on their way to Aleppo, a hundred miles or more to the west from Rakka. It was now in the heat of midsummer, and Alex- ander, in the interest of the health of his troops, avoided the plain of Mesopotamia, and instead of moving south-east toward Babylon, marched to the north, keeping the Euphrates on his left, until he reached the highlands at the foot of the Armenian mountains. This route, in addition to the advant- age of climate, afforded better means for provision- ing his army. Persian scouts who were taken prisoners here told that Darius had left Babylon and was now encamped, with his army, on the eastern side of the Tigris, by Gaugamela. He had sur- mised that the march of Alexander would bring him to the Tigris near this point, and had taken his position there with a view to defending the ford. The spot he had chosen lay near the village of Gaugamela, but vulgar tradition has always asso- ciated the name of the battle that was to follow with Arbela (modern Erbel), a city some fifty miles to the east. Near this point the great routes of in- land communication met and crossed, as they do to-day, at Mosul, hard by on the western bank, and as they had done from the dawn of history, when Nineveh, whose unheeded mounds were now almost in sight of the camp, was the goal of all the cara- vans. Here passed the great road joining Susa to Sardis and the far West, and here met it the eastern route from Ecbatana (modern Hamadan), farther Asia, and India, the southern route from Babylon 358 Alexander the Great. [331 b.c. and the Persian Gulf, and the northern from Armenia and the Euxine at Trebizond. The trade routes between India and the Western world were in antiquity, as they have been ever since, the great arteries of the world's wealth.* They gave life to the lands through which they passed, as the sweet Nile waters do to the deserts traversed by their branches and canals. Their changing courses have all through the ages deter- mined the flow and deposit of wealth and the location of empire. The lands and the wealth Alexander was to conquer had been enriched by the overland trade which for centuries had found its outlet through Phoenicia to the West. His later discovery of the sea route from India to the Persian Gulf offered the suggestion of another route, which, with the breaking up of his empire, made for a while the shorter land way up the Euphrates valley, on the line of the mediaeval and modern Busrah, Bag- dad, and Damascus, the preferred highway. But as the Parthian empire (second century B.C. to the third century A.D.) rose to throttle this, another way prepared by Alexander, that by the Red Sea, Egypt, and Alexandria, came in to take its place, and in Roman times Egypt was the great distribut- ing centre. Then for a while Constantinople, then the Mohammedan rulers of Egypt and Persia, con- trolled the trade, until, with the close of the cru- sades and the increase of the European demand for * For the suggestion of the ideas embodied in the following para- graph I am largely indebted to my former colleague, Professor Morse-Stephens. 331 B.C.] Battle of Gaugamela. 359 luxuries, it passed into the hands of those who from the north coasts of the Mediterranean distributed to Europe, and Venice and Genoa emerged into great- ness and wealth. Then came, with Vasco da Gama's discovery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope (1497), a violent diversion from the old chan- nels. Lisbon became the distributing centre for Europe, and the riches of India poured into the lap of Portugal. The Dutch and English were content to play the part of middlemen, and to distribute from Lisbon to northern Europe, until Spain laid her hand on Portugal, and the folly of Philip II. in closing the port of Lisbon to Dutch and English vessels sent first Dutch (1595) and then English ships (1601) direct to India, and destroyed the monopoly of the Indian trade which Portugal for a century had maintained. The result is the wealth and empire of England. Now, in these latter days, the opening of the Suez Canal has brought the trade route back to one of its old channels, and made it essential for England to hold Egypt. It will not be long before a railway connecting the Levant with the head of the Persian Gulf will reopen another route, and recent movements indicate that Ger- many aspires to this task. A third route through Persia or Turkestan and Afghanistan lies before the eyes of Russia. The iron rail is a firmer bond than the tracks of ships, and the old caravan routes will yet reassert themselves. When Alexander heard that Darius was awaiting him, he advanced directly toward him, and coming to the Tigris, crossed it immediately by a ford 360 Alexander the Great. [331 B.C. which, to his surprise, he found unguarded. The place of crossing was probably near the modern Jesire, some eighty miles above Gaugamela, where the river, broadening out to a width of a thousand feet, offers an easy ford. After the troops had passed the ford there occurred an eclipse of the moon, which at first inspired apprehension; but when Aristander, the prophet, interpreted it as im- plying disaster to the Persians, and reported that the signs from the sacrifices were propitious, they moved forward. This eclipse occurred, as the calculations of modern astronomers have shown, on the evening of September 20, 331 B.C. Alexander must have spent, therefore, nearly two months in Mesopotamia. The direct distance between Thapsacus and Gauga- mela would have been no more than 250 miles. The army of Darius had been brought together of the most various elements composing his vast em- pire. The remotest nations and tribes had furnished their contingents — Scythia, Bactria, and Sogdiana, Arachosia, Arabia, and Armenia. For a year the host had been assembling. By constant drill and careful organisation it had been brought to a grade of effectiveness supposed far to surpass that of the mass which met Alexander at Issus. Its numbers the cautious Arrian puts at one million infantry and forty thousand cavalry. The scythe-bearing chari- ots, a peculiar Persian institution, of which one nat- urally hears nothing at Issus, were here brought into play to the number of two hundred. They consisted of the ordinary two-wheeled battle-chariot, equipped with long sword-blades extending from the 331 B.C.] Battle of Gaugamela. 361 axle-ends, generally with a cant toward the ground, also from the body of the axle toward the ground. Sometimes these blades were also attached to the pole and to the body of the chariot. The appre- hension which this mechanism caused in advance among the opposing troops seems not to have been justified by the result. Darius, taught by the ex- perience of Issus, had carefully selected a place level and wide enough to give his army free play. Where the ground was uneven he had, for the benefit of the chariots and the cavalry, levelled it out ; in fact, he had prepared a graded battle-field. Alexander advanced with great caution to meet him. There was nothing of the reckless dash which characterised the approach to Granicus. He was now in the heart of the enemy's country, hemmed in by river and mountains, in the face of a vast and well-organised army encamped on a battle-field selected for its own advantage. Everything was staked on the issue of this single conflict. On the morning of September 21st he broke camp and advanced, keeping the river on his right and the mountains on his left. On the fourth day, the 24th, his scouts reported the appearance of hostile cavalry in the distance on the plain. It proved to be a body of about a thousand horsemen, who quickly fled when attacked. From the prisoners taken it was learned that Darius was near by. Alexander, for the purpose of resting his army, made a fortified camp, and remained quietly there four days. On the 29th the preparation for advance was again begun, and in the middle of the night the army, leaving behind in 362 Alexander the Great. [331 b.c. the camp all the baggage and the non-combatants, advanced, expecting to join battle at daybreak. On their approach the Persians assumed battle array. The Macedonians, climbing a low range of hills, suddenly came in sight of the vast host filling the plain before them, less than four miles away. They were just beginning to descend the hills; a short hour more, and the great battle would be on. Suddenly the order was given to halt. A council of war was called. Should they attack immediately? The battle ardour was already awake with the sight of the foe, and many said yes; but Parmenion and the cooler heads thought it best to reconnoitre. It was untried ground. Who knew if concealed ditches and stakes had not been set to hinder and entrap the advance ? Was it wise to attack without studying the disposition and arrangement of the enemy's line ? Parmenion's view prevailed. The army encamped in order of battle. Alexan- der, with a body of light infantry and the hetairoi, set out to reconnoitre the field. So the forenoon passed along. Alexander returned and called another council. Careful instructions were given to all the officers. Each was to carry a word of ex- hortation to his command. The Persian army all this time remained under arms, in nervous expect- ation of an immediate attack. The afternoon wore away. Still no order to advance was given. Dinner- time came, and after dinner the men were sent to rest. The night of the 30th of September drew on. Still the Persians remained mistrustfully at their arms in the plain below. 331 B.C.] Battle of Gaugamela. 363 It is a striking picture, brilliant in contrasts, which Plutarch gives us in his account of the night and its scene: the quiet and dark of the camp on the hill, offset against the hum and glare from the plain ; on the one side, Parmenion and the staff, from their sombre outlook surveying the world of fact about them ; on the other, Alexander by the altar-fire before his tent, seeking communion with the inner world of mystery. 11 On the eleventh night after the eclipse of the moon, which occurred in the month of Boedromion, and about the beginning of the mysteries-fete at Athens, the two armies lay in full sight of each other. Darius, with his troops under arms, was passing about among the lines and holding review by the light of torches; Alexander, his Macedonians asleep, was busied, out before his tent, in performing, with the help of Aristander, the diviner, certain mysterious rites, and in sacrificing to the god Fear. Meanwhile, the King's staff, and especially Par- menion, when they beheld the whole plain between Niphates and the Gordyaean mountains all agleam with the lights and fires which were made by the barbarians, and heard the confused, indistinguishable sound of voices and the noise arising out of the camp like the distant roar of a vast ocean, were overwhelmed with amazement at the thought of such a multitude, and ex- pressed among themselves the opinion that it would be a most serious and hazardous venture for them to engage battle with so vast an army in open daylight. They therefore waited on the King when he came from sacri- ficing, and besought him to attack the enemy by night, and so conceal with the cover of darkness the fearful 364 Alexander the Great. [331 b.c. peril of the coming battle. To this he gave them the memorable answer: ' I steal no victory.' " In this Parmenion spoke the professional, Alexan- der still the amateur. Battle was to the latter still a form of sport, and there were rules to the game, and a standard of sportsmanship to be observed. And yet, as Arrian estimates, his decision was also based on proper calculation of advantage. He was unwilling to take the chance of such accidents as would be incident to a night attack. He had con- fidence in his own military superiority, and he pre- ferred a regular game accurately played. One result of his continued delay was that his soldiers gained the night's rest, while the Persians entered the battle, the next morning, wearied by a night's watching and worrying. If the battle had been ordered on the morning of the 30th, when the troops first arrived on the scene, the conditions would have been the reverse. The Macedonians had been marching half the previous night. Late at night, after the generals had left him, Alexander " lay down in his tent, and slept the rest of the night more soundly than was his wont, to the great astonish- ment of the generals who came to his tent at dawn, and were obliged to take upon themselves the unusual re- sponsibility of ordering the troops to breakfast. At last, when the time was pressing, Parmenion went to his bed- side, and called him twice or thrice by name till he awakened him. Then Parmenion asked him what was the matter with him, that he should sleep the sleep of a 331 B.C.] Battle of Gaugamela. 365 victor, rather than that of a man who had before him the mightiest battle ever fought. With a hearty laugh, Alexander replied: ' What! Does n't it seem to you as if we had already conquered, now that we are at last re- lieved of the trouble of wandering around in a wide, waste country, hunting for the battle-shy Darius ? ' " On the morning of October 1 (331 B.C.) the two armies stood arrayed against each other. The Macedonian force numbered about forty thousand infantry and seven thousand cavalry. It sufficed only to oppose the centre of the enemy's line. Far out beyond either wing, ominously menacing the flanks, this line extended. Not by force of num- bers, however, nor by weight of masses was this battle to be won, but by disposition of troops and direction of the thrust. The full, accurate, and perfectly in- telligible account which has survived to us makes it possible to appreciate distinctly the reason for the result. The splendid tactics of the battle of Gaug- amela, even if nothing else were known of him, would mark Alexander as a master of military science. To protect his line from being surrounded, Alex- ander set a reserve column in rear of each flank, so that by facing about it could meet an attack on the flank or rear. He prepared as usual to open his at- tack by a charge of the picked cavalry, the hetairoi, against the left of the enemy's centre. The ques- tion was one of finding precisely the point to strike, and he watched his opportunity with the eye of a hawk until the point developed. He began by a sidewise movement of his line to the right. The 366 Alexander the Great. [331 B.C. Persians followed suit, shifting toward the left and keeping their left wing still far beyond his right. Soon the movement threatened to bring the Persian line beyond the ground which had been specially levelled for the chariots, and Darius, to check it, opened the battle by sending his Scythian and Bactrian cavalry around the Macedonian right wing for a flank attack. The detachment of Greek cavalry sent to meet them was at first repulsed, but others came to their aid, and after a sharp engagement, in which Alexander's men lost heavily, the enemy was held in check. Meanwhile the scythe-bearing chariots had come on at a gallop against the phalanx in the centre. This was intended to break up the solid mass of the phalanx, but the attempt proved a failure. Many of the chariot-horses were disabled by javelins, many were caught by the reins, and their drivers killed with the sword before ever they reached the phalanx line; such as escaped passed through the lines of the phalanx, which, in well- disciplined response to previous orders, opened to receive them, and then quickly closed again. The shifting of the Persian line to the left had opened a gap in their front. Alexander saw his opportunity at a glance. Massing his attacking force, a part of the phalanx, headed by the hetairoi cavalry, by a quick manoeuvre, into a flying wedge, he turned sharply with an oblique movement to the left, smote at the opening, and burst into the midst of the very centre of the host, straight toward the spot where the Shah was posted. It was sudden and relentless as a bolt from the clouds. Nothing 331 B.C.] Battle of Gaugamela. 367 could withstand, as nothing ever had withstood, the furious onslaught of this matchless cavalry squadron, backed by the long pikes and solid front of the phalanx. The Shah, whose charioteer was pierced by a spear, turned and fled for his life. The first rank reeled back upon the second, which in the sud- den panic gave it no support, but was instantly in confusion and directly in flight. The whole centre and the left, struck by the cavalry of the right wing, melted away. Meanwhile the Parthian, Indian, and Persian cavalry of the Persian right had burst through the opening in the Macedonian line made by Alexander's sudden attack, and cutting his left wing entirely off from the army, burst through upon the camp be- hind. The left was now entirely surrounded, and, under the furious attack of Mazseus, leading the Armenian and Cappadocian cavalry of the Persian right, was threatened with extermination. Parmen- ion sent to Alexander for aid. The reserve column behind the Macedonian right now faced about, and with a sharp attack routed the Parthians and Indians, driving them back through the gap by which they had come. As they scurried back, they met Alexander with his hetairoi, ad- vancing across the field to the aid of Parmenion on the left. Here arose a furious fight, the flying cavalrymen seeking to cut their way through to safety, the hetairoi stubbornly holding them in check. In the few moments of the struggle, sixty of the hetairoi lost their lives, but of the enemy only a few cut their way through. Meantime the 368 Alexander the Great. [331 B.C. Thessalian cavalry of the left wing, second in pres- tige only to the hetairoi, had brought the onslaught of Mazaeus to a check. A few moments of stand- still, then came the break and turn, and before Alexander had reached the scene the Persian right had joined the rest of the vast army in furious, con- fused, disgraceful flight. Now the pursuit began. Thick clouds of dust, out of which came the sound of cracking whips and the beat of hoofs and the confused voice of fright, concealed the panic-stricken rout. The Macedon- ians plunged in, and slaughter held its carnival until night took pity on the vanquished. Alexander pressed on beyond the river Lycus, and halting there to give his men and horses rest, started again at midnight and forced his march through to Arbela, fifty-five miles from the battle-field, in hope of overtaking Darius. But the Shah had allowed himself no rest. The loss of time which Parmenion's call for help had cost had saved the Shah from cap- ture. He was now miles beyond reach, and the victor must be content, as at Issus, with the empty symbols, the chariot and the spear and bow. The Shah, accompanied by his body-guard and an escort of Bactrian cavalry, had fled far to the east into Media. His army was scattered to the four winds. Thousands upon thousands were captive. The slain no man could count. The greatest battle in the record of the ancient world had been fought. The issues of centuries had struck their balance in a day. The channel of history for a thousand years had been opened with a flying wedge. CHAPTER XXIII. THE FRUITS OF VICTORY : OCCUPATION OF PERSIA — DEATH OF DARIUS. 331-330 B.C. LEAVING the Shah for the time being entirely out of account, precisely as he had after Issus, Alexander recrossed the Tigris and started directly south on his three-hundred-mile march to- ward Babylon. Here he was received without op- position, probably with genuine welcome, and, as in Egypt, he manifested always kindliest consideration for the feelings of the population. He allowed them to show him the wonders of their city, and gave orders to restore the temple of their great god, Belus ; he accepted the instructions of the Chaldean priests, and, in careful regard for their advice and directions, offered his worship at the altar of Belus. The sight of Babylon and the consciousness of what it meant to be its lord quickened in him the growth of the idea to which Tyre and Egypt had given the first impulse — the idea of a world, now so diverse in its outward expression, ultimately united in and 369 SJO Alexande?' the Great. [331B.C- through the person of him whom the course of events, if not the purpose of fate, was now making its universal lord. From Babylon he advanced to Susa, the capital proper of the Persian Empire, which, with its enor- mous treasure, fifty thousand talents ($65,000,000), fell without a blow into his hands. Still leaving Darius and the North-east unheeded, he pushed out into Persia proper, forcing his way through the Uxians, whom he subjugated and put under tribute, and scattering the army of the viceroy, Ariobarzanes, who ventured to oppose him. Persia now lay open to him. The royal cities, Persepolis and Pasargadse, were promptly occupied, and here again the heaped- up bullion of the empire revealed itself in enormous stores. If Curtius Rufus and Diodorus are to be trusted, one hundred and twenty thousand talents were found in the former city, and six thousand talents in the latter. The stories of the other treas- ures found in Persepolis became for aftertime the typical dreams of Oriental wealth and abundance. Jewels, furniture, rugs, utensils in the precious metals, enough to load ten thousand pairs of mules and five thousand camels, Plutarch says, were found at Persepolis. These objects must have come chiefly from the royal palace, which seems to have consti- tuted the principal part of the city — if indeed it was a city at all, in the ordinary sense. Before leaving Persepolis, where, according to Plutarch, he tarried four months (the winter season), Alexander caused the palace to be burned. The different accounts are somewhat at variance as to 330 B.C.] The Fruits of Victory. 371 the degree of premeditation involved. Plutarch, Diodorus, and Curtius Rufus tell a story which represents the thing as the outcome of a particular carousal. This is Plutarch's tale: 11 When he was about to set forth from this place against Darius, he joined with his companions in a merry-making and drinking bout, at which their bona- robas were present and joined in the debauch. The most celebrated of them was Thais, a girl from Attica. She was the paramour of Ptolemy, afterward King of Egypt. As the license of the drinking-bout progressed, she was carried so far, either by way of offering Alexan- der a graceful compliment or of bantering him, as to ex- press a sentiment which, while not unworthy the spirit of her fatherland, was surely somewhat lofty for her own condition. For she said she was amply repaid for the toils of following the camp all over Asia that she could this day revel in mockery of the haughty palace of the Persians. But, she added, it would give her still greater pleasure, if, to crown the celebration, she might burn the house of the Xerxes who once reduced Athens to ashes, and might with her own hands set the fire under the eyes of the King; so the saying might go forth among men that the little woman with Alexander took sorer ven- geance on the Persians in behalf of Greece than all the great generals who fought by sea or land. "Her words were received with such tumults of ap- plause, and so earnestly seconded by the persuasions and zeal of the King's associates, that he was drawn into it himself, and leaping up from his seat with a chaplet of flowers on his head and a lighted torch in his hand, led the way, while the rest followed him in drunken rout, with bacchanalian cries, about the corridors of the palace. 372 Alexander the Great. [331 B.C.- And when the rest of the Macedonians learned of it, they were delighted, and came running up with torches in their hands; for they hoped the burning and destruction of the palace was an indication that his face was turned homeward, and that he had no design of tarrying among the barbarians. ' ' * This story, though not mentioned by Arrian, is probably true ; at least, such a scene as this probably attended the setting of the fire ; but it is not neces- sary to suppose that the idea originated in the mind of Thais. Arrian's statement shows it was pre- meditated by Alexander, and discussed beforehand with Parmenion, who opposed it. It was planned and put upon the scene as a great symbolic act repre- senting, in the form of a revenge for Xerxes's de- struction of Athens, an announcement to the world that the empire of Persia was finally humbled and destroyed. This was Alexander's idea, but it ap- pears to have been a poor one. We are not apprised that the deed was attended with political gain, and the general sentiment must accord with Arrian's, who says: "Alexander does not seem to me to have acted on this occasion with prudence. ' ' This was also Alexander's opinion later. Though Alexander had now in possession the capital, the treasure, and the family of the Shah, and had burned his chief palace, the Shah himself * The princes applaud, with a furious joy, And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy ; Thai's led the way To light him to his prey, And, like another Helen, fired another Troy. — Dryden, Feast of Alexander. 330 B.C.] The Fruits of Victory. $73 was still at large and the tiara erect. At Ecbatana, five hundred miles north of Persepolis, he had taken up his residence, and quietly waited there, ready to take advantage of any change which might arise in Alexander's fortunes, or, in case Alexander should advance against him, to avail himself of the way of retreat open behind him into Hyrcania or Parthia, that which is to-day north-eastern Persia. In prepa- ration for the extreme necessity, he had sent the women, his treasure, and other property, together with his covered travelling-carriages, on to the mountain pass called the Caspian Gates. For Darius to pass the Caspian Gates meant that he forsook the domain proper of the Persian Empire; for though his sway had extended over Bactria and Sogdiana, and in a half-recognised authority over the nomads of the North, still he would be a fugitive headed toward the uttermost frontier, and at the mercy of roaming Scythian tribes outside the pale of orderly civilisation and state. When the spring opened (330 B.C.), Alexander began his march toward Ecbatana. As long as there was still a shah, the conqueror's title to ex- clusive empire was not beyond dispute. Alexan- der's ambitions had grown with the months, and he no longer was satisfied to be the leader and unifier of the Greeks. There arose already before his mind the vision of a world-empire united in the person of one who was neither Greek, nor Egyptian, nor As- syrian, nor Persian, but a world-man, above the limitations of nations and blood, above the conven- tions of usage and religion. This ambition could be 374 Alexander the Great. [331 B.C.- fulfilled only when he had the person of the Shah within his control. At first he heard the Shah was planning to give him battle, and proceeding cautiously, prepared for battle, he was after twelve days within the bounds of Media. The word came that the King, disap- pointed in his reliance upon aid from the Cadusians and Scythians, was preparing to flee. When but three days distant from Ecbatana, Alexander learned that the Shah, taking with him seven thousand talents of money and accompanied by about nine thousand troops, had fled the city five days before. The final and decisive reason for the abandonment of his plan of resistance was a division of counsels among his generals, whereby one party, headed by Nabarzanes, the commander of the Persian cavalry, and Bessus, the satrap of Bactria, insisted on a trans- fer of the military authority to Bessus and a with- drawal into Bactria, with hope of bettering their fortunes. The partisans of Bessus urged the hope- lessness of resistance, and the popularity of Bessus among the Bactrians and their Scythian neighbours, in support of their scheme; but the Shah, while compelled, in his helplessness, to accede to their plan of flight, still clung to the tiara and the name of king. Our knowledge of these incidents rests solely on the authority of Curtius Rufus, the main features of whose story must represent a historical basis, though some of the details, perhaps, are dreamed. After entering Ecbatana it became evi- dent to Alexander that conditions had assumed a new and final form. Darius was no longer Shah, 330 B.C.] The Fr tuts of Victory. 375 but a fugitive without city, army, or throne, at the mercy of the satraps of the North-east, and no longer dangerous, except as a symbol or an article of barter in their hands. It became now merely a task of rescuing him from them. An important step which the King took at this time indicates the ripening of the new status. He dismissed the Thessalian cavalry and the other Greek allies, sending them back to the sea and making preparations for their transportation to Eubcea. Each man was paid for his full time reckoned to the date of the arrival home, and two thousand talents was given for distribution among them all. Such as wished again to enlist were allowed to do so. Those who did entered upon a new career. The original plan of the great expedi- tion was completed. Now there lay before them the uncertainties of a venture out into the dark of the unknown North-east. They were no longer fol- lowing the standards of the Hellenic champion; they were attaching themselves to the personal cause of a leader whose schemes transcended the vengeance due upon Xerxes, and who no longer could act the simple role of a. young Achilles. With the burning of the royal palace at Persepolis the work which Alexander, five years before, at the Congress of Corinth, had bound himself to perform, was given its spectacular finale. The allies, whose presence in the army was a standing testimony to the contract and alliance framed at Corinth, were now dismissed in token of the completed work. Throughout all the campaigns up to this time it is 376 Alexander the Great. [331 B.c._ to be noted that the allied infantry had been em- ployed only for garrison duty or reserve. The allied cavalry, among whom the Thessalians constituted the most trusty element, had served in battle, but under Macedonian leaders. Whether the Greek States had wished to furnish troops or not, it is evi- dent that Alexander had no great desire for them and probably little confidence in them. Enough were used to keep up the appearance of an alliance ; but now that the news of Antipater's victory at Megalopolis had come, no further solicitude for Greek cooperation was felt, and the guise of alliance could be dropped. So Greece was finally retired from the partnership, and henceforth sank into the background. It was now four years since Alexan- der had left Europe (in the spring of 334 B.C.), and he was destined never to see it again ; the remaining seven years of his life were to be occupied in sub- duing the eastern half of the Persian Empire. Rapidly the ties slackened that bound him to the West. The dream c r Vyouth melted away, but a new vision in larger perspective arose with ever- strengthening outlines in its place. The champion of West against East faded away in the mist, and the form of a world-monarch, standing above the various worlds of men and belonging to none, but moulding them all into one, emerged in its stead. Leaving six thousand men of the phalanx as guard of the treasure now assembled into Ecbatana, he started out on his new campaign. With him he took the old reliable elements of his army, the hetairoi cavalrymen, the archers and Agrianians, 330 B.C.] The Fruits of Victory. 377 the mercenary cavalry under Erigyius, and the re- mainder of the phalanx. Now began a series of rapid forced marches to the east. Men and horses dropped by the way in fatigue. On the eleventh day he was at Rhagse, near the modern capital of Persia, Teheran, two hundred miles from Ecbatana. Here he heard that the Shah had already passed the Caspian Gates. This was, at the rate Alexander had been going, only a day's march distant; but relin- quishing for the time the hope of overtaking him, Alexander gave his army five days' rest. Darius's little escort was evidently melting away, for many deserters came into the Macedonian camp, and rumour said that many others had betaken them- selves to their homes. Then setting out again, after passing the Caspian Gates, Alexander was met by Bagistanes, a Persian noble who had deserted from the camp of Darius, and who brought the astound- ing news that Darius was no longer a free man. As the fugitive band moved along their discouraged march, and every day brou^ 1 ' new despair, Bessus's plan grew into one of treason. Only the Greek mercenaries, two thousand in number, who still fol- lowed, faithful as the Swiss Guard, the declining fortunes of their employer, remained loyal, but they soon found themselves shut off entirely from com- munication with him either in his tent by night or in his carriage by day. Bessus and his troop rode close about him on the road, rather as keepers than guard. The suspicions of the Greeks were aroused. Their leader, the Phocian Patron, forced his way up to the carriage, and speaking in Greek, which the 378 Alexander the Great. [331 b.c- Shah, but not Bessus, could understand, warned him of his peril, and besought him to intrust himself to the hands of the Greeks. Bessus, who under- stood the purport, though not the words, of Patron's proposal, hesitated no longer. At the first halt the Bactrians surrounded the tent of the Shah, and in the quiet of the night he was put in chains, to be carried off a prisoner into Bactria. A few of the Persian troops accompanied the Bactrians, but Ar- tabazus and his sons, who had remained true to Darius as long as they could aid him, now joined with the Greek mercenaries and pushed north into the shelter of neighbouring mountains. When the information reached Alexander, he took with him the hetairoi cavalrymen, the skirmish cavalry, and the strongest and lightest of his in- fantry, and without waiting even for the return of a foraging party, which had been sent out under Ccenus's command and with only two days' provi- sions, started on a rapid march toward the scene of the recent events. He marched the whole night and until noon of the next day; then giving his men a short rest, pushed on again the whole night, and at daybreak reached the village where the mutiny had taken place. Here he learned that the mutineers had left there several days before, taking Darius with them in a covered carriage; that the supreme command had been lodged in Bessus's hands by virtue of his near relationship to the Shah, as well as of his local rights as satrap; and that, furthermore, it was the purpose of Bessus and his men, in case Alexander pursued them, to use the 330 B.C.] The Fruits of Victory. 379 Shah's person in barter for their own immunity; in case he turned back, to raise an army and establish a government on their own account. There was no time for delay. Men and horses were already fatigued by the forced marches, but there could be no halt. It was a race for a prize Alexander had set his heart upon gaining. On they went again over hill and valley, through the night and on until noon. Then they came to a village which the party had left only the day before, but with the intention of travelling by night. Still they were twenty-four hours ahead. Alexander's troop was almost exhausted. Did the villagers know of no shorter road ? There was one, but through a desert country, with no water for horse or man. Quickly transferring five hundred selected infantry- men to as many horses taken from the cavalry, and directing the rest of the infantry to follow by the main road, he set off on the canter by the desert road. Men fell by the way, horses foundered, but all night long the mad chase was forced. Nearly fifty miles had been covered. Then in the grey morning light was discovered on ahead the straggling caravan. There was no preparation for defence. One glimpse of those dreaded horsemen, and then a wild scramble for life. The few who stayed to fight were cut down. Bessus and his aides had tried to induce the captive Shah to mount a horse and flee, but he stoutly refused. Then they drove their javelins into his body, and scurried off. On down the dismantled line of the caravan the Macedonian riders came, no more than threescore 3 So Alexander the Great. [331 b.C- able to keep pace with the leader. " They rode over abundance of gold and silver that lay scattered about, and passed by chariots full of women which wandered here and there for want of drivers, and still they rode on, hoping to overtake the van of the flight and find Darius there " (Plutarch). But no- where was Darius to be found, until at last a rider, straggling away from the rest, found a waggon far away from the road, by a valley pool where the frightened, unguided mules had dragged it. In it lay the dying Shah. 1 ' Still he asked for a little cool water to drink, and when he had drunk he said to Polystratus, who had given it to him : ' Sir, this is the bitter extremity of my ill fortune, to receive a benefit which I cannot repay; but Alexander will repay you. The gods recompense to Alexander the kindness he has done my mother and my wife and my children. I give him through you this clasp of the hand.' With these words he took the hand of Polystratus and died. When Alexander reached the spot, he was pained and distressed, as one could see, and he took off his own mantle, and laid it upon the body, and wrapped it around " (Plutarch). Thus died at fifty years of age (July, 330 B.C.), an honourable and kindly man, a courtly gentleman of the old school. He would have been a capable ad- ministrator in time of peace, but, to his misfortune, the date of his accession matched that of Alexander. Though he certainly lacked the aggressiveness of will and the daring essential to a great soldier, under ordinary conditions, and with the game played «*» tJ&* J 15000yards BATTLE OF ARBELA. A, The preliminary actions ; B, The battle; X, Alexander's camp. The same letters used for Alexander's divisions, f , The scythe chariots, sent to attack his advance by the Persians, a, b, The Bactrian and Scythian cavalry which attacked his advancing right wing; C, C. Arachosians and Dahse cavalry, forming left wing of the Persians ; d, Persian and Indian cavalry, which broke Alexander's centre and separated his infantry ; e, Cappadocian cavalry, which attacked the Macedonian left and rear; D, The position of Darius ; F, F, F2, The successive fronts of the Persian army. It is plain from these plans that Alexander was here in imminent danger of defeat ; on Map B, his successive positions are marked I, II, III, showing how he had to wheel about to succour his defeated wing, when Darius fled. 330 B.C.] The Fr ttits of Victory. 381 according to the old rules, he might not have been discovered in his weakness, and might have passed for a tolerable military head ; but with the Mace- donians had been introduced a new art of warfare, with Alexander a new standard of generalship, and the pace was too fast for him. Alexander's sorrow at the sight of the lifeless body may have been mixed with vexation and chagrin that his wearisome chase had yielded so meagre a quarry, but when viewed in connection with all we know of the hero's real warmth of heart and resources of sympathy, we must reckon it better than that. The sight of one who four years before was undisputed monarch from the Hellespont to the Indus, now left to a lonely death, empireless, for- saken, and betrayed, was a sight worthy the pity of harder hearts than his. With all the honour due his state, Darius was carried to his grave. He was gathered to his fathers, for they buried him in Persepolis. 11 Quae ducis Emathii fuerit dementia Poros Prasclarique docent funeris exsequiae." * * " What was the mercy of Macedonia's prince, let Porus tell, and the pomp of funeral rites [accorded to Darius]." — Ovid. CHAPTER XXIV. IN AFGHANISTAN. 33O-329 B.C. IT was in July, 330 B.C., that Darius came to his end. Alexander's fearful race with treachery and death had carried him along the borders of the great salt desert of Khorasan in the scorch- ing heat of an inland summer. The route which the fugitives followed had been the main highway from Media eastward into far Bactria. It was the same which leads to-day from Teheran, by way of Semnan, Damaghan, Shahrud, and Meshed, out of Persia, into the land of the Turkomans and the border realms of the Czar. On the right lay the salt steppes ; on the left rose the mountains which to-day mark Persia's frontier and offer a temporary check upon the inevitable advance of the Russian glacier. Close behind these mountains trails already the line of the Transcaspian Railway, and it cannot be long before a branch will find its way through the hills and strike across toward the Persian Gulf. The place where the Shah was murdered was not 382 330-329 B.C.] In Afghanistan. 383 far from the site of the modern Shahrud. Here join to-day, as they did of old, the eastern route and the road from Asterabad (ancient Zadracarta), fifty miles to the north, in the Caspian basin. An English officer* who visited the place in 1896 remarks upon its position : " An army stationed at Shahrud would at once com- mand the approaches from the sea, and at the same time effectually prevent any junction between forces operating in Khorasan and the west. It is only fifty miles from Asterabad to Shahrud, and with a little skilful engineer- ing the road could easily be made passable for artillery, or at any rate for light field-guns. No doubt the Rus- sians realise its strategic importance. The whole place is dominated by Russian influence." After allowing his soldiers a short rest at He- catompylus (near the present Shahrud), Alexander moved to the north, through the Elburz Mountains, into the narrow strip of country called Hyrcania, which skirts the southern shores of the Caspian. The sea, when it first came in sight, was evidently a surprise to him. He saw before him, as Plutarch says, the bay of an open sea not much smaller ap- parently than the Black Sea, but with somewhat sweeter water than in most seas. He was unable, however, to gain any certain information about it, and concluded it must be an arm of the Sea of Azov. Plutarch, with his superior geographical knowledge, implies that he might have known better, for before * Clive Bigham, A Ride through Western Asia, p. 193 ff. Lon- don, 1897. 384 Alexander the Great. [330 b.C- his time scientists had already located it as the north- ernmost of the four great gulfs descending into the continent from the outer ocean. In asserting this, however, Plutarch is almost certainly guilty of an anachronism, for the common opinion of Alexander's day connected the Caspian as an inland sea with the Euxine. Not until Patrocles, in the early part of the next century, explored the coasts of the Caspian, did the mistaken theory of its connection with the northern ocean make its appearance. Accepted then by Eratosthenes, it held its place in the vul- gate geography until the time of Ptolemy (second century A.D.). Alexander's soldiers identified the Jaxartes with the Don (Tanai's). . While in Hyrcania, he subjugated the various tribes of mountain and plain, and received the sub- mission of the two satraps Phrataphernes, governor of Hyrcania and Parthia, and Autophradates, gov- ernor of Tapuria, both of whom, in accordance with his principle of respecting and utilising existing in- stitutions of government, he forthwith reinstated in their authority. Many others also, high officials and noblemen, came to offer their surrender, among them the fine old Artabazus, whom, in recognition of his rank and his loyalty to his sovereign, as well as for old acquaintance' sake, he treated with dis- tinguished consideration, and attached to his per- sonal staff of aides and advisers. This Artabazus, through long experience, as general, governor, and rebel, in the affairs of Asia Minor, as well as a seven years' (352-345 B.C.) residence as a political fugitive at Philip's court in Pella, had made himself familiar 329 B.C.] In Afghanistan. 385 with Western ideas, and was a cosmopolitan far be- yond the measure of the ordinary Persian grandee. There came also to surrender themselves fifteen hundred Greek mercenaries, last vanishing remnant of the Greek contingent in Darius's army. In re- ceiving their submission Alexander saw fit to make a distinction — and it is worthy of note that he did — between those who had enlisted in the service of the Shah before the Congress of Corinth (336 B.C.) had proclaimed the Greek war against Persia, and those who, in quasi-disloyalty, had enlisted later. The former were discharged free, the latter compelled to reenlist. With the mercenaries were found a num- ber of sadly stranded Greek ambassadors, who, for some reason or other, had been in attendance at Darius's court at this most untimely season. One who had come from Chalcedon and a delegation from Sinope were set free; they might be considered out- side the pale of responsibility ; but the five Spartan ambassadors, who furnished in their presence one last testimonial to the incorrigible stubbornness of their little State, were kept in duress. From Asterabad, where, after the work was over, Alexander had given his army a fortnight's rest and the delectation of a fete with the usual games, he returned (early autumn of 330 B.C.) into Parthia, and passed thence along the Bactrian road eastward until he came to Susia, a city of Aria, near the site of the modern Meshed, at the extreme north-eastern frontier of modern Persia. Meshed, only fifty miles from the present line of the Transcaspian Railway, stands near the junction of the Persian, Afghan, and 25 386 Alexander the Great. [330 B.C.- Russian frontiers, and hard by the gate which Rus- sia must choose in entering Afghanistan as a vesti- bule to India. At Susia the satrap Satibarzanes submitted to him, and rejoiced to be confirmed in the government of his province. News of Bessus's activity in the East soon, however, caused the new convert to backslide, and Alexander, who was al- ready on his way toward Bactra, Bessus's capital, turning sharply to the south, and in two days' marches pushing through the seventy miles that separated him from the rebel's stronghold at Herat (Artacoana), proceeded to cleanse the land of every vestige of opposition, and then to place a trustier man, Arsames the Persian, in the governorship of the land. Satibarzanes had meanwhile fled to join Bessus at Bactra (modern Balkh). At the foot of Artacoana's citadel arose later one of Alexander's famous Greek cities of the East, Alexandria- Areion, which survives to-day as Herat, for two centuries past the apple of discord between Persia and Afgh- anistan. It stands where the ways part, the great eastern road by the Heri-Rud valley across Afghan- istan to the east, and the route which the caravan trade from the remotest antiquity to the present time has always followed from northern Persia and the Caspian, by way of Herat, Kandahar, Ghasni, and Kabul, on into India. This is the route that all the great conquerors have trod whose hosts have entered the gate of India — Mahmud the Great (1001 A.D.), Genghis Khan (thirteenth century) and Tamerlane (1398) the Mongols, Nadir Shah the Per- sian (1737), Alexander the Macedonian. It is the 329^ B.C.] In Afghanistan. 387 well-known " Key of India," and when Afghanistan passes under Russian control, it will be still better known. The revolt of Satibarzanes had determined Alex- ander to secure this important route and the country adjacent to it, the present western and southern Afghanistan, before penetrating to Bessus's lair at Bactra (Balkh) in northern Afghanistan. So con- tinuing his march southward from Herat, he entered the province of Drangiana, the district about the great Hamun swamps (Palus Aria). Here, probably at its capital city, Phrada (Proph- thasia), came to light an ominous conspiracy in the very heart of his own camp. No less a person was involved than Philotas, the commander of the famous companion cavalry, and son of Parmenion, the com- mander-in-chief ; and the sudden emergence of the trouble just at this time seems to be connected with a change in Alexander's relation to his men and to his mission that was now beginning to be felt, and perhaps with a change in the bearing of Alexander himself. The occurrence has received much atten- tion from modern * as well as ancient historians, and a fair and correct understanding of its significance is important for an estimate of the conqueror's whole mind and attitude at this determining period of his career. Parmenion, now seventy years of age, had been * The most recent and the fullest discussion of the subject is found in an article by Friedrich Cauer, " Philotas, Kleitos, Kallisthenes," Jahrbucher fur Class. Philol., Supplement-Band XX. (1894), pp. 1-79. 388 Alexander the Great. [330 B.c- from the start the most faithful reliance of the young conqueror. It was he who had assured him the loyalty of the army in Asia on his father's death, who had among all his generals favoured most un- reservedly the plan of Asiatic conquest, and who, through all the hardships, difficulties, and triumphs of the four years past, had been his nearest adviser and most important military aide. His apparent lack of energy in the battle of Gaugamela, and his premature call for reinforcement which had so un- fortunately diverted Alexander from the pursuit, had left an unpleasant impression upon the young King's mind. Perhaps it was through weariness of his conservatism or suspicion of his senility that he had been left behind now in command of the garri- son at Ecbatana. His influence had always been great among the Macedonian soldiery. He had originally had three sons in the army, two of whom had lost their lives in service. One of them, Nicanor, had held the important post of commander of the hypaspists ; another was Philotas, in a like or even more import- ant command. His son-in-law Ccenus and his brother Agathon were also in important commands. Many of his kinsfolk held minor positions in the army. This group formed an easy nucleus about which should shape itself into expression the rising discontent with the new order of things. There was uneasiness abroad in the Macedonian camp. The older men were beginning to feel that the Alex- ander with whom they had left Europe was gradu- ally drifting away from them. He had begun to 329 B.C.] In Afghanistan. 389 show a liking for Oriental manners that was not to their mind. The talk about his assumption of di- vinity had not been met with favour by them when it first cropped up nearly two years before in Egypt. Little had been heard of it since then, but since Darius's death there had been a growing tendency to assume the court manners of an Oriental despot. He had not yet, as he did a year or two later, gone so far as to exact of his Macedonians the Oriental etiquette of prostration in his presence, but even the acceptance of it constantly from the Orientals themselves was not a good omen for the future. Then, too, Persian noblemen, like Artabazus, were being admitted to his court and confidences in in- creasing numbers. Persian satraps were being re- stored to the control of rich provinces, and native officials of lower grade retained in authority. What wonder if the old Macedonians who had borne the toil of war saw in all this only the victor robbed of his spoils! Alexander had also begun, at least on state occa- sions, to assume the Oriental dress, not in its ex- treme form, tiara and all, to be sure, but with a compromise between the Median and Macedonian styles. Plutarch * speaks about it thus : M From here [Hyrcania] he marched into Parthia, and, as he had not much to do here, first put on the Median dress, probably with a desire to accommodate himself to the usages of the country, in recognition of the influence which conformity to the usual dress and costume has in ♦Plutarch, Alexander, xlv. 390 Alexander the Great. [330 B.c- the work of civilising a people; or perhaps it may have been a way of insinuating upon the Macedonians the usage of prostration through accustoming them to tolerate this change in the conduct of life. He did not, however, assume the ultra-Oriental style of dress, with all its odious barbarian features, the trousers, the sleeved jacket, or the tiara, but a compromise between the Persian and the Macedonian, more quiet than the former, but yet more imposing than the latter. At first he wore this only when meeting barbarians or with his friends at home, but later he appeared in it publicly, when he drove out, and at public audiences — a sight which caused the Macedonians much pain." We should not, from what we know of national prejudices even in the present enlightened days, ex- pect to find charitable judges of Alexander's grow- ing cosmopolitanism among the hardy warriors of homely Macedonia. His great idea of a cosmopoli- tanism expressed in a world-empire, and created by the breaking down of barriers, so that each part might contribute of its own, was just beginning to intrench itself in his mind, at the expense of the old idea of exploiting the East for the good of the West, and must be his excuse to those who give him char- itable judgment. All know, however, who have observed individual specimens of humanity under- going the process of cosmopolitanising, with how great risk to character it makes its way, and how frequently it is itself an evidence of loss of anchorage and of moral decay Parmenion and his kin were evidently patrons of the old school. Rumours had reached the ears of 329 B.C.] In Afghanistan. 391 the King, two years before, of things Philotas, in unguarded moments, had said which involved critic- ism of the King. Through Philotas's mistress, a fair woman of Pydna who had been taken among the captives at Issus, word had come that one day in his cups Philotas had boasted that all the great deeds were really those of his father and himself, though the benefit of them, kingship and all, ac- crued to Alexander alone. The King had appar- ently forgotten it, but still he watched Philotas. This was the state of things when in the late autumn of 330 B.C., at Phrada, in Drangiana, word suddenly came of a plot. A young man named Nicomachus had been incited by a friend, one Dim- nus, to join in a conspiracy planned against the life of the King. He, through his brother, had sent word of the danger to Philotas, who had failed to carry it to the King, though in constant communi- cation with him. Two days elapsed, when the matter was by another route reported to the King. This brought Philotas under suspicion ; and others, influenced to some extent by prejudice against him, now appeared with positive accusations. He was immediately put under arrest, and, i«n old-fashioned style, put on trial before the army, with the King as his accuser. We have no way of estimating the evidence. The method of procedure was certainly not such as to guarantee the dispassionate hearing worthy of a court. Philotas had gained many private enemies by his overbearing manner and his tendency to in- dulge in luxury and ostentation. Even his father 392 Alexander the Great. [330 B.c- had once rebuked him: " My son, to be not quite so great would be better." Whatever the proofs were, the army-court declared him a would-be regi- cide, and clamoured for his execution. In judging of the probable justice of this verdict, it is to be noted that another general, Amyntas, who was ac- cused of complicity in the same conspiracy, was by the same tribunal acquitted. Arrian says Philotas was convicted by clear proofs. The presumption is that he was guilty. There is nothing inherently improbable in the belief. It was always the fate of autocrats to be conspired against by those nearest them. Still Alexander was not absolutely satisfied. Phi- lotas had insisted on his innocence, and excused his failure to report the alleged conspiracy by saying that he had discredited the report of its existence. He was therefore subjected to torture, in the hope of extorting a confession. The torture was admin- istered in private by Hephaestion, Craterus, and Ccenus, the three most intimate associates of the King; and Alexander himself, in order to take per- sonal cognisance of every detail, was close at hand, hidden by a curtain. When Philotas, under stress of torture, showed an unexpected lack of fortitude for a tried soldier, Alexander is reported to have said from his place of concealment: " What, Philo- tas, sensitive and craven as that, and yet engaged in a design like this ? " He is said at last to have confessed and to have implicated his father — this, however, on the authority of Curtius Rufus only. He was then put to death, and trusty messengers 329 B.C.] In Afghanistan. 393 were sent swiftly across to Ecbatanato order the as- sassination of his father also, which was forthwith accomplished by the hands of his officers. This was a high-handed and outrageous act. It seems impossible that Parmenion could have been guilty, but the mere fact that the King could have thought it necessary showed how sensitive he had become to the possibility of an opposition centring about the family of Parmenion. The command of the companion cavalry, formerly held by Philotas, was now divided between Clitus, the son of Dropides, and Hephaestion, the latter of whom had of late advanced rapidly in the esteem of Alexander. It is remarked, for instance, that he among all the Macedonians showed most sympathy for the new ideas of the King. It was a period of transition in Alexander's life, and the friendship of Hephaestion marks the new period. It is evident that Alexander could have spent but little time in Drangiana. Late * in October or early in November he advanced through the country of the peaceable and hospitable Ariaspians dwelling along the lower courses of the Hilmend, on the western frontiers of the modern Afghanistan, and thence turned his line of march toward distant Bac- tria, where Bessus was still maintaining the emblems of authority of the old Persian Empire. The route chosen led up the valley of the Etymandrus (Hil- mend) toward Ghasni, then down into the Kabul * Hogarth's attempt {Philip and Alexander, Appendix B) to revise the chronology of this period fails of satisfying Arrian's account of later movements in Sogdiana. 394 Alexander the Great. [330 B.C.- basin, and thence northward over the passes of Paro- pamisus (the modern Hindu Kush). Opposition faced him at every turn, but he fought his way rapidly through to the foot of the Paropamisus. At two points at least on the route he founded colonies, probably marked by the modern sites of Kandahar and Ghasni, and near his halting-place at the foot of the mountains a third, not far from the modern Kabul. Once during the year word came of trouble in the outer world. An army from Bac- tria had invaded Aria and was seeking to detach the district from its allegiance. Not to be himself diverted from his projects, Alexander sent a strong force under Artabazus the Persian, which not with- out difficulty accomplished the defeat of the intrud- ers. Alexander's way up the Etymandrus valley led at times through deep snow, and bitter priva- tions were suffered. The winter was coming on, and when he reached the foot of the mountains by Kabul it must have been late in December (330 B.C.). With the opening of spring (329 B.C.) he crossed the passes of the Hindu Kush at an elevation of over thirteen thousand feet, and came to the city of Drapsaca in Bactria. After a little rest he pushed on in pursuit of Bessus, who gradually retired before him, and crossed the Oxus (Amu-Darja) into the ter- ritory of the modern Bokhara. The Oxus, which now flows into the Sea of Aral, was in Alexander's time, and even down to as recent a period as the sixteenth century, a tributary of the Caspian. If a plan recently proposed by Russian engineers of re- storing it to its ancient course should be realised, it 329 B.C.] In Afghanistan, 395 will provide a waterway from the Caspian into north-eastern Afghanistan, direct toward the gate of India. When Alexander came to. the Oxus he found it a mighty stream swollen with the melting snows; and in default of boats, or wood with which to build them, he sent his men across on " life- preservers " improvised out of their leather tent- coverings stuffed with straw. Five days were expended in the crossing. Hounding Bessus down, he finally found him with a few soldiers in a fortified village, forsaken and betrayed by his generals and his army. Now Darius could be avenged. Strip- ped naked, with his neck in a heavy wooden yoke, Bessus was made to stand by the roadside while the army marched by. When Alexander came up to where the wretched man was placed, he caused his chariot to halt, and asked him why he had betrayed his King, who was his kinsman and benefactor. He answered that he had not done it alone ; others had planned it with him, and they had done it in hope of winning Alexander's favour. The King showed his appreciation of the answer by ordering him scourged and sending him in chains to Bactra (Balkh), his capital, whence, in the following winter, he was brought to Zariaspa (Charjui), and there, by a court of his peers, condemned in due and proper Median form to suffer the death of a regicide. They cut off his ears and nose, and sent him to Ecbatana to be put to death by the native author- ities. So, though Greek and Macedonian shuddered at the horror of mutilation, the lord of the East was avenged by the East, and in genuine Eastern style. 39° Alexander the Great. [330 B.C.- Arrian,* in passing, cannot restrain his Hellenic instincts from volunteering the remark: " I do not approve of this harsh punishment of Bessus; nay, rather, I regard the mutilation of the body as a barbarian trick, and agree that Alexander was led into imitation of the ways of the rich Medo-Persians, and especially of the way, characteristic of their kings, of treating their subjects as inferior beings." But the larger significance of the event he does not note. Viewed as an act of political prudence, it left the East to bear the burden of the Shah's death, and cleansed the hands of Alexander. Viewed on still larger perspective, it presented a first glimmer- ing of that idea of empire and law which was gaining hold upon the mind of Alexander, whereby peoples were to find the rule and order of life in the beaten track of their own usage and faith, and empire, wrought out from within rather than imposed from without, was to be more a thing of levelling the barriers of distrust and misunderstanding than of impressing a foreign will and sway. The complete conquest of Bactria and its adjoin- ing country, Sogdiana, Bokhara, and southern Turkestan, was to Alexander a necessary condition of assured peace. Here was the very centre of the Persian religion, the scene of Zoroaster's teachings. The valleys of the Oxus and of the Jaxartes evi- dently formed then the seat of a strong, well- developed civilisation that had been able to assert itself against the nomadic tribes of the western desert and against the Scythians of the north, and * Arrian, Anabasis, iv., 7. 329 B.C.] In Afghanistan. 397 supported a population, we have reason to believe, considerably denser and more settled than that of to-day. Here Alexander found the sturdiest oppo- sition he had met with since entering Asia. The people he was dealing with were of the Aryan stock pure and undefiled, and uncontaminated by the re- finements which had their seat in the old settled life of Mesopotamia. Evidence enough of the difficult- ies encountered is found in the fact that over two years (April, 329 B.C., to May, 327 B.C.) were oc- cupied in reducing to complete submission a district three hundred and fifty miles square, while in a single year (July, 331 B.C., to July, 330 B.C.) he had overrun Syria, Assyria, Persia, Media, and Parthia, a domain one thousand miles in width. CHAPTER XXV. IN BOKHARA AND TURKESTAN. 329-327 B.C. AFTER the capture of Bessus Alexander tarried in the rich plains of the Oxus long enough to rest his army and to replenish his supply of horses, which had suffered terribly in passing the mountains, and then pushed rapidly across Sogdiana to the north-east, and occupied its chief city, Mara- canda (modern Samarkand). Since crossing the Oxus he had been upon soil which to-day is under Russian protection, or is Russian outright. Samarkand, the most important ancient city of the Transcaspian region, and the city where Tamerlane received his crown, is now an important station of the Trans- caspian Railway, and represents in its schools of theology the strong fortress of Mohammedan orthodoxy. It is the " head of Islam, as Mecca is its heart." From here Alexander pushed on a hundred miles and more farther to the banks of the Jaxart.es (modern Syr-Darja) at the modern Kho- jend. Suddenly the flame of revolt burst out in his 398 329-327 B.C.] In Bokhara and Turkestan. 399 rear. The whole frontier was ablaze with defiant opposition. The last remnants of the Persian power, under leadership of Spitamenes, joined with the frontier population, and the roaming tribes of the North arose as by concerted signal to sweep across the path by which he had come and to shut him off from the world. First he turned back against the seven frontier cities which, in close proximity to one another to the west of Khojend, formed the barrier against the northern steppes. These in quick succession he reduced to subjection. Then he turned back eastward to Khojend. A great force of Scythians (Sakai) had now gath- ered on the opposite bank of the river, apparently awaiting their opportunity to invade the country. Their insulting challenges hurled across the river dared the Macedonians to cross and find out how different Scythians were from the effeminate peoples of Asia. Alexander had hitherto had no purpose to carry his arms farther, but this was too much for his sense of sportsmanship. In order to give them a sample of his mettle he did just what he had done six years before (335 B.C.) at the Danube: he made a sudden passage of the river, using the same means as at the Oxus, drove the Scythians before him, and penetrated a day's march into their land, until the bad water of the country, which in the excessive heat he had drunk too rashly, came to the rescue of the fugitives and demonstrated the great chieftain's bowels to be mortal. On the borders of the stream he founded a city, the Alexandria-Eschata marked by the present site 400 Alexander the Great. [329 B.c- of Khojend. Within twenty days its walls were built, and it was settled with the Macedonians who had become unfit for service, some of the Greek mercenaries, and people from the neighbourhood who volunteered for the new enterprise. During his two years' stay in the North-east at least eight such colonies were founded, — according to Justin, twelve, — and these became afterward important factors, as outposts of Hellenism, in assuring the unity of the empire and in leavening the lump. In no wise was Greece so effective as in the city form. Her civilisation was at the heart social and human, and urban life was its sine qua non: The site of Alexandria-Eschata (Khojend) was given its importance not only by the bend which the Syr-Darja makes at this point toward the north, but preeminently by its command of the eastern route into far central Asia. Hence the beaten track leads on through the rich province of Ferg- hana by Osh to the mountain-passes descending to Kashgar, the gate of China. All these regions are so deep in the heart of the continent, here at the " roof of the world," where to-day Russia, China, and India meet, that the rivers all weary of seeking the open sea, and die in the land. The Jaxartes, which Alexander seems to have sup- posed was the Tanais (Don), had been the recognised boundary of the Persian Empire, and Alexander re- garded it as a proper limit of his own conquests. His geography, as we have already seen, regarded the Caspian as connected directly with the Sea of Azov or the Euxine. Strabo, three centuries later, 327 B.C.] In Bokhara and Turkestan. 401 held it, in accordance with the vulgate opinion since Patrocles and Eratosthenes (third century B.C.), to be a gulf of the great northern ocean. The region of the Rha (Volga) was entirely left out of calcula- tion until the second century after Christ, when the river Volga duly appears in the map of Claudius Ptolemaeus as a tributary of the Caspian, and the Caspian resumes its place as an inland sea, as it had been treated by Herodotus. The Jaxartes was re- garded by Alexander as the boundary between Europe and Asia. A later expression of his sug- gests that it may have been his intention, after com- pleting the subjugation of Asia, to return and effect the conquest of the Scythians by way of the Helles- pont and the Black Sea; but this was no part of his initial purpose, which was certainly limited to a conquest of the Persian Empire proper. The Hindu Kush range, which he had crossed on entering Bac- tria, he believed to be the Caucasus, and this an extension of the Taurus range, running east and west directly through the centre of Asia. The southern half of this Asia he understood to be occupied by Assyria, Persia, Ariana, and India (Penjab), the lat- ter bounded on the west by the Indus, and consti- tuting on the east the south-eastern limit of the continent. At the Jaxartes, therefore, his conquests found a natural halting-place. Having seen the river, he retreated, but his name and memory he left to survive in the " tradition of the mouth " through the turnings and overturnings of more than twenty centuries. Nowhere in all the lands he con- quered is the direct tradition of his greatness, strange 26 402 Alexander the Great. [329 B.c- to say, so vivid to-day as among the mountain tribes about the Ferghana. Their chiefs claim still direct descent from Alexander, and, as a recent explorer * testifies, " everything great and grand they still couple with the name of Alexander." From the Jaxartes he turned back now to quell the insurrection that still prospered in his rear. At Samarkand his garrison had been beleaguered in the citadel. A detachment of his army sent on in ad- vance had been sadly defeated. He came on, an avenging storm, drove Spitamenes, rebels, and raid- ers fugitive into the far steppes of the North, and then turned back to waste with fearful fury the whole pleasant valley of the Sogd. More than a hundred thousand lives were sacrificed in expiation of the re- volt. Then there was quiet. This ended the year's work. It was already the depth of winter, and he returned to winter quarters in Zariaspa, the site of the modern Charjui, where the Transcaspian railway now crosses the Oxus (Amu-Darja). The year 328 B.C. was spent again in Bokhara, where persistent hostility still asserted itself at many points. The mountains were full of retreats where opposition found a refuge, and the sturdy, warlike character of the people gave Alexander the sorest trial he was called upon to face in all his mili- tary career. Bactria, too, was again in danger, and Craterus, who represented Alexander in his absence, was only after a sharp engagement successful in again relegating Spitamenes and his half-nomad fol- lowing to the wilderness of the west. Not until * Franz von Schwarz, Alexanders Feldziige in Turkestan, p. 97. 327 B.C.] In Bokhara and Turkestan. 403 later, when an attack led by Alexander was threat- ened, did these followers bow the knee and pay their tribute to the great King in the form of Spitamenes's head. At the end of the season Alexander returned again toward the boundaries of Bactria. He spent the most of the winter at Nautaka (Shachrisabs- Shaar in central Bokhara). During the campaign of 328 B.C. in Sogdiana occurred at Samarkand one of the most grievous misdeeds chargeable against Alexander's personal record — the murder of his friend Clitus. The in- cidents connected with it, stated and discussed fully as they are in all our sources, afford so clear a revelation of our hero's mood and inner life, and so complete a picture of the man off his guard, that they are worthy of fullest recital. Clitus had been the captain of the cavalry agema but after the death of Philotas was promoted, along with the new favourite Hephaestion, to the com- mand of half the chosen immortals, the hetairoi cavalry. Unlike Hephaestion, he had remained a stalwart Macedonian in tastes and sympathies, and had long regarded with apprehension and concealed vexation the Medo-mania of his King ; and yet he was a loyal friend, and all might have gone well, but for the madness of wine. One night, on the oc- casion of a festival of Dionysus, the symposium had been protracted to abnormal length, and the pota- tions had been deeper than was the wont even with these fervent devotees of Bacchus. In the depths of a Greek drinking-bout, small talk and banter were apt to find their common pabulum, not in politics 404 Alexander the Great. [329 B.c- and the weather, but in the finesse of the Greek mythology, about which everybody knew some- thing, and the tantalising variations of which offered themes as unlikely of final settlement as either the tariff or determinism. This night the conversation turned on the problem of the paternity of Castor and Pollux, and the unhappy impulse of some one, who was at once a modernising realist and a vapid flatterer, brought it down to earth and turned it into a comparison of Alexander and the aforesaid demi- gods. Surely the conqueror of Asia had wrought greater deeds than these provisional worthies. It is forsooth the perversely narrow-minded people who see no good and great thing except in old times and in the Old Testament, and utterly ignore the great movements and great men of their own day. There were many seconders. Courtier zeal strove to outbid itself. Alexander's deeds were extolled as greater than the labours of the widely travelled Hercules. The old-fashioned Macedonians were shocked at the impiety, but held their peace ; only the impulsive Clitus raised his voice in protest. As the conversation, however, developed into a com- parison of the achievements of Philip and of Alex- ander, to the disparagement of the former, the issue between the new school and the old became still more sharply drawn, and when the revellers came to amuse themselves by singing the serio-comic verses of Pranichus, which chaffed the old Macedonian officers for their defeats in Sogdiana, the last straw was added to the burden. Clitus's indignant protest against exposing worthy veterans to ridicule as 327 B.C.] In Bokhara and Turkestan. 405 cowards was answered by Alexander, who had thus far quietly treated the whole discussion as baccha- nalian nonsense— and answered, it appears, with a jest: " Clitus seems to be pleading his own cause." But the jest carried a sting to the half-drunken advocate, and anger and wine drowned humour. ' You ought to be the last one to name me a coward — you who at Granicus, fleeing from Spithridates's sword, owed your life to my hand. These Mace- donians, whom your creatures ridicule, have bought with their blood your fame." Alexander had thus far preserved his composure, but now a sensitive point had been touched, and he rebuked Clitus. Such talk, he said, served only to stir up animosities and sedition. But Clitus was in no mood to heed the injunction of silence. " Why do you ask free- men to dine with you at all, if you are unwilling they should speak their minds ? You 'd better associate altogether with your lickspittle Persians, who bend the knee to your white tunic, and say only what you want them to." Alexander's temper could tolerate an indefinite amount of mythological con- troversy, but this approached dangerously near to twitting on facts. Anger came quick and strong. He seized the first object that lay at his hand, hurled it at the offender, and reached to find his sword. A prudent guard had hidden it out of his sight. Friends gathered about seeking to soothe and re- strain him, but he broke from them, and shouting loud to his guards in his native Macedonian idiom — indication of return to first, savage principles — he bade the trumpeter blow the call, and smote him 406 Alexander the Great. [329 B.c- with clenched fist when he hesitated to obey. Clitus's friends, in hope of preventing a collision, hurried him out of the room, and Ptolemy led him away out of the citadel and beyond the moat; but his fate and the folly of wine drew him back. In a moment he had entered at another side of the banqueting-hall, and raising the portiere that hung before the door, stood definantly there, chanting in tone of reckless challenge Euripides's verses of dis- content from the " Andromache " : " Alas, in Greece how ill things ordered are! When trophies rise for victories in war, Men count the praise not theirs who did the deed, But give alone to him who led the meed." A few words brought the import of the well- known passage. The apparition at the doorway was sudden as the challenge was insulting. Quick as a flash the impetuous King snatched a spear from the hands of a guard and hurled it at the figure by the raised curtain. The deed was done. The friend of his childhood, his life-companion and rescuer, lay gasping out his life. Quick came the rebound from the fury of anger in a passion of remorse. Alexander bent by the side of the prostrate body, drew out the fatal spear, and would have turned it against himself, but his com- panions seized him and led him away by force to his chamber. There he lay through the night and through the day, writhing in the torment of remorse and self-reproach. Now he would call Clitus by name as if to awake him from death, now implore 327 B.C.] In Bokhara and Turkestan. 407 his forgiveness, now chide himself as murderer of his friends, now call the name of his nurse Lanice, Clitus's sister, and, as if she were present, abuse himself in self-accusation before her: " How ill have I repaid thee, kindly foster-mother, for all thy care in rearing me! Thy sons thou hast given to die fighting in my behalf; thy brother I have slain with mine own hand." When the first storm of grief had spent itself, he lay still upon his bed, neither eating nor drinking, nor uttering a word. So for three days, until the fear spread through the camp that he might become demented. Men came to plead with him that he should face his work and put his grief behind him ; but he listened to none of them, till finally " specious platitudes of kismet and predestination began to soothe, and a sophistic Greek infused a baleful balm, reminding the successor of Darius that emperors stand above obligation and above law."* Still the deed re- mained a burden upon his soul, and the memory of it seems to have embittered the remainder of his life. Perhaps it added something of the hardness we cannot fail to note creeping in upon his temper during the latter years. Continuous life in the hard experience of war, coupled with the unnatural ex- citements of risk and enormous success, might well have been expected to show their effects in his character; but this incident alone cannot be made, prominent as it has been in the accounts of his life, to carry the whole argument. A man who aspired to rule the whole world had ♦Hogarth, Philip and Alexander. 408 Alexander the Great. [329 B.c- shown himself unable to rule his own temper. His weakness stood out in the powerful light of one terrible demonstration. He saw it himself and de- spised himself. He hardened himself against his shame and grew harsh. So our ideals slip away from us, as we discover our weakness, and paint their substitutes over " to resemble iron." Yet we shall do Alexander injustice if we attribute his unhappy act to a radical decadence of character, or see in it an indication that his relations to his men and his attitude as a sovereign had suffered radical change. He was a human being, and the incident helps to show how very human he was ; but still the Alexan- der who hurled the spear at Clitus and then bowed in instant repentance over the prostrate body is, on the whole, the same Alexander whose impulsive violence and impulsive generosity and love have all through the story of his life given an individual colour to a character shaped in strong lines of sagacity, idealism, and force. The significant thing is that he could still repent. Arrian says well : * u Alexander is the only one I know of among the kings of olden time who from nobility of character repented of the errors he had committed. The majority of men, even when themselves convinced they have done wrong, make the mistake of thinking they can conceal their sin by defending their action as just. But, as I look at it, the only cure for sin is for the sinner to confess it and to be visibly repentant regarding it. ' ' If the Clitus incident is to serve any didactic pur- pose beyond that of a temperance lecture, it can ♦Arrian, Anabasis ■, vii., 28, 327 B.C.] In Bokhara and Turkestan. 409 only be used as a further illustration of the Mace- donian envy, which had two years before shown itself in the conspiracy of Philotas, and which still maintained a smouldering life behind the ashes. The old-fashioned Macedonians could not reconcile themselves to the sight of their King hobnobbing with Persian grandees and toying with Oriental fashions and manners. His reconstruction policy of reconciliation and amalgamation found no real favour in the hearts of these Stalwarts; they be- lieved in robuster things. Warrior-like, they re- sented any curtailment of the doctrine that to the victors belong the spoils. The murder of Clitus occurred at Samarkand in the year 328 B.C. In the following spring (327 B.C.) another thing occurred which furnishes further in- dication of the same unreconcilable spirit of stalwart- ism. In the train of Alexander had been since the beginning of his campaigns in Asia the Olynthian Callisthenes, nephew and pupil of Aristotle, a man of great personal dignity and scholarly refinement, and distinguished alike by his frankness of speech and by his skill as a writer and speaker. He was the literary man of the court, par excellence, and he had accompanied the army with the express purpose of recording and glorifying the great deeds of his sovereign. The rescued fragments of his Persica, which covered the period down to Darius's death, betray him to have been more rhetorician than chronicler. Intimate as his relations had been with Alexander, his brusqueness of speech, addressed not infrequently 4io Alexander the Great. [329 B.c- against the new cosmopolitanism, had of late brought him into some disfavour. His independence of man- ner, too, manifesting itself now in declining invita- tions to social entertainments that most men eagerly sought, now in a churlish and disgruntled air that seemed to speak disapproval of all he saw, and cast a gloom over the company of which he was a mem- ber, had served to brand him as a malcontent, so that Alexander is said once to have mildly expressed his disapproval of his conduct by quoting a verse of Euripides: " I hate the sophist who is not sophos [wise] for himself: physician, heal thyself." On one occasion, being called upon at the King's dinner- table to make an extempore speech in praise of the Macedonians, he did it with such fervour of elo- quence that all rose from their seats to applaud, and cast their garlands upon him as a tribute. There- upon Alexander, with the remark that so good a theme makes eloquence easy, bade him test his skill by turning the subject about and criticising the Macedonians, to the end that they might know their faults as well as their virtues. Callisthenes accepted the challenge with all vigour, and pro- ceeded to score them with a boldness and skill that well-nigh provoked an outburst of disorder. He spared not even Philip, who, he dared to say, had grown great out of the discords of the Greeks — " in civil strife e'en villains rise to fame." His effort may have been an artistic success, but as a contribu- tion to the spread of peace and good-will among men it was a failure. It certainly made the author thoroughly disliked, and Alexander expressed the 327 B.C.] In Bokhara and Turkestan. 411 opinion that he had " given a sample of his ill will rather than of his eloquence." Of his churlishness there seems to have been no moral ground for doubt. It was Callisthenes, too, who at about this time provoked a " scene " at a state banquet by ostenta- tiously declining to perform the act of proskyncsis (prostration), which had been introduced as a form of etiquette from the Oriental usage. Stories were circulated, also, of the wild things he had said about resistance to tyrants, and defiance of arbitrary power, and rejection of foreign usages. Particularly among the young men of the court his bluntness and appar- ent fearlessness of speech had won him a certain admiration. He was suspected of having much in- fluence with them. Hence when a conspiracy against the life of the King, originating in the per- sonal grudge of one who had been severely pun- ished, was one day discovered among the pages of the court, suspicion turned to him. Whether there was any real evidence against him we shall never know. The chief culprit, Hermolaus, was his inti- mate, and openly confessed sympathy with his views. Despite the express statements of Aristobulus and Ptolemy that the pages named him as their instiga- tor, equally explicit statements of other authorities to the contrary are probably correct. He was put in chains, and died some months later, still a prisoner. This all happened at Balkh, in the spring of 327 B.C. The coldness which is supposed to have grown up between Aristotle and Alexander is com- monly brought into some connection with this occur- rence. 412 Alexander the Great. [329B.C.- In the early spring of 327 B.C., Alexander had entered the mountain country at the extreme east of Sogdiana, to subdue the last relics of resistance which lingered still in the mountain fastnesses. The Bactrian chieftain Oxyartes, a former associate of Bessus, had withdrawn, with the families of several of the Bactrian nobility under his protection, into an extensive and well-nigh impregnable fortress located on the peak of a precipitous mountain-rock (Baisun-tau). There he sat in cool defiance and presumed immunity until three hundred Macedon- ian soldiers performed the impossible, climbed up the face of the almost perpendicular cliff command- ing the citadel, and so forced a surrender. Among the captives was Roxane, daughter of Ox- yartes, who, Curtius Rufus says, possessed "surpass- ing beauty and a grace of bearing rarely seen among barbarians. " Her beauty won a victory in the hour of her father's defeat — the first victory Asia had won over its conqueror. Thus far Alexander's breast- plate had proved impervious to Cupid's arrows. Before the storied charms of Darius's wife and daughters he had stood unmoved. Except for his intimacy with Barsine, Memnon's widow, who was taken captive at Damascus, he had never been known to pay the slightest heed to the attractions of women. But now it was a case of love at first sight, and declining to use the right of a conqueror, he proposed an honourable marriage. Oxyartes thus became his ally and friend, and through his mediation the remaining opposition of the country was rapidly conciliated. 327 B.C.] hi Bokhara and Turkestan. 413 This was a further decided step in the King's policy of conciliation and amalgamation, which, to the disappointment of the old-school Macedonians, had been steadily unfolding itself of late. They looked decidedly askance at the marriage, but no one ventured a protest. The situation was becom- ing too strong for them. The Oriental element, arrayed with the Greeks who sympathised with the new idea, was already powerful enough to set the tone, and behind him Alexander had the unflinching loyalty of the army. For the next four years we hear, strange to say, nothing further about Roxane. Shortly after the King's death (323 B.C.) she bore him a son, who be- came a disturbing factor for a while in the problems of the succession, until Cassander put him and his mother out of the way (311 B.C.). She plays, there- fore, small part in the story of Alexander, but the lonely record of the marriage stands to mark the progress of the new idea of fusing races and nations in a world-empire — the one idea which we are justi- fied as associating with Alexander's conception of what his conquests might be made to mean. Some have claimed it was his main purpose at the end, as at the beginning, to carry Greek sovereignty and Greek ideas over the East ; others have chosen to view his career as shaped alone by a restless, in- satiable greed of conquest that should bring the whole world beneath his arms. He surely loved conquest, because he loved to achieve ; he was rest- lessly active, because he loved to create and shape and do ; but the one dominant purpose toward which 414 Alexander the Great. [329-327 B.C. all his achievement looked, and in which all the facts of his life and all his expression and action find con- sistent explanation, is this ideal of establishing, in the organised form of empire, cooperation and a common understanding between those two great elements of the civilised life of men around which, as spiritual nuclei, had been shaped the dualistic history of mankind through all the time and within all the horizon that he and men of his day could explore and know — the life of the East and the life of the West, orientalism and occidentalism. CHAPTER XXVI. THE INVASION OF INDIA. 327-326 B.C. TWO full years had now been occupied in effect- ing the subjugation of two remote north- eastern provinces of the Persian Empire. The conquest of all Assyria, Persia (proper), and Media had cost but one. The reason for the con- trast is to be found not in the difficulty of the terrain, or in the remoteness of the country, but in the people. In Bactria the Macedonian had met his Indo- European kin. The Medes and the Persians, who, as representing the forward waves of the great Iranian influx, had for three centuries controlled Mesopo- tamia, and had given their name to its empire, were now so thoroughly absorbed in its civilisa- tion that they could no longer be counted as Indo- Europeans. In Bactria and Sogdiana the blood and the spirit of the Iranians remained in uncor- rupted vigour. The union between Alexander and Roxane was therefore the joining of two streams of Indo-European blood. In the movement of Indo- 415 41 6 Alexander the Great. [327 B.C.- European migration and influence toward the south- east, from Europe into Asia, the routes by the north of the Caspian and by the south had met, though the kinship of the wayfarers betrayed itself only in the stubbornness with which they fought each other when they met. There remained now of the Persian Empire for the conqueror to traverse only the extreme southern portions. Next in his way lay the satrapy of India, directly to the south. If he should conquer this, descend the Indus to its mouth, and then return to Babylon through Gedrosia, he would have fairly completed the circuit of the Persian world. Since the days of Cyrus and Darius Hystaspes, a certain district in the northern and western part of the Indus basin had been a nominal dependency of the Persian Empire, yielding its annual tribute of 360 talents of gold-dust, and furnishing its contingent of troops to the army. The host which Xerxes led into Greece contained, as Herodotus * reports, " In- dians clothed in raiment made of wood [cotton or bast ?], and carrying bows of bamboo and bamboo arrows tipped with iron." In the battle of Gaug- amela had appeared a force of Indians, " neighbours of the Bactrians," and some fifteen elephants " be- longing to the Indians who live this side of the Indus " (Arrian). India was still to the outer world a land of the unknown. Cyrus is not certainly known to have entered it. Darius had merely sent an army into the northern districts, and caused ships to be sent * Herodotus, vii., 65. 326 B.C.] The Invasion of India. 417 (509 B.C.) down the course of the Indus to find its mouth and ascertain the possibility of a water-route around to the Red Sea. Herodotus tells all that we know of this expedition : 11 Wishing to find out where the Indus, the second river known to produce crocodiles, empties into the sea, he sent an expedition of ships under charge of Scylax, of Caryanda [a city in Caria,] along with others upon whom he could rely to bring a true report. They started from the city of Kaspatyros [Kacyapapura] and the Paktyan country, and sailed down the river toward the east and the sunrise into the ocean, and then through the ocean in a westerly direction, until, in the thirtieth month, they came to the place where the King of Egypt had sent off the Phoenicians to circumnavigate Africa." * The little which Herodotus had to tell about the land may well have had its remote source in Scylax's reports. It all is vague and unreal, most of it dressed in the garb of the fabulous. Monster ants that delve in the vast sand-deserts bounding the land to the east bring to the surface the gold-dust which Persia receives in tribute. No people are known to live beyond them toward the sunrise. There are many tribes of many tongues. They are clothed in garments made of rushes beaten and plaited like a mat. They make their boats of reed, one joint sufficing for a boat. They kill nothing that has life, but live on herbs — in particular, upon a peculiar grain of the size of millet, in the pod, which they boil and eat with the pod. There are * Herodotus, iv., 44. 27 41 8 Alexander the Great. [327 B.C.- trees there which bear wool instead of fruit, and wool which excels in beauty and fineness that of sheep. All the birds and animals are much larger than in other countries, except the horses alone. A generation after Herodotus's time, the famous physician Ctesias of Croton, on his return from long residence in Persia, published, among other works, a book about India, of which we possess a summary made by Photius. Ctesias had never been in India, and his book could do no more than report what was commonly believed in Persia concerning this land of the remote and the marvellous; and that proves to be scanty, much of it grotesque. He has to tell of elephants and tigers ; apes with wonderful tails; birds of brilliant plumage, that speak with human voice in Hindu, or mayhap, if taught, in Greek; of men, some fair-skinned, some dark; of races of dwarfs and of giants; of men with tails, and men with heads like those of dogs; of fields rich beyond belief; of lakes swimming with oil pleasant to the taste ; of palm trees that touched the sky ; of reeds that grew by the river-banks as tall as the masts of ships, and so large that two men with their arms could not encircle one. Everywhere the back- ground of truth glimmers through the stories, but among the Greeks of the day they seem #0 have won the writer only the reputation of a ^classical liar. When Alexander, in his southward march, crossed the barriers of the Hindu Kush, and through the Kabul Valley entered the plains of the Indus, he passed from one world into another. The early 326 B.C.] The Invasion of India. 419 history of human civilisation unfolded itself in two great world-areas which were virtually isolated from each other entirely. One, the far East, shaped its destiny about the two centres India and China; the other, the near East, created for itself two funda- mental civilisations in the two river valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile. The civilisations of Me- sopotamia and Egypt found their solvent in the Mediterranean, and the first products of the blend appear in the half-recognised ^Egean culture which we temporarily call by the name Mycenaean. The ingrafting upon this stock of the active element, European occidentalism, brought into being that form of Mediterranean civilisation which, first under the leadership of Greece, then of Rome, furnished the substrate of modern European civilisation. It was Alexander's hand that fastened the graft securely in place. His mission dealt only with the relation of European occidentalism to the orientalism of the nearer East. The brief incursion into north-western India was only an incident — a bit of side-play con- sequent upon the extension of Darius's Empire to include it. And yet, upon Alexander's temporary path, trodden centuries later by the missionary fury of Mohammedanism, came back into the near East, and thence into the Western world, many a bit of Hindu wisdom, as the fable literature, from ^Esop to Eberhard of Wurtemberg, for instance, may well attest. The work of establishing permanent communica- tion between the two major areas of human civil- isation — the Indo-Chinese of the far East, on the 420 Alexander the Great. [327 B.c- one hand, and that of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Europe, united in the Mediterranean, on the other — tarried for twenty centuries after Alexander's work was complete. It tarried till a route was opened by the sea, and until maritime commerce gave the impulse. The discovery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope set on foot a move- ment that produced the Suez Canal. The leadership in that European-Mediterranean civilisation to the creation of which Alexander gave the impulse passed, in the order of time, into the hands of powers whose strength was gathered from the sea; and to them, as Alexander's successors, was given the mission of building the bridge of ships between Europe and the far East. The route by which Alexander entered India, namely, the passes of the Hindu Kush and the Kabul valley, was, in all probability, the same by which, many centuries before, the ancestors of the Hindu Aryans had come when they separated them- selves from the original Indo-Iranian stock. Their close relationship with their Iranian brethren was still betrayed in unmistakable marks. Their lan- guages differed from each other scarcely more than the popular dialects of northern and southern Ger- many to-day, certainly not so much as Dutch and German. Their religions, despite the thoroughgoing reformation which, under Zarathushtra's (Zoro- aster's) name, had purified the faith of the northern branch, still bore the evident marks of earlier identity. The Varuna of the Vedas was the Ahuramazda of 326 B.C.] The Invasion of India. 421 the Persians; Mitra corresponded to Mithra; the dragon-slaying (Vrtrahan) Indra to the victorious Verethragna; the Adam of the Hindus, Yama, the son of Vivasvant, who first walked the paths of death, was the Avestan Yima, son of Vivanhvant. The priests of both prepare the soma drink (Avestan haomd) for the sacred service, press out the sap, cleanse it through the sieve, and mix it with milk. One calls the priest hotar, the other zaotar. The ritual, always more conservative than the theology, retained the surest evidence of the common origin. The Aryans, immigrants, were still clearly distin- guishable by their fair complexion and blue eyes from the dark-skinned Dravidians who had formed the original population of the land. The Vedic hymns tell of the conflicts of the newcomers with the dark-skinned Dasyus: how Indra, " the much- invoked, smote Dasyus and Qimyus, as was his wont, hurled them with his thunderbolt to the earth, and won, with help of his white friends, the land " (Rigveda, I., 100, 18). Arrian, in his Indica (chap, vi.), writing on the authority of Alexander's contemporaries and associates, reports that " the Indians living toward the south are more like the ^Ethiopians, for they are black in their faces, and their hair is black; but they are not so flat-nosed or so curly- haired as the ^Ethiopians. The Indians farther to the north seem to resemble in their bodies the Egyptians." In another connection (chap, xviii.) he says: " The Indians are spare in body, and tall, and much lighter in weight than other men." 422 Alexander the Great. [327B.C- In the period which produced the Vedic hymns (perhaps 1 500-1 200 B.C.) the Hindu Aryans were still limited to the northern districts — the Indus basin and perhaps * the Upper Ganges valley. Only once is the Ganges (Ganga) mentioned in the Rigveda. From north to south, from the moun- tains to the seas, the Indus basin, covered mostly by the two later provinces of Punjab and Sindh, represents an extent of from seven hundred and fifty to eight hundred miles. In Alexander's time, however, the Aryan Hindus had already brought under their control the greater portion of northern and central India. Their medi- aeval period was already well under way, a thousand years in advance of its counterpart in Western life. The naive objectivism of the Vedic period, which plainly faced the outer world to seek of it such ma- terial blessings — gain, booty, offspring, victory — as it had to give, had yielded to the inward look. Life had passed to the ethico-religious basis ; a yearning for the supernatural had overcome that for the natural; Indra and Varuna had been displaced by Brahma; repentance and asceticism, the hermit and the monk, were the order of the day. Just when Greece, at the end of the sixth century B.C., was coming to its ripeness, the appearance of Buddha was providing for India the beginnings of a recorded history. The transfer of the central scene of Aryan life from the Indus to the Ganges was doubtless chiefly * E. W. Hopkins, " The Punjab and the Rig- Veda," in the Jour- nal of the American Oriental Society, xix. 326 B.C.] The Invasion of India. 423 responsible for the radical changes in thought, cus- toms, and social organisation which separate the people of the Vedas from the Hindus who emerge upon our observation in the fourth and third cen- turies B.C. The conquest of a civilisation far more advanced than their own, at least in the outward forms of settled life, and the acquirement of sover- eignty over the vast range of territory involved, had led to the creation of a stronger centralised form of the State, to the development of the kingship out of the tribal chieftaincy, to the crystallisation of a sys- tem of castes, guaranteed by the predominant in- fluence of the Brahman priesthood, and finally to the formation of an opulent luxurious type of civilised life. The old mother-land of the Hindus, the Punjab district, participated, however, but secondarily in the great changes which reshaped the life and ex- perience of the Magna India of the East. The tribal organisation, with its government of petty rajas, counterparts of Homer's basilees y survived. The Brahmanic laws and the system of castes were but imperfectly recognised. Some districts had no Brahman priests at all. Hence the people of the Indus valley were looked upon by the Ganges people as outside the pale, and called Vratyas, or heretics. They ate the flesh of oxen with garlic ; they knew no respect for the sacred law; they confused the castes ; they dealt in all manner of impurity, license, and vulgarity ; they knew neither trade nor agricul- ture ; they had no knowledge of the sacred language of the Brahmans, the Sanskrit, but used only the 424 Alexander the Great. [327 B.C.- vulgar Prakrit, its debased successor; they lived in perpetual war and disorder : in short, they were in the eyes of these new Hindus what the Macedonians were to the Greeks who had left them behind in their entrance into the Greek Peninsula — a mass of disgusting barbarians. Nothing is so odious to a new civilisation as the type it has just left behind and the garb it has just shuffled off. And yet the Hindus of the Punjab were simply old-fashioned Hindus, as the Macedonians were old-fashioned Greeks. Their preservation of the old warlike temper was one compensation for their failure to participate in the civilised progress of their kinsfolk, for Arrian credits them with being " the bravest people of all Asia in war." Toward the end of the spring of 327 B.C. Alexan- der turned his back upon the north country, and, with an army of over one hundred thousand men, set out across the passes of the Hindu Kush. Ten thousand foot-soldiers and thirty-five hundred cav- alrymen had been left in Bactria, under Amyntas's command. The army of thirty thousand at Issus and forty-five thousand at Gaugamela had grown during the campaigns in Turkestan to eighty thou- sand. Money and success had made recruiting easy in the West. Every man who had the spirit of ad- venture in his veins wished now to be with Alexander. During the winter of 329-328 B.C. alone reinforce- ments to the number of nineteen thousand, recruited in Greece, Macedonia, Lycia, and Syria, joined the army at Zariaspa. So they poured in a continuous stream, doubling the army, besides filling the places 326 B.C.] The Invasion of India. 425 of the dead who had carried their wounds and their glory down into Hades, and of the disabled and weary who had either returned to their homes or been settled as colonists in the new-founded cities. Reinforcements continued to arrive even after the army had entered the Punjab, and in the last days before starting for the return there came five thou- sand Thracian horsemen and seven thousand Greeks and Macedonians ; so that, despite all its losses, the grand army set forth down the Indus one hundred and twenty thousand strong. In leaving the north, Alexander took with him also, of native troops, some thirty thousand Bactrians, . Sogdianians, Scy- thians, and Daan bowmen, all mounted on the fam- ous horses that Arab and Turk have since brought to the notice of Europe. In ten days he was across the mountains, back in the Kabul valley he had left two years before; and here he spent most of the summer (327 B.C.), busied in strengthening the city Alexandria-under-Caucasus (Charikar ?), which he had founded on his previous visit, and in making preparations for the venturesome campaign he was about to undertake. In the autumn he started on his march down the valley of the Kophen (the Kabul River) toward India. In response to his summons, several Hindu rajahs, and among them his friend Taxiles from be- yond the Indus, came to meet him, bringing pres- ents and the assurance of support. At a point about one hundred miles east of Kabul, approxi- mately at the site of the modern Jalalabad, he divided his army, sending one portion, under the 426 Alexander the Great. [327 B.C.- command of Hephaestion and Perdiccas, along the Kophen, while he, with the other part, struck north up the valley of the Choaspes, the modern Khonar (Chitral). The force sent down the Kophen was intended to reduce to subjection the peoples on the south of the river, and especially to seize the famous Khyber Pass, where in modern times the Afghans have struggled to assert their boundaries against the Briton. The purpose of Alexander's detour to the north, on the other hand, was to subjugate the mountain tribes inhabiting the valleys of the streams tributary to the Kophen on the north, and so to assure control of the Chitral passes, by which an im- portant route led over the mountains to the head- waters of the Oxus, and then on to the eastern limits of Bactria. The Chitral valley leads directly up to the great Pamir plateau, on the southern edge of which the frontiers of the world-rivals, the Russian Empire and the British Empire, separated at the opening of this century by two thousand miles, have finally met and touched. Here join them, too, the outposts of the Chinese Empire. Alexander had chosen, as usual, the harder part. The shepherd people of the mountains gave him vigorous resistance. But swiftly and relentlessly he swept them before him, storming and sacking their fortified towns, and scattering them as fugitives in the mountains. From the country of the Aspasians (Acvakas), who dwelt in the valley of the Khonar, he passed into the Pandjkora basin, thence into the valley of the Swat, where the powerful tribe of the Assakenans, whose territory stretched across the 326 B.C.] The Invasion of India. 42 Indus well toward the boundaries of Kashmir, awaited him. Their chief city, Massaga, yielded only after vigorous siege. One after another, their cities fell, and Alexander fought his way out into the Indus valley. One peaceful incident is recorded in the midst of this story of hurried fight and siege and slaughter. Somewhere in the lower valley of the Khonar the invaders came upon a peaceful, sun-blessed plain, where grew in abundance not only the vine, but, as the story has it, the laurel and the ivy too. The appearance of the ivy, which Arrian says the Mace- donians had not seen for years, and which they welcomed with a veritable frenzy of joy, revived memories of old legends of Dionysus's wanderings, which had led him through the Orient, even to the bounds of India. The wild ecstasies of the f iva cult, which personified the power of growth and re- production in nature, reminded, too, of the Dionysiac worship. Nothing further was needed, therefore, to encourage men of naive philology in reading the value Nysaeans into the name Nishadas, which the people of the country bore, and in identifying their city as a sacred Nysa of their own Hellenic god. The name of the sacred mountain Meru, adjoining the city, they also rejoiced to recognise as Greek, and explain as the mountain of the thigh (Greek, meros), an allusion to the temporary lodgment of the prematurely born Dionysus in the thigh of Zeus. The cordial welcome of the good king Akuphis joined with the kindly assurances of folk-etymology to give the strangers for a season the sense of home, 428 Alexander the Great. [327 B.c- and to make in after days the memory of this shel- tered vale of the Nishadas an oasis in the desert of their wanderings and wars. Through the mist of the romantic which enshrouds the story of this place there comes one solitary gleam of genial humour, a touch of nature, to assure us Nysa stood on solid ground. When King Akuphis, at his first meeting with the conqueror, had asked what his people might do to make the Macedonians their friends, he received the answer: " They shall make thee their governor, and send us as hostages one hundred of their best men." To this came the smiling reply: " But methinks, King, I shall rule better if I send you the worst and keep the best." Dionysus, it should be remarked in passing, was not the only Hellenic deity the Greeks fancied they identified in the Hindu pantheon. The storm-god Indra was for them the Zeus Hyetios, the rain-bring- ing Jupiter. Krishna was their own bluff, robust Hercules. Krishna had wrought heroic deeds, slain the wild bull, driven out monsters. He was always represented as armed with a massive club. From his thousands of wives he had begotten his one hun- dred and eighty thousand sons. Like Hercules, he was raised, after his death, to divine honours. On the fortified peak of a mountain which rose abruptly from the Indus's bank, an army of fugitives had taken its refuge. Here was a citadel that the boldest could not approach. Hercules himself, so the story went, had assaulted it in vain. It was a famous place, and marvellous are the accounts about it, so that our candid Arrian reports them all with 3 2 6 B . c .] The Invasion of India, 429 a cautious "it is said." Thus the height of the mountain is given as over six thousand feet, and its circuit as twenty-two miles. It was well wooded, had a fine spring of water at the summit, and much tillable land ; but on every side it was precipitously steep, and only one narrow path zigzagged up to its top. Its Sanskrit name may well have been Avarana, 11 the Refuge "; but the Greeks did the best they could, and called it Aornos (Aornis), " the Birdless," forsooth because it was so high. Among the various attempts at modern identification, that of General Abbott in his Gradus ad Aomo?i> which makes it to be Mount Mahaban (4125 feet above the plain), about thirty miles above the mouth of the Kabul, is the most plausible. To Alexander the difficulty was a challenge. Se- lecting from his army the boldest and best, among them two hundred of the companions, many bow- men, the famous hoplite brigade of Ccenus, and the ever-trusty Agrianians, he advanced to the base of the mountain. Learning from some peasants of the country that there was a spur of the mountain close under the citadel which could serve as vantage ground for an attack, he accepted their offer of guidance, and intrusted to Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, the hazardous enterprise of a dash up the mountain to this favoured spot. It was the Ptolemy who was afterward to be the founder of the famous house of Egyptian kings, wisest and best of Alex- ander's captains. Under cover of the night Ptolemy set out, and with him the Agrianians and a few 430 Alexander the Great. [327 b.c- picked men of the hypaspists and light - armed troops. Before morning the blaze of a beacon high on the mountain-side told that they were at their goal. They had escaped the observation of the enemy. Without waiting for the morning, they hastened to intrench themselves behind palisades and ditch. And it was none too soon ; for with daylight the enemy were upon them, and all day long the fight was hot about the little stockade. Alexander's first attempt to scale the mountain and bring help met with failure; but Ptolemy and his little band clung to their perch on the cliff till night came and the enemy withdrew. During the night Alexander succeeded in communicating with Ptol- emy through a deserter who knew the mountain path, and a plan of cooperation was arranged for the following day. Alexander was to try forcing his way, with all his men, directly up by the path leading to Ptolemy's position; and Ptolemy was to sally out against the enemy, when occupied in re- sisting the advance, and hold them thus between two fires. With the morning the struggle began. In the face of flying missiles, spear-thrusts, and tum- bling boulders, the Macedonians clambered up the narrow path or climbed the face of the cliffs, some- times man after man as on a ladder, sometimes in isolated groups or single venture. It was a slow, stubborn fight. Every foothold cost a battle. All day long the struggle lasted ; but, foot by foot, the line crept up the mountain-side, and at nightfall Alexander and Ptolemy joined forces on the ridge. The enemy's citadel occupied an isolated rock, 326 B.C.] TJie Invasion of India. 431 the highest peak of the mountain. Ptolemy's posi- tion was considerably below it, and separated by an interval of swamp and ravine so wide that the cata- pults, with from four to five hundred yards' range, could not reach the defenders on the walls. The capture of the fortress by direct assault seemed out of the question. Scaling the cliffs that formed the foundation of its walls was too hopeless a venture. But there were here an energy and a will that did not shrink from what to weaker spirits might seem quixotic device. The causeway at Tyre and the mound at Gaza must be repeated. Each soldier was instructed to collect a hundred wooden stakes or logs. Speedily swords became axes. Trees were felled and stripped. Soon a bridge-like causeway, built in cob-house construction, began to push itself out from the lower peak across the depression, lift- ing itself steadily upward toward the level of the fortress. Alexander was everywhere present to chide and cheer. The work went merrily onward. The first day the bridge advanced three hundred yards. Already it gave a standing-place from which the machine-guns and the slingers could beat back with bolts and stones the assaults of the besieged. Another day, and the engines began to get the range of the stronghold. Early on the fourth day the gap was closed, and the Macedonians were swarming upon an outjutting corner of the rocky peak which bore the citadel, and moving to sur- round and beset the walls. Then the defenders lost heart, and began negotiations for surrender. What they really hoped was to weary out the day 432 Alexander the Great. [327-326 B.C. with bargaining, and then escape under cover of the night. Seeing this, Alexander withdrew a little from the walls, and offered the chance of escape. The offer was accepted. The moment the retreat began, seven hundred guardsmen scaled the walls, and from within and without they and others set upon the miserable fugitives. Many fell by the sword ; more were the victims panic and the preci- pices claimed. Awe fell upon the land in presence of a will before which even the mountain-tops had ceased to yield a refuge. CHAPTER XXVII. THE BATTLE OF THE HYDASPES. 326 B.C. SOME two miles south of the point where the Kophen flows into the Indus, near the modern Attok, Alexander now joined his forces again with those of the Hephaestion and Perdiccas. The southern campaign had met with easy success, and all the country west of the Indus was now under the Macedonian control. All the strong positions had been left well garrisoned, and the country organised under provincial government as a satrapy. In the neighbourhood of Attok the Indus narrows its bed, flowing through a rocky channel which gives it a depth in places of from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet, and a width of scarcely more than two hundred and fifty feet. Here on a bridge of boats the crossing was made, attended with the pomp of sacrifice and festal games. It was the early spring of 326 B.C. Within the strip of land, one hundred miles or more broad, which lay between the Indus and the Hydaspes (Jhilam), the 28 433 434 Alexander the Great. [326 B.C. strongest of the petty rajahs who held sway was Tax- iles, at whose suggestion Alexander had, ostensibly at least, first conceived the idea of an Indian cam- paign. The Hindu reputation for trustworthiness and honesty was well maintained when this prince came forward now to welcome the invader to his land. First, he sent forward to meet the King his presents of welcome to the land — three thousand animals for sacrifice, ten thousand sheep, thirty elephants, two hundred talents of silver, and a con- tingent of seven hundred Hindu horsemen. Then began the march toward the residential city. Its name from which the Greeks seem to have borrowed a name for its king, was in its Sanskrit form Tak- shacila; the Greeks called it Taxila. Its site is marked still by wide-spreading mounds of ruins near the railway that joins Hasan Abdal and Rawal Pindi, and eight miles from the former place. A few miles outside the gates, Taxiles, at the head of his whole army in gala array, came forth to meet Alexander and give him greeting, and offer himself and all his kingdom into his hands. The neighbouring rajahs and chieftains came also with presents — ivory, fine linen, precious stones, and treasure — to make their subjection. Even from far Kashmir, whose snow-capped mountains peered above the northern horizon, came an embassy to greet the conqueror. On the other side of the Hydaspes to the east, awaited him, however, a different welcome. Tax- iles's zeal had had its motive in apprehensions of the waxing power of his neighbour and rival, the King of the Paurauvas, whom the Greeks called 326 B.C.] Battle of the Hydaspes. 435 Porus; and this Porus was already collecting his forces to dispute the passage of the Hydaspes. It was no confused horde, such as Darius had assem- bled at Gaugamela, that Alexander had here to face, but a disciplined and sturdy army, solidly com- pacted under resolute and intelligent leadership. The determined resistance which it offered in a battle lasting from the early morning till the eighth hour of the day showed that the old Aryan vigour still was there, and, furthermore, that these Hindu Aryans had acquired what their Iranian brethren lacked — the power of organisation, and the sense for cooperative mechanical action under central control. In the battle with Porus, Alexander was called upon to face conditions substantially different from any which had confronted him before in his already varied experience; and if any further proof was needed of the catholicity of his military genius, we have it when this youth of thirty years, after facing the Illyrians and Thracians on their mountain sides, the Boeotian phalanx in the plains of Thebes, the Persian cavalry at the Granicus, after scaling the walls of Tyre and humbling the impregnable fort- resses of Gaza, after scattering the assembled hosts of western Asia at Gaugamela, and driving the un- tamed sons of Iran from their plains and their aeries, passed through the eastern gates of the known, joined conflict with an utterly new, strange world, and won his battle from a people who combined in their resources, as none he had yet met, wealth, courage, organisation, and an advanced acquaintance with the art of war. No great general in the world's 436 Alexander the Great. [326 B.C. history was ever exposed to such a variety of tests, and yet he is the only one who never lost a battle. When Alexander, with his army, reached the banks of the Hydaspes, he found it swollen by the melting snows of the mountains to a mighty stream a mile in width. Fording could be attempted only at a few favoured spots, and for an army in the face of an enemy was out of the question. On the southern bank opposite was drawn up the army of Porus, thirty-five thousand strong. Three hundred elephants disposed along the line looked like towers in the living wall. To attempt landing an attacking force from boats in the face of this opposition was vain. The horses of the cavalry could not have been brought to face the elephants, whose strange odour and stranger trumpetings drove them into un- manageable panic ; and the cavalry was Alexander's chief reliance for the attack. There was nothing left, therefore, but to wait for a better chance or to find a better way. No opportunity, however, was given the enemy for relaxing interest or dividing attention. Every day or two a feint was made at crossing. Boats would be assembled, the cavalry would be drawn up on the bank, a squad would drive into the river. Sometimes the trumpets would blare out through the night, as if calling the attack; and then the subtle Greeks could have their joy at seeing these honourable Hindus keeping their sleepless watch in battle order, and the solemn elephants drawn up in ponderous and vain array. And so it went on until apprehension grew callous, 326 B.C.] Battle of the Hydaspes. 437 Then Alexander allowed the rumour to spread that he should wait until the low water of autumn before attempting to cross. The country round about was ravaged, — and incidentally reconnoitered, — and the great stores of supplies accumulated at the river-side gave credence to the story of the sum- mer wait. The movement of Alexander's troops up and down the river ceased to provoke suspicion. Nine or ten miles above the Macedonian camp the Hydaspes turned abruptly in its southward course to flow toward the west ; and near the sharp angle of its bend, a point which made out into the river afforded a convenient passage to a wooded island hard by the opposite shore. Between the camp and this tongue of land the river-bank was heavily wooded, and, in sharp contrast to the level plain of the other side, rose steeply into hills. At intervals along the high bank Alexander posted sentries to pass the word along, and so establish a complete connection between the camp and the chosen place of crossing. Thither, by a circuitous route of over fifteen miles * around behind the hills, he led a picked body of his troops, about thirty thousand strong. The great mass of the army was left in camp under command of Craterus, with orders to hold the enemy's attention there as long as pos- sible. Only after the enemy had wheeled about to face the troops, who would meantime have crossed * Cunningham, who in his Geography of Ancient India (p. \^lff.) identifies the site, verifying in the modern topography every detail of the ancient story, reckons the exact distance by the circuit from Jalalpur to Dilawar as seventeen miles, which corresponds precisely to Arrian's one hundred and fifty stades. 43 8 Alexander the Great. [326 B.C. the river above, and would then be advancing upon their right flank, was Craterus to try the crossing. A strong division, furthermore, composed of mer- cenary troops under the chief command of Meleager, was posted on the river-bank half-way between the camp and the proposed place of crossing, under orders similar to those of Craterus. Under cover of a dismal night of furious rain and thunder, Alexander reached the river-bank, and hastened to improvise a ferriage for his troops. The heavy infantry and a detachment of cavalry, in all more than half his force, were to remain on this side the river to hold in check the army of Abisares of Kashmir, known to be close by, advancing to Porus's aid. The remainder, composed chiefly of cavalry, the hypaspists, and archers, in all about thirteen thousand men, prepared to cross. Boats sawn asunder had been transported through the woods, and now were roughly and hastily joined again. Some galleys had been cautiously assembled at the spot. Skins stuffed with hay served the pur- pose of the cavalrymen, who swam beside their horses. Rafts served for others. With the gray of morning the storm slackened, the rain ceased ; and though the yellow river rushed by fiercer than ever, at the signal they plunged in and struggled across. The night, the storm, and the wooded island oppo- site had thus far hidden them from the enemy's ob- servation. The moment they passed the shelter of the island and essayed the narrow ford beyond, the outposts of the enemy discovered them, and galloped away to make report at headquarters. The shore 326 B.C.] Battle of the Hydaspes. 439 was thus left undefended, and the landing was easily effected. The risk that Alexander, with his imper- fect knowledge of the topography, had taken, was disclosed when it was discovered that what had seemed to be the shore was really an island ; for an arm of the swollen river had cut its way between the place of landing and the plain. Then came the anxious search for a ford, attended by fear lest the enemy might return before they were across. At last, through water shoulder-deep, and on uneven, slippery footing, they slowly found their way across. It was here, in the desperate struggle of the ford, there escaped the lips of Alexander that word of fine humour which Onesicritus remembered, and Plutarch has handed down to us: " O Athenians, would ye believe what risks I run to earn your ap- plause!" When morning dawned the little army had assumed its order in the plain — the Daan horse- men and the squadrons of the companion cavalry on the left, the hypaspists (five thousand) and other footmen, supported by the archers, Agrianians, and javelin-men, on flanks and rear. They were now about seven miles to the east of Porus's position, and their line was exactly at right angles with his. He faced the river and the north ; they rested their right flank upon the river. In order to face them and prevent being attacked on flank and rear, Porus would therefore be obliged to abandon, in whole or part, his defence of the river-bank, and face about to the east. Porus's outposts had brought him word that an army was crossing the river at the island ford. 440 Alexander the Great. [326 B.C. What army it might be, they had either failed in the darkness to see, or had neglected in their assid- uous discretion to note. It might be, after all, so hope said, the long-expected reinforcements of Abisares, King of Kashmir; for there on the north shore could still be seen the camp and army of Alexander, to all appearances as strong as ever. So a body of two thousand horsemen, supported by one hundred and twenty chariots, was sent out, under command of the King's son, to give welcome if it were Abisares, to check the advance and gain time if it were Alexander. It seemed hardly possi- ble it could be the latter ; it was too rash a venture. But Porus did not know his man. Alexander was a leader who did not accept the situations created for him by others, but by aggres- sive action created them for himself. His crossing of the river and turning of the enemy's flank had suddenly changed the entire plan of battle and the entire situation. This movement, familiar to modern strategy, had been hitherto unknown in ancient. Porus's flank would now be menaced by Meleager, his rear by Craterus. His advantage of the river- bank had been at a stroke annulled. The two armies stood now on the level footing of the same plain, and Alexander's cavalry, in which was always his chief reliance, came to a hearing. It was Porus now who had to adapt himself to circumstances and accept a situation. The choice of place and weapons had fallen to the creative wit of his antagonist. Even now, if Porus had immediately assumed the offensive, he must have had the advantage. With 1 g & 1 : § Til & 5~ § .5 .S — "be "be rt 'C *c .5 O O h III c .2 o c -3 c a B E 1 E 326 B.C.] Battle of the Hydaspes. 441 his great superiority in numbers (from thirty-five to forty thousand against thirteen thousand), and espe- cially with the advantage given him by the ele- phants, which no cavalry could face, he might have surrounded and either annihilated or driven into th? river the entire force opposed to him, had he only assumed the offensive, and not waited to allow his antagonist a choice of the point of attack. The force sent out to reconnoitre speedily came back in routed fragments, leaving its leader and four hundred horsemen dead upon the field, and most of the chariots wrecked or the enemy's prizes. There was no longer any doubt. It was surely Alexander. The great line swung slowly round, and took its position in the plain, a mighty front three or four miles long, dotted with the towering elephants, from fifty to a hundred feet apart. If stationed only fifty feet apart, two hundred elephants made a line nearly two miles long. These held the centre — indeed, the main central extent — of the line. Be- tween them crowded the foot-soldiers, and behind them masses of infantry formed a second line. At the wings were the cavalry and the chariots. A few elephants, supported by a considerable force of in- fantry, remained at the old position by the river to watch the movements of Craterus and menace the ford. Slowly the great battle-line moved out across the meadows until it reached a wide stretch of solid ground suited to the movement of the chariots, and there it stopped, facing the solidly massed force of Alexander, which covered with its front no more 442 Alexander the Great, [326 B.C. than a fifth or a fourth of the space. Here was Alexander's opportunity, his only chance. He was given the choice of point of attack ; and this was what gave him the victory. He was bound to at- tack one of the wings in order to avoid the elephants. He chose the left or northern wing, not only in deference to his usage of attacking with his right wing, but because, by keeping near the river, he held to his reserve on the other river-bank, and pre- vented the possibility of being utterly cut off and surrounded. The infantry of his centre and left was ordered to delay attack until the left wing of the enemy had been thrown into confusion by the cavalry attack. The attack was opened by the one thousand Daan archer horsemen. Overwhelming the cavalry of the enemy's left with a shower of arrows, they drew them out to attack. Alexander then, with the great body of the companion cavalry, swept on to the attack, bearing to the front and right. Mean- time he had sent Ccenus, with his own regiment of cavalry and that of Demetrius, in a wide swing to the right against the extreme flank of the enemy, so that as the enemy's horse advanced obliquely out of position to meet Alexander, they might fall upon their rear. Owing to a misinterpretation of Arrian, based, it is to be feared, simply on an error of the published translations, the current accounts of this battle make Ccenus perform the miraculous feat of rounding the enemy's right wing and riding along their entire rear to reach the rear of their left wing. The account, as it stands in the original both of 326 B.C.] Battle of the Hydaspes. 443 Arrian and of Curtius Rufus, is clear and consistent, and involves no miracle. The enemy's left was simply drawn out of position, and then caught be- tween two masses of the Macedonian cavalry. Forced to face in two directions, the hostile cavalry was speedily thrown into confusion, and scattered to the shelter of the elephants. The left of the enemy's line was thus at the very beginning utterly broken in pieces, and the solid infantry centre, tow- ered with the elephants, was exposed to flank at- tack. Of the chariots which supported the Indian left we hear nothing, strangely enough, in any of the accounts of the battle. Alexander won all his battles by first breaking the enemy's line, and localising the battle at the wounded point. The point he chose for his blow in the battle of the Hydaspes was the suture between the elephants and the cavalry, and was determined by the necessity of avoiding the elephants. The elephants on the left of the centre were now driven forward to attack the united mass of Alexan- der's cavalry. The Indian cavalry rallied again to support them. The movement was oblique toward the left, for Alexander was on their flank. This broke their line, and here the advancing phalanx found its opportunity. At first the onrush of the strange monsters had driven back the Macedonian cavalry and riven asunder the solid mass of the in- fantry phalanx. But the veteran foot-soldiers stood their ground and fought, prodding the elephants with their long pikes, disabling the drivers, repelling the supporting infantry. Then came the rally of 444 Alexander the Great. [326 B.C. the Macedonian cavalry, driving in the Indian horse upon the elephants at the enemy's left, and cooping it up in the spaces between them. Following its advantage, the companion cavalry, now reuniting as if by instinct into a solid body, plied its furious attack upon the front and flank of the centre. The elephants began slowly to retreat, still, " facing the foe, ' ' as Arrian has it, ' ' like ships backing water, and merely uttering a shrill, piping sound." The pha- lanx had now formed again into a solid body which linked shields, and so cavalry and infantry joined in slowly pushing the elephants back. As they re- treated under pressure, from front and flank, they were forced closer together. The troops placed be- tween them were literally squeezed out of their place. The elephants trampled them underfoot. It became a confusion of horse- and foot-soldiers in- capable of action, soon a rout. Riderless elephants turned in flight through the mob. Just as the battle was turning, and while yet the enemy's right still stood unengaged in line, Craterus came hastening over from the other river-bank to take the burden from the shoulders of the weary troops, who had added to their all-night toil more than a half -day's fighting; for it was now two in the afternoon. Porus was no Darius. So long as any part of the line stood, he held his place, directing with vigour and intelligence the progress of the battle from his lookout on his elephant's back. At last, after every desperate effort to stay the rout, when all was in confusion, the attack thickening about him, and himself sorely wounded, he wheeled his elephant 326 B.C.] Battle of the Hydaspes. 445 about and retreated. Alexander, struck with ad- miration for his coolness, and anxious to spare his life, sent first Taxiles, on horseback, to bid him stop ; but the old man, when he saw his arch-enemy, menaced him with his javelin, and would have none of him. Then Meroes, an Indian, and old friend of Porus, was sent ; and when he overtook him, Porus stopped, and, dismounting, asked for water to drink. " And after he had drunk some water, and felt refreshed, he bade Meroes lead him forth- with to Alexander; and Meroes led him thither." Then Alexander, attended by a few of his body- guards, rode out to meet him ; and when he saw tne defeated King he checked his horse, and looked at him, " marvelling at his noble, stately figure and his stature; for he was above five cubits in height. He marvelled and admired him, too, that he did not seem cowed in spirit, but advanced frankly and fearlessly, as one brave man would meet another brave man, after gallantly struggling to defend his throne against another King. Alexander was the first to speak, bidding him say what treatment he would fain receive at his hands. ' Deal with me royally, Alexander.' Alexander was pleased at the word, and said ' For mine own part, Porus, " royally " be it unto thee; but on thine own part, what is thy royal desire ? ' Porus, however, said he was content; ' roy- ally ' covered it all " (Arrian). This is the story that antiquity always told of the chivalrous meeting of these two Aryan gentlemen, who knew war as sport. Sportsmen always recog- nise each other, the world over. 446 Alexander the Great. [326 B.C. The battle was over. In fineness of plan and brilliancy of execution it was Alexander's master- piece. The army of Porus had been dashed in pieces, almost annihilated. According to Diodorus, twelve thousand had been slain ; Arrian says twenty-three thousand. The chariots were shattered, their drivers killed. Eighty elephants were captured, but more had been killed. Among the slain were two sons of King Porus. Of the stately array that on the morning lined the river-bank and defied advance, at evening nothing remained. So sharp does wit and will strike the balance of war. On the site of the battle-field Alexander founded a city which he named Nicsea (Victoria) ; and on the other side of the river, near the site of his camp, he founded another, and named it from his faithful friend, the horse Bucephalus, who, as some say, wearied with fatigues and age, as others say, wounded in battle, died on the day of the victory. It was eighteen years that the horse had been con- stantly with him, sharing his lot, and ridden by none but him, and he deserved the honour. The monument survives to-day as the city of Jalalpur. CHAPTER XXVIII. COMPLETED CONQUEST OF THE PENJAB. 326-325 B.C. THE battle of the Hydaspes was fought in May, 326 B.C. It was just a year since Alexander had crossed the Hindu Kush into the Kabul valley, Four years had passed since he turned his back on Media and the centres of his empire. All this time the world quietly waited for him, and lived on, almost without event that history records. Even Greece, the intense little Greece, was quiet. Since the battle of Megalopolis (autumn, 331 B.C.), which ended the revolt of Spartan Agis, nothing had occurred to disturb the general peace. Athens found leisure to indulge in academic politics; and ^schines's suit against Ctesiphon brought out the glorious oration of Demosthenes " On the Crown " (August, 330 B.C.) — mostly concerned with matters ten or twenty years old. The stock of current issues was failing, and Athens, which must needs have whereon to debate, was beginning to live in her past. The largest interstate controversy of which we hear 447 448 Alexander the Great. [326 B.C.- is Athens's discussion of an issue in athletics, clean and unclean, with the Athletic Council at Olympia. One Callippus, an Athenian, having been fined for unsportsmanlike behaviour, bribery, in fact, — had refused to pay the fine. Athens, making his cause her own, and entering protest, was excluded from the games of 328 B.C. Then Apollo, the Chief Justice of Hellas, uttered his voice from the tripod at Delphi, and Athens paid the fine. These years of peace had naturally been years of prosperity and of rapid commercial development. Rhodes and Alexandria were just beginning their great com- mercial career. New conditions, arising from the consolidation of all the eastern Mediterranean under a single government, introduced new methods and new possibilities in the conduct of business. A clever Greek of Naucratis, in Egypt, early dis- covered one possibility which brought much pain to Athens. By keeping himself informed, through agents at the different ports, concerning the entire grain-supply in sight, and the prices at each port, he was able to create a grain trust, control the movement of grain-ships, and make the price. Thus at Athens during this period the price of grain rose repeatedly to three or four times its normal value. But nothing more stirring than this was happening while Alexander tarried in the far East. We re- turn, therefore, to him. After the battle of the Hydaspes he remained some thirty days in Porus's land. His mind was already occupied with plans for the return, and orders were given for the building of a great fleet 325 B.C.] Completed Conquest of the Penjab. 449 of rafts and boats for the voyage down the Indus. Porus and Taxiles, now reconciled to each other, were both confirmed in their old authority. Alex- ander was first and foremost a political conqueror, and where he found those whose ability he could trust, made the ablest his friends, not his slaves. Leaving Craterus to supervise the building of the two cities Nicaea and Bucephala, which he had lo- cated, he then pushed eastward to complete the con- quest of the five-stream land (Penjab). Moving first to the north-east, he received the submission of the Glaukanikoi, and of their thirty-seven cities, each containing not less than five thousand, many over ten thousand, inhabitants. Abisares of Kashmir, now rendered uncomfortable by the advance toward his frontiers, hastened to announce his subjection and make it concrete in a present of forty elephants and much gold. The next one of the rivers which lay in Alexan- der's path bears in modern times the name Chenab. Its Sanskrit name, Asikni, the Greeks twisted into Akesines — "river of healing," forsooth; and the omen was good. Crossing it, not without difficulty, he passed unopposed through the territory of a second Porus, kinsman of the first; who, however, being possessed both of cowardice and an evil con- science, dared face the conqueror neither for battle nor reconciliation. Next came the river Ravi, the ancient Iravati, which the Greeks called Hyarotis, or Hyraotis, the h being gratuitous, and the the best approach Greek lips could make to w (v). The peoples who dwelt by this river and beyond it, 29 450 Alexande7" the Great. [326 B.c- abjuring the institution of the kingship, lived in inde- pendent self-governed cities, after the manner of the primitive village communities; and the Greeks, ap- plying the analogy of their own autonomous cities, always spoke of them as the ' ' free Hindus. ' ' These city-republics offered the stoutest opposition Alex- ander had met with since the Hydaspes. Particu- larly did the Khattias (Kathaioi) make him difficulty. They were the people who fought from behind a barricade of waggons, and taught the hero of Shipka Pass that waggons have other use in warfare than as missiles. Their walled city, Sangala (modern Am- ritsir ?), yielded only after a siege and storm which condemned, as the story is, some seventeen thou- sand of its defenders to slaughter, and left seventy thousand prisoners of war. One after another, now, the cities of the district gave themselves over to the fearful conqueror; and so the army finally came to the banks of the Hypasis (Sanskrit Vipaca), above its junction with what is the modern Sutlej, the easternmost of the five rivers, and the natural limit to the eastward march. Alex- ander's entrance into India had contemplated no- thing beyond a conquest of the Penjab as a part of the Persian Empire. In fact, he knew of no other India. India proper was the Indus region, and the new India of the Ganges valley was beyond the know- ledge of the Western or the Persian world. The Ganges was unknown to Aristotle. Strange to say, too, none of the writers who were among Alexander's associates seem ever to have mentioned it, neither Ptolemy nor Aristobulus, Onesicritus nor Nearchus. 325 B.C.] Completed Conquest of the Penjab. 45 1 Megasthenes, who wrote in the fourth decade of the third century B.C., was the first to tell of the Ganges land ; and he had learned of its existence, not through reports of Alexander's soldiers, but through personal information obtained when present as ambassador at the court of Sandracottus. Alex- ander is, to be sure, represented as referring to the Ganges in the speeches which Arrian and Curtius Rufus put upon his lips. These formal speeches, however, are clearly the work of rhetoricians cent- uries later than Alexander; for they are sadly out of tune with Alexander's ideas, and attribute to him plans of a world-conquest in terms of a geography he did not and could not possess. The forgery is easy of detection. For instance, in the speech, to his officers, Arrian makes Alexander say : " Now, if any one desires to hear where our warfare will find its end and limit, let him know that the distance from where we are to the river Ganges and the sunrise sea is no longer great; and with this, you will find, is connected the Hyrcanian [Caspian] Sea; for the Great Sea surrounds the entire earth. I will also demonstrate to the Macedonians and their allies not only that the Indian Gulf is confluent with the Persian, but that the Hyrcanian [Caspian] Sea is confluent with the Indian Gulf." * We have already seen in another connection (Chapter XXIV) that the erroneous idea of a con- nection between the Caspian and the Arctic Ocean had currency in Arrian's time, chiefly on the au- * Arrian, Anabasis, v., 26. 452 Alexander the Great. [326 B.c- thority of Eratosthenes, but that Alexander, who believed the Jaxartes was the Tanais (Don), or con- fluent with it, and so a tributary of the Sea of Azov, could have conceived of the Caspian only as an in- land sea, perhaps connected in some way with the Sea of Azov, or with the Black Sea directly. Other indications coupled with this lead to the unmistak- able conclusion that the speech does not rest upon the authority of Alexander's contemporaries, but is purely an artificial product, projecting the ideas of the first or second century after Christ back upon the fourth century before Christ. All that we can of certainty know is that when Alexander reached the eastern part of the Penjab he heard that beyond the Sutlej there lay a fertile country where "the inhabitants were skilled in agriculture and brave in war; where they conducted government in orderly manner, and held the masses under the rule of the better class and in respect for the laws of property; where there were elephants much more abundant in number than among the other Indians; and where the men were su- perior in stature and courage. ' ' * Whether this was a vague intimation of the Ganges country, three hundred miles beyond the desert, or only a story of a Penjab district beyond the river, we cannot tell. Surely the name Ganges was not mentioned. Though Alexander had already planned the de* scent of the Indus, and had left orders behind for *Arrian, Anabasis, v., 25. 325 B.C.] Completed Conquest of the Penjab. 453 the building of a fleet, his curiosity impelled kim to push on yet farther than he had originally planned. The world kept stretching out before him in unex- pected width. Particularly the story of a settled civilisation, and of a society regulated by peculiar institutions, whetted his curiosity and aroused his ambition. At the Jaxartes he had turned back because he believed he was at the boundary between Asia and Europe, and only the barbarian Scyths were beyond. His notions of the civilised world had always been bounded at the east by the limits of Darius's Em- pire. Civilisation and the Persian Empire had thus far meant to him one and the same thing — at least, so far as the East was concerned.* When the King began his preparations for cross- ing the Hypasis, he found his army, for the first time in all his experience, reluctant to follow him. The men were weary. Many were wounded, many were ill. Seventy days of incessant rain had served to intensify their ills, and abate their ambition to know more of such a land. The King's address to his assembled officers, urging them to go on, fell on * The idea presented by Dr. Kaerst, in his recent Forschungen zur Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen (1887), that the invasion of India represents an utterly new departure in Alexander's plans, and the beginning of a scheme of world-conquest, finds no support in the plain contemporary facts. Alexander's desire to cross the Sutlej and push on farther was unmistakably developed after leaving the Hydaspes, and was more an incident of his ambition and restless energy than the product of a settled, far-reaching, and long-formu- lated plan. See also Dr. Kaerst's Historic he Zeitschrift N. F., xxxviii., pp. I^"., 193^". 454 Alexander the Great. [326 B.c- unwilling ears. Ccenus, in his reply, voiced the universal wish for a return. It was a new thing for Alexander to be crossed in his desires. In chagrin and disappointment, he shut himself up for two days in his tent, and con- versed with no one. When, however, on the third day he found no change in the temper of his men, and " the profound silence throughout the camp in- dicated that the soldiery, though annoyed at their leader's wrath, were still unmoved by it," he arose, as Ptolemy reports, and caused the sacrifices for the omens of crossing to be made; but when these turned out unfavourable, he called the elders of the hetairoi and his nearest friends together, and an- nounced his decision to return. " Then they shouted out as a mixed multitude would shout when rejoicing; and many of them were in tears; some even approached the royal tent and implored bless- ings many and great upon Alexander, because, forsooth, by them alone he had suffered himself to be conquered " (Arrian). After building there twelve high, tower-like altars, and dedicating them with sacrifices and gymnastic and equestrian sports, he turned back through the country where seven peoples and two thousand cities had yielded to his sway, and came to the Hy- daspes again, where his fleet was building. It was now September, 326 B.C. About two thousand boats, including no less than eighty thirty-oared galleys and some with a bank and a half of oars, had been assembled. Twenty-four Macedonians, 3 2 5 B . c ,] Completed Conquest of the Penjab. 455 eight Greeks, and. one Persian were appointed cap- tains or trierarchs; and in old-fashioned Greek style assigned the expense and the honour of fitting out the larger ships. Nearchus the Cretan was made admiral of the fleet, and Onesicritus the pilot of the royal galley, both destined to win immortal fame by their accounts of the voyage they were beginning. When, after solemn offerings to the gods of river and sea, the great fleet, at dawn of some day in October, 326 B.C., pushed out upon the current, and in stated order started down toward the sea, the end of Alexander's conquests had been reached, and the return to peace and settled life was begun. Standing on the prow of the royal galley, Alexander poured from a golden goblet libations to each of the rivers on which he was to sail ; again, he poured to Hercules, to Ammon, and to each of the gods whom it was his wont to invoke; and then the trumpet signal rang out, the oars moved, and the strange argosy was on its way toward the unknown sea. Even the dull prose of Arrian takes on an almost poetic luster as he describes the scene. The sharp cry of the boatswains as they timed the stroke, and the droning sound or clamorous shout of the rowers as they swung at their work, mingling with the thud and dash of the oars, reverberated from the high banks or the groves which lined the shores like the din of armies in battle. The natives swarmed from their villages to line the shore and wonder at the strange spectacle ; and most of all they marvelled at the sight of horses figuring as passengers on boats. 456 Alexander the Great. [326 B.C. And as the fleet moved on, they ran and danced along the bank, singing their native songs. " For since the time when Dionysus and his attendant Bacchanals traversed the land of the Indians, these people have been eminently fond of singing, and of dancing too " (Arrian). On board the ships had been embarked, with Alexander, the archers, the hypaspists, the Agrian- ians, and the cavalry agdma, that is, the flower of the army. The mass of the army followed on land in three detachments: one, under Craterus, on the right bank; another, under Hephaestion, on the left ; while a third, under Philip's command, brought up the rear, three days' marches behind Hephaestion. Slight opposition was experienced from the popula- tion along the banks, and seldom was any attempt made by the troops to penetrate far into the neigh- bouring country. Alexander's plan seems to have been satisfied in simply making the descent of the river, following the course of the Persian explorers before him. _ When he should have done this, and then followed the coast back to the head of the Persian Gulf, he would have made the circuit if the empire which had fallen to his hands, and have vin- dicated the right to rule and shape it; but, more than this, he would have linked India to his empire by a sea route as well as by land. The first determined opposition to the progress of the expedition was offered by the warlike Mallians, (ancient Malavas) dwelling in the region of the mod- ern Multan. Their territory extended on both sides of the river Hyraotis (Ravi), which in Alexander's 325 B.C.] Completed Conquest of the Penjab. 45 7 time flowed into the Akesines (Chenab) below Multan, and not, as now, thirty miles above it. It would scarcely concern us here to recount the story of the Mallians, and their vain struggle in self- assertion, were it not that it affords us another glimpse of the man Alexander in relief against a risk that almost cost him his life. After a forced march through the desert, he had taken one city after another, scattered opposition, and pursued the fugitives from one bank of the river to the other, until at last he came, on the eighth day of his cam- paign, to a strongly fortified town, which may have stood on the site of the present city of Multan. With the first break of day the assault upon the walls of the town began. The Mallians were unable to defend them. Alexander broke one of the gates, and, at the head of his troops, burst into the city unopposed. The entire population had taken refuge behind the high towered walls of the citadel. The attack upon that was immediately begun. Some started to undermine the wall; others brought on two scaling-ladders, and tried to set them in place. Missiles rained down from the defenders swarming on the battlements. It was too much for flesh and blood. The onset faltered. Impatient at the de- lay, Alexander seized one of the ladders and with his own hand placed it against the wall ; then, pro- tecting himself with his shield, he ran up the ladder, and pushed and fought his way to a standing-ground on the top. The veteran captains Peucestas and Leonnatus were close behind him. Abreas, a trusty old man- 45 8 Alexander the Great. [326 b.c- at-arms, mounted on a second ladder. Men crowded to follow the leaders. Under the weight the ladders broke, and the four men were left isolated on the rampart. From the towers on each side, from the battlements around them, from the ground within, missiles of every sort pelted them. The majestic figure and the shining armour of the King made a greedy target. From without a hundred voices called him to leap back into safety. He cast no look behind, but, measuring with a glance the dis- tance, deliberately sprang from the rampart straight into the heart of the citadel and into the midst of the enemy. It was rashness, perhaps it was folly ; but it was the folly of one who never sought success without risk, and who always succeeded — of one who had made himself a leader of men without parallel, be- cause his followers never saw him falter nor hesitate, but always act. With the wall at his back, he held the enemy for a time at bay, striking down with his sword the few venturesome ones who dared approach him, holding others in check by hurling stones. Then they crowded in a half-circle about him, pelting him with stones and javelins and arrows. His three com- panions had now leaped down and joined him in the fight. Abreas soon fell, pierced through the fore- head by an arrow. A heavy missile smote the helmet of the King. Dazed for a moment by the blow, he lowered his guard, and a heavy arrow, penetrating his breastplate, fastened itself deep in the lung. Still he fought on; but the blood with 325 B.C.] Completed Conquest of the Penjab. 459 every breath spurted from the wound. Faint with loss of blood, he faltered, dropped upon his knee, then swooned upon his shield. Still Peucestas and Leonnatus stood by him, the former covering him with the sacred shield brought from Athena's house at Troy. It looked as if the end of all were nigh at hand. A fury of excitement reigned without the wall. From the moment they saw their leader disappear within the rampart, the madness of desperation seized upon the troops. Some hammered at the gate ; some ran for ladders ; some drove pegs in the adobe walls, and dragged themselves slowly up hand over hand ; some mounted by human ladders over the shoulders of men. One by one they gained the top. One by one, with howls of vengeance, breath- ing grief at the sight of their prostrate leader, they came vaulting into the citadel, firebrands of fury. Rents were opened in the gates. Men pushed through, crept through. On the track of dozens followed scores and hundreds. A rill became a tor- rent, then a flood. That day there was no pity. The sword spared not of all it found — man, woman, or child. Alexander was carried out upon his shield to a tent. He had been wounded many times before, but his men had never seen him prostrate, and now the rumour spread throughout the army that he was dead. Within the tent they were trying to remove the missel that was still fastened in the breast. First they sawed off the wooden shaft so as to remove the cuirass; but the great head of the arrow, three 460 Alexander the Great. [326 B.C.- fingers broad and four fingers long, clung in the wound. The efforts to remove it roused the King from his swoon. He essayed with his own hand to widen the wound; but strength failed him, and, at his bid- ding, Perdiccas used his own sword in rude surgery, until, followed by a fierce hemorrhage, the barbs came forth. He swooned again. The flow of blood stopped. All that day and through the night they watched by him, while life and death hung in the balances; and outside the tent the soldiery waited, still under arms, and in sleepless anxiety, until word came with the morning grey that the King had fallen into quiet sleep. The first word which had reached the main army, waiting by the Akesines, four days distant, an- nounced the death of the King. " And at first there arose the voice of lamentation from all the army, as the rumour was handed on from one man to another " (Arrian). Then lamentation yielded to dejection and despair. Who could lead them back to their homes out of a strange land through hostile peoples ? Who but Alexander would be obeyed by themselves or feared by their foes ? When word came later that Alexander was recover- ing, though not yet strong enough to rejoin the army, they would not believe it. They thought the generals were deceiving them. When Alexander heard this, for fear some out- break might occur, he had himself conveyed on board a vessel, and started down the Hyraotis to- ward the camp. So far was he yet from recovery 325 B.C.] Completed Conquest of the Penjab. 46 1 that, lest he should be irritated by the shock of the oars, the galley was allowed simply to drop down the stream with the current until it came to the river-mouth, where were the camp and the fleet. The soldiers crowded to the bank, awaiting it. Alexander had caused the awnings to be removed from over the stern, where he lay, that all might see him. They said, however, to themselves, " It is Alexander's body they are bringing," until, as the galley neared the bank, he stretched out his hand toward the multitude in a gesture of welcome. " Then a mighty shout arose, and they stretched up their hands, some toward heaven, some toward Alexan- der himself. Many could not help shedding tears at the unexpected sight. Now some of the guard brought him a litter, when he was taken out of the ship; but he bade them bring him a horse; and when they saw him again on horseback, the whole army resounded again and again with clapping of hands. On coming to his tent, he dis- mounted, so that he might be seen walking. Then the men crowded around him on every side, some touching his hands, some his knees, some only his raiment. Some came near enough to get a glimpse of him, and turned back, thanking Heaven. Some threw garlands upon him, some the flowers which India at the season yields " (Arrian). It is told, on the authority of Nearchus, that some of his friends reproached Alexander for exposing himself so recklessly in battle, and urged that this was the duty of the common soldier, not of the general. Thereupon, an old Boeotian soldier, who 462 Alexander the Great. [326-325 B.C. had seen the advice was not to Alexander's mind, came to his support with a plain word, enriched in good Boeotian brogue: " Deeds, Alexander, tell the man " ; and capped it with a snatch of verse from ^Eschylus: " Who does must suffer." This pleased Alexander. Alexander exposed himself unduly in battle. With so much depending upon his life, ordinary judgment cannot fail to pronounce his action unwise and reck- less. That he escaped from all his risks must be reckoned to the account of his own impetuous con- fidence of success rather than to his luck. Nothing is more characteristic of him than that energy and brilliancy of will which fastened its look upon the result desired, and, as if by an auto-suggestion, clearly saw it as an accomplished reality. The Alexander who leaped from the wall at Multan was the same Alexander who had led the charge at Granicus and dared the sea beneath the cliffs of Mount Climax. His conduct during the Indian campaign affords no basis whatsoever for the theory of those who claim that since the conquest of Mesopotamia his mind and manner had suffered radical change. Neither was he, so far as we can see, any more or less a god, in his practical dealings with men and things, than before the famous seance at the oracle of Ammon. He had grown older and sterner, but surely he was very much a man among men. CHAPTER XXIX. RETURN TO PERSIA. 325-324 B.C. FROM the mouth of the Hyraotis (Ravi) the flotilla passed on down the Akesines (Chenab) a hundred and fifty miles or more, and found its way into the great Indus. Here Alexander founded a city, which some say he named Alex- andria, and built a dockyard, intending that this place, as an outpost of the Penjab satrapy, and lo- cated at the apex of the five-river district, should become the emporium of the region. The tribes along the Indus banks, among whom the Brahmans appear to have had more political significance than among the peoples farther to the north, frequently opposed the march of the army ; and the fleet was moored first at one bank, then at the other, while accounts were being settled with them. In the land of the Sogdoi another city was founded, also equipped with a dockyard, and appa- rently also with the name Alexandria. The location was evidently chosen with reference to the route 463 464 Alexander the Great. [325 B.C.- through the Bolan Pass toward Kandahar, and may have been that of the modern Sukkur, or of Kash- mor, higher up the river. The region between the mouth of the Akesines and the sea, approximately the modern province of Sindh, was constituted a satrapy under the government of Peithon. At this point about a third of the whole army, including the infantry brigades of Attalus, Meleager, and An- tigenes, together with a body of archers and a large number of veterans who, as unfit for longer service, were returning home, started, under command of Craterus, on the direct route westward by the Bolan Pass and Kandahar, and through the territory of the Arachotians and Drangians. This would have been the natural route for the whole army to have taken ; but Alexander was occupied with the supreme desire of testing the ocean route, and tracing the bounds of his empire where they followed the hem of the world. He therefore proceeded down the river, and in the midsummer of 325 B.C. reached Patala, at the apex of the delta, not far from the modern Hyderabad. Eight or nine months had been spent in descending the river. After ordering a harbour and shipyards, with proper fortifications, to be constructed here, he pro- ceeded to explore the delta, and made his first astonished acquaintance with the phenomenon of tides ; for in the Mediterranean, the only sea he knew, the tidal flow is seldom enough to attract attention. ' ' While the vessels were moored here the phenomenon of the ebb-tide of the great sea appeared, so that their 324 B.C.] Return to Persia. 465 ships were left stranded high and dry. And although this brought to Alexander's companions, who had never seen it before, no small alarm, they were much more startled when, as the time came round, the water flowed in and lifted their ships from the ground. The ships which it found settled in the mud it lifted quietly, and they floated again, without any injury whatsoever; but the ships which were moored higher up, on drier land, and rested on uneven bottom, when a compact wave came rushing in, were some of them dashed against one another, some of them driven against the bank and wrecked " (Arrian). After satisfying himself that the eastern branch furnished the best course for the fleet, he located a harbour and dockyards near its mouth; and with- out venturing on to the sea farther than to visit two islands near the coast, he contented himself with a three days' ride along the shore, in order to form an idea how a fleet was likely to fare in a coasting voyage. The extreme caution and anxiety dis- played by the King in all these preliminary ex- plorations and preparations testify not only to his appreciation that he was dealing with new and strange conditions, and more than ever before facing the unknown, but also to the high importance which the venture had assumed in his mind. At last, some time in September, 325 B.C., accom- panied by a force of from twenty-five to thirty thou- sand men, including the cavalry age'ma, half the hypaspists, and others of the best troops, he started on his terrible march along the Gedrosian coast, leaving Nearchus with the fleet, to wait until, a 30 466 Alexander the Great. [325 B.c- month or more later, the setting of the Pleiades should bring the change from the south-west to the north-east monsoon, and insure a quiet sea and a wind fair or on the beam. The army fought its way through the hostile land of the Oreitans, and then began its fearful sixty days through the Mekran, the coast desert of Balu- chistan, the hottest and "most hopeless part of the world. After Alexander's experience, no European is known to have penetrated it down to the present century. During the first part of the march con- tinual attention was paid to what had been an im- portant purpose of the expedition — the collection of supplies at points on the shore, and the digging of wells for the use of the fleet which was to follow. Later there were times when the army could find neither water nor food for itself. The heat grew fiercer. No tree offered its shade. The scanty water-courses were dry. Rolling hillocks of sand, in which the foot-soldier sank half to the knee, crossed the path. Nothing so far as the eye could reach but these billows of sand, and now and then, far off to the left, the glare of the barren sea. Exploring parties sent down from the plateau to the beaches reported that they found only miserable ichthyophagi, living in meager huts built of shells and the bones of fish, subsisting, without vegetable food, on fish alone, and drinking the brackish water that oozed through the sand of the beach. As they proceeded the supply of water became scantier. Sometimes they marched thirty, forty, even fifty miles without a drop of water to quench 324 B.C.] Return to Persia. 467 the awful fever of the desert thirst. Hunger beset them. Discipline lost its control. Corn-sacks scaled with the King's seal and destined to be left in store for the fleet were torn open and the corn stolen. Men killed the beasts of burden and the horses, ate the flesh, then lied, and said the animals had per- ished in the heat. Waggons carrying the sick were left standing in the desert, the animals that drew them being taken for food. Alexander suffered with the rest. Once when he was faint with thirst, some soldiers brought him, from a " mean little spring" they had found in a shallow cleft by the way, a bit of water in a helmet ; but, David-like, he poured it out on the ground before them, and gave them new heart, as if the water " had furnished a draught for every man." One by one they dropped by the way. Men lay down to sleep in the long, hot night marches, and woke to find the glare of day, the desert blank, and no track in the shifting sands. After sixty days a disordered mass of fam- ished, half-naked men reached the oasis of Pura, but it was barely a half of the army that had entered the desert. After some days of rest the relics of the army pushed on into Carmania, where a junction was effected with the division which under Craterus had followed the northern route. Reinforcements from the army of Media came now to meet them. Stasa- nor, the satrap of the Areians, came, too, with the camels, beasts of burden, and supplies in abundance. Horses, arms, and clothing could now be dis- tributed to the army that had crossed the desert. 468 Alexander the Great. [325 B.c- Carmania itself was a land of plenty. A thank- offering to the gods for the victories in India and the rescue from the jaws of the desert, a feast, games, a musical festival, and a round of Dionysiac merrymakings — these were all in the orthodox Greek programme, under which the King and his men celebrated the recovered joy of life. As yet no word had come concerning the fleet. It was now the beginning of December (325 B.C.). Nearchus was to have set sail toward the end of Octoben He had seven hundred and fifty miles in a straight line to cover before reaching, at the en- trance of the Persian Gulf, the harbour of Gumrun (Bender-Abbas), behind which, sixty or seventy miles inland, was Alexander's camp. There was, therefore, no immediate cause for solicitude, as no one could reckon with any certainty upon the time that the voyage would require; but, never- theless, as December came on, Alexander showed intense anxiety and nervously awaited tidings from the messengers he had sent to watch along the coast. The fleet had in reality started early in October, but contrary winds, as might have been expected, had held it in check for some three weeks oft* the mouths of the Indus. Once well under way, the voyage went, on the whole, prosperously. Scarcity of water and provisions gave the men at times much solicitude, but wind and weather favoured, and troubles passed. Among the many strange experi- ences they had to tell in after days, and which Nearchus with prosaic exactness recorded in his 324 B.C.] Return to Persia. 469 story of the voyage, the spouting whales and the terror they inspired held the first place in novel in- terest. This had the flavour of the Great Sea about it — a new thing for Greeks. After about thirty days they sighted the promontory of Ras Musandam, which marks the Arabian side of the Hormuz Straits, at the entrance to the gulf. Nearchus's conservative sense here spared the fleet the danger of missing the gulf altogether, as might have been the case had he followed Onesicritus's advice and steered for the headland. He would in that case have run the risk of being diverted into a trip down the east coast of Arabia, and might never have been heard from again. Fortunately, however, he kept along, hugging the shore, and sailed on into the straits, and in four or five days the ships were safely moored in the river Anamis, near what is now the harbour of Bender-Abbas. Here the men were glad to disembark in the pleasant land. A party of sailors who had gone a little way inland to explore the country spied in the distance a man wearing a Greek shoulder-cape. He looked, too, like a Greek. When they came near him and saluted him, and heard him answer in Greek, they wept for joy, " so unexpected a thing was it for them, after all their toils, to see a Greek and hear a Greek voice." And what, too, was their joy to hear, when they asked him whence he was, that he came from Alexander's camp ! There was now no honour too great for the King to show Nearchus. His delight was unbounded. He said, and confirmed it with an oath by Zeus and 470 Alexander the Great. [325 B.c- Ammon, that he rejoiced more at the news than at being the possessor of all Asia. The fleet was now (January, 324 B.C.) sent on to explore the coast up to the head of the Persian Gulf. Hephaestion, with the main army, proceeded up the Persian coast, and Alexander, with the light troops, went on to Pasargadae and Persepolis, which he had left six years before. In February or March he reached Susa. In the five years that he had been occupied in the extreme north-eastern and south-eastern parts of his empire, and especially during the two years of his absence in India, when reports of his death repeat- edly gained currency, many things had gone awry in the government. Here and there symptoms of disorder and revolt had shown themselves. In Bactria there was open insurrection. The military commanders in Media had, by violence and arbi- trary disregard of the rights and religion of the sub- ject people, aroused a furious discontent ; satraps of the West had collected armies of mercenaries and established themselves in almost complete inde- pendence. Greece and Macedonia were in unrest. Olympias, the King's mother, was making govern- ment difficult, and life in general intolerable, for the faithful old Antipater. The Harpalus scandal, too, was abroad. This keeper of the royal treasure had for years been mak- ing the royal funds his own, and while scandalising the world with his boldness, regal independence, harlots, and riotous living, had paralysed every at- tempt to bring him to justice through the enormous 324 B.C.] Return to Persia. 471 means at his free disposal. With the news of the King's approach he fled first into Cilicia, then into Greece, taking the treasure with him; and buying his way wherever he went, he left a smirch on vari- ous politics and various politicians, among them, chief of all, Demosthenes. Alexander addressed himself now energetically to the task of regulating abuses, punishing offenders, and replacing incompetent officials with new ap- pointees. His treatment was rigorous and severe. As a political organiser and head he showed the traits of a business man. He put men in positions of responsibility and trusted them fully, until they failed him. Then he was severe, and promptly so. In righting wrongs, reforming abuses, and estab- lishing new organisations, he was frank, direct, and exceedingly practical. In reforming he applied cor- rectives direct to the evil ; in organising he adapted means direct to the end. Old institutions he utilised if they could serve his purpose. Existing governments and governors were, in deference to the settled habits of the governed, retained as mechanism. New elements were grafted on to the old, where opportunity suggested it. It was the wise retention of large parts of the old mechanism of the Persian Empire which had made it possible for Alexander to be absent five or six years from his newly acquired domain, and yet re- turn to find the government essentially secure. The old provinces or satrapies had been left as they were, sometimes under the old satrap. Native dynasties were generally retained, often, as in the 47 2 Alexander the Great. [325-324 B.C. case of Ada in Caria and Porus in India, becoming the government of a province. In each province the military power was given an independent head responsible directly to the King as commander-in- chief. On to the Persian system of government by territorial division was ingrafted the Greek system of government by city communities. These cities not only served as citadels of the new regime, but being, as they were in general, independent of the territorial sway of the satraps, they set a check upon their power, and tended to prevent what had been a weakness in the Persian Empire, the semi-independ- ence of the territorial governments. The Oriental idea of the kingship exercising its authority through governors or satraps thus became blended with the Greek idea of the city-state supreme. The Oriental conception of the state as lord and land joined with the Greek conception of the state as a society of men. This is not the least important illustration of the way the East was married to the West. CHAPTER XXX. AT SUSA AND OPIS. 324 B.C. WHEN in February or March, 324 B.C., the armies of Hephaestion and of Alexander and the fleet under Nearchus met at Susa, the great days of the conquest were at an end. Men could now look back upon the work and esti- mate results. It was just ten years since Alexander, then a youth of one-and-twenty, had crossed the Helles- pont and entered Asia. He had received as an in- heritance from his father the plan and policy of unit- ing the Greeks and bringing them to the service of Macedonian ambitions, by leading them, or promis- ing to lead them, against the Persians. This plan he idealised into a contest between the East and the West, dreaming himself another Achilles. His youthful enthusiasm and vigour, under the inspira- tion of success, raised it to enlarged dimensions. What was to come after victory and conquest he seems, from the first, not to have planned, or at 473 474 Alexander the Great. [324 B.C. least but vaguely. He would conquer the barbarians and avenge the insults of Xerxes. He would glorify the plain old nationality of Macedonia, and provide its sturdy warriors and himself with food enough to feed the craving after war and enterprise and con- quest. Scarcely more than this was in his mind. But the years and the facts had brought a develop- ment of his ideas that gave his plan a larger and a different form. He had acquired respect for much he had observed in Oriental life and character. There was more in the world than he had thought. He had seen the strength and the resources of the old civilisation of Mesopotamia. The men of Bok- hara were as brave and manly as the best he knew in Greece. In the Nile Delta men of different races and civilisation were found mingling peacefully to- gether in a cooperative life. The idea of bringing the East and West together in a composite civilisation to which each should contribute its best, grew upon him with the years. But the old-line Macedonians adhered to their first theory of the conquest, well sum- marised in the dictum, " To the victors belong the spoils." They had undertaken the war for a Mace- donian " expansion " that meant only exploitation. Their ideas did not grow with his ; hence the murmur- ings we hear in the transition years from 330 B.C. to 327 B.C. They interpreted his new international- ism as outright apostasy, and cast at him the slurs which, translated into modern local idiom, taunt with Anglomania or un-Americanism him who has abated somewhat of his provincial bias. They were hard men, and narrow, and incapable of understanding 324 B.C.] At Susa and Opts. 475 their master's mind. What they thought about him and said about him in this regard, as also in re- gard to his supposed claim of divinity, is to be inter- preted as no better than a crude caricature of the original. Small men's reports of large ideas are all caricatures. Alexander's interest had shifted from an expan- sion that meant imposition from without to an expansion which encouraged cooperation and de- velopment from within, and with this shifting of in- terest Macedonia and its claims had been relegated from the centre to the outskirts. It was now merely one province of an empire. In its name and by its military power empire was administered and main- tained ; but that name and power was no end unto itself, but only an opportunity for order, under whose covert interchange might flourish, prejudice abate, and the larger civilisation arise. From Aris- totle, his teacher, Alexander had imbibed the aris- tocratic doctrine that the Greek, by virtue of his superior intelligence and independence of will, was natural lord of the barbarian ; but experience of the facts proved the doctrine vainly academic and led the mind of the conqueror away from the dicta of aristocracy toward the ideals of the imperialistic democracy. When he broke on this issue with Aristotle he broke with the old world. Ten years of conquest had consolidated into one colossal organisation all the organisations of life, thought, religion, and law in the central known world, and for this one organisation the conqueror conceived a government and a life not imposed by 476 Alexander the Great. [324 B.C. one of its members as from without, but contributed by all its members as from within. It is in the formulation of this idea, rather than in feats of arms, that Alexander's first claim to greatness rests. The winnings of his battles vanished away ; the out- ward organisation of his empire perished with his death; but the idea lived and bore fruit. Rome took the shell, Byzantium and the East kept the substance, and from Byzantium and the East came cosmopolitanism and the inner light, the seeds of the Renaissance and of the Reformation. The completion of the war of conquest was to be celebrated by the army at Susa in a grand five days' fete, and Alexander chose to give the festival a form which should symbolise the significance he wished his conquests to attain — the marriage of Europe and Asia. As unique as his conquests was his method of celebrating them. He and his generals and friends, two-and-ninety of them in all, took them wives from the noblest Persian families, and at the date of the greater Dionysia, the Eastertide of the Greeks, celebrated the joint weddings in one great public fete. Plutarch * in one of his essays, glorifies with rhetorical exuberance the symbolism of the wedding-feast in contrast with Xerxes's bridge, for they sought to join Asia to Europe, " not with rafts and timbers and senseless bonds, but by the lawful love of wedlock, and by community of offspring." Alexander himself married Statira, the eldest daughter of Darius. Hephaestion received Drypetis, a younger daughter; Craterus, a niece of Darius; * Plutarch, De Alex. Magni For tuna aut Virtute, i., 7. 324 B.C.] At Susa and Opis. 477 Perdiccas, the daughter of the satrap of Media; Ptolemy and Eumenes, two daughters of Artabazus; Nearchus, the daughter of Mentor; Seleucus, the daughter of Spitamenes the Bactrian. We have, fortunately, preserved to us an account of the festival in the words of Chares of Mitylene, who was master of ceremonies at the court, and therefore a prime authority. The account is a frag- ment of Chares's ten books on the life of Alexander, which has been preserved to us in Athenaeus's * famous scrap-book, The Diners-out, and also in part in ^Elian's * Varia Hist or ia. 11 It was a hall of a hundred couches (each large enough for two to recline at table), and in it each couch, made of twenty minas' worth of silver, was decked as for a wedding. Alexander's had feet of gold. And to the feast were bidden all his Persian friends, and given places on the opposite side of the hall from himself and the other bridegrooms. And all the army and the sailors and the embassies and the visitors were assembled in the outer court. The hall was decorated in most sumptuous style, with expensive rugs, and hangings of fine linen, and tapestries of many colours wrought with threads of gold. And for the support of the vast tent which formed the hall there were pillars thirty feet high, plated with silver and gold, and set with precious stones. And around about the sides were costly portieres, embroidered with figures and shot through with golden threads, hung on gilded and silvered rods. The circuit of the court was half a mile. Everything was started at the signal of a trumpet-blast, whether it was the beginning of the feast, ♦Athenseus, xii., p. 538^.; ^Elian, Far, Hist., viii., 7, 478 Alexander the Great. [324 B.C. the celebration of the marriages, or the pouring of one of the various libations, so that all the army might know. " For five days the wedding-festival continued. There participated many Greeks and many barbarians and men from India. And famous jugglers and showmen were there: Scymnus of Tarentum, and Philistides of Syracuse, and Heraclitus of Mitylene. After them the rhapsode Alexis of Tarentum gave a recitation. Then there came on the cithara virtuosi: Cratinus of Methymna, Aristo- nymus of Athens, Athenodorus of Teos. Heraclitus of Tarentum, and Aristocrates the Theban, gave songs with the cithara, and to the accompaniment of the flute sang Dionysius of Heraclea, and Hyperbolus of Cyzicus. There were flute virtuosi who played the Pythian air and then led the dancers; they were Timotheus, Phrynichus, Caphisias, and Diophantus. And there were plays by the tragic actors Thessalus and Athenodorus and Aris- tocrites, and by the comedians Lycon and Phormion and Ariston. Phasimelus, the harp-player, too, was there. The crowns that were brought as presents aggregated a value of fifteen thousand talents." Arrian, too, adds a little : " The weddings were celebrated in the Persian form. Great chairs of state were set along in a row for the bride- grooms, and after the banquet the brides came in and took their seats, each beside her own husband. And the bridegrooms welcomed them and kissed them. The King was the first to begin, and all the rest of the weddings followed the same form. This seems to have been one of the most popular and friendly things Alexander ever did. Each man took his own bride and led her away. And Alexander furnished them all with dowries. And 324 B.C.] At Stisa and Opts. 479 the names of all the other Macedonians who had married Asiatic wives he caused to be registered, and found there were over ten thousand of them, and these all received from him wedding-gifts." Proclamation was now made throughout the army that all who were burdened with debt might, on registering with the paymaster and stating the amount of their debts, receive money for their liquid dation. This was at first thought too good to be true, and few registered. Men suspected in it a de- vice for finding out who had been living extrava- gantly. When Alexander heard this he reproached them for their distrust of him, and ordered his pay- masters hereafter, on the presentation of evidences of debt, to pay without registering the debtors' names. Thus some twenty thousand talents of good money were put into circulation. Large gifts of money were also made to all who had rendered distinguished service in the wars. A few of those most conspicuous for personal bravery received as a mark of highest distinction golden crowns. Head- ing this roll of honour were Peucestas and Leon- natus, the heroes of Multan ; Nearchus, the admiral ; Onesicritus, the pilot; and Hephaestion, the lieu- tenant-general. Alexander came now to face the question of the future constitution of his army. Thus far the Greco-Macedonian element, even when, as in the Indian campaigns, in the minority, had been kept distinct, and had furnished the reliable nucleus of the army. A large number of these men were now becoming, either from age or the exhaustion of the 480 Alexander the Great. [324 B.C. long campaigns, unfit for further service. At least ten thousand men would shortly have to be dis- charged and sent back to their homes. Should their places be filled by the importation of others ? It was not in harmony with Alexander's conception of a real and permanent conquest, such as he desired, that a country should be held in subjugation by a foreign army. His purpose of welding Persia and Greece into an indivisible whole was better served by other means. He had caused to be collected from various provinces of the East, and from the cities lately founded, a body of recruits, some thirty thousand in number, all young men of the best in- telligence and vigour, and these, after being drilled in the Macedonian tactics and equipped with Mace- donian arms, he proceeded to distribute among the different regiments of his own best troops. This was a terrible shock to the old Macedonian sense of propriety. The veterans had never shown the slightest objection to the presence of foreign brigades and regiments in the army, but now when Bactrians, Parthians, Arachotians, and Zarangians, fine fellows and magnificent horsemen though they might be, were admitted within the sacred lines of the companion cavalry, and eight young Asiatic princes were enrolled in the age'ma, it was accepted as an insult. The suspicion, too, that with this pro- cedure Alexander was preparing the way ultimately to dispense altogether with the service of his own countrymen, and to replace them with barbarians, revived the old bugbear of his Persomania, and hur- ried discontent into open sedition. At Opis on the 324 B.C.] At Susa and Opts. 481 Tigris, whither the army had moved in the early summer, when it was learned that some of the old soldiers were to be discharged, the opposition flamed up suddenly into outright revolt. This was a new thing in the army of Alexander. In the presence of the assembled host the King had arisen to make his announcement. The wars, he said, were now past. The great purpose for which they were fought had been achieved. Among those who had served him so well many were now weary of absence from home, wounded, enfeebled. He would not settle them in remote cities, as he had done with many of their comrades, but would pro- vide them return to their homes, and bestow upon them such rewards as would make them objects of envy wherever they went. A storm of protests here interrupted the words of the King. " You have used us up, and now you cast us aside ! Take your barbarian soldiers ! Will you conquer the world with women ? Come, let us all go! Keep all or none! Why don't you get your father Ammon to help you ? " Such were the words hoarse voices shouted, now in challenge, now in mockery. The tumult grew. The army was a mob. Alex- ander sprang from the platform on which he stood straight into the midst of the throng. Here one, there one of the ringleaders he caught by the arm, pointed at, or called by name, as he placed them under arrest. The muteness of terror fell upon them all. He returned to the dais, and facing their sullen silence, addressed them : 31 482 Alexander the Great. [324 B.C. " Not to prevent your leaving me and marching home- ward do I now speak further to you. So far as I am con- cerned, go where you will. But one word to show your thankfulness to those who have made you what you are. My father Philip found you poor and vagabond, clad in skins, feeding a few sheep on the mountain-sides, and fighting to protect these from the neighbouring Thrac- ians and Illyrians. He gave you the soldier's cape to replace the skins, settled you in cities, gave you laws and manners, made you masters instead of slaves of the bar- barians about you, added Thrace to Macedonia, opened the mines of the Pangaeum to your industry, the harbours of the sea to your commerce. He made you the rulers of those very Thessalians before whom you had lately shrunk with deadly awe. He humbled the Phocians, and gave you entrance into Greece by a broad highway. Instead of your paying tribute to the Athenians and obeying the Thebans, these states now look to us as arbiters of their weal. He entered the Peloponnesus, and was declared commander-in-chief of all the Greeks for the war against Persia, bringing not more glory to himself thereby than to you and your state. This is what my father did for you, great when viewed by itself, small in comparison with what we have done. " From my father I received in inheritance a few gold and silver goblets, a treasury containing less than sixty talents, and five hundred talents of debts. I borrowed eight hundred more, set forth from a land that afforded subsistence not even for you, and opened you a way across the Hellespont, that the Persian masters of the sea controlled. The satraps of Darius I overwhelmed at the Granicus. Ionia, ^Eolia, both Phrygias, and Lydia I overran, and the fruits of victory came to you. The blessings of Egypt and Cyrene fell into your lap. Syria, 324 B.C.] At Susa and Opts. 483 Palestine, Mesopotamia, are your possession. Babylon and Bactra and Susa are yours; the wealth of the Lydians, the treasures of the Persians, the stores of India, the great outer sea, all are yours. From among you come satraps and generals and taxiarchs. And what have I from all these spoils except it be this purple and this diadem ? Nothing have I acquired for myself, and no man can point to treasure-stores of mine, except to point to these your possessions or what is kept in store for you. What use have I for them ? I eat as you eat, sleep as you sleep. Nay, indeed, my fare is simpler than that of many of your self-indulgent ones. I often sit up at night, I know, to watch for you, that you may sleep in quiet. 11 Or will any one say that while you endured privation and toil I did not ? Who of you can say that he has suffered more for me than I for him ? Come now, who of you has wounds, let him bare himself and show them, and I will show mine. No member of my body is with- out its wound. No kind of weapon whose scars I do not bear. I have been wounded by the sword, by the arrow from the bow, by the missile from the catapult; I have been pelted with stones and pounded with clubs, while leading you to victory and to glory and to plenty, through all the land and the sea, across all the rivers and the mountains and the plains. I have wedded like as you have wedded. Your children will, many of them, be akin to mine. Those of you who have debts have I re- lieved from debt without inquiring how, despite abundant pay and richer booty, you acquired them. Golden crowns have been awarded as the imperishable memories of your bravery and my esteem. To those who have died all the honours of war have been paid. Their graves are nobly marked. Statues of bronze rise for them in their native cities. Their children, freed from the 484 Alexander the Great. [324 B.C. burdens of taxation, enjoy the civic honours. And no man under my leading has fallen in flight. 11 And now I was minded to send to your homes such of you as were no longer fit for war, and to make you shine in the eyes of men. But you all wish to leave me. Then get you gone! Go home and tell them that your King Alexander, who conquered the Persians and the Medes and the Bactrians, who brought beneath his sway the' Uxians, the Arachotians, and the Drangians, who carried his arms to the shores of the Caspian, passed the Caucasus, crossed the Oxus, the Tanais, and the Indus, who penetrated unto the Great Sea, marched through the deserts of Gedrosia, and took possession of Carmania — go tell that after he had brought you back to Susa you deserted him, and left him to the protection of the conquered foreigners. Mayhap this report of yours will appear glorious in the eyes of men, and righteous in the sight of the gods. Get you gone! " Alexander turned abruptly and retired into his palace. None but his immediate staff attended him. The soldiers stood there still in dazed silence. They were without counsel. No man knew which way to turn. So that day passed, and the next. No word came from the palace. No one had seen Alexander. No one had been admitted to audience. Then on the third day came the news that the chief commands were being assigned to Persians and Medes, that new regiments of foreign troops were being organised to replace the old — a Persian foot- guard, Persian cavalry companions. They could no longer restrain themselves. Running in a body to the palace, they cast their arms upon the ground, 324 B.C.] At Susa and Opis. 485 threw themselves as suppliants beside them, and humbly called upon their master, beseeching him to show his face and have pity upon them. And then he forgave them, and the reconciliation was sealed in one great love-feast, whereat Persian and Mace- donian sat down together in peace, and the King and his guests dipped wine from the same mixer and joined in pouring the same libations, and Grecian and Magian priests invoked the blessings of the gods together. So the last effort of the old Macedonian spirit to assert itself settled away in failure. The person- ality of the King had been the one controlling factor in the result. Ten thousand men were now sent back home, each having received a talent in addition to full pay. Craterus, who was sent back home with them in command, was commissioned to succeed Antipater in the government of Macedonia, Thrace, Thessaly, and Epirus, while Antipater was ordered to come with fresh troops into Asia. This inter- change had its political purpose in the interest of the new internationalism, and even the ten thousand were missionaries of the new gospel. CHAPTER XXXI. THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER. 323 B.C. THE return of Alexander from the far East be- gan now to make itself felt among the old Greek states. The arrival of the absconding treasurer Harpalus, in the early summer (324 B.C.), was the first symptom, and the long investigation conducted by the Areopagite court dragged on till December, forming a leading subject of the local gossip. In July Nicanor, as special ambassador, had ap- peared at the Olympic festival with a proclamation from the King recommending the various states to restore to citizenship all those who had been ban- ished for political reasons. Twenty thousand of such unfortunates are said to have been assembled at the festival to hail the proclamation with their plaudits. This, too, was a movement toward the opening of a new political era. It not only signified the can- celling of accounts inherited from the old regime, 486 323 B.C.] The Death of Alexander. 487 but it was sure to add in all the cities a considerable and an influential contingent to the body of those who sympathised with Alexander and the new regime. Most of the cities acceded readily to the request, but at Athens it started up much bubbling in the political pot. So did also the movement started by monarchical enthusiasts in various cities for award- ing divine honours to the King. There is no sound reason for supposing that this movement originated in a decree or proclamation from the throne: had there been such a proclamation we should have heard of it through some other source than the fable-loving yElian of the second century A.D. Cer- tainly nothing like the establishment of an Alexan- der cult was at that time intended by anyone, and there are no traces of any such thing until long after his death. That the idea appealed in any wise to the century after him is to be attributed to the paling of interest in the gods of the old city system, and the yearning for a broader and higher basis of confidence and reverence — a yearning which sought its satisfaction in adoration of the state, the magni- fied />, whose representatives and first citizens " the old-time gods had been, In obedience to this instinct the head of Alexander, decked with the lion-skins of Heracles or the horns of Ammon, ap- peared as the genius of the state upon the coinage of his successors, in place of the old gods who typi- fied the city-state, and set the fashion for all the coinage of the Western world from that day to this. So the way was prepared for the later worship of the 488 Alexander the Great. [323 B.C. genius of the Roman Empire, out of which Christ- ianity, with its theory of the carnal body and the divine spirit, and its recognition of a kingdom of heaven as well as of this world, and of the duty to render not only unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, but unto God that which is God's, created a Holy Roman Empire, with its dualism of state, which is body, and church, which is soul. From Opis Alexander went to Ecbatana, where his friend Hephaestion fell sick of fever and died, and was mourned by him and buried, as Patroclus by Achilles. In the spring of 323 B.C., after spend- ing the winter in subduing the unruly mountain tribes of the Cossaeans and Uxians, he marched to- ward Babylon, and rejecting the warnings of the Chaldean priests, who said that mischief awaited him, he entered the city. Already on his march embassies had come to meet him from distant peo- ples, — the Libyans, the Bruttians, Lucanians, and Etruscans, — for already the shadow of surmise con- cerning his ambitions had fallen upon the far West. On his arrival in the city delegations from many Greek cities awaited him, with testimonials, crowns, and felicitations. Some brought him, too, special appeals for favour, and laid before him as court of highest resort questions of internal politics and order to settle. These were busy days, but in the midst of it all he found time to discuss and introduce radical changes in the tactics of the army, to initiate on a large scale a reconstruction of the canal system in the marshes about Babylon, and also to arrange in detail a plan for the conquest and occupation of 323 B.C.] The Death of Alexander. 489 Arabia. This last involved the building of a fleet and the sending out of parties for preliminary ex- ploration. Earlier he had sent Heraclides into Hyrcania, with orders there to build a fleet and ex- plore the Caspian. This betrays a plan, of which we have other * indications also, to take up the work he had aban- doned at the Danube and again at the Jaxartes, subjugate the Scythians, and join his empire to- gether at the north. Nowhere do we find, however, safe evidence of any immediate plan of wider and all-embracing conquest. The after-world easily dreamed him such plans, but he himself, if we may judge by what men who knew him said, and by the things he actually did, had no formulated plan further than to join into one empire, as a consoli- dated whole, the Europe of his knowledge and the realm of Darius, and to round this out by filling the gap between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea with Arabia, and the gap between the Jaxartes and the Danube with Scythia. By the end of May (323 B.C.) fleet and army were ready for the expedition to the Arabian coast. On the morning of June 2 the King fell sick. A part of the night before, and all of the preceding night, he had spent in drinking and merrymaking at the house of Medius the Thessalian. On returning home the second night " he bathed, took a little food, and slept where he was, because he felt a little feverish "; so we have it on the authority of the Court Journal, from which Plutarch and Arrian *Arrian, iv., 15, 6. 490 Alexander the Great. [323 B.C. freely cite in giving their accounts of the illness. He was carried out on his couch to offer the wonted morning sacrifice, then lay all day indisposed in the great hall of the palace, but able still to give in- structions to his officers and appoint the departure of the army for the 5th of June, and of the fleet, which he intended to accompany, for the 6th. In the evening he went by boat to the gardens across the river, there bathed and slept. The next day (June 3) he bathed, offered the morning sacrifices, chatted and played dice with Medius awhile, sent orders to his generals to meet the next day at day- break. He was feeling better; but the fearful swamp-fever of Babylon was in his veins, and he was deceived. That night the fever raged the night through. In the morning (June 4), after bath and sacrifice, he conferred with Nearchus and other officers of the fleet, and charged them to be ready to start on the day after the next, for he counted on being well enough to set out at the appointed time. The fever steadily increased. On the 8th it assumed a dangerous form. The generals were now ordered to remain in constant attendance in the hall, the captains before the palace gates. He recognised his generals, but was unable to speak. Thus far he had offered the daily sacrifice ; after this day he was no longer able to. Two days before he had discontinued the baths. No hint is given us of any treatment employed by the physicians. Years later the story gained currency, and has since been repeated by ancient and modern writers, that he was poisoned; but medical experts who have 323 B.c.J The Death of Alexander. 49 t reviewed the symptoms so explicitly stated in the record of the Ephemerides, or Court Journal, have no hesitation in asserting that poisoning was out of the question, and that the disease was certainly a fever. There is no allusion in any way to localised pain or inflammation. While his excesses of the two nights preceding the attack had undoubtedly made him physically less capable of resisting dis- ease, the story of his having died from the results of hard drinking is another form of canard. His condition passed steadily from worse to worse. In his environment hope gave place to panic. On the 1 2th rumour spread among the soldiers that he was dead. Some believed his body-guards were concealing ;he fact for a purpose. They surrounded the palace, demanding admittance. Even when con- vinced that he was still living, they insisted they must see him once more. They forced their way through the gates. Grief and love were their ex- cuse. In awe-struck quiet the rude old soldiers filed through the room where he lay. He stretched out his hand to each of them, feebly raised his head a little, and spoke with his eyes his farewell. Toward evening of the next day, June 13, 323 B.C., he died, thirty-two years and eight months of age, having reigned twelve years and ten months. He left no testament, and, except for the unborn child of Roxane, no heir. His friends, who in his last moments pressed him to tell them to whom he left the throne, caught only the whispered words, " To the best man." This was the test his own claim of leadership had stood. 49^ Alexander the Gi r eat. [323 B.C. Over city and camp there rested the stillness of death. Doubt, terror, dismay, swallowed up grief. For the moment the pulse of the world stood still. The empire of the world lay there soulless and in swoon. Alexander had been its soul, but Alexander was gone from among the living. The King was dead, but no man cried, " Long live the King! " There was no lawful heir. Heracles, the son of Barsine, Memnon's widow, whom Alexander had taken from among the spoiled at Issus, could not count as such. Except for the unborn child of Roxane, no other could claim to be of Alexander's seed. Nearest of kin was the feeble-minded Ar- rhidseus, Philip's son by the Thessalian Philinna, and so half-brother of Alexander. This was all that the principle of legitimacy had to offer wherewith to awake the empire into life again. On the other side stood military power, embodied in the leaders of the army — all picked men, and tried, all noblemen as well as generals, any one of whom might have given the empire life, could he only command the allegiance of the rest. But that was out of the question. From the first council meeting their views went wide asunder. Ptolemy, at one extreme, argued for a division of the empire among the generals ; Meleager, at the other, called for the immediate recognition of Heracles or Ar- rhidaeus as King. He would not await the birth of Roxane's child. Roxane was an Asiatic. The child might be a girl. Meleager spoke the feeling of the ul- tra-Macedonian legitimists. They wanted a king and that a Macedonian. But it was another proposition, 323 B.C.] The Death of Alexander. 493 that of Perdiccas, which prevailed. Perdiccas, since Hephaestion's death, had been chief of staff; he held the insignia of royalty and the signet-ring, and was for the time the most influential of the generals. He proposed to await the birth of Roxane's child, and if it were a son to proclaim him King. Meanwhile four men, Perdiccas, Leon- natus, Antipater, and Craterus, with Perdiccas at the head, were to constitute a board of regency. This the nobility, represented by the cayalry, ac- cepted ; but when the yeomanry of the phalanx heard of it, their loyalty to the monarchical idea took offense. They scented in the scheme a return to the rule of the barons. The army was rent in twain. The monarchical infantry proclaimed Ar- rhidaeus, under the name of Philip, King. The aristocratic cavalry, forced to withdraw from the city, stood threateningly before its gates; but be- fore blood was shed a compromise was effected, in which the influence of Perdiccas again reasserted itself. The cavalry and the nobles agreed on their part to recognise Philip-Arrhidaeus as King, stipulat- ing only that in case Roxane should bear a son he should also receive recognition as King. The phalanx in its turn accepted the rule of the gen- erals, with Perdiccas as regent. The empire was to be divided into satrapies among the great captains. From that day the principle of legitimacy got no more than formal hearing. A month later Roxane bore a son, and he was duly proclaimed King, with the name Alexander. So there were two kings, one a half-wit, one an infant, both under the care of 494 Alexander the Great. [323 B.C. Perdiccas, and later, after his downfall and death (321 B.C.) under that of Antipater. After the death of this faithful old regent (319 B.C.) both fell upon troublous times. Their kingship had never been more than an empty name, and they but meaning- less insignia passed from hand to hand in the melee of politics and civil war. Both came to their death by violence, Arrhidaeus, with Eurydice, his Queen, in 317 B.C., by order of Olympias, Alexander's mother, and the little Alexander, together with Roxane, in 311 B.C., by order of Cassander. Olym- pias had already met a like fate five years before. An attempt to use the name of Heracles, Barsine's son, for political effect, brought him, too, and his mother, in 309 B.C., to their end, and so the line of Alexander perished from off the earth. But in Alexander's line had never lain the hope of continuing his empire. The King had died too young. The achievements of the army were too recent. The visible forms of power rested still in the arm of military force. The only hope lay in the predominance of one of the generals over the others. For a while it seemed that Perdiccas might be that one; again it was Antigonus, again Seleucus. But each one whetted the sword against the other, and the empire went down in a tangle of strife and car- nage. With the close of the century, and the issue of the battle of Ipsus (301 B.C.), it had resolved itself into four well-ascertained domains — Syria and Babylonia under Seleucus, Egypt under Ptolemy, Thrace and Asia Minor under Lysimachus, Mace- donia and Greece under Cassander. Twenty-five 3 2 3 B , c .] The Dea th of A lex a n der. 495 years later the portion of Lysimachus had disap- peared before the cyclone of the Celtic incursions, and three great kingdoms survived. So in substance the ruins remained until the consuls and the legions came, and unity again emerged under the name and the standards of Rome. Surely if we estimate in terms of external organi- sation, Alexander's empire had perished with him. His head appears on coins, his name and his memory were abundantly conjured with, but within ten years after his death all serious purpose of restoring the structure to unity had shifted into mere political pretence. If a man's life-work is to be judged only by what he erects into formal organisation, then we must pronounce the career of Alexander a failure, and more than a failure. He had dismantled what he found, and built nothing sure in its place. His dream of fusing the East and the West had been fulfilled and embodied in no visible institution, no form of government or law, of state or church. Greece, Egypt, and the Orient were still in govern- ment asunder. No wonder that historians have written the story of Greece — among them great names like Niebuhr and Grote — and seen nothing more in the career of Alexander than a brilliant disturbance of the world's order, an enthronement of militarism, an annihilation of Greek liberty, and an undoing of Greece in all that makes her life of interest to the world. It is another thing that their blindness could see in Alex- ander himself only a mad opportunist and greedy conqueror, whose life, had it been spared, could 496 Alexander the Great. [323 B.C. have wrought no more than further conquest; for Alexander was of all things an idealist, and they who have not read that in the story of his life may as well not have read it at all. Grote set him- self to write the achievements of the Greek demo- cracies. In the life of the free city Greek life had for him attained its consummation. What came after this in the maturing of history was to his eyes destruction, and not development. Alexander and the Macedonians were the agents of destruction, and in them could be found no good thing. Grote, looking through the eyes of Demosthenes, and cap- tivated by the brilliancies of a single form of life and a single set of institutions, under a single class of conditions, assigned to them an absolute validity for all conditions. Grote and Demosthenes are each in his way types of historians and statesmen who have spent their strength in deploring the waste of goodly seed-corn scattered on the fields, their eyes turned toward the former harvest, not the next. The old maxims, the old creeds, and the good old times are reasserted, defended, and bewailed long after they have passed to their larger fruitage in the unfolding of a* larger life. In the five years that elapsed between Alexander's accession to the Macedonian throne and his entrance into Babylon (331 B.C.) the world had passed from one harvest-time to another, but most men knew it not. In the year 330 B.C. all Athens was assembled in the theatre, hanging upon the words of Demos- thenes and ^Eschines as they fought their famous duel De Corona; but the issues with which the 323 B.C.] The Death of Alexander. 497 orators dealt were all six years old, some of them sixteen. The Athens in which these issues had been vital had long since gone forth from its narrow plain into the larger world. Nothing is surer evi- dence thereof than the sight of these men playing with the shards of an empty tomb. When Alexander's career began, the culture of the world, fixed in two main types, the feminine and the masculine, if we may broadly characterise them so, was still centralised and located, on the one hand in the wealth and settled industrial life of the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian river valleys, on the other in the free energy of the old Greek city communities. When his career ended, the barrier separating these domains had been broken down, never to be raised again. When Alexander came upon the scene, Greece was still the old Greece, the composite of autono- mous cities and cantons. In this form it was past the bloom, and was ripening to seed. All that the little communities could accomplish for history through living for themselves had been accom- plished. In the miniature life of their isolated valleys, opening to the sea, they had developed a social system in which, as individual achievement directly counted, and individual responsibility was directly assessed, personality gathered to itself un- wonted consciousness of power. So it was that here man first, as it were, discovered himself — first saw with clearness the power and the right of the free human soul. Man as a base-line for measuring the universe, man as a source of governing power, 32 498 Alexander the Great. [323 B.C. arose in Greece ; it was Greece that shaped the law of beauty from which came the arts of form, the law of speculative truth from which by ordered ob- servations came the sciences, and the law of liberty from which came the democratic state. This was what the old Greece held in keeping for the world. Alexander was the strong wind that scattered the seed ; again, he was the willing hand of the sower. When he planted seventy cities of the Greek type on Oriental soil he acted with plan and purpose. The city was Hellenism in the concrete. As a prin- ciple of social order, Hellenism was the government of communities of men located in territory, and the source of authority was from within; Orientalism was the government of territory in which lived men, and the source of authority was from without. In the centuries following Alexander the urban life, based on the Greek, gradually sought its centres outside the old limits of Greece, in the domain of a greater world. Alexandria, Rhodes, Pergamon, Antioch, Byzantium, instead of Athens, became its representatives. The forms of Greek culture, which were transmitted direct to the after-world through Rome, were those which lived here in the greater Greece. Until modern scholarship tunnelled a route back to the Old Greece, it was the taste and the in- tellectual interests of Alexandria, rather than those of Athens, that passed current as Greek. In the New Greece the culture of the Old assumed a world- form, and prepared itself for universal extension. The dialects of cantons shrank back before a uni- versal type of standard Greek, the lingua franca of 323 B.C.] The Death of Alexander. 499 the Levant. Local citizenship slowly yielded to a sense for citizenship of the world, and cosmopolitan- ism was born. The worship of the old city gods, based on community of blood, gave place to a yearn- ing for something that might symbolise the higher unity of human life. The old cities had passed over into the life of a greater whole, but this was as yet without body, and, except for the vision and type of a deified Alexander, without expression or sym- bol. It remained for Rome to satisfy the instinct of the times. Its deified emperors replaced the Alexander type, and with the acceptance of Christ- ianity a Holy Roman Empire, joined of body and soul, arose to claim the larger allegiance of men, — prototype of which had been the old allegiance to the Greek cities, now melted and dissolved in the fluid of the state. The existence of Christianity as the embodiment of the higher life of European civilisation is the best evidence of the reality and permanence of Alexander's empire. Religion is always in antiquity a surer guide to the real conditions of nationality than is political organisation. Christianity as a sys- tem, and as the historian sees it, is a pure and simple expression of Alexander's world. Its inner life, its heart, is of the East ; its philosophical organisation, its brain, is Greek. It blended Jew and Gentile in a brotherhood larger than that bond of blood and tribe which the mixing of the peoples had annulled. In Christian Europe of to-day the domain of Pro- testantism represents the individualism of the North- folk* the domain of Roman Catholicism marks the 500 Alexander the Great. [323 B.C. limits of the Roman Empire; the domain of the Eastern Church, the sphere of influence of ancient Greece and Byzantium. In Asia and Africa Mo- hammedanism holds the ground overrun by the Macedonian arms, and the frontiers of its predomi- nance to the east are those of Alexander's empire, from the Jaxartes to the Indus. Beyond there is another world, another order of life and thought. Though Islam is an after-growth of Orientalism, it bears in its fibre the evidence that Western spirit once helped till the soil whereon it grew. The seed-ground of European civilisation was neither Greece nor the Orient, but a world joined of the two. Most of the settled types of thought and things that go to make up the culture life of the West here acquired their outline form. Through the whole range from the species and varieties of cultivated trees and garden fruits to the forms and methods of industrial art, the standards of taste, the moulds of civic and social life, the categories of liter- ary form, the ordered schemes for conduct, thought, and faith — in them all the creation of the types and the first selection of the standards were the handi- work of this old-time larger world of men. Into this world we must take them back to find in true per- spective their motive and their meaning. It was a world in which the dawning instinct of cosmopoli- tanism first shaped provincial and domestic products to the universal use of men. The story of Alexander has become a story of death. He died himself before his time. With his life he brought the Old Greece to its end ; with his 323 B.C.] The Death of Alexander. 501 death the state he had founded. But they all three, Alexander, Greece, the Grand Empire, each after its sort, set forth, as history judges men and things, the inner value of the saying, " Except a grain of wheat faM into the earth and die, it abideth alone." INDEX Abdera, special tribute to Persia, 198 Abisares, ally of Porus at Hyda- spes, 438 ; submits to Alexan- der, 449 Abreas, in an attack on a city of the Mallians, 457 ff. Acarnania, joins Athens, 68 Achaia, joins Athens, 68 Achilles's tomb, Alexander at, 21 5 Ada, queen of Caria, submits to Alexander, 244 ; appointed viceroy of Caria, 247 Admetus, commander of hypas- pisls at Tyre, 321 ^gse, early capital of Macedo- nia, 8 ; marriage of Alexan- der's sister and King of Epirus at, 77 ^Egina, commercial superior of Athens, 84 ^ropus, King of Macedonia, T50 ^Eschines, age at birth of Alex- ander, 3 ; escapes conviction at Athens, 67 ; member of Athenian embassy to Philip, 72 ; leader of Macedonian party, 125, 126 ; causes war to be declared against Amphissa, 147 ; taunts Demosthenes, 281 ; taunted by the anti-Ma- cedonians, 296 ; suit against Ctesiphon, 447 ; contest with Demosthenes, De Corona, 496 ^Eschylus, Aristotle's neglect of, 43 ^Etolia, under control of Philip, 145 ; throws off Macedonian authority, 153 Agathon at court of Archelaus, 16 Agathon, brother of Parme- nion, 388 Agialects, diversity of Greek, 86 ff- >imnus, plots against Alexander, 391 )inocrates, architect of Alexan- dria, 342 )iodorus Siculus, biographer of Alexander, 161 (foot-note) Jiogenes, colloquy with Alexan- der, 53, 157 )iogenes, made tyrant of Mity- lene, 263 )iopeithes, in the Chersonese, 67 Hophantes, advocates slave-em- ployment at Athens, 136 Motimus the Athenian, person demanded by Alexander, 178 Drangiana, Alexander in, 3^"] ff. Drapsaca in Bactria, Alexander at, 394 Eastern Question, the, a monu- ment from Alexander's time, 183 Ecbatana, seat of Median Em- pire, 187 ; royal summer resi- dence of Persia, 200 ; Darius at, 373 ; Alexander at, 373 ff. Ecclesia, the Athenian, 116 ff. Egypt, conquered by Cambyses, 189 ; tribute to Persia, 197, 199 ; its peculiar civilisation, 329 ; Alexander in, 332 ff. ; a commercial centre, 358 Elis, joins Philip, 66 ; throws off Macedonian authority, 153 Epaminondas, military leader, 17 ; death, 139 Ephesus, location and character, 231 ; submits to Alexander, 232/". Ephialtes the Athenian, person demanded by Alexander, 178 Epidamnus, slave -employment in, 135 . Epirus, joins Philip, 66 Eretria, under Philip's influence, 66 Erigyius, commander of Alexan- der's mercenary cavalry, 377 Eubcea, under Philip's influence, 66 ; joins Athens, 68 ; its cities united in an anti-Macedonian league, 146 Eubulus, Lord of the Treasury at Athens, 120; leader of Ma- cedonian party, 125, 126 ; policy as treasurer of the dis- tribution fund, 131 ff. ; his- t o r i c a 1 connections of his policy, 133 Eumenes, marriage at Susa, 477 Euphrates, the, crossed by Alex- ander, 356 Euripides, death, 16 ; Aristotle's opinion of, 43 Ferghana, chiefs of the tribes about the, descended from Alexander, 402 Ganges, the, 450 Gaugamela, the battle of, loca- tion, 357 ; Darius encamped at, 357 ; Alexander fords the Tigris, 359 ; Darius's army at, 360 ; Darius's position at, 361 ; Alexander's approach, 361 ; 5^ Index. Gauagmela — Continued. Macedonian army at, 365 ; Al- exander's attack, 365 ; the fly- ing wedge, 366; Darius's flight, 367 ; the pursuit to Ar- bela, 368 Gaumata, the Pseudo-Smerdis, usurps the Persian throne, 189 Gaza, siege-engines at, 48 ; taken by Alexander, 325 ff. Gedrosian coast, the, Alexan- der's march along, 465 ff. Getae, defeated by Alexander, 162 Glaucippus, proposal to Alex- ander at Miletus, 237 Glaukanikoi submit to Alexan- der, 449 Gordian knot, the story of the, 258/: Gordium, Alexander at, 224, 258 Granicus, the battle of the, Per- sian position at, 217 ; Alexan- der's attack, 219 ; the Persian rout, 221 ; the dead, 222 ; the wounded, 223 ; the booty, 224 ; significance, 229 ; ratio of lost, 302 Greece, areas, 82 ; distances be- tween chief cities, 83 ; geo- graphy, 84 ff. ; effect of to- pography, 85 ; particularism of its communities, 86 ; dia- lects, 86 ff. ; manners and customs, 88 ff. ; educational standards, 90 ; weights and measures, 90 ; calendar, 91 ; religious usages, 92 ff.; com- mercial intercourse between cantons, 94 ff. ; travel, 96 ; theory of the state, 98 ff. ; citi- zenship, 100 ; religious charac- ter of the state, 101 ; relation of the individual to the state, 102 ff. ; state intrusion upon private right, 105 ff. ; legal status of the individual, 107 ; smallness a principle of the states, 108 ; political organisa- tion unsuited to an empire, no; treaties between states, in ; the Amphictyonies, 112 ; the Delian Confederacy, 113 ; obstacles to the creation of an imperial state, 114 ff.; the Athenian state, 115 ff. ; political history after Pelo- ponnesian war, 122 ff. ; slave-employment in, 135 ff. ; summary of events, 404-355 B.C., 138 ff. ; complete disor- ganisation, 141 ; submits to Alexander after destruction of Thebes, 177 ; its civilisation contrasted with the Persian, 180 ff. ; essential character- istics of the people, 183 ff. ; events during reign of Darius the Great, x 9 i , indifference to Alexander's campaign, 210, 267, 269 ; events during Alex- ander's campaign in Asia, 447 ; effect of Alexander's return to Susa, 486 ; before and after Alexander, 496 ff. Greeks of Italy, the, 346 Grote, on Alexander, 495 H Hadrian, on Alexandria, 339 Halicarnassus, resists Alexander, 243 ff.; besieged by Alexan- der, 244^"./ fired by Memnon, 246 ; taken by Alexander, 247 ; Macedonian loss in night sortie at, 302 Halonnesus, the affair of the, 68 Harpalus, sends books to Alex- ander, 43 ; misuse of funds, 470; flight to Greece, 471 Hecatseus, despatched to seize Attalus, 151 Hegelochus, sent to collect a fleet, 264 ; recaptures Tene- dos, 296 ; brings news of the dispersion of the Persian fleet, 344 Index. 513 Hegesippus, speech against Philip, 68 ; leader of anti- Macedonian party, 125 Hegesistratus, Persian com- mander of Miletus, 234 Heliopolis, Alexander at, 333 Hellenic Congress at Corinth, Toff- . r Hellenism, a critical time for, 191 ; Alexander champion of, 225 Helots, the, position at Sparta, 136 Hephaestion, called Philalexan- dros by Alexander, 52; honours the tomb of Patroclus, 215 ; visits Darius's family after Is- sus, 300 ; at the torture of rhiioten, 39c ; receives par- tial command of the com- panion cavalry, 393 ; in command of part of the army in India, 426 ; on the march down the Indus, 456 ; goes up the Persian coast with the main army, 470 ; marries Dry- petis, 476 ; receives a golden crown for bravery, 479 ; death at Ecbatana, 488 Heracles, son of Barsine, claim- ant for throne, 492 ; death, 494 Hermocrates, discussion with Pausanias, 78 Hermolaus forms a conspiracy against Alexander's life, 411 Herodotus, history of the con- flict between Greece and Per- sia, 182 ff. Hetairoi, the, 215 Hindoo Gymnosophists, ques- tioned by Alexander, 53 Hippocrates, at court of Perdic- cas II., 16 Homer, Alexander's delight in, 43/: Hydaspes, the battle of the, 29, 434 ff. ; Porus's army, 436 ; Alexander delays attack, 436 ; Alexander fords the river, 33 43S ; Porus's order of battle, 441 ; Alexander's attack, 441: ; Porus's surrender, 444 ; the slain, 446 ; Alexander's return to, 454 Hypasis, the, Alexander at, 450, 453 Hypaspists, 216 Hyperides, leader of anti-Mace- donian party, 125 ; person de- manded by Alexander, 178 Hyraotis, Alexander conveyed down the, 460 Hyrcania, Alexander in, 383 I Idrieus, king of Caria, 244 Illyria, conquered by Philip, 140; revolt of, 345 Imbros, retained by Athens, 72 India, Alexander in, 416 ff. ; the peoples, languages, re- ligions, 420 Indus, the voyage down the, 449. 463 Ipsus, battle of, results, 494 Isocrates, On the Peace, 3, 132 ; conception of rhetoric, 51 ; address to Philip, 144 Issus, battle of, arrival of Da- rius, 282 ; Alexander's coun- cil before, 283 ; Alexander's preparations for, 285 ; Da- rius's position at, 285 ff. ; the plain of, 286 ; Alexander's po- sition at, 286^". / Alexander's advance, 287 ; Alexander's at- tack, 2S9 ; the engagement, 290 ; Darius's flight, 291, 293 ; Persian rout, 292 ; Alexan- der's pursuit, 292 ; results, 293 ; the booty, 298 ; Alexan- der's treatment of Darius's family, 299 ; Macedonian loss at, 301 ; Persian loss at, 303 ; Alexander wounded, 304; Alexander's letter to Darius after, 168 Iturrean tribes of Syria, submit to Alexander, 314 5H Index. Jaxartes, the, identified with the Don, 384 ; Alexander at, 398 ff. ; the limit of Alexander's conquests, 400 Justinus, biographer of Alexan- der, 161 (foot-note) K Kathaioi, the, oppose Alexan- der, 450 Lampsacus, submits to Alexan- der, 217 Lanice, nurse to Alexander, 20 Laurion, silver mines in, 135 Lechseum, ratio of loss at the battle of, 303 Lemnos, retained by Athens, 72 Leonidas, Alexander's tutor, 21 ff- • „ Leonnatus, a " companion, car- ries message to Darius's fam- ily, 299 ; in an attack on a city of the Mallians, 4&] ff. ; re- ceives a golden crown for bravery, 479 ; regent after Alexander's death, 493 Lesbos, surrenders to Memnon, 262 ; submits to Macedonian rule, 344 Leucas, joins Athens, 68 Leuctra, victory of Thebes at, 139 ; ratio of loss at the battle of, 303 Loss in battles, ancient and mod- ern, ratio of, 302 Lycia, Alexander in, 248 ff. ; the people, language, civilisa- tion, 249 Lycurgus, Lord of the Treasury at Athens, 120 ; leader 6f anti- Macedonian party, 125 ; treas- urer of the distribution fund, 131 ; person demanded by Al- exander, 178 Lyncestian line, the, connected with Philip's death, 79 ; fur- nishes a candidate for the throne, 150 ; two opponents of Alexander put to death, 150 Lysander, the Spartan king, re- sponse of the Delphic Pythia to, 349 Lysimachus, Alexander's peda- gogue, 22 ; in Syria, 24 ff. ; likens Alexander to Achilles, 44 Lysimachus, becomes ruler of Thrace and Asia Minor, 494 ; his kingdom swept away by the Celts, 495 Lysippus, makes statues of the "companions" who fell at Granicus, 223 ; portrays 4lex- andcr, 228 M Macedonia, the government, peo- ple, language, 9 ff. ; royal family, 14 ; espousal of Hel- lenic interests, 15 ff. ; intro- duction of Greek culture, 16 ; ambition, 18 ; influence among Greek cities, 66 ff. Macedonian Party, situation pre- cedent to, 125; "the peace party," 126 ; its conservative point of view, 127 ; developed from conservative elements, 137 ; formative policy, 143 Magi, the, Median priests, 202 Magnesia, submits to Alexander, 234 Mallians, the, subdued by Alex- ander, 456 ff. Mantinea, the battle of, end of preeminence of Thebes, 139 Maracanda, Alexander at, 398 Mareotis Lake, Alexander at, 336 Masakes, Persian satrap at, 332 Massaga, taken by Alexander, 427 rr, . Mausolus, king of Cana, 244 Index. SO Mazaeus, at Gaugamela, 367 Media, tribute to Persia, 197, 199 Medius the Thessalian, during Alexander's last illness, 489, 490 Megalopolis, ratio of loss at the battle of, 303 ; besieged by Sparta, 346 Megara, relations with Philip, 66, 67 ; joins Athens, 68 ; the people of, 86 Megasthenes, writer of the third century B.C., 451 Mekran, Alexander's march through the, 466 Melanippides at court of Perdic- cas II., 16 Meleager, sent to Macedonia, 248 ; at tile battle of the Ply. daspes, 438 ; in the council after Alexander's death, 492 Memnon, at Granicus, 217 ; withdrawal to Halicarnassus, 233 ; commander of Persians at Halicarnassus, 243 ; plans to cut Alexander off from Eu- rope, 260 ; wins over Chios and Lesbos, 261, 262 ; death at Mitylene, 263 ; his plans abandoned by Darius, 264 Memphis, captured by Camby- ses, 189; Alexander at, 333 ff. ; Alexander receives a Greek delegation at, 354 Menecles the Peloponnesian, teaches Alexander mathemat- ics, 48 Mercenaries, employment in Greece and Persia, 211 Messene, under Philip's influ- ence, 66, 67 Metics, status at Athens, 99 ; tax upon, 128 Mieza, seat of Aristotle's school, 34 Miletus, rival of Ephesus, 232 ; opposes Alexander, 234 ff.; besieged by Alexander, 236 ff. ; augury before the battle of, 237 ; Alexander's answer to Glaucippus at, 237; capture of, 240 ; the Persian fleet at, 241 ; Alexander disbands his fleet, 242 Mithra cult, the, 205 Mithridates, the son-in-law of Darius, death at Granicus, 221 Mitylene, besieged by Memnon, 262 ; capitulates to Pharnaba- zus, 263 ; recaptured from the Persians, 344 Mnoitai, the, public serfs in Crete, 136 Mcerocles the Athenian, person demanded by Alexander, 178 Musaeum, the, at Alexandria, 340 Myndus, Alexander's attack upon, 244 N Nabarzanes, commander of the Persian cavalry, 374 National Council at Corinth. 156 Naucratis, a Greek settlement in Egypt, 337 Nearchus, studies in natural his- tory, 49 ; made admiral of Alexander's fleet in India, 455 ; left with fleet at the mouth of the Indus, 465 ; sails to the Persian Gulf, 468 ff.; marriage at Susa, 477 ; re- ceives a golden crown for bravery, 479 ; at Alexander's last illness, 490 Neoptolemus, father of Olym- pias, 4 Neoptolemus, a Lyncestian prince, death at Halicarnassus, 245 Nicaea, founded by Alexander, .446, 449 Nicanor, the Macedonian ad- miral, at Miletus, 240 Nicanor, son of Parmenion, com- mander of the hypaspists, 388 5i6 Index. Nicanor, ambassador from Alex- ander to the Olympic festival, 4S6 Nicomachus, plots against Alex- ander, 391 Niebuhr, on Alexander, 495 Olympias, mother of Alexander, her character, 4 ff.; quarrel with Philip, 75 ; goes to Epi- rus, 76 ; returns from Epirus, 77 ; connected with Philip's death, 79 ; causes the murder of Cleopatra's child, 158 ; re- ceives gifts from booty at Granicus, 224 ; influence on Alexander's character, 351 ; makes trouble in Macedonia, 470 ; orders death of Arrhi- dseus, 494 ; death, 494 Olynthus, fall of, 142 Onesicritus, pilot of Alexander's royal galley in India, 455 ; on the voyage to the Persian Gulf, 469 ; receives a golden crown for bravery, 479 Oreus, under Philip's influence, 66 Oropus, added to Attica, 72 Othontopates, king of Caria, 244 ; defeated at Halicarnas- sus, 278 Oxus, Alexander at the, 394 Oxyartes, father of Roxane, sub- mits to Alexander, 412 Pactolus, gold mines of, 187 P3eonians, conquered by Philip, 140 Pamphylia, the people and lan- guage, 250 ; Alexander in, 254 Paneum, the, at Alexandria, 341 Parsetacene, number of lost in the battle of the, 302 Paralos, the sacred Athenian trireme, 355 Parmenion, at time of Philip's death, 150, 151 ; in Asia Mi- nor, 159; the crossing at Ses- tus, 213 ; at Granicus, 218 ; sent to occupy Dascylium, 230; at Miletus, 236 ; augury at Miletus, 237 ; in command in winter quarters in Phrygia, 249 ; sends word to Alexander of the Lyncestian plot, 251 ; at Gordium, 258 ; warns Alex- ander against the physician Philip, 276; occupies the Amanus Mountains, 277 ; at Issus, 287 ; occupies Damas- cus, 304 ; advises Alexander to accept Darius's terms, 324 ; advises reconnoitre at Gauga- mela, 362 ; hard pressed at rirtugamcict, 307 ; opposes the burning of the palace at Per- sepolis, 372 ; his services re- viewed, 387 ; implicated by Philotas in his conspiracy, 392 ; put to death, 393 Parthia, Alexander in, 3&S ff. Pasargadae, treasure in, 199; oc- cupied by Alexander, 370 ; Alexander's return to, 470 Patala, Alexander at, 464 Patroclus, his tomb honoured by Hephaestion, 215 Patron, the Phocian, leader of Darius's Greek mercenaries, 377 Pausanias, murders Philip, 78 ; proclaimed a public benefactor at Athens, 153 Peithon, made satrap of a region on the Indus, 464 Pelion, in Illyria, burned by Alexander, 165 Pella, birthplace of Alexander, 8 Pelusium welcomes Alexander, 332 Perdiccas, slays murderer of Philip, 79 ; precipitates attack on Thebes, 173 ; refuses lands assigned him by Alexander, 209; in command of part of Judex. Perdiccas — Continued. Alexander's army in India, 426; marriage at Susa, 477 ; regent after Alexander's death, 493 ; guardian of Roxane's son, 494; death, 494 Perdiccas II., king of Macedo- nia, 16 Perdiccas III., king of Macedo- nia, 17 Pericles, imperial policy, 65 ; an Athenian boss, 120 Perinthus, besieged by Philip, 67 Persepolis, built by Darius the Great, 199 ; treasure in, 199 ; occupied by Alexander, 370 ; Alexander's return to, 470 Persia, contributes to Athenian league, 68 ; i-L-iaintains balance of weakness among Greek states, 139; relations to Greece, 143; begins operations to check Alexander, 167; its civil- isation contrasted with the Greek, 180 ff.; wars under Darius and Xerxes, 182 ; the people, 187 ; early history, 188 ff. Persian Empire, the, origin of, 187 ; organised by Darius the Great, 190 ff. ; resources and taxes, 197 ; special taxes in, 198; area and population, 199; army maintenance, 199 ; royal residences in, 199 ; the royal court, 200 ; the wives of the King, 201 ; kings from Darius the Great to Darius Codoman- nus, 206 Persian espionage, 194 Persian Gulf, the, explored by Alexander's fleet, 470 Persian military roads, 195; the road from Sardis to Susa, 196 ; make Alexander's em- pire possible, 197 Persian satraps, powers of, 193 Peucestas, in an attack on a city of the Mallians, 457 ff.; re- ceives a golden crown for brav- ery, 479 Pezetairoi, 216 Phalanx, the Macedonian, 216 Phaleas of Chalcedon, demands likeness of property for all cit- izens, 136 Pharnabazus, takes Mitylene, 263; takes Tenedos, 264 ; goes to head off revolt at Chios, 298; a fugitive, 344 Pharos, Alexander's first visit to, 45 ; the island of, 341 ; the lighthouse at, 342 Pheidippides, courier before bat- tle of Marathon, 83 Philip, his two great achieve- ments, 7 ; hostage at Thebes, 17 ; ascends the throne, 19 ; the attack on Byzantium, 64 ; the peace of Philocrates, 65 ; made member of Amphicty- onic Council, 65; presides over Pythian games, 65; ends Sacred War, 65; occupies Thrace, 66 ; begins two years' war with Athens, 67 ff.; be- sieges Perinthus and Byzan- tium, 67 ; receives embassy from Athens, 71 ; treaty with Athens after Chaeronea, 72 ; Hellenic Congress at Corinth and its results, 73 ff. ; com- mander in chief of Hellenic league, 74 ; quarrel with Alex- ander and Olympias, 74 ff.; marries Cleopatra, 75 ; ar- ranges marriage between Alexander's sister and King of Epirus, 77 ; murdered, 7&ff.; summary of events, 404-355 B. c. , 138 ff. ; involved i n affairs of central Greece, 141 ; defender of Delphi, 141 ; his opportunity in Greece, 144 ; concessions to Athens, 145 ; desires hegemony, not subju- gation, 145; movement against Byzantium, 146; enters central Greece at the head of an army, 5i8 Index. Philip — Continued. 147 ; master of Greece, 148 ; wounded by the Triballi, 159 Philip, commander on the march down the Indus, 456 Philip the Acharnanian, physi- cian with Alexander at Tarsus, 276 Philistus, historian of Sicily, 43 Philocrates, the peace of, 65 Philonicus, sells Bucephalus to Philip, 26 Philonides, courier of Alexander, 83 (foot-note) Philotas, son of Parmenion, in- volved in a conspiracy against Alexander, 387 ; previous criti- cism of Alexander, 391 ; put on trial, 391 ; convicted and put to death, 392 Philoxenus, in Aristotle's Poli- tics, 43 Phocion, member of Athenian embassy to Philip, 72 ; leader of Macedonian party, 125 ; approves of Eubulus, 131 ; counsels against war, 147 ; ad- vises submission to Alexander's demand for the ten politicians, 178 ; persuades Alexander to moderate his terms, 179 Phocis, occupied by Philip, 65 Phrada, Alexander at, 387 Phrataphernes, submits to Alex- ander, 384 Phrygia, Alexander in, 247, 256 ff- Pindar, celebrates Alexander's victories, 15 ; the one great writer of Thebes, 172 ; his house spared at destruction of Thebes, 174 Pisidia, Alexander in, 253 ff. Pixodarus, brother of Ada, queen of Caria, 244 Plutarch, biographer of Alex- ander, 160 (foot-note) Polyeuctus the Athenian, per- son demanded by Alexander, 178 Polystratus, at death of Darius, 380 Porus, the battle with ; see Hy- daspes ; confirmed in his old authority, 449 Posidonius, engineer with Alex- ander, 238 Potidsea, seized by Philip, 140 Priapus, submits to Alexander, 217 Proteas, son of Lanice and as- sociate of Alexander, 20 Proteas, captures Persian ships at Siphnus, 265 Protesilaus, tomb of, visited by Alexander, 214 Prytaneum, the daily meal at the, 136 Prytany, the Athenian, 118 Psammetichus I_ employ Gictk mercenaries, 337 Ptolemseus, king of Macedonia, 17 Ptolemy, son of Seleucus, sent to Macedonia, 248 ; killed at Issus, 304 Ptolemy Soter, first ruler of Alexandria, 337 ; builder of the lighthouse at Pharos, 342 ; institutes the Alexander cult, 354 ; at the murder of Clitus, 406 ; at the siege on the In- dus, 429 ; marriage at Susa, 477 ; in the council after Alex- ander's death, 492 ; becomes ruler of Egypt, 494 Pydna, seized by Philip, 140 Pyrgoteles, portrays Alexander, 228 Pythian games, presided over by Philip, 65 R Rhagae, Alexander at, 377 Rhodes, alliance reestablished with anti-Macedonian party, 146 ; beginning of her com- mercial career, 448 Index. 5<9 Roxane, marriage with Alex- ander, 412 ; birth of a son, 413 ; death, 413, 494 S Sacred War, begun, 141 ; con- tinued, 142 ; ended by Philip, 65 Sagalassus, Alexander at, 256 Samos, retained by Athens, 72 Sangala, siege of, 302 ; captured by Alexander, 450 Sardis, captured by Cyrus, 188 ; submits to Alexander, 230 ; government of Lydia under Alexander, 231 Sarissophors, 216 Satibarzanes, satrap at Susia, srrbrrvitfi to Alexander, 386 Sattagydae, the satrapy of the, tribute to Persia, 197 Satyrus, Life of Philip, 75 Scythians, defeated by Alex- ander, 399 Seleucus, marriage at Susa, 477 ; becomes ruler of Syria and m Babylonia, 494 Selge, Alexander's treaty with, 255 Sema, the, at Alexandria, 341 Serapeum, the, at Memphis, 334 Sestos, expedition to, 182 Sidon, surrenders to Alexander, 307 ; Alexander collects a fleet at, 313; population, 338 Siege-engines, use of by the Greeks, 238 Siege-tower, the, type used by Alexander, 239 Siwah, oasis of, site of temple of Jupiter Amnion, 348 Slaves in Greece, public employ- ment, 135 jf.j price and sup- ply. 174 Smerdis, murdered, 190 Social War, political situation at end of, 140 Socrates declines Archelaus's in- vitation, 16 Solon, rebukes Crcesus, 182 Sophocles declines Archelaus's invitation, 16 Sparta, refuses to participate in compact with Philip, 74 ; plain of, 85 ; summary of events, 404-355 B.C., 138^.; throws off Macedonian authority, 153 ; refuses to recognise Alexan- der's leadership, 156 ; accepts money from Darius, 168 ; pop- ulation, 338 ; the disaffection of, 345 ; submits to Antipater, 346 ; besieges Megalopolis, 346 Spitamenes, revolt of, 399 ; de- feated by Craterus, 402 ; de- feated by Alexander, 402 ; put to death, 403 Stagira, Aristotle's birthplace, 33 I rebuilt by Philip, 34 Stasanor, meets Alexander with supplies, 467 Strategoi, the Athenian, 119 Strymon, Alexander subdues tribes on the, 64 Susa, capital of Persia, 1S8 ; treasure in, 199 ; capital of Persian Empire, 199 ; Alexan- der at, 370 ; Alexander's re- turn to, 470 ; the five days' marriage fete at, 476^". Susia, Alexander at, 385 Syracuse, population, 338 Syria, tribute to Persia, 197 Syrphax, leader of the oligarchs at Ephesus, 233 ; stoned to death by Ephesian mob, 234 Tarsus, Alexander at, 275 Taxiles, an Indian rajah, meets Alexander, 425; welcomes Alexander, 434 ; confirmed in his old authority, 449 Tenedos, yields to Pharnabazus, 264 ; recaptured by Hegelo- chus, 296 ; returns to Macedo- nian rule, 344 520 Indi ex. Teos, welcomes Alexander, 234 Termessus, Alexander at, 255 r rhapsacus, Alexander crosses the Euphrates at, 356 Thebes, after Chseronea, 70 ; oc- cupied by Macedonian garri- son, 74 ; the people, 86, 171 ff. ; summary of events, 404- 355 B.C., 138 ff.; victory at Leuctra, 139 ; alliance with Athens, 146 ff. ; recognises . Alexander'sleadership,i56; re- volt against Alexander, \70ff.; location, etc., 171 ff. ; Alex- ander encamped before, 172 ; captured by Alexander, 173 ; destroyed by Alexander and inhabitants sold as slaves, 174; fate pronounced by a tribunal of neighbouring states, 175; be- trayal of Greece in Persian war, 176 ; refounded by Cas- sander, 176; population, 338 Thermopylae, passed by Philip, 65 Thessaly, becomes Philip's ally, 65 ; joins Alexander, 155 Tigris, the, crossed by Alexan- der, 359 Timolaus, a Theban leader, slain, 170 Timotheus, at court of Archelaus, 16 Trade routes between India and the Western world in an- cient and modern times, 358 Tralles, submits to Alexander, 234 Triballi, the, attitude towards Macedonia, 159; defeated by Alexander, 162 Trireme, the, 235 Trogus Pompeius, biographer of Alexander, 161 (foot-note) Troy, Alexander at, 214 Tyre, siege-engines at, 48 ; early history, 307 ff.; unwilling to admit Alexander, 307 ; Eze- kiel's curse upon, 308 ; nomi- nal vassal of Persia, 309; necessity for its capture, 310 ; length of the siege, 311 ; build- ing of the mole, 311 ff.; Alex- ander collects a fleet, 313 ; ar- rival of Cleander, 314; attack by Alexander's fleet, 315 ; at- tack from the mole, 316 ; at- tack by Tyrian fleet, 317 ; Alexander's only sea-fight, 318 ; the capture, 2 2 off.; loss at the capture of, 322 ; dis- posal of the inhabitants, 323 ; population, 338; Alexander at, on return from Egypt, 355 U Uxians, the, return Bucepha- lus, 28 ; subjugated, 370 Varuna, identified with Ahura Mazda, 203 Xenophon, On the Revenues, 3 ; monograph on the finances of the Athenian state, 127 ff. Zamolxis cult, the, 162 Zariaspa, Alexander winters at, 402 Zend-Avesta, sacred writings of the Ahura Mazda cult, 202 Zeno, the Stoic, 59 Zeuxis at court of Archelaus, 16 Zoroaster, religious reformer. 189 ; gives form to the Ahura Mazda religion, 202, 204 Heroes of the Nations. EDITED BY EVELYN ABBOTT, M.A, Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. A Series of biographical studies of the lives and work of a number of representative historical characters about whom have gathered the great traditions of the Nations to which they belonged, and who have been accepted, in many instances, as types of the several National ideals. With the life of each typical character will be presented a picture of the National conditions surrounding him during his career. 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