HIS MOTIVES (DROYSEN)
[Bishop Thirlwall[k] sees great benefits from Alexander’s conquests, but doubts if they were all intentional with him, or largely the accidents of his success. Droysen feels no doubt as to the presence of sharply definite motives and large policies in Alexander’s mind.]
“That the soul of this king was built on a scale that surpassed human measure,” Polybius says, “is an opinion in which all agree.” His strength of will, his wide vision, his intellectual pre-eminence are proved by his deeds and the strict, the rigid, logic of their consistency. What his desire was, and what his conception of his work (a fair judge will wish no other measure), this is something one can approximately learn only from such parts of his work as he was allowed to realise. Alexander was versed in the highest culture and knowledge of his time; he would have cherished no meaner opinion of a king’s calling than the “master of those who know.” But for him, unlike his great teacher, the thought of what monarchy was and the “monarch’s duty as watchman” did not logically lead to the necessity of treating barbarians like animals and plants. Nor would it have been his opinion that his Macedonians had been trained to arms from his father’s time in order that they might be, in the philosopher’s language, “masters over those who were fitly slaves”; still less that first his father, and then he himself, had forced the Greeks into the Corinthian federation, that they might plunder defenceless Asia, squeeze it dry with their exquisite selfishness and their shameless intrigues.
Aristotle teaching the Youthful Alexander
He had dealt Asia a terrible blow. He would remember the spear of his ancestor Achilles. He would recognise that the grace of the true spear of royalty lay in its power to heal the wounds it made. With the annihilation of the old kingdom, with the death of Darius, he became heir to the empire over unnumbered peoples who had been governed till then as slaves. A labour it was, worthy of a king indeed, to free them so far as they could understand or learn of freedom, to preserve and further them in whatever they enjoyed of laudable and sound, to respect and spare them in whatever was sacred in their eyes and whatever was their very own. He must know how to propitiate, how to win them, that they too may be made to share the burden of the empire which is gradually to unite them with the Greek world. Such a monarchy could permit no mention of conquerors and conquered when once the victory was won; it must wipe out from men’s memory the distinction between Greek and barbarian.
There lay on this road difficulties immeasurable—much that was arbitrary, much that was violent, unnatural—they seemed to make the undertaking impossible. But him they did not stop nor perplex; they only heightened the vehemence of his will, and stiffened the rigid and conscious assurance of his dealings. The work which he had undertaken in the exaltation of youth possessed him; gathering like an avalanche it swept him on; ruin, devastation, fields of dead, marked his progress; with the world that he conquered, there came a change over his army, over his surroundings, over the man himself. He passed on like a tempest, he saw only his aim, and in that his justification.
The majority misunderstood and disapproved of what the king did or left undone. While Alexander tried all means to win the conquered and make them forget their conquerors in the Macedonians, many of his followers in their insolence and their selfishness calmly claimed the conquerors’ ruthless right of violence. While Alexander received with the same graciousness the genuflexions of Persian magnates and the congratulatory missions with which Greece honoured him, accepting alike the worship which the orientals considered they owed him, and the military acclamations of his phalanxes, they would have liked to see themselves as the equal of their king, and everything else far below them in the dust of humility. And while they themselves yielded to all the luxuriousness and licentiousness of Asiatic life, so far as the camp and the vicinity of their openly disapproving king permitted—yielded with no other object besides the gratification of appetites run mad—they took it ill of their king that he wore the Median dress and affected the Persian court functions, wherein the millions of Asia recognised and worshipped him as their god and king.[l]