SCHEMES OF CONQUEST
[334 B.C.]
A year and some months had sufficed for Alexander to make a first display of his energy and military skill, destined for achievements yet greater; and to crush the growing aspirations for freedom among Greeks on the south, as well as among Thracians on the north, of Macedonia. The ensuing winter was employed in completing his preparations; so that early in the spring of 334 B.C., his army destined for the conquest of Asia was mustered between Pella and Amphipolis, while his fleet was at hand to lend support.
The whole of Alexander’s remaining life—from his crossing the Hellespont in March or April 334 B.C., to his death at Babylon in June 323 B.C., eleven years and two or three months—was passed in Asia, amidst unceasing military operations, and ever-multiplied conquests. He never lived to revisit Macedonia; but his achievements were on so transcendent a scale, his acquisitions of territory so unmeasured, and his thirst for further aggrandisement still so insatiate, that Macedonia sinks into insignificance in the list of his possessions. Much more do the Grecian cities dwindle into outlying appendages of a newly grown oriental empire. During all these eleven years, the history of Greece is almost a blank, except here and there a few scattered events. It is only at the death of Alexander that the Grecian cities again awaken into active movement.
The Asiatic conquests of Alexander do not belong directly and literally to the province of an historian of Greece. They were achieved by armies of which the general, the principal officers, and most part of the soldiers, were Macedonian. The Greeks who served with him were only auxiliaries, along with the Thracians and Pæonians. Though more numerous than all the other auxiliaries, they did not constitute, like the Ten Thousand Greeks in the army of the younger Cyrus, the force on which he mainly relied for victory. His chief secretary, Eumenes of Cardia, was a Greek, and probably most of the civil and intellectual functions connected with the service were also performed by Greeks. Many Greeks also served in the army of Persia against him, and composed indeed a larger proportion of the real force (disregarding mere numbers) in the army of Darius than in that of Alexander. Hence the expedition becomes indirectly incorporated with the stream of Grecian history by the powerful auxiliary agency of Greeks on both sides—and still more, by its connection with previous projects, dreams, and legends, long antecedent to the aggrandisement of Macedon—as well as by the character which Alexander thought fit to assume. To take revenge on Persia for the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, and to liberate the Asiatic Greeks, had been the scheme of the Spartan Agesilaus and of the Pheræan Jason; with hopes grounded on the memorable expedition and safe return of the Ten Thousand. It had been recommended by the rhetor Isocrates, first to the combined force of Greece, while yet Grecian cities were free, under the joint headship of Athens and Sparta; next, to Philip of Macedon as the chief of united Greece, when his victorious arms had extorted a recognition of headship, setting aside both Athens and Sparta. The enterprising ambition of Philip was well pleased to be nominated chief of Greece for the execution of this project. From him it passed to his yet more ambitious son.
Though really a scheme of Macedonian appetite and for Macedonian aggrandisement, the expedition against Asia thus becomes thrust into the series of Grecian events, under the Panhellenic pretence of retaliation for the long-past insults of Xerxes. We call it a pretence, because it had ceased to be a real Hellenic feeling, and served now two different purposes: first, to ennoble the undertaking in the eyes of Alexander himself, whose mind was very accessible to religious and legendary sentiment, and who willingly identified himself with Agamemnon or Achilles, immortalised as executors of the collective vengeance of Greece for Asiatic insult; next, to assist in keeping the Greeks quiet during his absence. He was himself aware that the real sympathies of the Greeks were rather adverse than favourable to his success.
Apart from this body of extinct sentiment, ostentatiously rekindled for Alexander’s purposes, the position of the Greeks in reference to his Asiatic conquests was very much the same as that of the German contingents, especially those of the confederation of the Rhine, who served in the grand army with which the emperor Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. They had no public interest in the victory of the invader, which could end only by reducing them to still greater prostration. They were likely to adhere to their leader as long as his power continued unimpaired, but no longer. Yet Napoleon thought himself entitled to reckon upon them as if they had been Frenchmen, and to denounce the Germans in the service of Russia as traitors who had forfeited the allegiance which they owed to him. We find him drawing the same pointed distinction between the Russian and the German prisoners taken, as Alexander made between Asiatic and Grecian prisoners. These Grecian prisoners the Macedonian prince reproached as guilty of treason against the proclaimed statute of collective Hellas, whereby he had been declared General and the Persian king a public enemy.
Hellas, as a political aggregate, has now ceased to exist, except in so far as Alexander employs the name for his own purposes. Its component members are annexed as appendages, doubtless of considerable value, to the Macedonian kingdom. Fourteen years before Alexander’s accession, Demosthenes, while instigating the Athenians to uphold Olynthus against Philip, had told them: “The Macedonian power, considered as an appendage, is of no mean value; but by itself, it is weak and full of embarrassments.” Inverting the position of the parties, these words represent exactly what Greece herself had become, in reference to Macedonia and Persia, at the time of Alexander’s accession. Had the Persians played their game with tolerable prudence and vigour, his success would have been measured by the degree to which he could appropriate Grecian force to himself, and withhold it from his enemy.
Alexander’s memorable and illustrious manifestations, on which we are now entering, are those, not of the ruler or politician, but of the general and the soldier. In his character his appearance forms a sort of historical epoch. It is not merely in soldier-like qualities—in the most forward and even adventurous bravery, in indefatigable personal activity, and in endurance as to hardship and fatigue—that he stands pre-eminent; though these qualities alone, when found in a king, act so powerfully on those under his command, that they suffice to produce great achievements, even when combined with generalship not surpassing the average of his age. But in generalship, Alexander was yet more above the level of his contemporaries. His strategic combinations, his employment of different descriptions of force conspiring towards one end, his long-sighted plans for the prosecution of campaigns, his constant foresight and resource against new difficulties, together with rapidity of movement even in the worst country—all on a scale of prodigious magnitude—are without parallel in ancient history. They carry the art of systematic and scientific warfare to a degree of efficiency, such as even successors trained in his school were unable to keep up unimpaired.[b]