This process of hellenizing Asia—in so far as Asia was ever hellenized—which has often been ascribed to Alexander, was in reality the work of the Diadochi who came after him; though his conquests doubtless opened the door and established the military ascendency which rendered such a work practicable. The position, the aspirations, and the interests of these Diadochi—Antigonus, Ptolemy, Seleukus, Lysimachus, etc.—were materially different from those of Alexander. They had neither appetite nor means for new and remote conquest; their great rivalry was with each other; each sought to strengthen himself near home against the rest. It became a matter of fashion and pride with them, not less than of interest, to found new cities immortalizing their family names. These foundations were chiefly made in the regions of Asia near and known to Greeks, where Alexander had planted none. Thus the great and numerous foundations of Seleukus Nikator and his successors covered Syria, Mesopotamia, and parts of Asia Minor. All these regions were known to Greeks, and more or less tempting to new Grecian immigrants—not out of reach or hearing of the Olympic and other festivals, as the Jaxartes and the Indus were. In this way a considerable influx of new hellenic blood was poured into Asia during the century succeeding Alexander,—probably in great measure from Italy and Sicily, where the condition of the Greek cities became still more calamitous—besides the numerous Greeks who took service as individuals under these Asiatic kings. Greeks, and Macedonians speaking Greek, became predominant, if not in numbers, at least in importance, throughout most of the cities in Western Asia. In particular, the Macedonian military organization, discipline, and administration, was maintained systematically among these Asiatic kings. In the account of the battle of Magnesia, fought by the Seleukid king Atiochus the Great against the Romans in 190 B. C., the Macedonian phalanx, constituting the main force of his Asiatic army, appears in all its completeness, just as it stood under Philip and Perseus in Macedonia itself.[648]
When it is said however that Asia became hellenized under Alexander’s successors, the phrase requires explanation. Hellenism, properly so called—the aggregate of habits, sentiments, energies, and intelligence, manifested by the Greeks during their epoch of autonomy[649]—never passed over into Asia; neither the highest qualities of the Greek mind, not even the entire character of ordinary Greeks. This genuine Hellenism could not subsist under the overruling compression of Alexander, nor even under the less irresistible pressure of his successors. Its living force, productive genius, self-organizing power, and active spirit of political communion, were stifled, and gradually died out. All that passed into Asia was a faint and partial resemblance of it, carrying the superficial marks of the original. The administration of the Greco-Asiatic kings was not hellenic (as it has been sometimes called), but completely despotic, as that of the Persians had been before. Whoever follows their history, until the period of Roman dominion, will see that it turned upon the tastes, temper, and ability of the prince, and on the circumstances of the regal family. Viewing their government as a system, its prominent difference as compared with their Persian predecessors, consisted in their retaining the military traditions and organization of Philip and Alexander, an elaborate scheme of discipline and manœuvring, which would not be kept up without permanent official grades and a higher measure of intelligence than had ever been displayed under the Achæmenid kings, who had no military school or training whatever. Hence a great number of individual Greeks found employment in the military as well as in the civil service of these Greco-Asiatic kings. The intelligent Greek, instead of a citizen of Hellas, became the instrument of a foreign prince; the details of government were managed to a great degree by Greek officials, and always in the Greek language.
Moreover, besides this, there was the still more important fact of the many new cities founded in Asia by the Seleukidæ and the other contemporary kings. Each of these cities had a considerable infusion of Greek and Macedonian citizens, among the native Orientals located there, often brought by compulsion from neighboring villages. In what numerical ratio these two elements of the civic population stood to each other, we cannot say. But the Greeks and Macedonians were the leading and active portion, who exercised the greatest assimilating force, gave imposing effect to the public manifestations of religion, had wider views and sympathies, dealt with the central government, and carried on that contracted measure of municipal autonomy which the city was permitted to retain. In these cities the Greek inhabitants, though debarred from political freedom, enjoyed a range of social activity suited to their tastes. In each, Greek was the language of public business and dealing; each formed a centre of attraction and commerce for an extensive neighborhood; all together, they were the main hellenic or quasi-hellenic element in Asia under the Greco-Asiatic kings, as contrasted with the rustic villages, where native manners, and probably native speech, still continued with little modification. But the Greeks of Antioch, or Alexandria, or Seleukeia, were not like citizens of Athens or Thebes, nor even like men of Tarentum or Ephesus. While they communicated their language to Orientals, they became themselves substantially orientalized. Their feelings, judgments, and habits of action, ceased to be hellenic. Polybius, when he visited Alexandria, looked with surprise and aversion on the Greeks there resident, though they were superior to the non-hellenic population, whom he considered worthless.[650] Greek social habits, festivals, and legends, passed with the hellenic settlers into Asia; all becoming amalgamated and transformed so as to suit a new Asiatic abode. Important social and political consequences turned upon the diffusion of the language, and upon the establishment of such a common medium of communication throughout Western Asia. But after all, the hellenized Asiatic was not so much a Greek as a foreigner with Grecian speech, exterior varnish, and superficial manifestations; distinguished fundamentally from those Greek citizens with whom the present history has been concerned. So he would have been considered by Sophokles, by Thucydides, by Sokrates.
Thus much is necessary in order to understand the bearing of Alexander’s conquests, not only upon the hellenic population, but upon hellenic attributes and peculiarities. While crushing the Greeks as communities at home, these conquests opened a wider range to the Greeks as individuals abroad; and produced—perhaps the best of all their effects—a great increase of intercommunication, multiplication of roads, extension of commercial dealing, and enlarged facilities for the acquisition of geographical knowledge. There already existed in the Persian empire an easy and convenient royal road (established by Darius son of Hystaspes and described as well as admired by Herodotus) for the three months’ journey between Sardis and Susa; and there must have been another regular road from Susa and Ekbatana to Baktria, Sogdiana, and India. Alexander, had he lived, would doubtless have multiplied on a still larger scale the communications both by sea and land between the various parts of his world-empire. We read that among the gigantic projects which he was contemplating when surprised by death, one was, the construction of a road all along the northern coast of Africa, as far as the Pillars of Herakles.[651] He had intended to found a new maritime city on the Persian Gulf, at the mouth of the Euphrates, and to incur much outlay for regulating the flow of water in its lower course. The river would probably have been thus made again to afford the same conveniences, both for navigation and irrigation, as it appears to have furnished in earlier times under the ancient Babylonian kings. Orders had been also given for constructing a fleet to explore the Caspian Sea. Alexander believed that sea to be connected with the Eastern Ocean,[652] and intended to make it his point of departure for circumnavigating the eastern limits of Asia, which country yet remained for him to conquer. The voyage already performed by Nearchus, from the mouth of the Indus to that of the Euphrates, was in those days a splendid maritime achievement; to which another still greater was on the point of being added—the circumnavigation of Arabia from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea; though here we must remark, that this same voyage (from the mouth of the Indus round Arabia into the Red Sea) had been performed in thirty months, a century and a half before, by Skylax of Karyanda, under the orders of Darius son of Hystaspes;[653] yet, though recorded by Herodotus, forgotten (as it would appear) by Alexander and his contemporaries. This enlarged and systematic exploration of the earth, combined with increased means of communication among its inhabitants, is the main feature in Alexander’s career which presents itself as promising real consequences beneficial to humanity.
We read that Alexander felt so much interest in the extension of science, that he gave to Aristotle the immense sum of 800 talents in money, placing under his directions several thousand men, for the purpose of prosecuting zoological researches.[654] These exaggerations are probably the work of those enemies of the philosopher who decried him as a pensioner of the Macedonian court; but it is probable enough that Philip, and Alexander in the early part of his reign, may have helped Aristotle in the difficult process of getting together facts and specimens for observation—from esteem towards him personally, rather than from interest in his discoveries. The intellectual turn of Alexander was towards literature, poetry, and history. He was fond of the Iliad especially, as well as of the Attic tragedians; so that Harpalus, being directed to send some books to him in Upper Asia, selected as the most acceptable packet various tragedies of Æschylus, Sophokles, and Euripides, with the dithyrambic poems of Telestes and the histories of Phlistus.[655]
CHAPTER XCV.
GRECIAN AFFAIRS FROM THE LANDING OF ALEXANDER IN ASIA TO THE CLOSE OF THE LAMIAN WAR.
Even in 334 B. C., when Alexander first entered upon his Asiatic campaigns, the Grecian cities, great as well as small, had been robbed of all their free agency, and existed only as appendages of the kingdom of Macedonia. Several of them were occupied by Macedonian garrisons, or governed by local despots who leaned upon such armed force for support. There existed among them no common idea or public sentiment, formally proclaimed and acted on, except such as it suited Alexander’s purpose to encourage. The miso-Persian sentiment—once a genuine expression of Hellenic patriotism, to the recollection of which Demosthenes was wont to appeal, in animating the Athenians to action against Macedonia, but now extinct and supplanted by nearer apprehensions—had been converted by Alexander to his own purposes, as a pretext for headship, and a help for ensuring submission during his absence in Asia. Greece had become a province of Macedonia; the affairs of the Greeks (observes Aristotle in illustrating a philosophical discussion) are “in the hands of the king.”[656] A public synod of the Greeks sat from time to time at Corinth; but it represented only philo-Macedonian sentiment; all that we know of its proceedings consisted in congratulations to Alexander on his victories. There is no Grecian history of public or political import; there are no facts except the local and municipal details of each city—“the streets and fountains which we are repairing and the battlements which we are whitening”, to use a phrase of Demosthenes[657]—the good management of the Athenian finances by the orator Lykurgus, and the contentions of orators respecting private disputes or politics of the past.
But though Grecian history is thus stagnant and suspended during the first years of Alexander’s Asiatic campaigns, it might at any moment have become animated with an active spirit of self-emancipation, if he had experienced reverses, or if the Persians had administered their own affairs with skill and vigor. I have already stated, that during the first two years of the war, the Persian fleet (we ought rather to say, the Phenician fleet in the Persian service) had a decided superiority at sea. Darius possessed untold treasures which might have indefinitely increased that superiority and multiplied his means of transmarine action, had he chosen to follow the advice of Memnon, by acting vigorously from the sea and strictly on the defensive by land. The movement or quiescence of the Greeks therefore depended on the turn of affairs in Asia; as Alexander himself was well aware.
During the winter of 334-333 B. C., Memnon with the Persian fleet appeared to be making progress among the islands in the Ægean,[658] and the anti-Macedonian Greeks were expecting him farther westward in Eubœa and Peloponnesus. Their hopes being dashed by his unexpected death, and still more by Darius’s abandonment of the Memnonian plans, they had next to wait for the chance of what might be achieved by the immense Persian land-force. Even down to the eve of the battle of Issus, Demosthenes[659] and others (as has already been mentioned) were encouraged by their correspondents in Asia to anticipate success for Darius even in pitched battle. But after the great disaster at Issus, during a year and a half (from November 333 B. C. to March or April 331 B. C.), no hope was possible. The Persian force seemed extinct, and Darius was so paralyzed by the captivity of his family, that he suffered even the citizens of Tyre and Gaza to perish in their gallant efforts of defence, without the least effort to save them. At length, in the spring of 331 B. C., the prospects again appeared to improve. A second Persian army, countless like the first, was assembling eastward of the Tigris; Alexander advanced into the interior, many weeks’ march from the shores of the Mediterranean, to attack them; and the Persians doubtless transmitted encouragements with money to enterprising men in Greece, in hopes of provoking auxiliary movements. Presently (October 331 B. C.) came the catastrophe at Arbela; after which no demonstration against Alexander could have been attempted with any reasonable hope of success.