This problem was the first great political difficulty he solved; and he solved it very early in his career by the successful experiment of founding a city on the confines of the Greek seas and the Asiatic continent, into which Jews and Egyptians crowded along with Greeks, and produced the first specimen of that composite Hellenistic life which soon spread over all his empire.
His development of commerce.
Diffusion of gold.
This happy experiment, no doubt intended as an experiment, and perhaps the easiest and most obvious under the circumstances, must have set Alexander's mind into the right groove. Further advances into Asia showed him the immense field open to conquest by his arms, and also by the higher culture and enterprise of Greeks and Jews. He must have felt that in the foundation of chains of cities peopled by veterans and traders he would secure not only a military frontier and military communications, but entrepôts for the rising trade which brought new luxuries from the East, and new inventions from the West. Two distinct causes tended largely to promote this commerce, the vigorous maintenance of peace and security on roads and frontiers, and still more the dissemination of a vast hoard of gold captured in the Persian treasuries. This hoard, amounting to several millions of our money, not only stimulated trade by its mere circulation, but afforded the merchant a medium of exchange as superior in convenience to baser metals as bank-notes are to gold. The new merchant could pay out of his girdle in gold as much as
his father had paid out of a camel's load in silver or copper. I have no doubt the Jews were the first people to profit by these altered circumstances, and thus to attain that importance from Rhodes to Rhagæ which comes to light so suddenly and silently in the history of the Diadochi.
Development of Alexander's views.
His romantic imagination.
No pupil of Aristotle.
These changes seem to me to have dawned gradually, though quickly, upon the powerful mind of the conqueror, and to have transformed him from a young knight-errant in search of fame into a statesman facing an enormous responsibility. His intense and indefatigable spirit knew no repose except the distraction of physical excitement; and unfortunately, with the growth of larger views, his love of glory and of adventure was not stilled. No cares of State or legislative labours were able to quench the romance of his imagination and the longing to make new explorations and new conquests. This is the feature which legends of the East and West have caught with poetic truth; they have transformed the visions of his fancy into the chronicle of his life. But all that he did in the way of real government, of practical advancement in civilization, of respecting and adjusting conflicting rights among his various subjects, seems to me the result of a rapid practical insight, a large comprehension of pressing wants and useful reforms, not the working out of any mature theory. Hence I regard it as nonsense to call the politician and the king in any important sense the pupil of Aristotle. There is hardly a point in the Politics
which can be regarded as having been adopted in the Macedonian settlement of the world. The whole conditions of this problem and its solution were non-Hellenic, non-speculative, new.
