It was while he made a visit to Ecbatana, in the summer of B.C. 324, that his favorite, Hephæstion, died. His sorrow and grief were unbounded. He cast himself upon the ground, cut his hair close, and refused food and drink for two days. This was the most violent grief he ever manifested, and it was sincere. He refused to be comforted, yet sought for a distraction from his grief in festivals and ostentation of life.
His entrance into Babylon. Splendor of the funeral of Hephæstion. Death of Alexander.
In the spring of B.C. 323, he marched to Babylon, where were assembled envoys from all the nations of the known world to congratulate him for his prodigious and unprecedented successes, and invoke his friendship, which fact indicates his wide-spread fame. At Babylon he laid plans and made preparations for the circumnavigation and conquest of Arabia, and to found a great maritime city in the interior of the Persian Gulf. But before setting out, he resolved to celebrate the funeral obsequies of Hephæstion with unprecedented splendor. The funeral pile was two hundred feet high, loaded with costly decorations, in which all the invention of artists was exhausted. It cost twelve thousand talents, or twelve million dollars of our money. The funeral ceremonies were succeeded by a general banquet, in which he shared, passing a whole night in drinking with his friend Medius. This last feast was fatal. His heated blood furnished fuel for the raging fever which seized him, and which carried him off in a few days, at the age of thirty-two, and after a reign of twelve years and eight months, June, B.C. 323.
His boundless ambition. His death a fortunate event. Effects of his conquests.
He indicated no successor. Nor could one man have governed so vast an empire with so little machinery of government. His achievements threw into the shade those of all previous conquerors, and he was, most emphatically, the Great King—the type of all worldly power. “He had mastered, in defiance of fatigue, hardship, and combat, not merely all the eastern half of the Persian empire, but unknown Indian regions beyond. Besides Macedon, [pg 396] Greece, and Thrace, he possessed all the treasures and forces which rendered the Persian king so formidable,” and he was exalted to all this power and grandeur by conquest at an age when a citizen of Athens was intrusted with important commands, and ten years less than the age for a Roman consul. But he was unsatisfied, and is said to have wept that there were no more worlds to conquer. He would, had he lived, doubtless have encountered the Romans, and all their foes, and added Italy and Spain and Carthage to his empire. But there is a limit to human successes, and when his work of chastisement of the nations was done, he died. But he left a fame never since surpassed, and “he overawes the imagination more than any personage of antiquity.” He had transcendent merits as a general, but he was much indebted to fortunate circumstances. He thought of new conquests, rather than of consolidating what he had made, so that his empire must naturally be divided and subdivided at his death. Though divided and subdivided, the effect of those conquests remained to future generations, and had no small effect on civilization, and yet, instead of Hellenizing Asia, he rather Asiatized Hellas. That process, so far as it was carried out, is due to his generals—the Diadochi—Antigonas, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Lysimachus, &c., who divided between them the empire. But Hellenism in reality never to a great extent passed into Asia. The old Oriental habits and sentiments and intellectual qualities remained, and have survived all succeeding conquests. Oriental habits and opinions rather invaded the western world with the progress of wealth and luxury. Asia, by the insidious influences of effeminated habits, undermined Greece, and even Rome, rather than received from Europe new impulses or sentiments, or institutions. A new and barbarous country may prevail, by the aid of hardy warriors, adventurous and needy, over the civilized nations which have been famous for a thousand years, but the conquered country almost invariably has transmitted its habits and institutions among the conquerors, so much more majestic [pg 397] are ideas than any display of victorious brute forces. Dynasties are succeeded by dynasties, but civilization survives, when any material exists on which it can work.
Athens was never a greater power in the world than at the time her political ruin was consummated. Hence the political changes of nations, which form the bulk of all histories, are insignificant in comparison with those ideas and institutions which gradually transform the habits and opinions of ordinary life. Yet it is these silent and gradual changes which escape the notice of historians, and are the most difficult to be understood and explained, for lack of sufficient and definite knowledge. Moreover, it is the feats of extraordinary individuals in stirring enterprise and heroism which have thus far proved the great attraction of past ages to ordinary minds. No history, truly philosophical, would be extensively read by any people, in any age, and least of all by the young, in the process of education.
The remaining history of Greece has little interest until the Roman conquests, which will be presented in the next book.