Soothed with the sound, the king grew vain;
Fought all his battles o'er again;
And thrice he routed all his foes; and thrice he slew the slain.
The master saw the madness rise;
His glowing cheeks, his ardent eyes;
And, while he Heaven and Earth defied,
Changed his hand, and checked his pride.
He chose a mournful Muse,
Soft pity to infuse;
He sung Darius, great and good,
By too severe a fate,
Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen,
Fallen from his high estate,
And weltering in his blood;
Deserted at his utmost need,
By those his former bounty fed;
On the bare earth exposed he lies,
With not a friend to close his eyes.
With downcast looks the joyless victor sat,
Revolving in his altered soul
The various turns of chance below;
And, now and then a sigh he stole,
And tear's began to flow.
Under the soothing influence of the next theme, which is Love, Alexander sinks into a slumber, from which, however, a change in the music to discordant strains arouses him to feelings of revenge, as the singer draws a picture of the Furies, and of the Greeks "that in battle were slain." Then it was that Alexander, instigated by Thais, a celebrated Athenian beauty who accompanied him on his expedition, set fire to the palace of Persepolis, intending to burn the whole city—"the wonder of the world." The poet compares Thais to Helen, whose fatal beauty caused the downfall of Troy, 852 years before.
Now strike the golden lyre again;
A louder yet, and yet a louder strain.
Break his bands of sleep asunder,
And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder.
Hark! hark! the horrid sound
Has raised up his head,
As awaked from the dead,
And, amazed, he stares around.
Revenge! revenge! Timotheus cries,
See the Furies arise!
See the snakes that they rear!
How they hiss in their hair,
And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!
Behold a ghastly band,
Each a torch in his hand!
These are the Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain,
And unburied remain,
Inglorious on the plain:
Give the vengeance due
To the valiant crew,
Behold how they toss their torches on high!
How they point to the Persian abodes,
And glittering temples of their hostile gods!
The princes applaud with a furious joy;
And the king seized a flambeau with zeal to destroy;
Thais led the way,
To light him to his prey,
And, like another Helen, fired another Troy!
During four years Alexander remained in the heart of Persia, reducing to subjection the chiefs who still struggled for independence, and regulating the government of the conquered provinces. Ambitious of farther conquests, he passed the Indus, and invaded the country of the Indian king Po'rus, whom he defeated in a sanguinary engagement, and took prisoner. Alexander continued his march eastward until he reached the Hyph'asis, the most eastern tributary of the Indus, when his troops, seeing no end of their toils, refused to follow him farther, and he was reluctantly forced to abandon the career of conquest, which he had marked out for himself, to the Eastern ocean. He descended the Indus to the sea, whence, after sending a fleet with a portion of his forces around through the Persian Gulf to the Euphrates, he marched with the remainder of his army through the barren wastes of Gedro'sia, and after much suffering and loss once more reached the fertile provinces of Persia.
VIII. THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER.
For some time after his return Alexander's attention was engrossed with plans for organizing, on a permanent basis, the government of the mighty empire that he had won. Aiming to unite the conquerors and the conquered, so as to form out of both a nation independent alike of Macedonian and Persian prejudices, he married Stati'ra, the oldest daughter of Darius, and united his principal officers with Persian and Median women of the noblest families, while ten thousand of his soldiers were induced to follow the example of their superiors. But while he was occupied with these cares, and with dreams of future conquests, his career was suddenly terminated by death. On setting out to visit Babylon, in the spring of 324, soon after the decease of an intimate friend —Hephæs'tion—whose loss caused a great depression of his spirits, he was warned by the magicians that Babylon would be fatal to him; but he proceeded to the city to conclude his preparations for his next ambitious scheme—the subjugation of Arabia. Babylon was now to witness the consummation of his triumphs and of his life. "As in the last scene of some well-ordered drama," says a modern historian, "all the results and tokens of his great achievements seemed to be collected there to do honor to his final exit." Although his mind was actively occupied in plans of conquest, he was haunted by gloomy forebodings and superstitious fancies, and endeavored to dispel his melancholy by indulging freely in the pleasures of the table. Excessive drinking at last brought to a crisis a fever which he had probably contracted in the marshes of Assyria, and which suddenly terminated his life in the thirty-third year of his age, and the thirteenth of his reign (323 B.C.). He was buried in Babylon. From the Latin poet LUCAN we take the following estimate of
His Career and His Character.
Here the vain youth, who made the world his prize,
That prosperous robber, Alexander, lies:
When pitying Death at length had freed mankind,
To sacred rest his bones were here consigned:
His bones, that better had been tossed and hurled,
With just contempt, around the injured world.
But fortune spared the dead; and partial fate,
For ages fixed his Pha'rian empire's date.
[Footnote: Pharian. An allusion to the famous light-house, the Pharos of Alexandria, built by Ptolemy Philadelphus, son of Ptolemy Soter, who succeeded Alexander in Egypt.]
If e'er our long-lost liberty return,
That carcass is reserved for public scorn;
Now it remains a monument confessed,
How one proud man could lord it o'er the rest.
To Maçedon, a corner of the earth,
The vast ambitious spoiler owed his birth:
There, soon, he scorned his father's humbler reign,
And viewed his vanquished Athens with disdain.
Driven headlong on, by fate's resistless force,
Through Asia's realms he took his dreadful course;
His ruthless sword laid human nature waste,
And desolation followed where he passed.
Red Ganges blushed, and famed Euphrates' flood,
With Persian this, and that with Indian blood.