And bid alternate passions fall and rise;
While at each change, the son of Lybian Jove
Now burns with glory, and then melts with love,—
Now his fierce eyes with sparkling fury glow,
Now, sighs steal out, and tears begin to flow;
Persians and Greeks like turns of nature found,
And the world's victor stood subdued—by sound!”[79]
On these lines, which allude to the celebrated ode of Dryden,—who adapted, with most happy application, to the burning of the Persian palace, an anecdote recorded of the power of Timotheus over the same great warrior, on another occasion,—I may remark, by the way, what influence the accidental composition of this ode has had, in giving almost a sort of dignity to the very madness of the act which it records. It is impossible for us,—even though we knew well how fictitious is the circumstance attached to it,—not to look upon the action, in a different light, from that in which we should have viewed it, if we had read only the historical account of it, as originating in a drunken debauch, at the instigation of a drunken prostitute.
Such is the influence of genius. Its power extends not over the present and the future merely, but, in some measure, also over the past, which might have seemed fixed forever. In spite of our conviction, we look upon an action of Alexander differently, because an individual existed, many centuries after him, and in a country which would then have been justly counted barbarous, by the very barbarians whom he overcame.
“Ebrio scorto de tanta re ferente sententiam, unus et alter, et ipsi mero onerati, assentiunt: Rex quoque fuit avidior quam patientior. ‘Quin igitur ulcisimur Græciam, et urbi faces subdimus?’ Omnes incaluerant mero; itaque surgunt temulenti ad incendendam urbem, cui armati, pepercerant.”[80]