Such were the sentiments excited by Alexander’s career even in the middle of 330 B.C., more than seven years before his death. During the following seven years his additional achievements had carried astonishment yet further. 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 its easternmost limits. Besides Macedonia, Greece, and Thrace, he possessed all that immense treasure and military force which had once made the Great King so formidable. By no contemporary man had any such power ever been known or conceived. With the turn of imagination then prevalent, many were doubtless disposed to take him for a god on earth, as Grecian spectators had once supposed with regard to Xerxes, when they beheld the innumerable Persian host crossing the Hellespont.
Exalted to this prodigious grandeur, Alexander was at the time of his death little more than thirty-two years old—the age at which a citizen of Athens was growing into important commands; ten years less than the age for a consul at Rome; two years younger than the age at which Timour first acquired the crown and began his foreign conquests. His extraordinary bodily powers were unabated; he had acquired a large stock of military experience; and, what was still more important, his appetite for further conquest was as voracious, and his readiness to purchase it at the largest cost of toil or danger as complete as it had been when he first crossed the Hellespont. Great as his past career had been, his future achievements with such increased means and experience were likely to be yet greater. His ambition would have been satisfied with nothing less than the conquest of the whole habitable world as then known; and, if his life had been prolonged, he probably would have accomplished it.
The patriotic feelings of Livy dispose him to maintain that Alexander, had he invaded Italy and assailed Romans and Samnites, would have failed and perished like his relative Alexander of Epirus. But this conclusion can not be accepted. If we grant the courage and discipline of the Roman infantry to have been equal to the best infantry of Alexander’s army, the same can not be said of the Roman cavalry as compared with the Macedonian companions. Still less is it likely that a Roman consul, annually changed, would have been a match for Alexander in military genius and combination; nor, even if personally equal, would he have possessed the same variety of troops and arms, each effective in its separate way, and all conspiring to one common purpose; nor, the same unbounded influence over their minds in stimulating them to full effort.
Among all the qualities which go to constitute the highest military excellence, either as a general or as a soldier, none was wanting in the character of Alexander. Together with his own chivalrous courage—sometimes, indeed, both excessive and unseasonable, so as to form the only military defect which can be fairly imputed to him—we trace in all his operations the most careful dispositions taken beforehand, vigilant precaution in guarding against possible reverse, and abundant resource in adapting himself to new contingencies. His achievements are the earliest recorded evidence of scientific military organization on a large scale, and of its overwhelming effects.
Alexander overawes the imagination more than any other personage of antiquity by the matchless development of all that constitutes effective force—as an individual warrior and as organizer and leader of armed masses; not merely the blind impetuosity ascribed by Homer to Ares, but also the intelligent, methodized, and all-subduing compression which he personifies in Athene. But all his great qualities were fit for use only against enemies, in which category, indeed, were numbered all mankind, known and unknown, except those who chose to submit to him. In his Indian campaigns amid tribes of utter strangers, we perceive that not only those who stand on their defense, but also those who abandon their property and flee to the mountains are alike pursued and slaughtered.
Apart from the transcendent merits of Alexander as a general, some authors give him credit for grand and beneficent views on the subject of imperial government and for intentions highly favorable to the improvement of mankind. I see no ground for adopting this opinion. As far as we can venture to anticipate what would have been Alexander’s future, we see nothing in prospect except years of ever repeated aggression and conquest, not to be concluded till he had traversed and subjugated all the inhabited globe. The acquisition of universal dominion—conceived not metaphorically but literally, and conceived with greater facility in consequence of the imperfect geographical knowledge of the time—was the master-passion of his soul.
“You are a man like all of us, Alexander, except that you abandon your home,” said the naked Indian to him, “like a medlesome destroyer, to invade the most distant regions; enduring hardship yourself and inflicting hardship on others.” Now, how an empire thus boundless and heterogeneous, such as no prince as has yet ever realized, could have been administered with any superior advantages to subjects, it would be difficult to show. The mere task of acquiring and maintaining, of keeping satraps and tribute-gatherers in authority as well as in subordination, of suppressing resistances ever liable to recur in regions distant by months of march, would occupy the whole life of a world conquerer, without leaving any leisure for the improvements suited to peace and stability—if we give him credit for such purposes in theory.
In respect of intelligence and combining genius, Alexander was Hellenic to the full; in respect of disposition and purpose, no one could be less Hellenic. The acts attesting his Oriental violence of impulse, unmeasured self-will, and exaction of reverence above the limits of humanity, have been recounted. To describe him as a son of Hellas, imbued with the political maxims of Aristotle, and bent on the systematic diffusion of Hellenic culture for the improvement of mankind is in my judgement an estimate of his character contrary to the evidence.
Alexander is indeed said to have invited suggestions from Aristotle as to the best mode of colonizing; but his temper altered so much after a few years of Asiatic conquest, that he came not only to lose all deference for Aristotle’s advice, but even to hate him bitterly. Instead of “Hellenizing” Asia, he was tending to “Asiatize” Macedonia and Hellas. His temper and character as modified by a few years of conquest rendered him quite unfit to follow the course recommended by Aristotle toward the Greeks—quite as unfit as any of the Persian kings, or as the French Emperor Napoleon, to endure that partial frustration, compromise, and smart from personal criticism, which is inseparable from the position of a limited chief.
Plutarch states that Alexander founded more than seventy new cities in Asia. So large a number of them is neither verifiable nor probable, unless we either reckon up simple military posts or borrow from the list of foundations established by his successors. Except Alexandria in Egypt, none of the cities founded by Alexander himself can be shown to have attained any great development. The process of “Hellenizing” Asia, in as far as Asia was ever “Hellenized,” which has so often been ascribed to Alexander, was in reality the work of the successors to his great dominion.