The death of Alexander, thus suddenly cut off by a fever in the plenitude of health, vigor, and aspirations, was an event impressive as well as important in the highest possible degree, to his contemporaries far and near. When the first report of it was brought to Athens, the orator Demades exclaimed, "It can not be true: if Alexander were dead, the whole habitable world would have smelt of his carcass." This coarse, but emphatic comparison, illustrates the immediate, powerful, and wide-reaching impression produced by the sudden extinction of the great conqueror. It was felt by each of the many remote envoys who had so recently come to propitiate this far-shooting Apollo—by every man among the nations who had sent these envoys—throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, as then known—to affect either his actual condition or his probable future.
The first growth and development of Macedonia, during the twenty-two years preceding the battle of Chæroneia,[44] from an embarrassed secondary state into the first of all known powers, had excited the astonishment of contemporaries, and admiration for Philip's organizing genius. But the achievements of Alexander, during his twelve years of reign, throwing Philip into the shade, had been on a scale so much grander and vaster, and so completely without serious reverse or even interruption, as to transcend the measure, not only of human expectation, but almost of human belief. The Great King (as the King of Persia was called by excellence) was, and had long been, the type of worldly power and felicity, even down to the time when Alexander crossed the Hellespont. Within four years and three months from this event, by one stupendous defeat after another, Darius had lost all his Western empire, and had become a fugitive eastward of the Caspian Gates, escaping captivity at the hands of Alexander only to perish by those of the satrap Bessus. All antecedent historical parallels—the ruin and captivity of the Lydian Crœsus, the expulsion and mean life of the Syracusan Dionysius, both of them impressive examples of the mutability of human condition—sank into trifles compared with the overthrow of this towering Persian colossus. The orator Æschines exprest the genuine sentiment of a Grecian spectator when he exclaimed (in a speech delivered at Athens shortly before the death of Darius), "What is there among the list of strange and unexpected events that has not occurred in our time? Our lives have transcended the limits of humanity; we are born to serve as a theme for incredible tales to posterity. Is not the Persian king—who dug through Athos and bridged the Hellespont—who demanded earth and water from the Greeks—who dared to proclaim himself in public epistles master of all mankind from the rising to the setting sun—is not he now struggling to the last, not for dominion over others, but for the safety of his own person?"
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 possest all that immense treasure and military force which had once rendered 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 would probably have accomplished it. Nowhere (so far as our knowledge reaches) did there reside any military power capable of making head against him; nor were his soldiers, when he commanded them, daunted or baffled by any extremity of cold, heat, or fatigue. The patriotic feelings of Livy dispose him to maintain that Alexander, had he invaded Italy and assailed Romans or 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 found a match for Alexander in military genius and combinations; nor, even if personally equal, would he have possest 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. I do not think that even the Romans could have successfully resisted Alexander the Great; tho it is certain that he never throughout all his long marches encountered such enemies as they, nor even such as Samnites and Lucanians—combining courage, patriotism, discipline, with effective arms both for defense and for close combat.
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 fairly be 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. Amidst constant success, these precautionary combinations were never discontinued. 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, amidst 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 soldier and 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 until 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. At the moment of his death, he was commencing fresh aggression in the south against the Arabians, to an indefinite extent; while his vast projects against the western tribes in Africa and Europe, as far as the Pillars of Hercules, were consigned in the orders and memoranda confidentially communicated to Kraterus. Italy, Gaul, and Spain would have been successively attacked and conquered; the enterprises proposed to him when in Bactria by the Chorasmian prince Pharasmanes, but postponed then until a more convenient season, would have been next taken up, and he would have marched from the Danube northward round the Euxine and Palus Mæotis[45] against the Scythians and the tribes of the Caucasus. There remained, moreover, the Asiatic regions east of the Hyphasis, which his soldiers had refused to enter upon, but which he certainly would have invaded at a future opportunity, were it only to efface the poignant humiliation of having been compelled to relinquish his proclaimed purpose. Tho this sounds like romance and hyperbole, it was nothing more than the real insatiate aspiration of Alexander, who looked upon every new acquisition mainly as a capital for acquiring more. "You are a man like all of us, Alexander" (said the naked Indian to him), "except that you abandon your home like a meddlesome destroyer, to invade the most distant regions; enduring hardship yourself, and inflicting hardship upon others." Now, how an empire thus boundless and heterogeneous, such as no prince has ever yet 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-conqueror, without leaving any leisure for the improvements suited to peace and stability, if we give him credit for such purposes in theory.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] From Chapter LVIII of the "History of Greece." Altho several histories of Greece have been written since Grote's, his work "still remains in some respects the greatest," says A. D. Lindsay, his latest editor. Grote, in a sense, stands to Greece as Gibbon to the Roman Empire. He depended mainly on the literary sources, archæology in his day having done little to widen knowledge. His work is therefore defective in its earlier parts, but from the sixth century down, when the literary sources begin, he is "still almost as valuable as ever."
[41] The expedition to Sicily of which, as recorded by Thucydides, two notable incidents are given in Volume I of this collection.
[42] Alcibiades was a leader of the party which had favored the expedition, and which prevailed at last over bitter opposition.