Aristotle teaching the Youthful Alexander
He had dealt Asia a terrible blow. He would remember the spear of his ancestor Achilles. He would recognise that the grace of the true spear of royalty lay in its power to heal the wounds it made. With the annihilation of the old kingdom, with the death of Darius, he became heir to the empire over unnumbered peoples who had been governed till then as slaves. A labour it was, worthy of a king indeed, to free them so far as they could understand or learn of freedom, to preserve and further them in whatever they enjoyed of laudable and sound, to respect and spare them in whatever was sacred in their eyes and whatever was their very own. He must know how to propitiate, how to win them, that they too may be made to share the burden of the empire which is gradually to unite them with the Greek world. Such a monarchy could permit no mention of conquerors and conquered when once the victory was won; it must wipe out from men’s memory the distinction between Greek and barbarian.
There lay on this road difficulties immeasurable—much that was arbitrary, much that was violent, unnatural—they seemed to make the undertaking impossible. But him they did not stop nor perplex; they only heightened the vehemence of his will, and stiffened the rigid and conscious assurance of his dealings. The work which he had undertaken in the exaltation of youth possessed him; gathering like an avalanche it swept him on; ruin, devastation, fields of dead, marked his progress; with the world that he conquered, there came a change over his army, over his surroundings, over the man himself. He passed on like a tempest, he saw only his aim, and in that his justification.
The majority misunderstood and disapproved of what the king did or left undone. While Alexander tried all means to win the conquered and make them forget their conquerors in the Macedonians, many of his followers in their insolence and their selfishness calmly claimed the conquerors’ ruthless right of violence. While Alexander received with the same graciousness the genuflexions of Persian magnates and the congratulatory missions with which Greece honoured him, accepting alike the worship which the orientals considered they owed him, and the military acclamations of his phalanxes, they would have liked to see themselves as the equal of their king, and everything else far below them in the dust of humility. And while they themselves yielded to all the luxuriousness and licentiousness of Asiatic life, so far as the camp and the vicinity of their openly disapproving king permitted—yielded with no other object besides the gratification of appetites run mad—they took it ill of their king that he wore the Median dress and affected the Persian court functions, wherein the millions of Asia recognised and worshipped him as their god and king.[l]
HIS EFFECT ON FEDERALISATION (PÖHLMANN)
[Every one admits that the lack of unity among the Greek towns was the cause of evils innumerable, and that some form of federation was vitally needed. Many have felt that Alexander furnished the needed unifaction by his centralised empire; but Pöhlmann is of contrary mind.]
Droysen’s peculiar way of seeing history has led him greatly to overrate the blessings of the new federal régime. It is true that in Hellas, under the old party names of aristocrat and democrat, the hostile interests of rich and poor were engaged in a pitiless and passionate struggle, and, if we consider the decomposition that was killing the life of communities, a monarchy would appear to be exactly what was needed to exercise a levelling and reconciliatory influence. But a kingdom of this national character, whose first aim would be to satisfy the most vital interests of the nation and create a true internal peace—such a kingdom was not at all the ideal of the Macedonian monarchy. So far from standing superior to party warfare, the monarchy supported itself by favouring the particular interests of that party which came over to the Macedonian camp. The immense emigration produced by the consequent oppression of those who belonged to the opposition, is proof enough that the new order did not produce a citizenship of inner peace, but, on the contrary, gave new food to the differences from which the communities suffered. So far as the policy of Philip was concerned, the object of the bond was attained when it brought the power of the Greek people into its own service; and even if the war against Persia had its national and Hellenic side, yet so early an authority as Polybius rightly and soberly judged that the Macedonian king was chiefly acting in the matter to satisfy a personal end. It is an illusion of Droysen’s to imagine that this subjection of Greece to a policy which was, by its nature, bound to serve dynastic and personal interests, at the same time secured to the Greeks a common national policy.