The story of Alexander has become a story of death. He died, himself, before his time. With his life he brought the old Greece to its end; with his death, the state he had founded. But they all three, Alexander, Greece, the Grand Empire, each after its sort, set forth, as history judges men and things, the inner value of the saying, “Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth alone.”[o]
CHAPTER LVIII. GREECE DURING THE LIFE OF ALEXANDER
The great conqueror is so much more of a cosmopolitan than a Greek that it has been possible and advisable to trace his career as a unit almost without alluding to the little territory his father had been so anxious to acquire and appease. But Greece, never quiet, was not stagnant during the absence of Alexander; and before taking up the tangle of the successors of Alexander, it will be well to glance at the activities of the Grecians and their futile restiveness.[a]
The springs of that policy among the Grecian republics, which produced war against Alexander in Greece itself while he was prosecuting the war of the Grecian confederacy against Persia—nowhere declared by ancient writers, but seeming rather studiously involved in mist by some of them—may nevertheless, by a careful examination of information remaining, in a great degree be traced.
Nothing in ancient history remains more fully ascertained than that, under the Macedonian supremacy, the Grecian republics enjoyed, not only more liberty and independency than under the Athenian or Lacedæmonian supremacy, but, as far as appears, all that could be consistent with the connection of all as one people. Nor did it rest there; Demosthenes, in the Athenian assembly, reviled the Macedonian monarchs, the allies of his commonwealth, the heads of the Grecian confederacy, in a manner that in modern times would be reckoned highly indecent towards an enemy; and he avowed and even boasted of treasonable practices against the general confederacy, of which his commonwealth was a member. “I,” he said, “excited Lacedæmon against Alexander: I procured the revolt against him in Thessaly and Perrhæbia.” In fact the government of Athens, described, as we have formerly seen, by Xenophon and Isocrates as in their time verging towards anarchy, is largely shown, in the extant works of following orators, and especially in the celebrated contest between Æschines and Demosthenes, to have been still advancing in corruption and degradation. During the whole time that Alexander was in Asia, the struggle of parties was violent—one, under Demosthenes, with the support of Persia, contended ably and indefatigably for the mastery of Athens and of Greece; the other, after Isocrates, looking to Phocion as their leader, desired peace under the established supremacy of Macedonia, and above all things dreaded the ascendency of Demosthenes and his associates.
[333-331 B.C.]