In literature, as in life, very much depends on the impression a man makes on his introduction. Alexander's introduction is happy and suggestive. He meets us first at Troy when setting out on his expedition. Around him rise the temples of the memorable dead who died in the Ten Years' War. He is in search of the fane of Achilles, his ancestor, as he claims. Aphrodite and Helen have no attractions for him, upon whose mind “the wise Stagirite” had impressed the high code of pagan morals, that the passions were “a yoke which Action's strenuous sons should scorn to bear.” He stands on ground where heroes fought and [pg 355] strove for ten long years together, and the question comes at once to his earnest mind,
“That ten years' war, what fruit thereof remains?
What empire lives, its witness and its crown?
What shall we say? That those were common men
Made large by mists of Time? Or shall we rather
Conclude them real, and our age a fraud?”
His friend Hephestion is reminded by the fanes around, not of the greatness, but of the littleness, of man and of the common ashes to which we come at last. In what, had he the ear to hear it, had been for his leader a solemn warning, he cries out:
“Alas! how small an urn
Suffices for the earth-o'erstriding dust
Which one time shook the world!”