IV
ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND WORLD MONARCHY
Alexander the Great was born in 356 B.C. His mother, Olympias, was a half-civilized Molossian princess whose fresh beauty, revealed at a wild religious fête on mystic Samothrace, had caught the roving fancy of Philip of Macedon. Their union had the further attraction to Philip that it might bring Epirus under his suzerainty.
Philip wished his wife to be his chief concubine rather than his consort. Olympias, a proud and passionate woman, chafed at her husband's marital infidelities, and had the will and courage to revolt and act for herself when Philip set her aside in 337 B.C. She cannot be acquitted of guilty knowledge of the murder of Philip which occurred a year later at the marriage arranged by him between her daughter and her brother. The act was timed to assure the accession of her son, who was its chief beneficiary.
"My father," Alexander is reported to have said twelve years later to his mutinous Macedonian soldiers,[58] "found you nomadic and poor. Clad in sheepskins, you tended your meagre herds on the mountains, and had to fight grievously for them against the Illyrians, Triballi, and Thracians on your borders. He gave you cloaks to wear in place of hides, he led you down from the hills into the plains, he made you the match in battle of the barbarians who dwelt near you; so that you depended for your safety thenceforth, not on the inaccessibility of your country, but on your own valor. He taught you to live in cities; he appointed good laws and customs for your governance. He made you lords, instead of slaves and subjects of those barbarians by whom you and your possessions had long been harried. The greatest part of Thrace he annexed to Macedon. By seizing the most suitable points on the seacoast, he threw open your country to commerce. He gave you the chance to work your mines in safety. The Thessalians, before whom you had cowered, half dead with fright, he taught you to conquer, and by humbling the Phocians he made your road into Greece, hitherto narrow and difficult, broad and easy. To such a degree did he lower the Athenians and the Thebans, who had ever been ready to fall upon Macedon,—and herein had he my help,—that, instead of your paying tribute to Athens and taking orders from Thebes, it was to us in turn that they went for protection. Into the Peloponnesus he passed and set matters to rights there; and, being appointed commander-in-chief of united Greece in its projected war against Persia, he achieved this high distinction, not so much for himself as for the commonwealth of Macedonia."
The words are not those of the great king himself: they are at the best a paraphrase of the ideas expressed by him on the occasion; at the worst they are the free invention of an historian concerned only with having Alexander say what the situation seemed to him to demand. However that may be, they are a good account of the wonderful work which Alexander, as a boy and young man, saw his father accomplish for Macedon. "What a man we had to fight," said Demosthenes,[59] his great enemy. "For the sake of power and dominion he had an eye put out, his shoulder broken, an arm and a leg injured. Whatever limb fortune demanded, that he gave up, so that the remnant of his body might live in glory and honor." "Taking everything into account," says Theopompus,[60] the far from generous contemporary historian of his achievements, "Europe has never produced the like of Philip, the son of Amyntas."
The court of Philip was rough and boorish. Revels, disgraced by drunkenness and debauchery, interrupted the king's wars and amours. In Pella men behaved like Centaurs and Læstrygonians, sneered the fastidious Athenians; and the frenzy which wine inspired in Philip, religion inspired in Olympias. In wild abandon she let herself be possessed with the spirit of the god, Dionysus, and roamed the hills at night in the company of other women equally intoxicated, brandishing the thyrsus and the "wreathèd snake," shouting with ecstasy. Hers was the religion which William Vaughn Moody, with poetic license, singled out in the splendid Prelude to his Masque of Judgment as characteristic of the world into which Christ was born. It was really abhorrent to the best Greek feeling, and was repressed with stern cruelty by Rome.