Passion, fierce and generous, the main source of heroic action, was bred in the bone of Alexander. His imagination, naturally fervent, was fed by tales of his ancestor Achilles which he heard at his mother's knee, and fired by the vistas opened out to it by the exploits of his father. At thirteen Philip gave him Aristotle as his tutor, and during the formative years of his youth he studied poetry with this great teacher. The poetry was Greek, not Macedonian. In it were found the ideals of the people to which Alexander belonged in spirit and in blood, if not in nationality; thence came the ideas tinged with emotion which fasten themselves like barbed arrows in the memory of the learner—the ideas of right and wrong, of heroism and tenderness, of regard for parents and for duties; as Plato would say, of justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage—which color all subsequent thinking and constitute character. The Greeks have still something to teach us as to the educative power of great poetry.
The commandments of Homer, whom Aristotle never ceases to cite in his philosophical works, went over into the flesh and blood of Alexander, and in him Achilles, the youthful hero of the Iliad, became in a real sense incarnate. Next after Homer, Alexander rated and knew the Attic tragedians, the continuators and improvers of Homer, according to Aristotle, who, therefore, bases his Poetics largely upon tragedy, as being the highest form of dramatic art.
There can be no question of the influence of Aristotle in determining the literary interest and taste of Alexander. It seems also clear that the young prince came at least to know, and probably to share, his teacher's curiosity as to natural history; for he afterwards sent specimens back from Asia for Aristotle's botanical and zoölogical collections. This being the case, it seems incredible that he should have received from him no instruction in politics; that Aristotle, the pupil of Plato, who had himself gone to Sicily to educate the young Dionysius II for his high place, should have failed to communicate to the future ruler of Macedon and of Greece the ideas which he had formed as to the best kind of government. We can imagine the thousand opportunities which their three years of close association in the country seat at Mieza offered for the discussion of politics: how Aristotle explained that virtue or merit or political capacity, or however the elusive Greek word arete be translated, gave the best claim to leadership, and that the best of all forms of government was that in which the man of the highest virtue ruled; "that," to use his own words,[61] "wherever there is, as it happens, a whole family or an individual so superior in virtue to all the rest that the virtue of this individual or family exceeds that of all others in the state, in that case it is but just that this family should enjoy a regal or supreme position and that this individual should be king. For ... this is not only in accordance with the principle of justice usually alleged by the founders of polities, whether aristocracies, oligarchies, or democracies, in all of which the claim to rule is dependent on superiority, although the superiority is not the same; but it accords also with the theory we laid down before. For assuredly it is not proper to put to death or outlaw or even ostracize this preëminent individual or to require him to become a subject in his turn.... The only alternative is that they should yield him obedience, and that he should be supreme, not on the principle of alternation, but absolutely.... It will be a wrong," he urged,[62] "to treat him as worthy of mere equality, when he is so vastly superior in virtue and political capacity, for any person so exceptional may well be compared to a deity upon the earth." Again and again, in season and out of season, often doubtless to the annoyance of the impatient young prince, who feared lest his father's victories should leave him nothing to do, Aristotle[63] must have harped on the theme that "man is naturally a city-dwelling animal and that one who is not a native of a city, if the cause of his isolation be natural and not accidental, is either a superhuman being or low in the scale of civilization, as he stands alone like a 'blot' on the backgammon board. The 'clanless, lawless, hearthless' man so bitterly described by Homer is a case in point; for he is naturally a native of no city and a lover of war." We can imagine the philosopher insisting that just as city life was synonymous with civilized life, so city was synonymous with state; that the highest of all human activities, the exercise of political functions, was destroyed the moment a city became dependent upon an outside power; that subjects could not exist permanently unless the conquered were natural inferiors like the Asiatics; that it was, however, to the interest of such persons that they should be ruled by their superiors, in the case of Asiatics, by the Greeks. Such were the oft-repeated maxims of the political philosopher in whose age Philip rejoiced, it is said,[64] "that his son was born, since his teaching would make him worthy of his father and equal to the position to which he was to succeed." Such was the literary and political education of Alexander: his military training and his knowledge of affairs he got in the unrivaled school of his father; but in this connection it is well to remember the admission of Napoleon:[65] "War is a singular art; I can assure you that fighting sixty battles taught me nothing I did not know at the first one. The essential quality of the general is firmness, and that is a gift from heaven."
It is not my purpose to give a biographical sketch of Alexander, nor yet to tell the story of his marvelous conquests, or to estimate the consequences of his work on the later course of history. I have had in mind while preparing this chapter first to emphasize such features in his family and education as help to explain his political thinking, and then, somewhat in Plutarch's fashion, to pick up such incidents in his career as show concretely how precisely he aimed to organize his world empire.
Where the political sagacity of Alexander stood forth most conspicuously, according to Napoleon, was in the skill with which he appealed to the imagination of men. Love of symbolism was ingrained in his nature. By an act which he went deliberately out of his way to perform he contrived again and again to illumine an entire situation, to drive home a lesson, to reveal a policy. In a way it was a kind of advertising; a means of conveying to the world at large in an unmistakable manner the will and attitude of the monarch. But it was more than that. It was the application in the world of politics of a mode of expression with which the Greeks were familiar in the world of the plastic arts.
The first instance of this sort of thing was the destruction of Thebes in 335 B.C. At the accession of Alexander a year earlier, all Greece had seethed with insurrection. Philip was dead in the full vigor of manhood, and a stripling of twenty was about to take his place. By a prompt advance southward Alexander nipped the threatened revolt in the bud; and to secure himself for the future, he put a garrison in the citadel of Thebes, where the most manifest disaffection had existed. A few months later, however, while he was cleansing his northern frontiers, preparatory to attacking Persia, the Thebans, acting on the false report that he had fallen in battle, and in conjunction with Athens and other Greek cities, revolted a second time. With almost incredible secrecy and celerity Alexander came upon Thebes, took it by assault, sold the inhabitants into slavery, and razed the city to the ground. No such disaster had overtaken a Greek city (outside of unhappy Sicily) since the destruction of Miletus by the Persians in 493 B.C. It showed beyond the shadow of a doubt what the Greeks had to expect if they continued to make trouble while Alexander was absent in Asia. And on this occasion one object lesson was contained within another: by sparing the house of Pindar, the destroyer of Thebes proclaimed his regard for Hellenic civilization; distinguished himself clearly from the destroyers of Miletus and other barbarians.
Next year, when about to open his attack on the Persian empire, Alexander sent his army across the Hellespont by the usual route from Sestus to Abydus; but he himself proceeded to Elaius where he sacrificed at the tomb of Protesilaus, and prayed that he might have a better fate than was his who first of Agamemnon's men set foot on the soil of Asia. Then crossing the Hellespont to Harbor of the Achæans, he went up to Ilium where he dedicated his armor to Athena Ilias and took in its place some weapons said to have been used in the Trojan War. After appeasing the manes of Priam and entreating them to forgive him, a descendant of Neoptolemus, Priam's slayer, he laid a wreath on the tomb of Achilles, while his bosom friend, Hephæstion, laid another on that of Patroclus. Whereupon he proceeded to rejoin his army. The incident stirred in every Greek a thousand memories. He saw another Agamemnon set out to take another Troy; another champion of the Hellenes in their eternal struggle with the peoples of Asia. In no way could Alexander more clearly identify his undertaking with the long cherished dreams of the whole Greek race. It was the nearest that a ruler of that time could come to proclaiming a holy war.
At Gordium, where Alexander's troops spent their first winter in Asia, there stood on the citadel the cart in which, according to the story, Midas, a peasant's son, had driven to the meeting-place of the Phrygians on the day when unexpectedly he was proclaimed their king. The legend had spread thence around the country that whosoever unfastened the knot of cornel bark which held the yoke to the shaft of this cart would become king of Asia. This task Alexander essayed in vain. Then he drew his sword and cut the thong in two. Thereby he announced both his departure from the policy of Philip, which had been simply to emancipate the Ionian Greeks, and the forthcoming execution of his own policy, which was to take from the Persians their dominion over Asia.
After his first victory at the Granicus River Alexander advanced along the Ægean seaboard as far as Cilicia, securing as he went all the coast towns in Asia Minor which had contributed ships to the Persian fleet. This plan of campaign he adhered to after his second victory at Issus over Darius, when, instead of keeping in touch with his defeated enemy and of following him into the interior, as the ordinary common sense of war commanded, he let the King go, and spent a year in seizing the naval towns between Cilicia and Cyrene. This he did in order to destroy the Persian fleet, an end which he could not otherwise attain, since he had no ships of his own. To leave the enemy's fleet in possession of the Mediterranean, however, while he was campaigning far in the heart of the continent would have been to jeopardize all that he had already accomplished, and, in particular, to leave to the Persians the means of causing a general insurrection among the Greeks, whom he rightly feared more than the Persians. This long détour southward to Egypt is, accordingly, amply explained by sound strategical considerations. That, however, cannot be said of Alexander's sensational march through the Sahara to the oasis of Siwah in the hinterland of Cyrene. There, in mysterious aloofness, lay an oracle of the Egyptian Ammon whom the Greeks called Zeus. Just as Dodona in Epirus had been eclipsed in times past as an oracular seat by the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, so this in turn had waned in prestige and credit when it became known gradually to the Greeks that Zeus Ammon revealed unfailingly the future to his priests at Siwah. For more than two generations prior to Alexander's visit the Ammonium had been the Mecca of pilgrims, and the recipient of gifts from all parts of the Greek world. Athens had even built a sacred trireme, the so-called "ship of Ammon," to carry public messengers to and from the oracle. In Egypt the Ammon of Siwah was of no account as compared with the Ammon of Thebes; but among the Greeks the Ammon that was known and revered was, to speak with Plato, the Ammon of Cyrene. Alexander knew well the impression which would be produced in the official and pious world of Hellas should the priests of Ammon greet him as the son of their god. This, however, they were bound to do on his arrival at the temple, since to omit this formality would have been to refuse allegiance to the new Pharaoh who had just been recognized in Egypt; for every Pharaoh from time immemorial was officially a son of Ammon. It was the peculiarity of Siwah that the ruler greeted there as the son of Ammon was presented authoritatively to the Greek world as the son of Zeus.