His enthusiasm for absolutism was, when one considers his age and how deeply he was involved in military plans and schemes, less of a reflection on himself than a curse to his followers and successors, who kept faithful to the personal tradition of their leader and made the Hellenization of Asia untrue to so much that was best in Greek political life and thought. It was, as Ranke says, a break in their whole national history, for the Greeks to have extended over them the kind of authority which was in no way different from that against which they had contended in warfare for a century. But it must be remembered that Alexander had only just begun to rule over Asiatics; he had receded before his death from pressing his theory of amalgamation to its logical conclusion, and quick as he was to feel instinctively the meaning of new conditions, it may be fairly supposed that he would have come to recognize the value of Aristotle’s profoundly wise advice to him, that he should behave to the Greeks as a leader or president and to the barbarians or non-Greeks as a master.
We may put to one side all the ingenious speculations as to what might have happened if Alexander had reached the ordinary limit of human life, a line of thought which Livy seems to have originated, when he tried to foretell for his age what would have happened if Alexander had taken up the rôle followed later by his relative, Pyrrhus. It is only necessary to say that, so far as Greek affairs were concerned, Alexander was the son of his father. His public career began when, as Philip’s son, he put the finishing touches to Philip’s program for dominating the free states of Greece. So long as Alexander lived, the lines of Macedonian supremacy, the outcome of the battle of Chæronea, remained clear and fixed. The destruction of Thebes was but the epilogue of Philip’s own career. The sentimental vein in the nature of Alexander made him patient with the somewhat childish and ineffective hostility shown him by both Athens and Sparta, venerable names as protagonists in the secular struggle with the Persians, whose mantle had now fallen on his broader shoulders.
In Asia his conquests, rather than his half-thought-out plans for racial amalgamation, were decisive of future political development. There was an expansion of Hellenic culture throughout the East, marked by the common use of the Greek language and by a general absorption of the special traits of Greek social usages and sympathies. The civilization, so wrought out and transplanted, lost the creativeness and the spontaneity of the small communities of continental Greece. The Hellenic spirit lost its potency, if we may so phrase it, and in the sphere of government especially exhibited disheartening symptoms of selfishness and greed. Economically, the opening up of Asia meant enlarged facilities for the commercial exploitation of a vast and rich territory. It ushered in a period of great industrial fortunes, it increased opportunities for communication both by land and sea, it established higher standards of comfort and taste among populations who had lived a crude, colorless, and isolated existence. On the basis of Alexander’s conquests a grandiose cosmopolitanism was built up in Asia which cast down tribal and racial boundaries and made it possible for masses of plain people to gain a livelihood under tolerable conditions.
CÆSAR
I
CÆSAR’S BEGINNINGS
The progress of an imperial power is obscure even when the foundations of its greatness are associated with some great military leader or lawgiver, but when one has to give a reason why some one political community becomes the point of centripetal attraction, and gathers about it, either by fear or devotion, the support of large masses of mankind, the efforts of historical analysis are frustrated at almost every point.
Cæsar
(Naples, Museum.)
The rise of the small town community on the Tiber, about whose name there centered for nearly two thousand years the dread and the reverence of the progressive nations of the world, is veiled in legend. Why did not Palestrina, or Cori, or one of the numerous Etruscan cities to the north, become the germ of a world-wide rule? Of course the answer of the economist is that just because Rome is situated on the Tiber, its position gave it possibilities of advancement denied to the ordinary hill towns of Italy. This explanation may be taken as sufficient only when one allows that the burghers of Rome set out to accomplish what they did, not only because they were traders, but because the imaginative and grandiose factors in commercial enterprise must have worked in a singularly sensitive and highly organized social medium.