Part 6

In administering his domains, Alexander showed great conservatism; he made few changes, he allowed each of the countries which acknowledged the Great King as its overlord to retain its particular institutions. One important modification he did introduce into the loosely organized and haphazard Persian system of rule, the division of power. The Persian satrap was generally the sole governor, having in his hands the civil, military, and financial administration. Alexander limited him to matters of internal administration, appointing a financial officer and a military commander armed with considerable powers. After the return from India, there was a further innovation made by the appointment of a Chiliarch, as the supreme director and head of the provinces, with a place immediately after the monarch himself. This official was a part of the governmental machinery of the Persian Empire, holding in it the place of a Grand Vizier. It was given to Alexander’s friend, Hephæstion, but after his death it was left vacant. The most trusted servant, the actual head of the administration, was the Chief Secretary Eumenes from Cardia, a man of first-rate military and civil capacity; he was unfailingly loyal to his master, and after Alexander’s death, suffered many vicissitudes because of his devotion to the Macedonian royal house.

Alexander was not satisfied with the rôle of conqueror; he wished to give his rule in the East that trait of legitimacy which the popular Oriental mind required as a stimulus to its loyalty. It was impossible for him to be King of Persia by the grace of God, for it was the might of his own hand, not the right of succession, that constituted him the heir of Darius. This Gordian knot of politics he solved in his own direct fashion by directing that divine honors should be paid to him by the subject populations. The custom of apotheosis originated in Egypt, but it was not alien to Greek thought, according to which no deep distinction existed between man and divinity. The mythical heroes of the Greek people, whom all allowed to have once been men, were everywhere honored with altars and sacrifice. Asclepius and Herakles sat on Olympus with the greater divinities of a purely spiritual origin. It had become not unusual in the age preceding Alexander to accord divine honors to the living. Such had been the case with Clearchus of Heracleia who had been greeted as the son of Zeus, and with Dionysius the Younger who had caused himself to be honored at Syracuse as the son of Apollo. Alexander’s achievements, far greater in comparison, gave him a right to this distinction during his lifetime; his divine origin had, besides, been attested by the Erythrian Sibyl and by the oracle at Branchidæ; with this theological and official stamp all that remained to be done was to give the accepted belief a concrete form. The cult of the conqueror became a part of the state religion in the Greek communities throughout the empire. Whether Alexander took the initiative in this form of adulation we do not know; he certainly did not discourage it, and on his return from India he did not reject the adulatory form of congratulation expressed by many Greek states, who instead of sending formal deputations, presented the so-called “theories” usual when the festivals of the gods were celebrated. Athens at first resisted this form of transcendent courtesy, but finally, in order to avoid offending Alexander, it was resolved in the year 324 to enrol the conqueror among the gods of the city under the designation of Dionysus. So this debasing custom took root in Greece; the monarch became, by a noxious fiction, differentiated from the rest of mortals, and the infection spread from Greece to Rome, and later on became crystallized in Christian civilization, through the example of the Byzantine court, and under the form of monarchy by divine right has not yet disappeared.

After the dismissal of the veterans from the army at Opis, Alexander withdrew from the plains of the Tigris, and according to the custom of the Persian monarchs spent the summer in the highlands of Media. He passed the time in relaxation; nautical and athletic festivals were held, in which celebrities from Greece took part. When the cooler weather began, there were expeditions to repress the bandit hill-tribes who dwelt between Ecbatana and Susa, people whom the Persians had never succeeded in bringing under control. Afterwards, the king returned to Babylon, where he received deputations from the Greek states and even from Italy. It was thought that an expedition to the west was being planned. But the king preferred to give his immediate attention to Arabia and, by conquering it, to open at last a direct road of communication between the interior of Persia and Egypt.

By June both the fleet and army were ready to start. A great banquet was given in honor of Nearchus, the admiral who was to undertake the adventurous voyage from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. The king withdrew from the feast and spent the rest of the night in a carouse with a friend, Medius. He rose late in the morning and another night was spent in excessive drinking. The following day he was attacked with fever; he could not walk and had to be carried on a couch to the altar, to make the customary sacrifices. He spent the day discussing the plans of the expedition with Nearchus. In the evening he had himself conveyed across the river to a garden villa, hoping for relief from its quiet isolation. But for six days the fever continued, the king being able only to attend the sacrificial ceremonial. His condition grew worse, and he was taken back to the palace; he slept a little, but the fever did not abate, and when his officers visited him, they saw that he had lost the power of speech. There was confusion among the soldiers, for it was rumored that their leader was dead; they clamored to be let into the palace, and passing by the bodyguard they circled past the bed of the dying monarch; but he was not able to speak and only signified by movements of his hands and eyes that he recognized them. Some of those about him spent the night in the temple of Serapis, awaiting an indication of the god that he might be transported to the temple as he lay and be healed by divine help. But they were warned, it is said, by a voice that he was not to be moved, and on the evening of June 13th he died, before he had completed his thirty-third year.

During the years of Alexander’s conquests, the history of the Greek states sinks into insignificance. After the battle of Issus all hope of defeating Macedon by a combination with Persia was abandoned. The confederacy sent congratulations, and only Sparta stood aloof. Its king, Agis, even ventured to declare war, but, after a few small successes, he was defeated in the battle of Megalopolis, losing his life in the field. Sparta then sent hostages to Alexander and was generously treated. Later on he interfered again in the affairs of Greece by directing the confederation to take back the Greek exiles, 20,000 in number, and so mark his overlordship by an era of good feeling. Only two states objected, Athens and Ætolia.

The only exciting incident in continental Greece was connected with the flight of the faithless finance minister, Harpalus, who came to the coast of Attica with 5000 talents, a body of mercenaries, and a considerable fleet, hoping to stir up a revolt. But the Athenian politicians were too cautious to be drawn into an intrigue which would certainly have proved dangerous. They seized Harpalus and took his treasure, proposing only to surrender this money to officers expressly sent by Alexander. Half the money taken disappeared and there was no official record made of the sum received. Demosthenes was involved in the scandal, and he emerged from it with a besmirched reputation. Harpalus escaped and was soon afterwards murdered. Demosthenes was condemned, imprisoned, and escaped. But Greek feeling was not sensitive about a case where it was plain that a man had appropriated stolen money for the good of the state, and Demosthenes was praised as a patriot.

Alexander’s conquests, both in method and in achievement, were but the elaboration of the groundwork laid down by Philip his father. The army that conquered Persia and invaded India was trained in the campaigns of continental Greece, and without this preliminary training in Europe, its spectacular successes in Asia would not have been possible. Up to the time of Philip of Macedon, warfare in Greece had achieved only negative results. It was not systematized, no extensive imperial rule had come to the victors through any of the decisive battlefields, for these military successes were never followed up by a consistent scheme of conquest. Philip changed all this, and he brought his developed army and his new political policy into close connection. Demosthenes himself remarked this contrast, for he said that King Philip fought his wars not only with a phalanx of heavy-armed men, but with light infantry, archers, and cavalry.

The old campaigning schedule, which consisted in ravaging the enemy’s territory for a few months, a set battle in the open country, and a withdrawal to winter quarters, was no longer observed. If the Macedonian king did not find his enemy in the field, he besieged his towns, using siege engines to bring him to terms. Summer and winter were alike used for operations when the old array of citizen amateur soldiers had given place to the professional fighters. Alexander’s victories were won not only on the battlefield, but through the quick following up of his victories; the enemies’ power of resistance was annihilated by the rapidity with which a defeated army was pursued and never allowed a chance to gather itself together again after it was beaten. These cavalry marches in the rear of a retreating enemy, or the suddenly delivered attacks on a foe preparing to resist, attacks made irrespective of mountains and deserts, were as military achievements no less remarkable than the set battles and the sieges of strongly walled cities and citadels. Supremely characteristic of Alexander’s strategy was the pursuit after the battle of Gaugamela, when numbers of horses fell on the road from exhaustion.

As a general, Alexander did great deeds and did them in an heroic style. He was a warrior distinguished by personal bravery, filled with the ardor of combat, eager to be in the thickest of the fight, and yet the physical passion of the fighter in no way dulled the acute intelligence of the general, or made him indifferent to the mastery of details in preparing for battle or in following a victory up after it had been won. He showed strategical knowledge in approaching the enemy and knew how to overcome the natural difficulties in his way. So we see him unhesitatingly marching through narrow defiles and organizing different classes of troops according to the changing conditions which confronted him. He showed high capacity in selecting his base, in looking after his communications, in providing for and provisioning his men. When all was ready, and not before, these cautious provisions gave place to the impetuous onslaught in battle and the untiring pursuit of the defeated enemy. But the duties of generalship, complicated as they were, were not allowed to interfere with the “joy of fighting.” Alexander in every fight led his cavalry in person; whenever a breach was made in a fortification he was in the first rank; whenever a town was taken he was the first to scale the wall.

He seemed instinctively to have taken in the significance of the enlarged scale on which warfare under him was conducted. He had to solve untried problems, due to the vast extent of territory he traversed, so different in every way from the restricted limits of continental Greece. The students of strategy have especially admired his originality in the systematic following up of a victory, an element in successful warfare not dreamed of by the citizen generals of Greece. In the Peloponnesian war it never occurred to the Spartans when they had defeated the Athenians to besiege Athens. But after Issus, a most decisive victory, Alexander showed the utmost resourcefulness in the long seven months’ siege of Tyre, and finally took it by storm. The same mobility of generalship is noted in India, where he did not hesitate in the face of a division of elephants, an unknown arm in warfare, to cross a river and deliver a frontal attack.

The army, which never failed to respond to the ever-developing visions and schemes of its commander, until he had carried it to the eastern limits of the known world in his career of conquest, was at the very beginning of Alexander’s career trained for any military project he might propose. It was composed of seasoned officers and men, who had proved their mettle and gained their laurels under Philip while he was bringing his army to the highest pitch of excellence. In the list of great Greek military leaders, Philip is placed by the side of Epaminondas, the Theban, the man who revolutionized the Greek art of warfare by a fine stroke of genius. It had been noted that in the Greek battles, where the phalanx had become the controlling factor, its right wing was frequently victorious in both opposing armies. This phenomenon was simply due to the fact that the Greek heavy-armed soldier carried a shield on his left arm and naturally tended to move in an oblique direction towards the right hand. The chief innovations introduced by Epaminondas were the strengthening of the left wing by increasing its depth--it was made fifty men deep--and the holding back of the right wing as the whole phalanx advanced in battle array. With the increased depth of the phalanx, the front was necessarily shortened, and in order to prevent flanking operations, Epaminondas made great use of cavalry, in protecting the flanks of his men from an encircling movement on the part of the enemy, whose phalanx, since it was not so deep (being the old shape), would stretch out on both sides beyond the lines of the Theban line. As a general, Philip accepted these new tactical principles originated by Epaminondas, and applying them to Macedonian conditions, made of the Macedonian army a wonderfully effective military machine.

Macedonia was peopled by peasants and herdsmen, and up to Philip’s time they were an untrained mass, insufficiently armed, not able to contend with the armies of the rest of Greece. There was a landed aristocracy in Macedon, forming a special warrior class, who fought as cavalry. Using these elements and adding to them Greek mercenaries, King Philip had created a military force far superior to any that Greece had ever seen before.

The Greek cavalry moved in loose formation, the horsemen wore armor, and as arms they had a shield, sword, and spear, the spear being used rather for throwing than for striking, as is the case with the modern lance, with the whole momentum of the moving mass, man and horse. The troops of the Macedonian cavalry, formed of the nobles of the land, were called the followers of the king, “Hetairoi.” They bore a shield and a spear for casting or thrusting, and a sword, and were always given a crucial position in an engagement. As contrasted with Greek cavalry generally, the Macedonians showed superior training and discipline; they moved together and behaved in a fight, not as individual warriors, but as tactical units, and were controlled in their movements by a single will. Such development of cavalry was unfamiliar to the Greek republics, which confined themselves to the technical training of the phalanx.

The Macedonian foot were the special creation of Philip, and were named by him “the followers on foot.” They fought in the ordinary phalanx formation, but closer together than was usual, and used long spears, so that several lines were enabled at once to engage in actual hand-to-hand fighting. The spear was so constructed as to weight, thickness, and length that it could reach the opposing line and yet be firmly grasped. The ordinary spear was somewhat over six feet in length, but the Macedonian phalanx depended for its success not so much on man-to-man fighting as on the irresistible impact of the whole. When it was acting on the defensive, it was virtually impenetrable. Its disadvantage was in its lack of individual initiative; the soldiers were machines rather than fighting men. It was heavy in its movements and could be thrown into disorder more easily than the older Greek phalanx with its looser formation. The élite corps, the hypaspists, were more lightly armed than the men in the phalanx, and so moved more freely. In Alexander’s battles they were the connecting link between the cavalry and heavy mass of the phalanx, which advanced slowly forward. As managed by Alexander, these various arms seem to have worked admirably together, all sharing in the activity of a general offensive movement. It should be added that Alexander was also indebted to his father for much of the advance made in the art of besieging. He constantly used siege engines, and we have noticed how much he depended on their successful employment at Tyre and Halicarnassus.

Posterity has justly selected the epithet “great” as most fitting to be coupled with Alexander’s name, and he has this honor for more than one reason. It is perhaps less contested than in the case of any other of the world’s leading personalities, Charles the Great alone excepted, for Charles, like Alexander, introduced a new age of the world’s history. Great as were the successes of Alexander, they constitute less of a claim on the personal admiration of posterity than his knightly qualities as a warrior, and the charm and impetuosity of youth. His great victories were won between the years of twenty-one and twenty-five. In the space of thirteen years there are crowded together events and achievements that would exalt the longest life of the greatest man.

His sudden and premature death did him a kind of poetic justice, because his temperament cannot be coupled consistently with the characteristics of old age or even with the middle period of man’s life. His body and his brain had been under a tremendous pressure, which even a strong constitution could not resist. It was this restive youthfulness that spurred him on to adventures which were purposeless when looked at from the point of view of the mature statesman, such as the expedition to India, an uncalculated move not to be understood except as due to the stimulus of an explorer’s curiosity and the desire to accomplish a feat unheard of before.

The impulsiveness and emotionalism of Alexander in combination with his military genius produced results unprecedented in history. His career is that of a Homeric hero on a larger stage. It is not surprising that his conquests almost defy criticism and make a personal estimate seem artificial. He did so much that it apparently makes little difference what he was, for his actions speak for themselves, and they tell their tale like a fairy story, without any need of analysis. It is obviously unfair to look for constructive statesmanship in a career so short, when almost every month was occupied with military campaigns either planned or in execution. When his life was ended, Alexander was still a young man with a fresh and vigorous intelligence, open to new impressions. It is hazardous to infer (as Grote does) that he would have spent his life in acts of military aggression or that he would have sunk to the position of an Oriental despot, little differing from the Persian kings to whose title he succeeded. It is safer to put aside these pessimistic historic prognostics of what might have been, and to recognize that Alexander, provided he kept his mental powers undulled by drink, would have remained a Greek and not become a Hun or a Vandal.

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.

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CÆSAR

I CÆSAR’S BEGINNINGS