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Death of Hephaistion. 324 B.C.

was completely broken by this thorough ignoring of their existence. They threw down their arms at the palace gates and begged forgiveness with cries and tears. Alexander accepted their contrition, and the restoration of harmony was celebrated by a sumptuous sacrifice. But for Alexander past victories were only a stimulus to further exploits. Arabia still remained unsubdued, and for this conquest a vast addition was needed to his fleet. Orders were sent to Phenicia for the construction of ships, which were to be taken to pieces and sent overland to Thapsakos on the Euphrates, while others were to be built at Babylon. But the shadows of death were soon to fall upon him. The journey to Agbatana was marked by a violent quarrel between Eumenes and Hephaistion; their reconciliation was soon followed by the death of the latter from an attack of fever. The grief of the conqueror was as fierce as that of Achilleus; it would perhaps be not unfair to set it down as a deliberate imitation of it. For two days he neither ate nor drank; he cut his hair short, and ordered that the horses and mules in his army should have their manes docked also. Human blood could scarcely be shed with prudence on his pyre; but he was resolved that his friend should begin his life in the unseen world with unstinted wealth, and the precious things burnt on his funeral pile at Babylon (the sides of the square being a furlong in length) represented, it is said, a sum of nearly two million and a half pounds sterling. Messengers were sent to the Egyptian oracle to ask if the dead man might be worshipped as a god; and Eumenes, with many others, took care to anticipate its answer by offering him such honours as might fall in with the humour of the divine mourner. His grief seemed to serve no other purpose than to render his bursts of passion more fearful. None dared to address him except in the language of the most grovelling flattery; and, in the words of Plutarch, his only consolation was found in his old habit of man-hunting. The diversion was this time furnished by the Kossaians, some mountain tribes. between Media and Farsistan.

323 B.C.

His march to Babylon steeped him still more in the intoxication of success. As he advanced on his path, he was met by ambassaDeath of dors not only from Illyrians and Thrakians, from Sicily Alexander at Babylon. and Sardinia, from Libya and Carthage, but from Lucanians and Etruscans, and, as some said, from Rome itself. He received the worship of Ethiopians and Scythians, of Iberians and Gauls, and even of Greeks, who entered his presence with wreaths on their heads, offering him golden crowns. The lord of all the earth could scarcely look for wider acknowledgement or more devout submission; but his self-gratulation may have been damped by the warning of the Chaldean priests, that it would

be safer for him not to enter the walls of Babylon. For a while he hesitated; but he had more to do than to heed their words. The preparations for his Arabian campaign must be hurried on. All that might be needed must be done to improve the navigation of the Euphrates; a new city must be built to rival perhaps the Alexandria which he had founded on the banks of the Nile; and his Persian levies must be disciplined into masses as formidable as those which had fought his own battles and the battles of the father whom he disowned. More than all, he had to celebrate the obsequies of Hephaistion, whose body had been brought to Babylon from Agbatana. The feasting which everywhere accompanied the funeral rites of the ancient Aryans was exaggerated by the Makedonians, as by other half-rude or savage tribes, into prolonged revelry. Alexander spent the whole night in the house of his friend Medios in drinking, and the whole of the next day in sleeping off his drunkenness. Throughout the following night the same orgies were repeated. When he awoke in the morning, he was unable to rise. Fever had laid its grasp upon him, and each day its grasp became tighter, while he busied himself incessantly with giving orders about his army, his fleet, his generals, until at length the powers of speech began to fail. When asked to name his successor, he said that he left his kingdom to the strongest (or the worthiest). His signet ring he took from his finger and gave to Perdikkas. Throughout the army the tidings of his illness spread consternation. Old grudges were all forgotten. His veterans forced themselves into his presence, and with tears bade farewell to their general whose signs showed that he still knew them. A few hours later Alexander died, after a reign of less than thirteen years, and before he had reached the age of thirty-three.

Purposes

and motives of Alex

ander.

That the schemes with which almost to the last moment he had been absorbingly busied must, had he lived, have been in great part realised, can scarcely be doubted, unless we suppose that causes were at work which at no distant period would disturb and upset the balance of his military judgement, and deprive him of that marvellous power of combination, and of shaping means to circumstances, in which Hannibal and Napoleon are his only peers. It would be rash to say that such a darkening of his splendid powers might not have been brought about even before he could reach middle age. In truth, except as a general, he had lost the balance of his mind already. The despot who fancied himself a god, who could thrust a pike through the body of one friend, and sneer at the cries drawn forth from another by the agonies of torture, who could order the

Arrian, vii. 24-5.

massacre of hundreds or of thousands for the offences of their remote forefathers, was already far removed from the far-sighted prudence of the politic statesman and ruler. His conquests served great ends; and before he set out on his career of victory, he may have had some faint and distant vision of these ends. Desire for knowledge, the wish to see new forms of human and of animal life, the curiosity of traversing unknown lands, of laying open their resources, of bringing them all within the limits and the influence of the Makedonian, or, as he sometimes put it, the Hellenic world, the eagerness to establish over all known, possibly over all unknown regions, a mighty and centralised empire which should avail itself to the full of all their forces and throw down the barriers which rendered the interchange of their wealth impossible, may, to some extent, have mingled with his alleged or his real purpose of avenging on the Persian king the misdoings of Xerxes, Dareios, and Kambyses. But there is little evidence or none that these motives retained their power as he advanced further on his path of victory, while there seems to be evidence only too abundant that all other motives were gradually and even fast losing strength as the mere lust of conquest grew with his belief or his fancy of his superhuman power and origin. During his sojourn with Aristotle he must have learnt that real knowledge can be reached, and good government insured, only where there is freedom of thought and speech, and where the people obey their own laws. A few years later he had come to look on Aristotle as an enemy to be punished with scarcely less severity than Kallisthenes: he had put on the robes and the habits of a Persian despot, and substituted his own arbitrary will for the judicial processes of law. Persian customs, Persian adoration and flattery, were putting more and more in the background the civilisation which rests on the recognised rights and liberties of the people; and when he wasted millions on the pyre of Hephaistion, it may almost be said that the results which he had achieved were precisely those which would have followed if Xerxes had been the conqueror at Salamis, Plataiai, and Mykalê. If at the outset he wished to Hellenize Asia, his history seems to show that he achieved at least as much success in Asiatizing Hellas. Nor can we shut our eyes to the vast difference of the conditions under which his own wars were carried on from those against which his father had to struggle. Philip made his rude and ill-armed mountaineers victorious over the discipline, the weapons, and the bravery of the Greeks. Alexander found those mountaineers brought to the highest state of efficiency under a military organization as complete as it was elaborate, and led by generals each one of whom was almost the equal of Philip himself. With these forces and these officers he undertook an enterprise in which the

younger Cyrus had all but succeeded, and undertook it under conditions which would have rendered any disaster fatal. He started with an almost empty chest, leaving his commissariat practically to take care of itself, and trusting that Antipatros would be able to maintain his authority in Greece without a reverse. In such an enterprise he must, it is obvious, have failed, had he been compelled to face such enemies as those with which Philip had to struggle through a long series of years. In short, Kleitos may have been impolitic in his utterances at the fatal banquet; but what he said was true. It would be unfair to place Alexander in the ranks of those scourges of mankind amongst whom Alaric and Attila, Genghiz and Timour stand pre-eminent. Of the several accounts of his career which have come down to us, not one unhappily is strictly contemporary; and mere fairness calls upon us to give him the benefit of a doubt when this doubt can be justly entertained in reference even to deeds which carry with them an unutterable horror and shame. It is impossible to deny that with a higher sense of duty Alexander would better have deserved the title of Great. As it is, we must be content to say that in dealing with the necessities of the moment he is unsurpassed by any general, whether of ancient or of modern times.

648

BOOK VI.

LATER FORTUNES OF THE HELLENIC PEOPLE.

CHAPTER I.

THE LAMIAN WAR.-SICILIAN AFFAIRS FROM THE USURPATION OF THE ELDER DIONYSIOS TO THE RESIGNATION OF TIMOLEON.

Course of events in Hellas in Alexander's absence.

FROM the splendid but rapidly shifting scenes of Alexander's Eastern conquests, we can turn to no movements of large or abiding interest in the several Hellenic cities. Combined action had been always difficult. We can scarcely say that it had been realised during the struggle against Xerxes; and since the fall of Athens, at least, it had become impossible. Spasmodic efforts might show what under other circumstances the people might have done: but their only result was disaster. Isolated in her desperate struggle, Thebes had been levelled with the dust; a catastrophe

336 B.C.

330 B.C. scarcely less complete had put an end to the rising of the Spartan king, Agis, in the Peloponnesos. Like Leonidas and Kleombrotos, Agis fell on the battle-field; and with him Sparta lost such little strength as she had thus far retained. The victory of Alexander's viceroy, Antipatros, had fastened the Makedonian yoke more firmly on all the Greek states, and nothing remained, even for those who most heartily loathed it, but to continue their confidence in the men who had done what they could to avert the humiliation. In the year which ended the career of Philip by the dagger of Pausanias, Eschines had arrested, by the writ of illegal procedure, the proposal of Ktesiphon to crown Demosthenes. The issuing of this writ made it impossible to bring before the people the motion which had received the sanction of the Senate, until the question should have been judicially tried. But Eschines was in no hurry to bring it forward. More than once the accusers of Demosthenes had failed to secure the votes of one-fifth of the jurymen; and Eschines must, of course, run the same risk of incurring the fine of a thousand drachmas. On his part, Demosthenes, especially after the fearful doom which fell on Thebes, might hesitate to provoke by a formal

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