PHILIP OF MACEDON ( 359-336 B.C. ).
Whatever the sins of Athens as a political force, she had at least stood for progress, while Sparta, her victorious rival, demanding only a rigid adherence to outworn ideals, lacked the imagination to govern intelligently and so lost her grip on the peninsula. Athens defiant, lifted her head to intrigue with Persia and Thebes, In alliance with the latter a victory was gained over Sparta at Mantinea (362 B.C.) that once more threw the little world of city-states into confusion. This time a settlement was brought about by an outside power, Macedonia, in race and outlook largely Greek, though Demosthenes, the Athenian orator, in his embittered philippics was to denounce the northern king and his court as barbarians beneath civilized contempt.
Yet Philip of Macedon claimed descent
from the Greek hero, Heracles, and far from despising culture, gathered round him learned men, selecting as tutor
for his own heir no less a scholar than Aristotle the Stagirite. A modern writer has described Philip as "probably the best-educated man of his day" and "without doubting, one of the greatest monarchs the world has ever seen." (H. G. Wells: "The Outline of
History." )
Though his early death left it to Alexander to conquer the world, it was the Macedonian phalanx supported by mobile
cavalry units, a weapon forged by his experience, that was to break every army opposed to it from the Balkans to
India.
Again, it was Philip's idea to weld the Greek states into an alliance by offering to be their hegemon, or federal
commander, in a war of revenge against Persia. In this respect, if the League of Corinth that held a peace conference
in 338 for the furtherance of panhellenism had been inspired by the philosopher Isocrates, it was also the outcome
of the Macedonian king's political ambitions.Sparta, of course, stood aloof; while Athens was torn in two: the
party of narrow patriotism championed by Demosthenes finally gaining the upper hand. A citizen army was put in
the field, and at Chaeronea (338 B.C.) was completely routed by the Macedonians, the young Alexander being in command
of the cavalry.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT (336-323 B.C.).
Alexander was the son of Philip II. of Macedon and his queen Olympias (daughter of King Neoptolemus of Epirus), and was born at Pella, B.C. 356. At the age of 13 years Aristotle was his instructor, and there is little doubt that he cultivated Alexander's interest in reading, Homer's writings. When 16 years old he returned to Pella to rule Macedonia in the absence of his father.
During Philip's attack on Byzantium, Alexander was left in charge of Macedonia in 340 and defeated the Maedi, a Thracian people; two years later he commanded the left wing at the Battle of Chæronea in 338, in which Philip defeated the allied Greek states, and displayed courage in breaking the Sacred Band of Thebes, which brought Greece entirely under Macedonia.
341 Philip divorced Olympias; and, after a dispute at a feast held to celebrate his father's new marriage, Alexander and his mother fled to Epirus, and Alexander later went to Illyria. Philip was murdered, gossip said at the instigation of his wife Olympias, who had long been sowing dissension between her husband and son.
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Now Alexander, not yet twenty years of
age, ascended the throne, B.C. 336. He at once executed the princes of Lyncestis, alleged to be behind Philip's
murder, along with all rivals and those opposed to him.He then marched south, recovering a wavering Thessaly,
Even more than his father he was proud of the Hellenic strain in his blood. Ulrich Wilcken, his modern biographer, says, "this deeply-rooted and vivid conception of his personal affinity with these heroes (i.e. Heracles and Achilles) is one of the non-rational and instinctive motives without which we cannot understand him at all." The Iliad was his bible, ever carried on his travels, as well as the writings of the great Greek tragedians. |
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A picture from a coin of Alexander's |
Meanwhile, rumours of his death caused a revolt of Theban democrats, urged on by the Demosthenes, the young king marched in 14 days 240 miles from Pelion (near modern Korçë, Albania) in Illyria to Thebes, put 6000 of the inhabitants to the sword, and carried 30,000 into captivity, and ordered that the buildings, save the temples and house of Pindar the poet, be razed.
Henceforward if they did not love their Macedonian overlord sufficiently to supply him with ships and levies, the once free city-states, remained quiescent through fear. Macedonian garrisons were left in Corinth, Chalcis, and the Cadmea (the citadel of Thebes). Alexander could then afford to treat Athens leniently
Alexander was confirmed as commander-in-chief of the Greek forces by the Greek assembly, and leaving Antipater to govern in Europe, who had faithfully served his father, he prepared an expedition against the Persians. He needed the wealth of Persia if he was to maintain the army built by Philip and pay off the 500 talents he owed. Alexander crossed over the Hellespont into Asia, in the spring of 334, with 30,000 foot and 5000 cavalrymen, of whom nearly 14,000 were Macedonians and about 7,000 allies sent by the Greek League. After visiting Ilium (Troy), a romantic gesture inspired by Homer, he marched due southwards, for his first encounter with the Persian forces (assisted by Greek mercenaries) at the small river Granicus, (modern Kocabas) near the Sea of Marmara (May/June 334 B.C.)
Alexander's victory was complete. Darius' Greek mercenaries were largely massacred, but 2,000 survivors were sent back to Macedonia in chains. The tyrants were expelled and (in contrast to Macedonian policy in Greece) democracies were installed.
In winter 334-333 Alexander conquered western Asia Minor, subduing the hill tribes of Lycia and Pisidia. In passing through Gordium he loosed the Gordian knot, which could only be done by the man who was to rule Asia; he then went on to conquer Ionia, Caria, Pamphylia, and Cappadocia.
A sickness, caused by bathing in the river Cydnus in Cilicia. (B.C. 333), checked his course; but scarcely was he restored to health when he continued his onward course, and this same year defeated the Persian emperor Darius III and his army of 500,000 or 600,000 men, (including 50,000 Greek mercenaries) near Issus (inner angle of the Gulf of Alexandretta).
From Issus Alexander marched south into Syria and Phoenicia, his object being to isolate the Persian fleet from its bases, the Phoenician cities Marathus and Aradus came over, and Parmenio secured Damascus and its rich booty, including Darius' war chest.
In reply to a letter from Darius offering peace, Alexander replied arrogantly, demanding unconditional surrender to himself as lord of Asia. After taking Byblos (modern Jubayl) and Sidon (Arabic Sayda), he was refused entry into the island city at Tyre It was while the siege of Tyre was in progress that Darius sent a new offer: he would pay a huge ransom of 10,000 talents for his family and suggested the Euphrates as the future boundary between Greece and the Orient. At the council of war that considered these terms the veteran soldier Parmenio declared they were more than Greece could have hoped.
"Were I Alexander," he said, "I would accept them."
"And I," answered
the young king, "were I Parmenio!"
He was not Parmenio, and his curt refusal marked a further stage in the prosecution of his ambitions. Alexander
did not pursue Darius, but proceeded southwards, to secure all the towns along the Mediterranean Sea.
Due to his military genius they successfully stormed after a siege of seven months, the almost impregnable island-fortress
of Tyre (July 332 B.C.), that, like Thebes, suffered a full measure of destruction it was attended with great
carnage and the sale of the women and children into slavery, for its refusal to surrender.
Leaving Parmenio in Syria, Alexander advanced south without opposition until he reached Gaza on its high mound; there bitter resistance halted him for two months, and he sustained a serious shoulder wound during a sortie
In November 332 he reached Egypt which, disliking Persian rule, was quite prepared to accept a fresh conqueror. Indeed, as the weeks of his visit passed there was even enthusiasm, for Alexander, impressed by the age and dignity of the land of the Pharaohs, treated its religions prejudices with respect. He founded the city of Alexandria near the western arm of the Nile on a fine site between the sea and Lake Mareotis, protected by the island of Pharos, and had it laid out by the Rhodian architect Deinocrates. He is also said to have sent an expedition to discover the causes of the flooding of the Nile. Hence he went through the desert of Libya, to consult the oracle of Ammon, (at Siwah), who gave him the traditional salutation of a pharaoh, as son of Amon. This roused the rugged Macedonians' sense of humour; for Alexander, impressionable and superstitious, was not so sure. Was he not the son of Heracles, a hero? And at least he had no doubt the gods were fighting on his behalf.
Leaving Egypt he rode back up the Maritime Plain, and by the Arbela, near Nineveh. On his return Alexander marched against Darius III (331 B.C.), who had collected an immense army in Assyria, and rejected the proposals of his rival for peace. A battle was fought at Gaugamela, about 50 miles from Arbela, B.C. 331, and notwithstanding the immense numerical superiority of his enemy, Alexander (who had but 40,000 men and 7,000 horse) gained a complete victory.
Babylon and Susa opened their gates to the conqueror, who marched towards Persepolis, the capital of Persia, and entered it in triumph. Alexander was now " lord of the Ancient East "; his headquarters the former capital of Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar. He now seems for a time to have lost control, and is said in a fit of intoxication to have set fire to the palace of Persepolis, one of the wonders of the world.
Rousing himself up, however, in midsummer 330 Alexander set out for the eastern provinces in pursuit of Darius, who, having lost his throne, was kept prisoner by Bessus, satrap of Bactriana. After a skirmish near modern Shahrud, the usurper had Darius stabbed and left him to die. Continuing his progress he subdued Bessus, and advanced to the Jaxartes, the extreme eastern limit of the empire, but did not fully subdue the whole of this region till 328, some fortresses holding out with great tenacity.
In one of these he took prisoner the beautiful Roxana, daughter of Oxyartes, a nobleman of Sogdiana, and having fallen in love with her he married her.
Meantime disaffection had once or twice manifested itself among his Macedonian followers which had been cruelly punished; and he had also, to his lasting remorse, killed his faithful friend Cleitus in a drunken quarrel. Alexander now formed the idea of conquering India, then scarcely known even by name.
In judging this amazing campaign it is necessary to remember contemporary geography as Alexander had been taught it by Aristotle. This said that India was on the edge of the world and that the Indus flowed into the ocean-stream surrounding it. Great was the king's surprise, and perhaps disappointment, to learn of other kingdoms and a river, the Ganges, many hundreds of miles distant still towards the East.
He passed the Indus near Attock (B.C. 326), marched towards the Hydaspes (Jhelum), at the passage of which he conquered a king named Porus who's army included 35,000 soldiers and 200 elephants the battle was fierce and bloody, Alexander advanced victoriously through the north-west of India, and intended to proceed as far as the Ganges, when the murmurs of his army who were weary and homesick, compelled him to return home. In his eagerness to stretch his empire to the furthest limits of the solid earth, he would have pushed on across the central plains; but here his army threatened rebellion, seeking to be back once more in lands and towns it knew.
Even an Alexander, son of Heracles, must yield on occasion to public opinion, and so by the Hydaspes he reached the Acesines (Chenab), and thus the Indus, down which he sailed to the sea. On reaching Patala, located at the head of the Indus delta, he built a harbour and docks The fleet was commanded by Nearchus, and Alexander's own captain was Onesicritus; both later wrote accounts of the campaign, hitherto only known to Scylax amongst the Greeks.
In spring 324 he was back in Susa, capital of Elam and administrative centre of the Persian Empire; he married Statira, the eldest daughter of Darius, admirers of Alexander point to these marriages and those of he and ninety of his generals contracted with the Persians as evidence of his wish to unite the two nations as closely as possible, it is answered that he was actuated merely by love of Oriental luxury, and that his aping of Persian customs and ready acceptance of divine homage went far to alienate his Macedonian subjects.
At Opis, on the Tigris, a mutiny arose among his Macedonians (in 324), who thought he showed too much favour to the Asiatics; by firmness and policy he succeeded in quelling this rising, and sent home 10,000 veterans with rich rewards. In the winter of 324 Alexander carried out a savage expedition against the Cossaeans in the hills of Luristan. His favourite, Hephæstion, died at Ecbatana, and Alexander's grief was un-bounded he buried him at Babylon. The following spring Alexander, was planning an invasion of Arabia as a prelude to the conquest of the western Mediterranean, when suddenly after a drinking bout at a banquet he contracted a fever, in a few days he died ( June, 323 B.C.) at the age of 33, after a reign of twelve years and eight months.
His body was after a time conveyed to Egypt with great splendour by his general Ptolemy.
Verdicts on Alexander's work will always differ, there is little doubt that continuous success turned Alexander's head, as well it might; It had been a magnificent achievement, and not merely as a test of military strength or courage and endurance. If worth nothing else, it added immensely to knowledge, for Alexander, keenly interested in natural history, ordered experts and specialists to investigate the countries he traversed. Against what he failed to achieve must be reckoned the towns he caused to be built as outposts of Hellenic civilization along his lines of march, and the extent to which the culture he worshipped permeated both Egypt and the East. He found himself king of a Greece rebellious and distracted: he left an empire so hellenized that two generations later learned Babylonians and Egyptians were contributing to literature books written in the Greek tongue.
"Alexander was the inaugurator of that comprehensive cosmopolitanism which reached its apogee in the Roman Empire," says a modern writer, or, as a Greek shortly after his own day expressed it simply, "He made of one every race of men."
HELLENIC EMPIRE
In 401 B.C. Xenophon, the historian, pupil of Socrates, had made his famous "up-country march" (anabasis) through Persian Asia Minor at the head of his small band of Greek mercenaries. This expedition, heroic though it was, seemed as nothing before the triumphal progress of the young Macedonian king, whose life-work was not, in its real essence, the building up of a material empire, but the stamping of civilization with an Hellenic impress it still bears in part to-day.
Hellenism is a word coined to "describe
particularly the latter phases of Greek culture, from the conquests of Alexander to the end of the Ancient World,
when those over whom this culture extended were largely not of Greek blood."
Due to Alexander the Great, the influence of Greece can be traced back to the famous days of Athens, when Ictinus
and Phidias in the world of art, and the great philosophers, more especially Socrates and Plato, cast their spell
over human imagination. Athens might decline from the naval supremacy bestowed upon her by her victories over Persia,
but Phidias had his successor in Praxiteles (364 B.C.), the early philosophers, in the fourth century, in Zeno,
founder of Stoicism, (Stoa, a Greek porch, i.e. the Painted Lecture-hall of Athens.) who preached the way of duty
and self-control, and in Epicurus (d. 270 B.C.), of Athenian descent, who, if he counselled the pursuit of pleasure.Yet
added for men's guidance, "we
cannot live pleasantly without living wisely, nobly, and righteously."
Alexander left behind him an immense empire, no heir had been appointed to the throne, so his generals shared it out among, Alexanders half brother Philip Arrhidaeus, and his posthumous son born of his first wife Roxana, Alexander IV, both failed to survive the ensuing conflict. Finally the empire was divided amongst his ( "Diadochi" successors) chief generals: Antigonus received Greece, Seleucus the Asiatic possessions, and Ptolemy, Egypt.
All were able, but there was no doubt
Seleucus had the hardest task in attempting to hold together the conglomeration of races that made up a vastly
expanded Persian empire. India was soon lost to a native king and indeed, before long, the Seleucids were confining
their attention mainly to Syria, where they founded a capital at Antioch, on the lower Orontes.
The rest of the kingdom and the neighbouring provinces they planted with colonies of Greeks brought from the mainland;
each a self-governing community in control of local affairs but paying taxes for the upkeep of the central government.
One of the most famous of the Alexandrian towns in Asia Minor was Pergamum, with its Grecian temples and colonnades.
For a time it achieved complete independence, and was sufficiently powerful to hold at bay hosts of invading Gauls,
who have left their name in their final place of settlement, Galatia. The impression the strength and valour of
these barbarians made on the cultured Greeks can be seen in famous statues of the day, such as "The Dying
Gaul," and the Pergamese altar-sculptures dedicated to Zeus .
Antigonus, who had achieved the European possessions in the general scramble for spoils, lost his life in an attempt
to secure the whole empire, and his grandson of the same name, Antigonus II, was content to be merely king of Macedonia,
though even this patrimony he did not enjoy undisturbed. His chief enemy was Pyrrhus king of Epirus, on the Albanian
coast.
It was not in Europe or Asia that the Hellenic Empire attained its zenith after its founder's death, but in Egypt under the Ptolomies (323-30 B.C.). Here the Greeks had possessed for some time an important commercial settlement Naucratis, but this was to fade into insignificance before Alexandria, the sea port founded in his lifetime by the young conqueror to replace the Tyre that he had laid in ashes.
Alexandria ranks with Athens and Rome
amongst the cities of ancient days. Its Pharos or lighthouse, that became a model both for Christian spire and
Mohammedan minaret, stood in colossal grandeur, gazing over the harbour, for some 1600 years. This harbour was,
in the early days of the Ptolomies, the central market of the Hellenic world, protected by their fleet that dominated
the western Mediterranean. Hero could be found the spices, precious stones and perfumes of the Orient; the ivory,
ebony, and gold of the hinterland of Africa; Cornish tin and Baltic amber.
The town had its prosperous foreign quarters. Jewish, Persian, Syrian, etc., and of these, the Jews of the "Diaspora"
(dispersion) were said to outnumber those of their race in Jerusalem itself. So much, too, had they taken colour
from their surroundings that it was found necessary to translate their scriptures into Greek (the Septuagint).
The Alexandrian Museum has been called "the first university in the world." Endowed by the Ptolomies
largely to promote research in science and other branches of learning, it had also its lecture halls, where Euclid
presented his problems to students in much their present form.
Other noted men of learning in Alexandria were Aristarchus, the astronomer, who more than 1200 years before Copernicus
discovered that our world and other planets must revolve round the sun; Eratosthenes, the geographer, who, by mathematics,
arrived within fifty miles of the true diameter of the earth; Herophilus and other doctors who (though not, it
is said, without the vivisection of criminals) deduced the brain to be the centre of the nervous system.
Even more famous than the scientists actually living in Alexandria at this time was Archimedes the Syracusan (d..
212 B.C.), who corresponded with those researching at the Museum about his own discoveries specific gravity, and
inventions for moving heavy objects by systems of cranks and levers.
One thing that drew men of learning to Alexandria besides her Museum, was her libraries, also under royal patronage.
Their shelves were piled with thousands of rolls of papyrus books, and an army of copyists was kept perpetually
employed in restoring the pages injured by constant thumbing, also in making fresh scripts of manuscripts that
had been lent, or taken from their owners forcibly by the king's orders until this was done. The most famous librarian
was Callimachus, who not only catalogued the collection but hit on the plan of dividing up books into a number
of small rolls for easier handling. Fire and pillage finally scattered this unique collection, though how far it
was the result of the Arab destruction of the city in A.D. 642 is uncertain.
It was in the realm of religion that
the impress made its deepest mark. In Alexandria, against the tolerant background of Greek philosophy, all religions
were weighed and discussed: the oracular pronouncements of Delphi, monotheistic Judaism, Egyptian worship of Osiris
Isis, and Horus, mystery cults of the Orient.
Under the pressure of argument and oratory even the most fanatical barriers showed cracks; and faiths absorbed
something of each other's essence. One outcome was the tendency to deify rulers after the Egyptian fashion; but,
save as the hallmark of political patriotism in later Roman times, this payment of divine honours to living men
lacked any depth of conviction.
What humanity sought was something less nebulous than Greek philosophy: a faith that would, if possible, bring
the purity and majesty of the Jews' invisible Yahweh (Jehovah)
into a closer relationship with weak and suffering humanity. Thus for many in the Hellenic civilization of Alexandria
the ground was prepared for belief in Christianity .
