The death of Alexander, thus suddenly cut off by a fever in the
plenitude of health, vigor, and aspirations, was an event impressive
as well as important in the highest possible degree, to his
contemporaries far and near. When the first report of it was brought
to Athens, the orator Demades exclaimed, "It can not be true: if
Alexander were dead, the whole habitable world would have smelt of his
carcass." This coarse, but emphatic comparison, illustrates the
immediate, powerful, and wide-reaching impression produced by the
sudden extinction of the great conqueror. It was felt by each of the
many remote envoys who had so recently come to propitiate this
far-shooting Apollo--by every man among the nations who had sent these
envoys--throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, as then known--to affect
either his actual condition or his probable future.
The first growth and development of Macedonia, during the twenty-two
years preceding the battle of Chæroneia,[44] from an embarrassed
secondary state into the first of all known powers, had excited the
astonishment of contemporaries, and admiration for Philip's organizing
genius. But the achievements of Alexander, during his twelve years of
reign, throwing Philip into the shade, had been on a scale so much
grander and vaster, and so completely without serious reverse or even
interruption, as to transcend the measure, not only of human
expectation, but almost of human belief. The Great King (as the King
of Persia was called by excellence) was, and had long been, the type
of worldly power and felicity, even down to the time when Alexander
crossed the Hellespont. Within four years and three months from this
event, by one stupendous defeat after another, Darius had lost all his
Western empire, and had become a fugitive eastward of the Caspian
Gates, escaping captivity at the hands of Alexander only to perish by
those of the satrap Bessus. All antecedent historical parallels--the
ruin and captivity of the Lydian Croesus, the expulsion and mean
life of the Syracusan Dionysius, both of them impressive examples of
the mutability of human condition--sank into trifles compared with the
overthrow of this towering Persian colossus. The orator Æschines
exprest the genuine sentiment of a Grecian spectator when he exclaimed
(in a speech delivered at Athens shortly before the death of Darius),
"What is there among the list of strange and unexpected events that
has not occurred in our time? Our lives have transcended the limits of
humanity; we are born to serve as a theme for incredible tales to
posterity. Is not the Persian king--who dug through Athos and bridged
the Hellespont--who demanded earth and water from the Greeks--who
dared to proclaim himself in public epistles master of all mankind
from the rising to the setting sun--is not he now struggling to the
last, not for dominion over others, but for the safety of his own
person?"
Such were the sentiments excited by Alexander's career even in the
middle of 330 B.C., more than seven years before his death. During the
following seven years his additional achievements had carried
astonishment yet further. He had mastered, in defiance of fatigue,
hardship, and combat, not merely all the eastern half of the Persian
empire, but unknown Indian regions beyond its easternmost limits.
Besides Macedonia, Greece, and Thrace, he possest all that immense
treasure and military force which had once rendered the Great King so
formidable. By no contemporary man had any such power ever been known
or conceived. With the turn of imagination then prevalent, many were
doubtless disposed to take him for a god on earth, as Grecian
spectators had once supposed with regard to Xerxes, when they beheld
the innumerable Persian host crossing the Hellespont.
Exalted to this prodigious grandeur, Alexander was at the time of his
death little more than thirty-two years old--the age at which a
citizen of Athens was growing into important commands; ten years less
than the age for a consul at Rome; two years younger than the age at
which Timour first acquired the crown, and began his foreign
conquests. His extraordinary bodily powers were unabated; he had
acquired a large stock of military experience; and, what was still
more important, his appetite for further conquest was as voracious,
and his readiness to purchase it at the largest cost of toil or danger
as complete, as it had been when he first crossed the Hellespont.
Great as his past career had been, his future achievements, with such
increased means and experience, were likely to be yet greater. His
ambition would have been satisfied with nothing less than the conquest
of the whole habitable world as then known; and if his life had been
prolonged, he would probably have accomplished it. Nowhere (so far as
our knowledge reaches) did there reside any military power capable of
making head against him; nor were his soldiers, when he commanded
them, daunted or baffled by any extremity of cold, heat, or fatigue.
The patriotic feelings of Livy dispose him to maintain that Alexander,
had he invaded Italy and assailed Romans or Samnites, would have
failed and perished like his relative Alexander of Epirus. But this
conclusion can not be accepted. If we grant the courage and discipline
of the Roman infantry to have been equal to the best infantry of
Alexander's army, the same can not be said of the Roman cavalry as
compared with the Macedonian companions. Still less is it likely that
a Roman Consul, annually changed, would have been found a match for
Alexander in military genius and combinations; nor, even if personally
equal, would he have possest the same variety of troops and arms, each
effective in its separate way, and all conspiring to one common
purpose--nor the same unbounded influence over their minds in
stimulating them to full effort. I do not think that even the Romans
could have successfully resisted Alexander the Great; tho it is
certain that he never throughout all his long marches encountered such
enemies as they, nor even such as Samnites and Lucanians--combining
courage, patriotism, discipline, with effective arms both for defense
and for close combat.
Among all the qualities which go to constitute the highest military
excellence, either as a general or as a soldier, none was wanting in
the character of Alexander. Together with his own chivalrous
courage--sometimes indeed both excessive and unseasonable, so as to
form the only military defect which can fairly be imputed to him--we
trace in all his operations the most careful dispositions taken
beforehand, vigilant precaution in guarding against possible reverse,
and abundant resource in adapting himself to new contingencies. Amidst
constant success, these precautionary combinations were never
discontinued. His achievements are the earliest recorded evidence of
scientific military organization on a large scale, and of its
overwhelming effects. Alexander overawes the imagination more than any
other personage of antiquity, by the matchless development of all that
constitutes effective force--as an individual warrior, and as
organizer and leader of armed masses; not merely the blind impetuosity
ascribed by Homer to Ares, but also the intelligent, methodized, and
all-subduing compression which he personifies in Athene. But all his
great qualities were fit for use only against enemies; in which
category indeed were numbered all mankind, known and unknown, except
those who chose to submit to him. In his Indian campaigns, amidst
tribes of utter strangers, we perceive that not only those who stand
on their defense, but also those who abandon their property and flee
to the mountains, are alike pursued and slaughtered.
Apart from the transcendent merits of Alexander as a soldier and a
general, some authors give him credit for grand and beneficent views
on the subject of imperial government, and for intentions highly
favorable to the improvement of mankind. I see no ground for adopting
this opinion. As far as we can venture to anticipate what would have
been Alexander's future, we see nothing in prospect except years of
ever-repeated aggression and conquest, not to be concluded until he
had traversed and subjugated all the inhabited globe. The acquisition
of universal dominion--conceived not metaphorically, but literally,
and conceived with greater facility in consequence of the imperfect
geographical knowledge of the time--was the master-passion of his
soul. At the moment of his death, he was commencing fresh aggression
in the south against the Arabians, to an indefinite extent; while his
vast projects against the western tribes in Africa and Europe, as far
as the Pillars of Hercules, were consigned in the orders and memoranda
confidentially communicated to Kraterus. Italy, Gaul, and Spain would
have been successively attacked and conquered; the enterprises
proposed to him when in Bactria by the Chorasmian prince Pharasmanes,
but postponed then until a more convenient season, would have been
next taken up, and he would have marched from the Danube northward
round the Euxine and Palus Mæotis[45] against the Scythians and the
tribes of the Caucasus. There remained, moreover, the Asiatic regions
east of the Hyphasis, which his soldiers had refused to enter upon,
but which he certainly would have invaded at a future opportunity,
were it only to efface the poignant humiliation of having been
compelled to relinquish his proclaimed purpose. Tho this sounds like
romance and hyperbole, it was nothing more than the real insatiate
aspiration of Alexander, who looked upon every new acquisition mainly
as a capital for acquiring more. "You are a man like all of us,
Alexander" (said the naked Indian to him), "except that you abandon
your home like a meddlesome destroyer, to invade the most distant
regions; enduring hardship yourself, and inflicting hardship upon
others." Now, how an empire thus boundless and heterogeneous, such as
no prince has ever yet realized, could have been administered with any
superior advantages to subjects, it would be difficult to show. The
mere task of acquiring and maintaining--of keeping satraps and
tribute-gatherers in authority as well as in subordination--of
suppressing resistances ever liable to recur in regions distant by
months of march--would occupy the whole life of a world-conqueror,
without leaving any leisure for the improvements suited to peace and
stability, if we give him credit for such purposes in theory.