adored by everyone, should adore the high priest of the Jews: "I do
not," said he, "adore the high priest, but the God whose minister he is;
for while I was at Dium in Macedonia, my mind wholly fixed on the great
design of the Persian war, as I was revolving the methods how to conquer
Asia, this very man, dressed in the same robes, appeared to me in a
dream, exhorted me to banish my fear, bade me cross the Hellespont
boldly, and assured me that God would march at the head of my army and
give me the victory over the Persians." This speech, delivered with an
air of sincerity, no doubt had its effect in encouraging the army and
establishing an opinion that his mission was from heaven.
From Jerusalem he went to Gaza, where, having met with a more obstinate
resistance than he expected, he cut to pieces the whole garrison,
consisting of ten thousand men. Not satisfied with this act of cruelty,
he caused holes to be bored through the heels of Boetis, the governor,
and tying him with cords to the back of his chariot dragged him in this
manner around the walls of the city. This he did in imitation of
Achilles, whom Homer describes as having dragged Hector around the walls
of Troy in the same manner. It was reading the past to very little, or
rather, indeed, to very bad purpose, to imitate this hero in the most
unworthy part of his character.
Alexander, having left a garrison in Gaza, turned his arms toward Egypt;
of which he made himself master without opposition. Here he formed the
design of visiting the temple of Jupiter, which was situated in the
sandy deserts of Lybia at the distance of twelve days' journey from
Memphis, the capital of Egypt. His chief object in going thither was to
get himself acknowledged the son of Jupiter, an honor he had long
aspired to. In this journey he founded the city of Alexandria, which
soon became one of the greatest towns in the world for commerce.
Nothing could be more dreary than the desert through which he passed,
nor anything more charming--according to the fabulous accounts of the
poets--than the particular spot where the temple was situated.
It was a perfect paradise in the midst of an immeasurable wilderness. At
last, having reached the place, and appeared before the altar of the
deity, the priest, who was no stranger to Alexander's wishes, declared
him to be the son of Jupiter.
The conqueror, elated with this high compliment, asked whether he should
have success in his expedition. The priest answered that he should be
monarch of the world. The conqueror inquired if his father's murderers
were punished. The priest replied that his father Jupiter was immortal,
but that the murderers of Philip had all been extirpated.
THE BATTLE OF ARBELA
B.C. 331
SIR EDWARD SHEPHERD CREASY
(When Alexander, having returned from his campaign against the
barbarians of the North, had suppressed a revolt which meanwhile had
broken out in Greece, he found himself free for undertaking those great
foreign conquests which he had planned. When he left Greece to conquer
the world, he said farewell to his own country forever. Crossing the
Hellespont into Asia Minor with a small but well equipped and
disciplined army, he advanced unopposed until he reached the river
Granicus, where he found himself confronted with a Persian host. Upon
this army he inflicted a defeat so signal as to bring at once to
submission nearly the whole of Asia Minor. He next advanced into Syria
and met the Persian king, Darius III, who in person commanded an immense
body of soldiers, against which the young conqueror fought at Issus,
winning a decisive victory. He not only captured the Persian camp, but
also secured the King's treasures and took his family prisoners. From
this time Alexander held complete mastery of the western dominions of
Darius, whom the conqueror afterward dethroned.
After he had next invaded and subjugated Egypt and there founded the
city of Alexandria, he pursued King Darius, who had taken flight, into
the very heart of his empire, where the Persian monarch, on the plains
of Gaugamela, near the village of Arbela, made his last stand against
his invincible foe. Of the battle to which Arbela gave its name, and
which proved the death-blow of the Persian empire, Creasy's narrative
furnishes a realistic description.)
A long and not uninstructive list might be made out of illustrious men
whose characters have been vindicated during recent times from
aspersions which for centuries had been thrown on them. The spirit of
modern inquiry, and the tendency of modern scholarship, both of which
are often said to be solely negative and destructive, have, in truth,
restored to splendor, and almost created anew, far more than they have
assailed with censure or dismissed from consideration as unreal.
The truth of many a brilliant narrative of brilliant exploits has of
late years been triumphantly demonstrated, and the shallowness of the
sceptical scoffs with which little minds have carped at the great minds
of antiquity has been in many instances decisively exposed. The laws,
the politics, and the lines of action adopted or recommended by eminent
men and powerful nations have been examined with keener investigation
and considered with more comprehensive judgment than formerly were
brought to bear on these subjects. The result has been at least as often
favorable as unfavorable to the persons and the states so scrutinized,
and many an oft-repeated slander against both measures and men has thus
been silenced, we may hope forever.
The veracity of Herodotus, the pure patriotism of Pericles, of
Demosthenes, and of the Gracchi, the wisdom of Clisthenes and of
Licinius as constitutional reformers, may be mentioned as facts which
recent writers have cleared from unjust suspicion and censure. And it
might be easily shown that the defensive tendency which distinguishes
the present and recent great writers of Germany, France, and England has
been equally manifested in the spirit in which they have treated the
heroes of thought and heroes of action who lived during what we term the
Middle Ages, and whom it was so long the fashion to sneer at or neglect.
The name of the victor of Arbela has led to these reflections; for,
although the rapidity and extent of Alexander's conquests have through
all ages challenged admiration and amazement, the grandeur of genius
which he displayed in his schemes of commerce, civilization, and of
comprehensive union and unity among nations, has, until lately, been
comparatively unhonored. This long-continued depreciation was of early
date. The ancient rhetoricians--a class of babblers, a school for lies
and scandal, as Niebuhr justly termed them--chose, among the stock
themes for their commonplaces, the character and exploits of Alexander.
They had their followers in every age; and, until a very recent period,
all who wished to "point a moral or adorn a tale," about unreasoning
ambition, extravagant pride, and the formidable frenzies of free will
when leagued with free power, have never failed to blazon forth the
so-called madman of Macedonia as one of the most glaring examples.
Without doubt, many of these writers adopted with implicit credence
traditional ideas, and supposed, with uninquiring philanthropy, that in
blackening Alexander they were doing humanity good service. But also,
without doubt, many of his assailants, like those of other great men,
have been mainly instigated by "that strongest of all antipathies, the
antipathy of a second-rate mind to a first-rate one," and by the envy
which talent too often bears to genius.
Arrian, who wrote his history of Alexander when Hadrian was emperor of
the Roman world, and when the spirit of declamation and dogmatism was at
its full height, but who was himself, unlike the dreaming pedants of the
schools, a statesman and a soldier of practical and proved ability, well
rebuked the malevolent aspersions which he heard continually thrown upon
the memory of the great conqueror of the East.
He truly says: "Let the man who speaks evil of Alexander not merely
bring forward those passages of Alexander's life which were really evil,
but let him collect and review _all_ the actions of Alexander, and then
let him thoroughly consider first who and what manner of man he himself
is, and what has been his own career; and then let him consider who and
what manner of man Alexander was, and to what an eminence of human
grandeur _he_ arrived. Let him consider that Alexander was a king, and
the undisputed lord of the two continents, and that his name is renowned
throughout the whole earth.
"Let the evil-speaker against Alexander bear all this in mind, and then
let him reflect on his own insignificance, the pettiness of his own
circumstances and affairs, and the blunders that he makes about these,
paltry and trifling as they are. Let him then ask himself whether he is
a fit person to censure and revile such a man as Alexander. I believe
that there was in his time no nation of men, no city, nay, no single
individual with whom Alexander's name had not become a familiar word. I
therefore hold that such a man, who was like no ordinary mortal, was not
born into the world without some special providence."
And one of the most distinguished soldiers and writers, Sir Walter
Raleigh, though he failed to estimate justly the full merits of
Alexander, has expressed his sense of the grandeur of the part played in
the world by "the great Emathian conqueror" in language that well
deserves quotation:
"So much hath the spirit of some one man excelled as it hath undertaken
and effected the alteration of the greatest states and commonweals, the
erection of monarchies, the conquest of kingdoms and empires, guided
handfuls of men against multitudes of equal bodily strength, contrived
victories beyond all hope and discourse of reason, converted the fearful
passions of his own followers into magnanimity, and the valor of his
enemies into cowardice; such spirits have been stirred up in sundry ages
of the world, and in divers parts thereof, to erect and cast down again,
to establish and to destroy, and to bring all things, persons, and
states to the same certain ends which the infinite spirit of the
_Universal_, piercing, moving, and governing all things, hath ordained.
Certainly, the things that this King did were marvellous and would
hardly have been undertaken by anyone else; and though his father had
determined to have invaded the Lesser Asia, it is like enough that he
would have contented himself with some part thereof, and not have
discovered the river of Indus, as this man did."
A higher authority than either Arrian or Raleigh may now be referred to
by those who wish to know the real merit of Alexander as a general, and
how far the commonplace assertions are true that his successes were the
mere results of fortunate rashness and unreasoning pugnacity. Napoleon
selected Alexander as one of the seven greatest generals whose noble
deeds history has handed down to us, and from the study of whose
campaigns the principles of war are to be learned. The critique of the
greatest conqueror of modern times on the military career of the great
conqueror of the Old World is no less graphic than true:
"Alexander crossed the Dardanelles B.C. 334, with an army of about forty
thousand men, of which one-eighth was cavalry; he forced the passage of
the Granicus in opposition to an army under Memnon, the Greek, who
commanded for Darius on the coast of Asia, and he spent the whole of the
year 333 in establishing his power in Asia Minor. He was seconded by the
Greek colonies, who dwelt on the borders of the Black Sea and on the
Mediterranean, and in Sardis, Ephesus, Tarsus, Miletus, etc. The kings
of Persia left their provinces and towns to be governed according to
their own particular laws. Their empire was a union of confederated
states, and did not form one nation; this facilitated its conquest. As
Alexander only wished for the throne of the monarch, he easily effected
the change by respecting the customs, manners, and laws of the people,
who experienced no change in their condition.
"In the year 332 he met with Darius at the head of sixty thousand men,
who had taken up a position near Tarsus, on the banks of the Issus, in
the province of Cilicia. He defeated him, entered Syria, took Damascus,
which contained all the riches of the Great King, and laid siege to
Tyre. This superb metropolis of the commerce of the world detained him
nine months.
"He took Gaza after a siege of two months; crossed the desert in seven
days; entered Pelusium and Memphis, and founded Alexandria. In less than
two years, after two battles and four or five sieges, the coasts of the
Black Sea, from Phasis to Byzantium, those of the Mediterranean as far
as Alexandria, all Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, had submitted to his
arms.
"In 331 he repassed the desert, encamped in Tyre, re-crossed Syria,
entered Damascus, passed the Euphrates and Tigris, and defeated Darius
on the field of Arbela when he was at the head of a still stronger army
than that which he commanded on the Issus, and Babylon opened her gates
to him. In 330 he overran Susa and took that city, Persepolis, and
Pasargada, which contained the tomb of Cyrus. In 329 he directed his
course northward, entered Ecbatana, and extended his conquests to the
coasts of the Caspian, punished Bessus, the cowardly assassin of Darius,
penetrated into Scythia, and subdued the Scythians.
"In 328 he forced the passage of the Oxus, received sixteen thousand
recruits from Macedonia, and reduced the neighboring people to
subjection. In 327 he crossed the Indus, vanquished Porus in a pitched
battle, took him prisoner, and treated him as a king. He contemplated
passing the Ganges, but his army refused. He sailed down the Indus, in
the year 326, with eight hundred vessels; having arrived at the ocean,
he sent Nearchus with a fleet to run along the coasts of the Indian
Ocean and the Persian Gulf as far as the mouth of the Euphrates. In 325
he took sixty days in crossing from Gedrosia, entered Keramania,
returned to Pasargada, Persepolis, and Susa, and married Statira, the
daughter of Darius. In 324 he marched once more to the north, passed
Echatana, and terminated his career at Babylon."
The enduring importance of Alexander's conquests is to be estimated, not
by the duration of his own life and empire, or even by the duration of
the kingdoms which his generals after his death formed out of the
fragments of that mighty dominion. In every region of the world that he
traversed, Alexander planted Greek settlements and founded cities, in
the populations of which the Greek element at once asserted its
predominance. Among his successors, the Seleucidae and the Ptolemies
imitated their great captain in blending schemes of civilization, of
commercial intercourse, and of literary and scientific research with all
their enterprises of military aggrandizement and with all their systems
of civil administration.
Such was the ascendency of the Greek genius, so wonderfully
comprehensive and assimilating was the cultivation which it introduced,
that, within thirty years after Alexander crossed the Hellespont, the
Greek language was spoken in every country from the shores of the Ægean
to the Indus, and also throughout Egypt--not, indeed, wholly to the
extirpation of the native dialects, but it became the language of every
court, of all literature, of every judicial and political function, and
formed a medium of communication among the many myriads of mankind
inhabiting these large portions of the Old World.
Throughout Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt the Hellenic character that was
thus imparted remained in full vigor down to the time of the Mahometan
conquests. The infinite value of this to humanity in the highest and
holiest point of view has often been pointed out, and the workings of
the finger of Providence have been gratefully recognized by those who
have observed how the early growth and progress of Christianity were
aided by that diffusion of the Greek language and civilization
throughout Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt which had been caused by the
Macedonian conquest of the East.
In Upper Asia, beyond the Euphrates, the direct and material influence
of Greek ascendency was more short-lived. Yet, during the existence of
the Hellenic kingdoms in these regions, especially of the Greek kingdom
of Bactria, the modern Bokhara, very important effects were produced on
the intellectual tendencies and tastes of the inhabitants of those
countries, and of the adjacent ones, by the animating contact of the
Grecian spirit. Much of Hindu science and philosophy, much of the
literature of the later Persian kingdom of the Arsacidæ, either
originated from or was largely modified by Grecian influences. So, also,
the learning and science of the Arabians were in a far less degree the
result of original invention and genius than the reproduction, in an
altered form, of the Greek philosophy and the Greek lore acquired by the
Saracenic conquerors, together with their acquisition of the provinces
which Alexander had subjugated, nearly a thousand years before the armed
disciples of Mahomet commenced their career in the East.
It is well known that Western Europe in the Middle Ages drew its
philosophy, its arts, and its science principally from Arabian teachers.
And thus we see how the intellectual influence of ancient Greece, poured
on the Eastern world by Alexander's victories, and then brought back to
bear on mediæval Europe by the spread of the Saracenic powers, has
exerted its action on the elements of modern civilization by this
powerful though indirect channel, as well as by the more obvious effects
of the remnants of classic civilization which survived in Italy, Gaul,
Britain, and Spain, after the irruption of the Germanic nations.
These considerations invest the Macedonian triumphs in the East with
never-dying interest, such as the most showy and sanguinary successes of
mere "low ambition and the pride of kings," however they may dazzle for
a moment, can never retain with posterity. Whether the old Persian
empire which Cyrus founded could have survived much longer than it did,
even if Darius had been victorious at Arbela, may safely be disputed.
That ancient dominion, like the Turkish at the present time, labored
under every cause of decay and dissolution. The satraps, like the modern
pachas, continually rebelled against the central power, and Egypt in
particular was almost always in a state of insurrection against its
nominal sovereign. There was no longer any effective central control, or
any internal principle of unity fused through the huge mass of the
empire, and binding it together.
Persia was evidently about to fall; but, had it not been for Alexander's
invasion of Asia, she would most probably have fallen beneath some other
oriental power, as Media and Babylon had formerly fallen before herself,
and as, in after-times, the Parthian supremacy gave way to the revived
ascendency of Persia in the East, under the sceptres of the Arsacidæ. A
revolution that merely substituted one Eastern power for another would
have been utterly barren and unprofitable to mankind.
Alexander's victory at Arbela not only overthrew an oriental dynasty,
but established European rulers in its stead. It broke the monotony of
the eastern world by the impression of western energy and superior
civilization, even as England's present mission is to break up the
mental and moral stagnation of India and Cathay by pouring upon and
through them the impulsive current of Anglo-Saxon commerce and conquest.
Arbela, the city which has furnished its name to the decisive battle
which gave Asia to Alexander, lies more than twenty miles from the
actual scene of conflict. The little village, then named Gaugamela, is
close to the spot where the armies met, but has ceded the honor of
naming the battle to its more euphonious neighbor. Gaugamela is situated
in one of the wide plains that lie between the Tigris and the mountains
of Kurdistan. A few undulating hillocks diversify the surface of this
sandy tract; but the ground is generally level and admirably qualified
for the evolutions of cavalry, and also calculated to give the larger of
two armies the full advantage of numerical superiority.
The Persian King--who, before he came to the throne, had proved his
personal valor as a soldier and his skill as a general--had wisely
selected this region for the third and decisive encounter between his
forces and the invader. The previous defeats of his troops, however
severe they had been, were not looked on as irreparable. The Granicus
had been fought by his generals rashly and without mutual concert; and,
though Darius himself had commanded and been beaten at Issus, that
defeat might be attributed to the disadvantageous nature of the ground,
where, cooped up between the mountains, the river, and the sea, the
numbers of the Persians confused and clogged alike the general's skill
and the soldiers' prowess, and their very strength had been made their
weakness. Here, on the broad plains of Kurdistan, there was scope for
Asia's largest host to array its lines, to wheel, to skirmish, to
condense or expand its squadrons, to manoeuvre, and to charge at will.
Should Alexander and his scanty band dare to plunge into that living sea
of war, their destruction seemed inevitable.
Darius felt, however, the critical nature to himself as well as to his
adversary of the coming encounter. He could not hope to retrieve the
consequences of a third overthrow. The great cities of Mesopotamia and
Upper Asia, the central provinces of the Persian empire, were certain to
be at the mercy of the victor. Darius knew also the Asiatic character
well enough to be aware how it yields to _prestige_ of success and the
apparent career of destiny. He felt that the diadem was now either to be
firmly replaced on his own brow or to be irrevocably transferred to the
head of his European conqueror. He, therefore, during the long interval
left him after the battle of Issus, while Alexander was subjugating
Syria and Egypt, assiduously busied himself in selecting the best troops
which his vast empire supplied, and in training his varied forces to act
together with some uniformity of discipline and system.
The hardy mountaineers of Afghanistan, Bokhara, Khiva, and Tibet were
then, as at present, far different from the generality of Asiatics in
warlike spirit and endurance. From these districts Darius collected
large bodies of admirable infantry; and the countries of the modern
Kurds and Turkomans supplied, as they do now, squadrons of horsemen,
hardy, skilful, bold, and trained to a life of constant activity and
warfare. It is not uninteresting to notice that the ancestors of our own
late enemies, the Sikhs, served as allies of Darius against the
Macedonians. They are spoken of in Arrian as Indians who dwelt near
Bactria. They were attached to the troops of that satrapy, and their
cavalry was one of the most formidable forces in the whole Persian army.
Besides these picked troops, contingents also came in from the numerous
other provinces that yet obeyed the Great King. Altogether, the horse
are said to have been forty thousand, the scythe-bearing chariots two
hundred, and the armed elephants fifteen in number. The amount of the
infantry is uncertain; but the knowledge which both ancient and modern
times supply of the usual character of oriental armies, and of their
populations of camp-followers, may warrant us in believing that many
myriads were prepared to fight or to encumber those who fought for the
last Darius.