MACEDON
The country of Macedon, as you will see on the Greek map, lies
northward of Greece. It was inhabited by tribes of the Slavs, or
Slavonic people, who lived the agricultural and pastoral life,
tilling the soil and having flocks and herds. About 100 years after
the battle of Salamis, a baby was born of the royal house of
Macedonia. He was given the name of Philip. His childhood was spent
at Thebes, in Greece, where he had been sent, or had been taken, as a
hostage. When he came to the throne of Macedon he seems at once to
have begun to strengthen the army, and to improve its organisation.
He had acquired his ideas of what an army should be, as we may
suppose, while he was being educated at Thebes. The Macedonian army
was formed much on the model of the Greek army, but there were
certain differences, and every one of the differences seems to have
been an improvement.
There was a phalanx, after the model of the Greek phalanx, and
therein was the great strength of the infantry. But the phalanx of
the Macedonians was not quite so closely packed (there was more space
between one soldier and the next) as the Greek phalanx, and it was
able to adopt this more open formation by means of giving to each
soldier a longer spear or pike than the Greek soldier had. Thus the
Macedonian phalanx was able to move more quickly than the Greek,
{154} and also could cover more ground with the same number of men.
Now as to the cavalry. The Greeks, as we saw, were not nearly so
well off as the Persians for horses. They had not the unlimited
extent of horse-raising country that the Persians had in the lands
towards the east. But the Macedonians, on the contrary, were almost
as well off in this way as the Persians themselves. Away back in
Thrace and Scythia they had these unlimited extents, so their cavalry
became a very strong force.
And the same lands which provided them with horses provided them with
soldiers also. Philip began to use his great strength of arms by
making himself master of the countries on all sides of the kingdom of
Macedon, to which he had succeeded. There were many Greek colonies
or small cities along the coast of Macedonia itself. These he took
possession of with little trouble. Certain of the Greeks at home
began to be alarmed by the growth of this power in the north. You
may have heard of some famous orations called "Philippics," delivered
by the great orator Demosthenes, at Athens. Their name comes from
this very Philip of Macedon, because it was in the hope of rousing
the Athenians to take strong measures, and to unite with other states
to oppose his power, that they were made.
But, as usual, there were jealousies. Athens did at length combine
with Thebes to oppose Philip, but by that time he had found allies in
Greece itself. He marched south, met the Thebans and Athenians at
Chæronea, in 338 B.C., and won a battle which makes a very great
difference in our story, for it was so decisive that it practically
put an end, once for all, to the independence of Greece. Greece for
many years had to {155} do what Macedonia ordered. Philip was given,
or assumed, command of all the Greek armies, with a title which has
been translated "Captain-General." Commander-in-Chief might describe
it nearly as well, and is a title better known to us.
And now, for the first time, we have a really united Greece. But
though a united Greece, it was not a free Greece. It was united
because it was under the masterful rule of the Macedonians.
But, being united, and joined moreover with the forces of the
Macedonians and their allies it probably was the greatest fighting
force the world had yet known. There was one direction in particular
in which it was likely that it would make its force felt--against
Persia.
[Sidenote: Alexander the Great]
In the midst of the preparation for the invasion of the Persian
empire, Philip was assassinated, after reigning for twenty-three
years, and was succeeded by his son Alexander--Alexander the
Great--then only twenty years old. And Alexander the Great died only
twelve years later. He was therefore only thirty-two years old at
his death. Yet he had time to win the name of Great; and when you
hear his story you will think that it was well deserved, for the
story is extraordinary.
It is extraordinary by reason of the immense extent of territory over
which Alexander went victoriously and with marvellous rapidity. But
the explanation is not very far to seek--it lies in that very
powerful army and fighting machine which had been delivered to him by
his father; in that, and in the lack of resisting power in the
enemies whom it overcame, is the explanation of his success.
The fighting power of the Persian empire had spent itself; and partly
it had spent itself in the destruction {156} of the fighting power of
the nations with which it had come into touch. In that, as it seems,
taken together with the very real strength of Alexander's army, lies
the explanation. The Persian power, moreover, apart from its loss in
actual fighting, had probably lost much by life in conditions more
easy and pleasant than those in the more rugged and barren country
from which Cyrus had led the Persians. We have noticed the same
change in the character of conquering nations already, and may see it
yet again in course of the great story.
As for this particular story which we are telling at the moment,
about Alexander and the march of his ever-victorious army, it will be
a short story although such a marvellous one. It is short, just
because the march had scarcely a stopping-place, scarcely a check,
all through.
This Alexander, succeeding to the throne of Macedonia and to all that
his father Philip had made of that throne, and to the
command-in-chief of the great army which Philip had created, had been
educated by perhaps the most wonderful man of that wonderful Greek
nation--the philosopher Aristotle. We call him philosopher, but
there was no branch of the learning of that time, and it was a time
of great learning, which he does not seem to have known perfectly.
The additions that he made to every branch of that learning are most
astonishing.
[Illustration: ALEXANDER THE GREAT. (From the British Museum.)]
We have to look on this young Alexander, then, as being as perfectly
trained and taught as it was possible for a young man to be, and as
having come into his kingdom with this great army ready to start,
with all its plans laid, for the Persian invasion. Let us see what
use he made of it. We know its composition--a certain number of
Macedonian native soldiers, Greek and other allies; and we know its
general way of {157} fighting, with the quickly moving Macedonian
phalanx, armed with the long pikes, and the hosts of cavalry on good
horses. But he was a very young king. The Greeks seem to have
thought they had a chance, on his accession, of freeing themselves
from the Macedonian yoke. Even in his own kingdom there was trouble,
and some of the tribes in the north rose in revolt. Alexander
crushed all these various attempts against his power. Twice he had
to march south, to Thebes, that city where he had been as a boy.
Once it admitted him at the head of his army without a fight, but on
the second occasion, when it had taken arms again against Macedon on
hearing a false rumour that Alexander had been killed in some
fighting in the north, he came down and razed the city walls and
punished the inhabitants with fearful severity.
These home troubles occupied two years of his reign, and in the third
year he crossed the Hellespont with his great army and had his first
big meeting with the Persian forces on the river Granicus. He was
completely victorious.
[Sidenote: Battle of Issus]
But Darius, the Persian monarch, still claiming the title of King of
Kings, was not likely to be content with the result of a single
battle. He gathered his strength anew, and again met Alexander in
the following year, at Issus, in Syria. This time his defeat was
even more decisive than before.
Alexander advanced southward conquering. He took all the
Phœnician cities of the coast, though Tyre made an obstinate
defence, and swept down into Egypt. Egypt appears to have made no
attempt--perhaps it had little wish--to resist him. By this time
there were many Greeks in Egypt, and it is likely that they would
receive the forces of the Macedonians, {158} among which were many of
their kinsmen, almost more as friends than foes. The city of
Alexandria, founded by him, or in his honour, takes its name from him.
The Persians, however, were not yet done with. By 321 B.C., two
years after his defeat at Issus, Darius had collected an army greater
than ever before, and Alexander, coming eastward out of Egypt, met
this vast host, said to have been a million strong, at Gaugemela, or
Arbela, and in this third and last conflict his victory was decisive.
Darius fled eastward, with Alexander constantly in pursuit of him.
Alexander took the great cities of Babylon and Susa on his way. The
fugitive Darius was assassinated in Parthia, and Alexander's lordship
over the ancient empire was complete.
Yet that was not enough for him. He pushed forward into India,
across high mountain ranges and wide rivers. What he accomplished
there, in the way of conquest, was marvellous, yet it had no big
effect on the great story, because his conquests beyond the mountains
were not lasting. His wonderful troops, though they must have looked
on him as almost supernatural in his ability to lead them on to
victory, began to long for their homes, probably to wonder if they
would ever see them again after coming so far. He reached the shores
of the Indian Ocean, and thence set his face to return homeward.
In Babylonia he stayed awhile, arranging for the government of the
immense empire of which he was the undisputed master, and there he
died, of a fever which is said to have been brought on, or greatly
increased, by intemperate drinking--a death unworthy of his
extraordinary achievements and of a pupil of such a master as
Aristotle.
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And death at thirty-two! The exploits of Alexander and his army are
unequalled in the whole course of the story of the world. Yet we
must ever remember how much of that immense achievement was due to
the genius of his father Philip, who created all the fighting force
which the son led so triumphantly. The fame of the son is so
glorious that the father's work is rather hidden by it. What Philip
might have done, if he had lived, with the great machine of war which
he devised we cannot tell, but it is sure that Alexander could not
have achieved his conquests as he did but for the machinery which his
father had made ready for him.
[Sidenote: Death of Alexander]
No doubt death came for the great conqueror quite unexpectedly in his
thirty-third year, and he had made no arrangements as to who was to
be his successor on the throne of the vast empire that he had won.
There was no lack of claimants for it. Many of his victorious
generals were willing enough, and there was much confused fighting
among the victors and the forces under the command of each. One of
the principal generals, Ptolemæus, or Ptolemy, was the commander of
the armies that held Egypt. In Babylonia and Syria it appears that
there was a period of rivalry and struggle between several of the
leading generals, until at length one of them, Seleucus, prevailed
over the rest, and he claimed to be, and in large measure really was,
ruler of Syria and of the East as Ptolemy was ruler of Egypt. The
proud title of King of Kings, which the Persian monarchs had assumed,
now came to nothing, seeing that there were at least two kings now in
this eastern part of the world. Seleucus and his successors, called
the Seleucidæ, became established as Kings of Syria, in its new {160}
capital city of Antioch; and Ptolemy and his successors, called the
Ptolemies, became no less firmly seated on the throne of the ancient
Pharaohs in Egypt.
Others of Alexander's generals who became rulers of one or other part
of his empire after his death were Antigonus, Lysimachus, and
Cassander. Cassander was son of Antipater, whom Alexander had left
as his regent in Macedonia to govern the country for him when he went
on his wars against the Persians. All these generals and their
followers continued fighting, with various results, until the great
and decisive battle at Ipsus (not Issus), of which the practical
result was that Cassander was established as king of Macedonia and
Greece. The battle of Ipsus was fought in 301 B.C., twenty-two years
later than the battle of Issus. Seleucus and Lysimachus were the
victorious leaders over Antigonus, who was killed during the fight in
this battle of Ipsus; and to Lysimachus had already been assigned the
kingdom of Thrace.
So now, in 300 B.C., we have Cassander over Macedonia and Greece,
Lysimachus over Thrace, Seleucus over Syria and Babylonia, and
Ptolemy over Egypt. That is the condition of affairs at that date on
this eastern side of the picture. But it had not been brought about
without some sharp fighting between Seleucus and Ptolemy, and here,
as before, Palestine was like the horseshoe between the blacksmith's
hammer and his anvil. It lay right in the path between the two great
combatants.
[Sidenote: The Jews in Egypt]
Alexander, when he went conquering, with little or no opposition,
into Egypt, had shown much favour to the Jews. We have seen that
many of them had returned, under favour of Cyrus the Persian, from
their Babylonian exile, to Jerusalem. The temple had been {161}
rebuilt, not without a good deal of interference from their Syrian
neighbours; the religious rites had been re-instituted and were
strictly observed.
Alexander, it appears, showed consideration to the Jews in Jerusalem.
He was, we may presume, a Greek in his religious views--that is to
say, that religion made very little difference and had very little
part in his life. He would not care what god a subject people liked
to worship, so long as they did not oppose him. He took some of the
Jews down with him, or had them brought, into Egypt, where there were
already some of their nation, and they were given quarters of their
own and a synagogue, or place of assembly and worship, in the new
city of Alexandria. So here we have yet another step in that
dispersion of the Jews which was to bring their religion, on which
Christianity is founded, into all parts of the world.
I mentioned too that, rather as the Jewish religion became known
throughout the world by the dispersion of those who followed it, so
also did the thought and culture of the Greeks become known by the
way in which that wonderful people was spread abroad. I have been
writing of Macedonians hitherto as though they were a people
altogether different from the Greeks, and so in truth, and in origin,
they were. But I want you to realise that though they conquered
Greece by their force of arms, it was (as always happened whenever
Greeks met people of other nationality) the Greek thought that
conquered their thought. They began more and more to think in the
Greek way. Moreover, their very armies were largely Greek.
Thus it came to pass, in course of time, that the distinction between
Macedonian and Greek began to be lost. After all, Macedon was a very
near neighbour {162} of Greece herself. There must have been much
coming and going between the two. Therefore the "Hellenising" of the
world, as you may read it described--which means making the thought
of the world like the thought of Hellas, which is another name for
Greece--went on very fast and was spread abroad very widely. There
is no part of that world which is the scene of our great story which
it had not reached and in which it had not made a considerable
difference in the lives of the inhabitants. Over a large part of it
Greek had become the language in use among the better-educated
classes. Seleucus was particularly active in introducing Greeks and
Greek customs into the kingdom under his rule.
The possession of Palestine, inevitably, because of its position, had
been very much disputed between Seleucus and Ptolemy after
Alexander's death, but the dispute was decided by the battle of
Ipsus, which seems to have cleared the air all round. Palestine then
became subject to Egypt and so remained under successive Ptolemies
for more than a hundred years.
[Sidenote: Alexandria]
The Jews in Judæa, with that love of their own customs which has
always been remarkably strong in their nation, held out against the
introduction of Greek thought and language, and so on, longer than
any of their neighbours, but many Jews, as we have seen, had settled
in Alexandria. The first three, at least, of the Ptolemies, who
successively reigned in Egypt, showed favour to them; they had
synagogues in other cities of Egypt besides Alexandria, and those
Jews of Egypt, besides those who were in Babylonia and other parts of
Asia, had the habit of coming up to Jerusalem, where was the Temple,
to attend their great religious ceremonies. And these Jews brought
to Jerusalem the {163} Greek language and thought, so that the Greek
influence penetrated there too at last.
Alexandria became a great city for men of letters, learned men and
writers, as well a great city of trade and a great seaport. The
largest library of the ancient world was collected--and later was
destroyed by fire--in that city. And there, probably before 250
B.C., the books of the Old Testament, originally written in Hebrew,
were translated into Greek. Possibly not all were translated at that
time, but it seems at least certain that the first five books, called
the Pentateuch, were done into Greek about that date. Wherever they
went the Jews never lost sight of their sacred books. The records of
their history and their religious institutions were always with them.
Under the later kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty the government of
Egypt was less strongly maintained, the power of Egypt waned, and in
198 B.C. the Egyptians were thoroughly defeated by the Syrians on the
banks of the Jordan, and Judæa and Jerusalem came under the rule of
the Syrian king. He did not interfere with their religion or their
customs, and for a while the change of rulers appears to have made
very little difference to them.
Such, then, is the outline which I would have you carry in your minds
of the position of those peoples of the story on the eastern side of
the Mediterranean, in Egypt southward, and in Thrace, Macedon, and
Greece. And now I would ask you to come back again to look at the
western side of the picture, for the time has fully come when we
should bring more prominently into it a figure which will grow larger
and larger until it grows to such a size as to fill in the whole
frame, and more than the frame--the figure of world-conquering Rome.
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