ALEXANDER THE MACEDONIAN ESTABLISHES A GREEK WORLD-EMPIRE, AND WHAT
BECAME OF THIS HIGH AMBITION
WHEN the Achaeans had left their homes along the banks of the Danube to
look for pastures new, they had spent some time among the mountains of
Macedonia. Ever since, the Greeks had maintained certain more or
less formal relations with the people of this northern country. The
Macedonians from their side had kept themselves well informed about
conditions in Greece.
Now it happened, just when Sparta and Athens had finished their
disastrous war for the leadership of Hellas, that Macedonia was ruled
by an extraordinarily clever man by the name of Philip. He admired
the Greek spirit in letters and art but he despised the Greek lack of
self-control in political affairs. It irritated him to see a perfectly
good people waste its men and money upon fruitless quarrels. So he
settled the difficulty by making himself the master of all Greece and
then he asked his new subjects to join him on a voyage which he meant to
pay to Persia in return for the visit which Xerxes had paid the Greeks
one hundred and fifty years before.
Unfortunately Philip was murdered before he could start upon this
well-prepared expedition. The task of avenging the destruction of Athens
was left to Philip's son Alexander, the beloved pupil of Aristotle,
wisest of all Greek teachers.
Alexander bade farewell to Europe in the spring of the year 334 B.C.
Seven years later he reached India. In the meantime he had destroyed
Phoenicia, the old rival of the Greek merchants. He had conquered Egypt
and had been worshipped by the people of the Nile valley as the son
and heir of the Pharaohs. He had defeated the last Persian king--he had
overthrown the Persian empire he had given orders to rebuild Babylon--he
had led his troops into the heart of the Himalayan mountains and had
made the entire world a Macedonian province and dependency. Then he
stopped and announced even more ambitious plans.
The newly formed Empire must be brought under the influence of the Greek
mind. The people must be taught the Greek language--they must live in
cities built after a Greek model. The Alexandrian soldier now turned
school-master. The military camps of yesterday became the peaceful
centres of the newly imported Greek civilisation. Higher and higher
did the flood of Greek manners and Greek customs rise, when suddenly
Alexander was stricken with a fever and died in the old palace of King
Hammurabi of Babylon in the year 323.
Then the waters receded. But they left behind the fertile clay of a
higher civilisation and Alexander, with all his childish ambitions and
his silly vanities, had performed a most valuable service. His Empire
did not long survive him. A number of ambitious generals divided the
territory among themselves. But they too remained faithful to the dream
of a great world brotherhood of Greek and Asiatic ideas and knowledge.
They maintained their independence until the Romans added western
Asia and Egypt to their other domains. The strange inheritance of this
Hellenistic civilisation (part Greek, part Persian, part Egyptian
and Babylonian) fell to the Roman conquerors. During the following
centuries, it got such a firm hold upon the Roman world, that we feel
its influence in our own lives this very day.