_Alexander_.--Your Majesty seems in great wrath! Who has offended you?
_Charles_.--The offence is to you as much as me. Here is a fellow
admitted into Elysium who has affronted us both--an English poet, one
Pope. He has called us two madmen!
_Alexander_.--I have been unlucky in poets. No prince ever was fonder of
the Muses than I, or has received from them a more ungrateful return.
When I was alive, I declared that I envied Achilles because he had a
Homer to celebrate his exploits; and I most bountifully rewarded
Choerilus, a pretender to poetry, for writing verses on mine. But my
liberality, instead of doing me honour, has since drawn upon me the
ridicule of Horace, a witty Roman poet; and Lucan, another versifier of
the same nation, has loaded my memory with the harshest invectives.
_Charles_.--I know nothing of these; but I know that in my time a pert
French satirist, one Boileau, made so free with your character, that I
tore his book for having abused my favourite hero. And now this saucy
Englishman has libelled us both. But I have a proposal to make to you
for the reparation of our honour. If you will join with me, we will turn
all these insolent scribblers out of Elysium, and throw them down
headlong to the bottom of Tartarus, in spite of Pluto and all his guards.
_Alexander_.--This is just such a scheme as that you formed at Bender, to
maintain yourself there, with the aid of three hundred Swedes, against
the whole force of the Ottoman Empire. And I must say that such follies
gave the English poet too much cause to call you a madman.
_Charles_.--If my heroism was madness, yours, I presume, was not wisdom.
_Alexander_.--There was a vast difference between your conduct and mine.
Let poets or declaimers say what they will, history shows that I was not
only the bravest soldier, but one of the ablest commanders the world has
ever seen. Whereas you, by imprudently leading your army into vast and
barren deserts at the approach of the winter, exposed it to perish in its
march for want of subsistence, lost your artillery, lost a great number
of your soldiers, and was forced to fight with the Muscovites under such
disadvantages as made it almost impossible for you to conquer.
_Charles_.--I will not dispute your superiority as a general. It is not
for me, a mere mortal, to contend with the son of Jupiter Ammon.
_Alexander_.--I suppose you think my pretending that Jupiter was my
father as much entitles me to the name of a madman as your extravagant
behaviour at Bender does you. But you are greatly mistaken. It was not
my vanity, but my policy, which set up that pretension. When I proposed
to undertake the conquest of Asia, it was necessary for me to appear to
the people something more than a man. They had been used to the idea of
demi-god heroes. I therefore claimed an equal descent with Osiris and
Sesostris, with Bacchus and Hercules, the former conquerors of the East.
The opinion of my divinity assisted my arms and subdued all nations
before me, from the Granicus to the Ganges. But though I called myself
the son of Jupiter, and kept up the veneration that name inspired, by a
courage which seemed more than human, and by the sublime magnanimity of
all my behaviour, I did not forget that I was the son of Philip. I used
the policy of my father and the wise lessons of Aristotle, whom he had
made my preceptor, in the conduct of all my great designs. It was the
son of Philip who planted Greek colonies in Asia as far as the Indies;
who formed projects of trade more extensive than his empire itself; who
laid the foundations of them in the midst of his wars; who built
Alexandria, to be the centre and staple of commerce between Europe, Asia,
and Africa, who sent Nearchus to navigate the unknown Indian seas, and
intended to have gone himself from those seas to the Pillars of
Hercules--that is, to have explored the passage round Africa, the
discovery of which has since been so glorious to Vasco de Gama. It was
the son of Philip who, after subduing the Persians, governed them with
such lenity, such justice, and such wisdom, that they loved him even more
than ever they had loved their natural kings; and who, by intermarriages
and all methods that could best establish a coalition between the
conquerors and the conquered, united them into one people. But what,
sir, did you do to advance the trade of your subjects, to procure any
benefit to those you had vanquished, or to convert any enemy into a
friend?
_Charles_.--When I might easily have made myself King of Poland, and was
advised to do so by Count Piper, my favourite Minister, I generously gave
that kingdom to Stanislas, as you had given a great part of you conquests
in India to Porus, besides his own dominions, which you restored to him
entire after you had beaten his army and taken him captive.
_Alexander_.--I gave him the government of those countries under me and
as my lieutenant, which was the best method of preserving my power in
conquests where I could not leave garrisons sufficient to maintain them.
The same policy was afterwards practised by the Romans, who of all
conquerors, except me, were the greatest politicians. But neither was I
nor were they so extravagant as to conquer only for others, or dethrone
kings with no view but merely to have the pleasure of bestowing their
crowns on some of their subjects without any advantage to ourselves.
Nevertheless, I will own that my expedition to India was an exploit of
the son of Jupiter, not of the son of Philip. I had done better if I had
stayed to give more consistency to my Persian and Grecian Empires,
instead of attempting new conquests and at such a distance so soon. Yet
even this war was of use to hinder my troops from being corrupted by the
effeminacy of Asia, and to keep up that universal awe of my name which in
those countries was the great support of my power.
_Charles_.--In the unwearied activity with which I proceeded from one
enterprise to another, I dare call myself your equal. Nay, I may pretend
to a higher glory than you, because you only went on from victory to
victory; but the greatest losses were not able to diminish my ardour or
stop the efforts of my daring and invincible spirit.
_Alexander_.--You showed in adversity much more magnanimity than you did
in prosperity. How unworthy of a prince who imitated me was your
behaviour to the king your arms had vanquished! The compelling Augustus
to write himself a letter of congratulation to one of his vassals whom
you had placed in his throne, was the very reverse of my treatment of
Porus and Darius. It was an ungenerous insult upon his ill-fortune. It
was the triumph of a little and a low mind. The visit you made him
immediately after that insult was a further contempt, offensive to him,
and both useless and dangerous to yourself.
_Charles_.--I feared no danger from it. I knew he durst not use the
power I gave him to hurt me.
_Alexander_.--If his resentment in that instant had prevailed over his
fear, as it was likely to do, you would have perished deservedly by your
insolence and presumption. For my part, intrepid as I was in all dangers
which I thought it was necessary or proper for me to meet, I never put
myself one moment in the power of an enemy whom I had offended. But you
had the rashness of folly as well as of heroism. A false opinion
conceived of your enemy's weakness proved at last your undoing. When, in
answer to some reasonable propositions of peace sent to you by the Czar,
you said, "You would come and treat with him at Moscow," he replied very
justly, "That you affected to act like Alexander, but should not find in
him a Darius." And, doubtless, you ought to have been better acquainted
with the character of that prince. Had Persia been governed by a Peter
Alexowitz when I made war against it, I should have acted more
cautiously, and not have counted so much on the superiority of my troops
in valour and discipline over an army commanded by a king who was so
capable of instructing them in all they wanted.
_Charles_.--The battle of Narva, won by eight thousand Swedes against
fourscore thousand Muscovites, seemed to authorise my contempt of the
nation and their prince.
_Alexander_.--It happened that their prince was not present in that
battle. But he had not as yet had the time which was necessary to
instruct his barbarous soldiers. You gave him that time, and he made so
good a use of it that you found at Pultowa the Muscovites become a
different nation. If you had followed the blow you gave them at Narva,
and marched directly to Moscow, you might have destroyed their Hercules
in his cradle. But you suffered him to grow till his strength was
mature, and then acted as if he had been still in his childhood.
_Charles_.--I must confess you excelled me in conduct, in policy, and in
true magnanimity. But my liberality was not inferior to yours; and
neither you nor any mortal ever surpassed me in the enthusiasm of
courage. I was also free from those vices which sullied your character.
I never was drunk; I killed no friend in the riot of a feast; I fired no
palace at the instigation of a harlot.
_Alexander_.--It may perhaps be admitted, as some excuse for my
drunkenness, that the Persians esteemed it an excellence in their kings
to be able to drink a great quantity of wine, and the Macedonians were
far from thinking it a dishonour. But you were as frantic and as cruel
when sober as I was when drunk. You were sober when you resolved to
continue in Turkey against the will of your host, the Grand Signor. You
were sober when you commanded the unfortunate Patkull, whose only crime
was his having maintained the liberties of his country, and who bore the
sacred character of an ambassador, to be broken alive on the wheel,
against the laws of nations, and those of humanity, more inviolable still
to a generous mind. You were likewise sober when you wrote to the Senate
of Sweden, who, upon a report of your death, endeavoured to take some
care of your kingdom, that you would send them one of your boots, and
from that they should receive their orders if they pretended to meddle in
government--an insult much worse than any the Macedonians complained of
from me when I was most heated with wine and with adulation. As for my
chastity, it was not so perfect as yours, though on some occasions I
obtained great praise for my continence; but, perhaps, if you had been
not quite so insensible to the charms of the fair sex, it would have
mitigated and softened the fierceness, the pride, and the obstinacy of
your nature.
_Charles_.--It would have softened me into a woman, or, what I think
still more contemptible, the slave of a woman. But you seem to insinuate
that you never were cruel or frantic unless when you were drunk. This I
absolutely deny. You were not drunk when you crucified Hephaestion's
physician for not curing a man who killed himself by his intemperance in
his sickness, nor when you sacrificed to the manes of that favourite
officer the whole nation of the Cusseans--men, women, and children--who
were entirely innocent of his death--because you had read in Homer that
Achilles had immolated some Trojan captives on the tomb of Patroclus. I
could mention other proofs that your passions inflamed you as much as
wine, but these are sufficient.
_Alexander_.--I can't deny that my passions were sometimes so violent as
to deprive me for a while of the use of my reason; especially when the
pride of such amazing successes, the servitude of the Persians, and
barbarian flattery had intoxicated my mind. To bear at my age, with
continual moderation, such fortune as mine, was hardly in human nature.
As for you, there was an excess and intemperance in your virtues which
turned them all into vices. And one virtue you wanted, which in a prince
is very commendable and beneficial to the public--I mean, the love of
science and of the elegant arts. Under my care and patronage they were
carried in Greece to their utmost perfection. Aristotle, Apelles, and
Lysippus were among the glories of my reign. Yours was illustrated only
by battles. Upon the whole, though, from some resemblance between us I
should naturally be inclined to decide in your favour, yet I must give
the priority in renown to your enemy, Peter Alexowitz. That great
monarch raised his country; you ruined yours. He was a legislator; you
were a tyrant.