in 335 B.C. At the accession of Alexander a year earlier, all Greece
had seethed with insurrection. Philip was dead in the full vigor of
manhood, and a stripling of twenty was about to take his place. By a
prompt advance southward Alexander nipped the threatened revolt in the
bud; and to secure himself for the future, he put a garrison in the
citadel of Thebes, where the most manifest disaffection had existed.
A few months later, however, while he was cleansing his northern
frontiers, preparatory to attacking Persia, the Thebans, acting on the
false report that he had fallen in battle, and in conjunction with
Athens and other Greek cities, revolted a second time. With almost
incredible secrecy and celerity Alexander came upon Thebes, took it by
assault, sold the inhabitants into slavery, and razed the city to the
ground. No such disaster had overtaken a Greek city (outside of unhappy
Sicily) since the destruction of Miletus by the Persians in 493 B.C.
It showed beyond the shadow of a doubt what the Greeks had to expect
if they continued to make trouble while Alexander was absent in Asia.
And on this occasion one object lesson was contained within another:
by sparing the house of Pindar, the destroyer of Thebes proclaimed his
regard for Hellenic civilization; distinguished himself clearly from
the destroyers of Miletus and other barbarians.
Next year, when about to open his attack on the Persian empire,
Alexander sent his army across the Hellespont by the usual route
from Sestus to Abydus; but he himself proceeded to Elaius where he
sacrificed at the tomb of Protesilaus, and prayed that he might have
a better fate than was his who first of Agamemnon's men set foot
on the soil of Asia. Then crossing the Hellespont to Harbor of the
Achæans, he went up to Ilium where he dedicated his armor to Athena
Ilias and took in its place some weapons said to have been used in the
Trojan War. After appeasing the _manes_ of Priam and entreating them
to forgive him, a descendant of Neoptolemus, Priam's slayer, he laid
a wreath on the tomb of Achilles, while his bosom friend, Hephæstion,
laid another on that of Patroclus. Whereupon he proceeded to rejoin
his army. The incident stirred in every Greek a thousand memories. He
saw another Agamemnon set out to take another Troy; another champion
of the Hellenes in their eternal struggle with the peoples of Asia. In
no way could Alexander more clearly identify his undertaking with the
long cherished dreams of the whole Greek race. It was the nearest that
a ruler of that time could come to proclaiming a holy war.
At Gordium, where Alexander's troops spent their first winter in
Asia, there stood on the citadel the cart in which, according to the
story, Midas, a peasant's son, had driven to the meeting-place of
the Phrygians on the day when unexpectedly he was proclaimed their
king. The legend had spread thence around the country that whosoever
unfastened the knot of cornel bark which held the yoke to the shaft
of this cart would become king of Asia. This task Alexander essayed
in vain. Then he drew his sword and cut the thong in two. Thereby he
announced both his departure from the policy of Philip, which had been
simply to emancipate the Ionian Greeks, and the forthcoming execution
of his own policy, which was to take from the Persians their dominion
over Asia.
After his first victory at the Granicus River Alexander advanced along
the Ægean seaboard as far as Cilicia, securing as he went all the coast
towns in Asia Minor which had contributed ships to the Persian fleet.
This plan of campaign he adhered to after his second victory at Issus
over Darius, when, instead of keeping in touch with his defeated enemy
and of following him into the interior, as the ordinary common sense
of war commanded, he let the King go, and spent a year in seizing the
naval towns between Cilicia and Cyrene. This he did in order to destroy
the Persian fleet, an end which he could not otherwise attain, since he
had no ships of his own. To leave the enemy's fleet in possession of
the Mediterranean, however, while he was campaigning far in the heart
of the continent would have been to jeopardize all that he had already
accomplished, and, in particular, to leave to the Persians the means
of causing a general insurrection among the Greeks, whom he rightly
feared more than the Persians. This long détour southward to Egypt
is, accordingly, amply explained by sound strategical considerations.
That, however, cannot be said of Alexander's sensational march through
the Sahara to the oasis of Siwah in the hinterland of Cyrene. There,
in mysterious aloofness, lay an oracle of the Egyptian Ammon whom the
Greeks called Zeus. Just as Dodona in Epirus had been eclipsed in times
past as an oracular seat by the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, so this in
turn had waned in prestige and credit when it became known gradually
to the Greeks that Zeus Ammon revealed unfailingly the future to his
priests at Siwah. For more than two generations prior to Alexander's
visit the Ammonium had been the Mecca of pilgrims, and the recipient of
gifts from all parts of the Greek world. Athens had even built a sacred
trireme, the so-called "ship of Ammon," to carry public messengers to
and from the oracle. In Egypt the Ammon of Siwah was of no account as
compared with the Ammon of Thebes; but among the Greeks the Ammon that
was known and revered was, to speak with Plato, the Ammon of Cyrene.
Alexander knew well the impression which would be produced in the
official and pious world of Hellas should the priests of Ammon greet
him as the son of their god. This, however, they were bound to do on
his arrival at the temple, since to omit this formality would have been
to refuse allegiance to the new Pharaoh who had just been recognized in
Egypt; for every Pharaoh from time immemorial was officially a son of
Ammon. It was the peculiarity of Siwah that the ruler greeted there as
the son of Ammon was presented authoritatively to the Greek world as
the son of Zeus.
The march across the desert to Ammonium was accomplished only with
supernatural assistance, according to the official report; and
deliberate mystery shrouded the interview of Alexander with the god. It
is with no impropriety, as we shall see presently, that Tennyson brings
his fine poem on the great king to a climactic close with an allusion
to the occurrence:--
"High things were spoken there, unhanded down;
Only they saw thee from the secret shrine
Returning with hot cheek and kindled eyes."
One thing, however, was stressed in the official version of what
happened: the desired greeting was given publicly to Alexander by the
eldest of the priests. And its import was enhanced by the arrival
of messengers to say that oracles to the same effect had been given
simultaneously by the Sibyl of Erythræ and Apollo at Branchidæ, where
a long silence of over one hundred and fifty years was interrupted
thereby. As to the private interview Alexander wrote to his mother that
"secret things were divulged to him which he could communicate only to
her personally."
I shall revert to the significance of the visit to Siwah presently.
Meanwhile, it will suffice to note that it was quite in character with
the methods already adopted by Alexander that he should seek in this
bizarre way to impress upon the imagination of men a new idea; to
disclose by a sensational action of this kind an important change of
policy. And it is paralleled by several incidents in his later career.
Twelve months after leaving Siwah, Alexander was master of Persepolis.
This was the capital of Persis, a land of some half a million
inhabitants whom Cyrus and Darius had made lords of a subject
population not much below that of the Roman empire. For over two
hundred years forty millions of people had looked to Persis and
Persepolis as the seats of the mighty. The "city of the Persians" and
the palace of their kings which it contained were the manifest symbols
of empire: the one Alexander gave over to his soldiers to pillage, the
other he fired with his own hand, thus proclaiming to the world that
the end of a dynasty had come. His own part in this catastrophe--which
affected the imaginations of men in some such way as did the capture of
Rome by Alaric in 410 A.D.--was taken conspicuously. Starting up from a
banquet, he and his companions, among whom was the beautiful Athenian
courtesan Thais, went in Dionysiac revel to the sound of flutes through
the streets to the palace, and threw the torches which they had taken
with them from the feast upon the cedar beams of the roof. Once the
flames had shot up and the desired effect had been produced, Alexander
ordered the fire to be extinguished.
Early in the following year Alexander entered Ecbatana, the summer
capital of the Persian empire, and Darius became a fugitive. Up to
this point Alexander had been hegemon of the Hellenic league as well
as king of Macedon, and, on liberating the Greek cities in Asia from
Persian control, he had added them to the league. Now that the war
against Persia, for which the league had been ostensibly formed, had
ended, Alexander thought the time had come to relieve himself of the
partnership into which, following the policy of Philip, he had entered
at the opening of his reign. This he did in his usual dramatic way. He
discharged all the Greek troops put under his command by the league,
and made elaborate provision for their transport back to the coast
and across the Mediterranean to Greece. To every Greek city which had
sent him a contingent, its return was a message that Alexander was no
longer bound by the treaties made when the league was formed. This did
not mean, as he took pains to show, that it was freed thereby from all
obligations toward him. Over the Macedonians he ceased at this point to
be hegemon, but he still remained their king.[66]
A little later he appeared before his astonished Macedonian officers
clad in what pleased him of the costume of the Persians. The tiara and
the sleeved jacket and the baggy trousers he did not adopt, but he
took their soft undergarments, and, as the symbol of authority, the
diadem. He also remodeled his court in the Oriental fashion, adding
purple to the uniform of the guards, chamberlains, and, if a dubious
report is to be trusted, a harem. Finally in 327 B.C., shortly after
his romantic marriage with Roxane, a Persian princess of the Sogdian
nobility, he added the requirement that all who were admitted to his
presence should kneel at his feet and kiss the dust before him. "Chares
of Mytilene,"[67] who was master of ceremonies when this custom was
inaugurated, "says that Alexander, while drinking at a symposium,
offered his goblet to one of his comrades, who, taking it, rose and
went to the hearth, where, quaffing it off, he first knelt and kissed
Alexander's feet, then kissed his cheek and returned to his couch. All
present did the same except Callisthenes," who proffered the kiss on
the cheek without first kneeling and thus earned the disfavor of the
king. With this rather lame conclusion was enacted the prologue of what
his old Macedonian nobles regarded as a great tragedy.
"It has been thought," says Eduard Meyer,[68] "that _proskynesis_"--to
use the technical term for this ceremony--"was only the natural
expression of the fact that by the arbitrament of battle Alexander
had become lord of the Persian empire and legitimate successor of
Darius. And, indeed, there is truth in this idea. But the meaning of
the requirement, and the historical significance of the occurrence
and of the conflict which it occasioned, are by no means exhausted
when proskynesis is regarded as a harmless concession to the views of
his Oriental subjects. The essential point is that Alexander demanded
it of the Macedonians and Greeks also. It is precisely in this
matter, however, that the views of Orientals and Europeans collide
most squarely and typically. Herein exists an antagonism which is
independent altogether of race and nationality. We cannot say how it
arose, but it dominates the whole course of the cultural and political
development of the regions in question. The Oriental, be he a Semite,
an Egyptian, an Indo-European, a Chinaman, or of any other stock, finds
it natural that in intercourse with others he has to humble himself;
that he call himself their servant, them his masters; that he kneel in
the dust, not only before the king, but before all superiors, without
lessening thereby the sense of personal pride with which he, too, may
be animated.
"To the European, on the other hand, such demeanor involves the
destruction of his own personality. Never will a free man call
himself the slave of another. Rather, he will always speak of himself
in confident tones, with a strong feeling of; his own worth....
Prostration and kissing the dust are due, in European thinking, only to
a god who is thereby acknowledged to be the lord of the worshiper, in
whose presence the worshiper can have no will of his own.
"It was among the Greeks, in their free republics, that this feeling
developed to its full strength. It finds typical expression in the
story of the Spartan heralds, Sperthies and Bulis, who, although they
had surrendered themselves to the Persian king to be executed, refused
to prostrate themselves before him; 'for in their country,' Herodotus
makes them say, 'it was not customary to kiss the dust before a man,
nor had they come for that purpose.' The stories of Themistocles who
rendered the required homage, and of Conon who on its account avoided
an audience with the King altogether, despite the high value it would
have had for him, are similarly significant. In demanding proskynesis,
accordingly, Alexander offended Greek sentiment violently. Rather,
what he thereby demanded was the acknowledgment that officially, in
his capacity of king,--his private position is a different matter
altogether,--he was no longer a man, but a god."
In other words, when Alexander demanded that Greeks and Macedonians
fall at his feet and kiss the dust before him, he demanded that they
recognize him as a god, as in fact the son of Zeus. This ceremony
had no such implications for the Persians; but, as we shall see in a
moment, in Alexander's thinking, the Persians were to cease to exist;
they were to be made Hellenes by education.
Alexander set out for Asia with a firm belief in the absolute
superiority of Hellenic culture; and in this belief he remained fixed
to the end. To establish Hellenic life throughout Asia, he regarded
as the main object of his conquests. His Hellenic ideals he revealed
to the astonished natives at almost every halting-place on his march;
for on such occasions he again and again held gymnastic and musical
contests after the Greek pattern. As we have seen, he had learned
from Aristotle that city-life and Hellenic life were synonymous,
and that without political activity city-life was animal rather than
human in character. Accordingly, he displayed a feverish energy in
founding Greek city-states everywhere in the conquered territory, but
particularly in the regions of the Far East where urban life had been
hitherto lacking. Like mushrooms overnight, towns by the scores sprang
up behind him on his line of march; so vast was the immigration into
Asia from Greece and Macedon even during the thirteen brief years of
his reign.
The fact was that by founding cities Alexander lessened enormously his
military and administrative difficulties. For every city took from his
shoulders responsibility for maintaining order, collecting taxes, and
dispensing justice in the territory assigned to it--necessary tasks,
now that a European state was arising in Asia, which could be performed
otherwise only by the creation of a bureaucratic system of officials.
This, however, was a non-Hellenic institution for which Alexander had
naturally no liking. In the future he saw the whole world--that of
Asia which he had already conquered and that of the Far West which he
meant to conquer--honeycombed, like Greece itself, with a multitude
of city-states, each a separate cell with a town in its centre, each
possessed of a general assembly and a council, magistrates of its own
choosing and laws of its own making or adoption, each the home of free
men speaking the Greek language, fostering Greek art and letters, and
fighting with Greek arms and tactics. It was a grand vision, which
failed of realization in Alexander's time and thereafter; but it set
forth an ideal toward which future generations moved for over five
centuries.
It is clear that Alexander never lost faith in the absolute supremacy
of Hellenic culture. Certainly the place of unlimited authority which
he reserved for himself above the world of city-states and their
law-bound citizens, was the one prescribed for the ideal wise man,
the man of supreme political ability, by Aristotle his tutor. That
Aristotle thought of a different _pambasileus_ for each city-state and
Alexander of a single "absolute monarch" for all, is a non-essential
difference, and it is simply in the institutions which Alexander found
necessary to translate the idea of the philosopher into the world of
reality that Hellenic practice and custom were violated.
These outlandish institutions, however, Alexander employed as means
for the better dissemination of Greek life and thought, without being
conscious, perhaps, that they were destructive of the spirit which they
were intended to preserve.
On the other hand, it is indisputable that Alexander revised his
tutor's, and his own youthful, opinion as to the worth of the Asiatics.
What he came to think of Semites and Egyptians we do not know; and it
may be that he continued to regard them as naturally servile and,
hence, condemned them to remain forever hewers of wood and drawers of
water for the Hellenic or Hellenized citizens in whose cities they
were to live. But as to the Medes and Persians and the kindred Iranian
stocks of the Far East, the views of their conqueror changed radically
when he came really to know them, and to appreciate fully the magnitude
of the task which he had undertaken.
He found that they had spirit and capacity comparable to those of
the Greeks and Macedonians themselves. That they caused him no
physical repulsion is shown by his falling in love with and marrying
Roxane. Teach them the Greek language, draw them along with the
immigrant Greeks into the body politic of the new cities, equip them
with Macedonian weapons, drill them in the Macedonian fashion, and
distribute them in the Macedonian regiments; above all, use the nobles
in the high administrative posts, and it seemed to Alexander possible,
within a short time, to fuse the new masters of Asia with the old into
a new cosmopolitan race.
With iron resolution he carried this policy forward despite all
opposition. Then, choosing the dramatic moment of his return to Susa
after his Indian campaign, he arranged an extraordinary marriage as a
symbol of the contemplated fusion of the dominant peoples of Europe
and Asia. "He himself," says Arrian in his _Anabasis_,[69] quoting
Aristobulus, an eye-witness, "married Barsine (rather Stateira), the
eldest of the daughters of Darius, and, in addition to her, another,
the youngest of the daughters of Ochus (the able predecessor of
Darius), Parysatis. Earlier, too, he had wedded Roxane, the daughter
of Oxyartes of Bactria. To Hephæstion he gave Drypetis, who, too, was
a daughter of Darius and sister of the wife he took himself; for he
wished the children of Hephæstion to be cousins of his own children. To
Craterus he gave Amastrine, the daughter of Oxyartes, Darius's brother;
to Perdiccas, the daughter of Atropates, satrap of Media; to Ptolemy,
his aide, and to Eumenes, his private secretary, children of Artabazus,
to the one Artacama, to the other, Artonis. To Nearchus he gave the
daughter of Barsine and Mentor, to Seleucus the daughter of Spitamenes
of Bactria; and in like manner to his other companions he gave the most
famous of the daughters of the Medes and Persians, to the number of
eighty. The marriages were celebrated in the Persian manner. Seats were
placed in order, and on them the bridegrooms reclined"; and at this
point we may let Chares, master of ceremonies, interrupt Arrian and
describe the setting which he had arranged for the service.
"It was," he says,[70] "a hall of a hundred couches, each large enough
for two to recline at table, and in it each couch, made of twenty
minas' worth of silver, was decked as for a wedding. Alexander's had
feet of gold. And to the feast were bidden all his Persian friends,
and given places on the opposite side of the hall from himself and the
other bridegrooms. And all the army and the sailors and the embassies
and the visitors were assembled in the outer court. The hall was
decorated in most sumptuous style, with expensive rugs, and hangings
of fine linen, and tapestries of many colors wrought with threads of
gold. And for the support of the vast tent which formed the hall there
were pillars thirty feet high, plated with silver and gold, and set
with precious stones. And around about the sides were costly portières,
embroidered with figures and shot through with gold threads, hung on
gilded and silvered rods.
"The circuit of the court was half a mile. Everything was started at
the signal of a trumpet-blast, whether it was the beginning of the
feast, the celebration of the marriages, or the pouring of one of
the various libations, so that all the army might know." "After the
banquet," resumes Arrian,[71] "the brides entered and seated themselves
each beside her fiancé, who thereupon took her by the hand and kissed
her; and the first to do this was the king.... Then each man, taking
his wife, led her away. Their dowries Alexander gave to every one of
them. And he caused the names to be written down of all the other
Macedonians who had married Asiatic women, and there were said to
be over ten thousand of them. To these, too, gifts were given by
Alexander at the marriage feast."
For five consecutive days artists from every land and people
entertained the cosmopolitan assembly with displays of skill as various
as were the ideas and interests to which they catered. But the discord
was lessened and the dominant _motiv_ repeated again and again by
the appearance and reappearance of the greatest Greek masters of the
dramatic and musical arts.
* * * * *
It being established by these many incidents that it was a salient
trait of Alexander's character to disclose his fundamental policies
by acts elaborately staged and performed before the largest possible
audiences, we may return to his extraordinary visit to the temple of
Ammon of Cyrene. He had first to proceed one hundred and seventy-five
miles along the Libyan coast and then southwest for about seven days
before reaching his goal. A month of the most difficult marching,
at a time when every day was precious, was the high price which
Alexander thought it economical to pay for the recognition which he
there received as the son of Zeus. What was, then, the value of this
well-advertised recognition?
That it had none for Egypt and the nations of Asia, to whom the god of
Siwah, like the prophet in his own country, was without honor, implies
that Alexander esteemed highly its value in the Greek world, where the
voice heard at Siwah was in fact an admonition to the pious and might
be an embarrassment to all in official positions. An oracle, however,
was always addressed primarily to him who received it. Other persons
could neglect it with impunity. Nevertheless, Alexander had made it
improbable that anybody should be unaware that Zeus had acknowledged
him as his son. Doubtless, much discussion was provoked; but there the
matter seems to have ended so far as Hellas was concerned till seven
years later, at the time of the feast at Susa, when Alexander issued
a mandate to all the Greek city-states, new and old, that they should
recognize him as a god.
Strange as it may seem to us, among whom church and state are
separated sharply, and religion depends upon a revelation which can
be interpreted but not supplemented, the question was one which came
properly within the province of the general assembly of the citizens of
each city. At this very time the Athenians, for example, had waiting
within their gates many foreign deities whose claims to official
recognition were being pressed upon the ecclesia by votaries among both
the alien and the native population. Such were Isis the Egyptian, and
the Cypriote Aphrodite. In comparatively recent times, moreover, the
ecclesia had yielded to similar solicitations, and had enrolled among
the deities of the Athenian people Asclepius and the Thracian Bendis.