was given in honor of Nearchus, the admiral who was to undertake the
adventurous voyage from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. The king
withdrew from the feast and spent the rest of the night in a carouse
with a friend, Medius. He rose late in the morning and another night
was spent in excessive drinking. The following day he was attacked with
fever; he could not walk and had to be carried on a couch to the altar,
to make the customary sacrifices. He spent the day discussing the plans
of the expedition with Nearchus. In the evening he had himself conveyed
across the river to a garden villa, hoping for relief from its quiet
isolation. But for six days the fever continued, the king being able
only to attend the sacrificial ceremonial. His condition grew worse,
and he was taken back to the palace; he slept a little, but the fever
did not abate, and when his officers visited him, they saw that he had
lost the power of speech. There was confusion among the soldiers, for
it was rumored that their leader was dead; they clamored to be let into
the palace, and passing by the bodyguard they circled past the bed
of the dying monarch; but he was not able to speak and only signified
by movements of his hands and eyes that he recognized them. Some of
those about him spent the night in the temple of Serapis, awaiting an
indication of the god that he might be transported to the temple as he
lay and be healed by divine help. But they were warned, it is said, by
a voice that he was not to be moved, and on the evening of June 13th he
died, before he had completed his thirty-third year.
During the years of Alexander’s conquests, the history of the Greek
states sinks into insignificance. After the battle of Issus all hope
of defeating Macedon by a combination with Persia was abandoned. The
confederacy sent congratulations, and only Sparta stood aloof. Its
king, Agis, even ventured to declare war, but, after a few small
successes, he was defeated in the battle of Megalopolis, losing his
life in the field. Sparta then sent hostages to Alexander and was
generously treated. Later on he interfered again in the affairs of
Greece by directing the confederation to take back the Greek exiles,
20,000 in number, and so mark his overlordship by an era of good
feeling. Only two states objected, Athens and Ætolia.
The only exciting incident in continental Greece was connected with
the flight of the faithless finance minister, Harpalus, who came to
the coast of Attica with 5000 talents, a body of mercenaries, and
a considerable fleet, hoping to stir up a revolt. But the Athenian
politicians were too cautious to be drawn into an intrigue which would
certainly have proved dangerous. They seized Harpalus and took his
treasure, proposing only to surrender this money to officers expressly
sent by Alexander. Half the money taken disappeared and there was no
official record made of the sum received. Demosthenes was involved
in the scandal, and he emerged from it with a besmirched reputation.
Harpalus escaped and was soon afterwards murdered. Demosthenes was
condemned, imprisoned, and escaped. But Greek feeling was not sensitive
about a case where it was plain that a man had appropriated stolen
money for the good of the state, and Demosthenes was praised as a
patriot.
Alexander’s conquests, both in method and in achievement, were but the
elaboration of the groundwork laid down by Philip his father. The army
that conquered Persia and invaded India was trained in the campaigns of
continental Greece, and without this preliminary training in Europe,
its spectacular successes in Asia would not have been possible. Up to
the time of Philip of Macedon, warfare in Greece had achieved only
negative results. It was not systematized, no extensive imperial rule
had come to the victors through any of the decisive battlefields, for
these military successes were never followed up by a consistent scheme
of conquest. Philip changed all this, and he brought his developed army
and his new political policy into close connection. Demosthenes himself
remarked this contrast, for he said that King Philip fought his wars
not only with a phalanx of heavy-armed men, but with light infantry,
archers, and cavalry.
The old campaigning schedule, which consisted in ravaging the enemy’s
territory for a few months, a set battle in the open country, and
a withdrawal to winter quarters, was no longer observed. If the
Macedonian king did not find his enemy in the field, he besieged his
towns, using siege engines to bring him to terms. Summer and winter
were alike used for operations when the old array of citizen amateur
soldiers had given place to the professional fighters. Alexander’s
victories were won not only on the battlefield, but through the quick
following up of his victories; the enemies’ power of resistance was
annihilated by the rapidity with which a defeated army was pursued and
never allowed a chance to gather itself together again after it was
beaten. These cavalry marches in the rear of a retreating enemy, or the
suddenly delivered attacks on a foe preparing to resist, attacks made
irrespective of mountains and deserts, were as military achievements no
less remarkable than the set battles and the sieges of strongly walled
cities and citadels. Supremely characteristic of Alexander’s strategy
was the pursuit after the battle of Gaugamela, when numbers of horses
fell on the road from exhaustion.
As a general, Alexander did great deeds and did them in an heroic
style. He was a warrior distinguished by personal bravery, filled with
the ardor of combat, eager to be in the thickest of the fight, and
yet the physical passion of the fighter in no way dulled the acute
intelligence of the general, or made him indifferent to the mastery of
details in preparing for battle or in following a victory up after it
had been won. He showed strategical knowledge in approaching the enemy
and knew how to overcome the natural difficulties in his way. So we
see him unhesitatingly marching through narrow defiles and organizing
different classes of troops according to the changing conditions which
confronted him. He showed high capacity in selecting his base, in
looking after his communications, in providing for and provisioning his
men. When all was ready, and not before, these cautious provisions gave
place to the impetuous onslaught in battle and the untiring pursuit
of the defeated enemy. But the duties of generalship, complicated as
they were, were not allowed to interfere with the “joy of fighting.”
Alexander in every fight led his cavalry in person; whenever a breach
was made in a fortification he was in the first rank; whenever a town
was taken he was the first to scale the wall.
He seemed instinctively to have taken in the significance of the
enlarged scale on which warfare under him was conducted. He had
to solve untried problems, due to the vast extent of territory he
traversed, so different in every way from the restricted limits of
continental Greece. The students of strategy have especially admired
his originality in the systematic following up of a victory, an element
in successful warfare not dreamed of by the citizen generals of Greece.
In the Peloponnesian war it never occurred to the Spartans when they
had defeated the Athenians to besiege Athens. But after Issus, a most
decisive victory, Alexander showed the utmost resourcefulness in the
long seven months’ siege of Tyre, and finally took it by storm. The
same mobility of generalship is noted in India, where he did not
hesitate in the face of a division of elephants, an unknown arm in
warfare, to cross a river and deliver a frontal attack.
The army, which never failed to respond to the ever-developing visions
and schemes of its commander, until he had carried it to the eastern
limits of the known world in his career of conquest, was at the very
beginning of Alexander’s career trained for any military project he
might propose. It was composed of seasoned officers and men, who
had proved their mettle and gained their laurels under Philip while
he was bringing his army to the highest pitch of excellence. In the
list of great Greek military leaders, Philip is placed by the side of
Epaminondas, the Theban, the man who revolutionized the Greek art of
warfare by a fine stroke of genius. It had been noted that in the Greek
battles, where the phalanx had become the controlling factor, its right
wing was frequently victorious in both opposing armies. This phenomenon
was simply due to the fact that the Greek heavy-armed soldier carried
a shield on his left arm and naturally tended to move in an oblique
direction towards the right hand. The chief innovations introduced by
Epaminondas were the strengthening of the left wing by increasing its
depth--it was made fifty men deep--and the holding back of the right
wing as the whole phalanx advanced in battle array. With the increased
depth of the phalanx, the front was necessarily shortened, and in order
to prevent flanking operations, Epaminondas made great use of cavalry,
in protecting the flanks of his men from an encircling movement on
the part of the enemy, whose phalanx, since it was not so deep (being
the old shape), would stretch out on both sides beyond the lines of
the Theban line. As a general, Philip accepted these new tactical
principles originated by Epaminondas, and applying them to Macedonian
conditions, made of the Macedonian army a wonderfully effective
military machine.
Macedonia was peopled by peasants and herdsmen, and up to Philip’s time
they were an untrained mass, insufficiently armed, not able to contend
with the armies of the rest of Greece. There was a landed aristocracy
in Macedon, forming a special warrior class, who fought as cavalry.
Using these elements and adding to them Greek mercenaries, King Philip
had created a military force far superior to any that Greece had ever
seen before.
The Greek cavalry moved in loose formation, the horsemen wore armor,
and as arms they had a shield, sword, and spear, the spear being used
rather for throwing than for striking, as is the case with the modern
lance, with the whole momentum of the moving mass, man and horse.
The troops of the Macedonian cavalry, formed of the nobles of the
land, were called the followers of the king, “Hetairoi.” They bore a
shield and a spear for casting or thrusting, and a sword, and were
always given a crucial position in an engagement. As contrasted with
Greek cavalry generally, the Macedonians showed superior training
and discipline; they moved together and behaved in a fight, not as
individual warriors, but as tactical units, and were controlled in
their movements by a single will. Such development of cavalry was
unfamiliar to the Greek republics, which confined themselves to the
technical training of the phalanx.
The Macedonian foot were the special creation of Philip, and were
named by him “the followers on foot.” They fought in the ordinary
phalanx formation, but closer together than was usual, and used long
spears, so that several lines were enabled at once to engage in actual
hand-to-hand fighting. The spear was so constructed as to weight,
thickness, and length that it could reach the opposing line and yet
be firmly grasped. The ordinary spear was somewhat over six feet in
length, but the Macedonian phalanx depended for its success not so much
on man-to-man fighting as on the irresistible impact of the whole. When
it was acting on the defensive, it was virtually impenetrable. Its
disadvantage was in its lack of individual initiative; the soldiers
were machines rather than fighting men. It was heavy in its movements
and could be thrown into disorder more easily than the older Greek
phalanx with its looser formation. The élite corps, the hypaspists,
were more lightly armed than the men in the phalanx, and so moved more
freely. In Alexander’s battles they were the connecting link between
the cavalry and heavy mass of the phalanx, which advanced slowly
forward. As managed by Alexander, these various arms seem to have
worked admirably together, all sharing in the activity of a general
offensive movement. It should be added that Alexander was also indebted
to his father for much of the advance made in the art of besieging. He
constantly used siege engines, and we have noticed how much he depended
on their successful employment at Tyre and Halicarnassus.
Posterity has justly selected the epithet “great” as most fitting
to be coupled with Alexander’s name, and he has this honor for more
than one reason. It is perhaps less contested than in the case of
any other of the world’s leading personalities, Charles the Great
alone excepted, for Charles, like Alexander, introduced a new age of
the world’s history. Great as were the successes of Alexander, they
constitute less of a claim on the personal admiration of posterity than
his knightly qualities as a warrior, and the charm and impetuosity of
youth. His great victories were won between the years of twenty-one and
twenty-five. In the space of thirteen years there are crowded together
events and achievements that would exalt the longest life of the
greatest man.
His sudden and premature death did him a kind of poetic justice,
because his temperament cannot be coupled consistently with the
characteristics of old age or even with the middle period of man’s
life. His body and his brain had been under a tremendous pressure,
which even a strong constitution could not resist. It was this restive
youthfulness that spurred him on to adventures which were purposeless
when looked at from the point of view of the mature statesman, such
as the expedition to India, an uncalculated move not to be understood
except as due to the stimulus of an explorer’s curiosity and the desire
to accomplish a feat unheard of before.
The impulsiveness and emotionalism of Alexander in combination with his
military genius produced results unprecedented in history. His career
is that of a Homeric hero on a larger stage. It is not surprising that
his conquests almost defy criticism and make a personal estimate seem
artificial. He did so much that it apparently makes little difference
what he was, for his actions speak for themselves, and they tell
their tale like a fairy story, without any need of analysis. It is
obviously unfair to look for constructive statesmanship in a career so
short, when almost every month was occupied with military campaigns
either planned or in execution. When his life was ended, Alexander was
still a young man with a fresh and vigorous intelligence, open to new
impressions. It is hazardous to infer (as Grote does) that he would
have spent his life in acts of military aggression or that he would
have sunk to the position of an Oriental despot, little differing from
the Persian kings to whose title he succeeded. It is safer to put aside
these pessimistic historic prognostics of what might have been, and to
recognize that Alexander, provided he kept his mental powers undulled
by drink, would have remained a Greek and not become a Hun or a Vandal.
His enthusiasm for absolutism was, when one considers his age and
how deeply he was involved in military plans and schemes, less of a
reflection on himself than a curse to his followers and successors,
who kept faithful to the personal tradition of their leader and made
the Hellenization of Asia untrue to so much that was best in Greek
political life and thought. It was, as Ranke says, a break in their
whole national history, for the Greeks to have extended over them the
kind of authority which was in no way different from that against which
they had contended in warfare for a century. But it must be remembered
that Alexander had only just begun to rule over Asiatics; he had
receded before his death from pressing his theory of amalgamation to
its logical conclusion, and quick as he was to feel instinctively the
meaning of new conditions, it may be fairly supposed that he would have
come to recognize the value of Aristotle’s profoundly wise advice to
him, that he should behave to the Greeks as a leader or president and
to the barbarians or non-Greeks as a master.
We may put to one side all the ingenious speculations as to what might
have happened if Alexander had reached the ordinary limit of human
life, a line of thought which Livy seems to have originated, when he
tried to foretell for his age what would have happened if Alexander
had taken up the rôle followed later by his relative, Pyrrhus. It is
only necessary to say that, so far as Greek affairs were concerned,
Alexander was the son of his father. His public career began when, as
Philip’s son, he put the finishing touches to Philip’s program for
dominating the free states of Greece. So long as Alexander lived, the
lines of Macedonian supremacy, the outcome of the battle of Chæronea,
remained clear and fixed. The destruction of Thebes was but the
epilogue of Philip’s own career. The sentimental vein in the nature of
Alexander made him patient with the somewhat childish and ineffective
hostility shown him by both Athens and Sparta, venerable names as
protagonists in the secular struggle with the Persians, whose mantle
had now fallen on his broader shoulders.
In Asia his conquests, rather than his half-thought-out plans for
racial amalgamation, were decisive of future political development.
There was an expansion of Hellenic culture throughout the East, marked
by the common use of the Greek language and by a general absorption
of the special traits of Greek social usages and sympathies. The
civilization, so wrought out and transplanted, lost the creativeness
and the spontaneity of the small communities of continental Greece.
The Hellenic spirit lost its potency, if we may so phrase it, and in
the sphere of government especially exhibited disheartening symptoms
of selfishness and greed. Economically, the opening up of Asia meant
enlarged facilities for the commercial exploitation of a vast and
rich territory. It ushered in a period of great industrial fortunes,
it increased opportunities for communication both by land and sea, it
established higher standards of comfort and taste among populations
who had lived a crude, colorless, and isolated existence. On the basis
of Alexander’s conquests a grandiose cosmopolitanism was built up in
Asia which cast down tribal and racial boundaries and made it possible
for masses of plain people to gain a livelihood under tolerable
conditions.
* * * * *
CÆSAR
I CÆSAR’S BEGINNINGS
The progress of an imperial power is obscure even when the foundations
of its greatness are associated with some great military leader or
lawgiver, but when one has to give a reason why some one political
community becomes the point of centripetal attraction, and gathers
about it, either by fear or devotion, the support of large masses of
mankind, the efforts of historical analysis are frustrated at almost
every point.
[Illustration: CÆSAR
(Naples, Museum.)]
The rise of the small town community on the Tiber, about whose name
there centered for nearly two thousand years the dread and the
reverence of the progressive nations of the world, is veiled in legend.
Why did not Palestrina, or Cori, or one of the numerous Etruscan
cities to the north, become the germ of a world-wide rule? Of course
the answer of the economist is that just because Rome is situated on
the Tiber, its position gave it possibilities of advancement denied
to the ordinary hill towns of Italy. This explanation may be taken
as sufficient only when one allows that the burghers of Rome set out
to accomplish what they did, not only because they were traders, but
because the imaginative and grandiose factors in commercial enterprise
must have worked in a singularly sensitive and highly organized social
medium.
If the rise of the republic of Rome is difficult to account for, even
more difficult is it to explain why such a community endowed with great
generals, great statesmen, and great patriots, found it impossible so
to modify their republican institutions that the manifest advantages of
a sane and well-balanced democracy might be retained unimpaired, and
might be extended at the same time to conquered races and nations. The
rigidity of Roman republican institutions led to grave and demoralizing
social disorders. The victories of Roman arms abroad were accompanied
by political degradation at home. It must have been felt as a shock
when a local government, admirably devised to promote civic virtues and
secure just administration, was found, just as soon as Rome got the
better of her numerous enemies, to be such a convenient protection for
misrule.
As early as the last twenty-five years of the second century before
Christ, the machinery of Roman government seems to have been recognized
as inadequate to perform its functions. Constitutional methods and
precedents were inadequate to solve the agrarian question, nor was
there in the state, as an organism, sufficient force either to check an
oligarchy of wealth or to impose restrictions on the personal ambitions
of successful military leaders such as Marius and Sulla. Some of the
fundamental principles of the Roman republican system were now treated
as legal fiction. There had been years of civil war, for not only had
Rome been attacked by groups of Italian towns associated with her
for several hundred years, but Roman citizens had been divided among
themselves in a way that would have been unthinkable in the period of
the Punic wars.
One would like to know the personal political convictions of the
opposing leaders, Marius and Sulla. The probability is that neither of
them looked much farther ahead than does a representative of “boss”
rule in America, who would be very much surprised if asked whether he
would like to see the principles of the political ring incorporated
frankly and definitely in the Constitution of the United States. It is
certain that after the death of Sulla, though personal rule had come
to an end, there was no effort made to prevent its re-emergence. The
question was rather--from what quarter it would emerge. The common
opinion was that the popular general, Pompeius, distinguished by his
victories in the East, would come to take the place left vacant by
Sulla’s death. He had none of the antipathetic personal qualities of
the late dictator, therefore he was regarded as a man of principle,
and accordingly, fitted to supply the personal element in Roman
administration which most people seem to have felt was needed.
But all these calculations were soon upset. Pompeius, rapidly elevated
to greatness along a smooth road of easy gradients, trusted to his
friends in Rome to overcome all the political obstacles in his way
there. While he was still acclaimed the great military champion of the
Roman Republic, he soon found himself face to face with a rival--a man
who set himself forward purposefully to revive the popular platform of
the Marian party.