a military force in any one state of Greece large enough, sufficiently
trained, and led by a leader of the necessary magnetism and genius for
organization, to undertake, unaided by allies on the way, a successful
march to a point many months distant from its base--apart from this
deficiency, the Empire to be conquered had not yet been really shaken.
The Ten Thousand Greeks would in all likelihood never have got under
Clearchus to Cunaxa or anywhere within hundreds of miles of it, but for
the fact that Cyrus was with them and the adherents of his rising star
were supplying their wants and had cleared a road for them through Asia
Minor and Syria. In their Retreat they were desperate men, of whom the
Great King was glad to be quit. The successful accomplishment of that
retreat must not blind us to the almost certain failure which would have
befallen the advance had it been attempted under like conditions.
SECTION 3. THE SATRAPS
What, ultimately, was to reduce the Persian Empire to such weakness that
a Western power would be able to strike at its heart with little more
than forty thousand men, was the disease of disloyalty which spread
among the great officers during the first half of the fourth century.
Before Cyrus' expedition we have not heard of either satraps or client
provinces raising the standard of revolt (except in Egypt), since the
Empire had been well established; and if there was evident collusion
with that expedition on the part of provincial officers in Asia Minor
and Syria, the fact has little political significance, seeing that Cyrus
was a scion of the royal House, and the favourite of the Queen-Mother.
But the fourth century is hardly well begun before we find satraps and
princes aiding the king's enemies and fighting for their own hand
against him or a rival officer. Agesilaus was helped in Asia Minor both
by the prince of Paphlagonia and by a Persian noble. Twenty years later
Ariobarzanes of Pontus rises in revolt; and hard on his defection
follows a great rebellion planned by the satraps of Caria, Ionia, Lydia,
Phrygia and Cappadocia--nearly all Asia Minor in fact--in concert with
coastal cities of Syria and Phoenicia. Another ten years pass and new
governors of Mysia and Lydia rise against their king with the help of
the Egyptians and Mausolus, client prince of Halicarnassus. Treachery or
lack of resources and stability brought these rebels one after another
to disaster; but an Empire whose great officers so often dare such
adventures is drawing apace to its catastrophe.
The causes of this growing disaffection among the satraps are not far to
seek. At the close of the last chapter we remarked the deterioration of
the harem-ridden court in the early days of Artaxerxes; and as time
passed, the spectacle of a Great King governing by treachery, buying his
enemies, and impotent to recover Egypt even with their mercenary help
had its effect. Belief gained ground that the ship of Empire was
sinking, and even in Susa the fear grew that a wind from the West was to
finish her. The Great King's court officers watched Greek politics
during the first seventy years of the fourth century with ever closer
attention. Not content with enrolling as many Greeks as possible in the
royal service, they used the royal gold to such effect to buy or support
Greek politicians whose influence could be directed to hindering a union
of Greek states and checking the rising power of any unit, that a Greek
orator said in a famous passage that the archers stamped on the Great
King's coins were already a greater danger to Greece than his real
archers had ever been.
By such lavish corruption, by buying the soldiers and the politicians of
the enemy, a better face was put for a while on the fortunes of the
dynasty and the Empire. Before the death of the aged Artaxerxes Mnemon
in 358, the revolt of the Western satraps had collapsed. His successor,
Ochus, who, to reach the throne, murdered his kin like any
eighteenth-century sultan of Stambul, overcame Egyptian obstinacy about
346, after two abortive attempts, by means of hireling Greek troops, and
by similar vicarious help he recovered Sidon and the Isle of Cyprus. But
it was little more than the dying flicker of a flame fanned for the
moment by that same Western wind which was already blowing up to the
gale that would extinguish it. The heart of the Empire was not less
rotten because its shell was patched, and in the event, when the storm
broke a few years later, nothing in West Asia was able to make any stand
except two or three maritime cities, which fought, not for Persia, but
for their own commercial monopolies.
SECTION 4. MACEDONIA
The storm had been gathering on the Western horizon for some time past.
Twenty years earlier there had come to the throne of Macedonia a man of
singular constructive ability and most definite ambition. His
heritage--or rather his prize, for he was not next of kin to his
predecessor--was the central southern part of the Balkan peninsula, a
region of broad fat plains fringed and crossed by rough hills. It was
inhabited by sturdy gentry and peasantry and by agile highlanders, all
composed of the same racial elements as the Greeks, with perhaps a
preponderant infusion of northern blood which had come south long ago
with emigrants from the Danubian lands. The social development of the
Macedonians--to give various peoples one generic name--had, for certain
reasons, not been nearly so rapid as that of their southern cousins.
They had never come in contact with the higher Aegean civilization, nor
had they mixed their blood with that of cultivated predecessors; their
land was continental, poor in harbours, remote from the luxurious
centres of life, and of comparatively rigorous climate; its
configuration had offered them no inducement to form city-states and
enter on intense political life. But, in compensation, they entered the
fourth century unexhausted, without tribal or political impediments to
unity, and with a broad territory of greater natural resources than any
southern Greek state. Macedonia could supply itself with the best cereal
foods and to spare, and had unexploited veins of gold ore. But the most
important thing to remark is this--that, compared with Greece, Macedonia
was a region of Central Europe. In the latter's progress to imperial
power we shall watch for the first time in recorded history a
continental European folk bearing down peninsular populations of the
Mediterranean.
Philip of Macedon, who had been trained in the arts of both war and
peace in a Greek city, saw the weakness of the divided Hellenes, and the
possible strength of his own people, and he set to work from the first
with abounding energy, dogged persistence and immense talent for
organization to make a single armed nation, which should be more than a
match for the many communities of Hellas. How he accomplished his
purpose in about twenty years: how he began by opening mines of precious
metal on his south-eastern coast, and with the proceeds hired
mercenaries: how he had Macedonian peasants drilled to fight in a
phalanx formation more mobile than the Theban and with a longer spear,
while the gentry were trained as heavy cavalry: how he made experiments
with his new soldiers on the inland tribes, and so enlarged his
effective dominions that he was able to marshal henceforward far more
than his own Emathian clansmen: how for six years he perfected this
national army till it was as professional a fighting machine as any
condottiere's band of that day, while at the same time larger and of
much better temper: how, when it was ready in the spring of the year
353, he began a fifteen years' war of encroachment on the holdings of
the Greek states and particularly of Athens, attacking some of her
maritime colonies in Macedonia and Thrace: how, after a campaign in
inland Thrace and on the Chersonese, he appeared in Greece, where he
pushed at last through Thermopylae: how, again, he withdrew for several
seasons into the Balkan Peninsula, raided it from the Adriatic to the
Black Sea, and ended with an attack on the last and greatest of its free
Greek coastal cities, Perinthus and Byzantium: how, finally, in 338,
coming south in full force, he crushed in the single battle of Chaeronea
the two considerable powers of Greece, Athens and Thebes, and secured at
last from every Greek state except Sparta (which he could afford to
neglect) recognition of his suzerainty--these stages in Philip's making
of a European nation and a European empire must not be described more
fully here. What concerns us is the end of it all; for the end was the
arraying of that new nation and that new empire for a descent on Asia. A
year after Chaeronea Philip was named by the Congress of Corinth
Captain-General of all Greeks to wreak the secular vengeance of Hellas
on Persia.
How long he had consciously destined his fighting machine to an ultimate
invasion of Asia we do not know. The Athenians had explicitly stated to
the Great King in 341 that such was the Macedonian's ambition, and four
years earlier public suggestion of it had been made by the famous
orator, Isocrates, in an open letter written to Philip himself. Since
the last named was a man of long sight and sustained purpose, it is not
impossible that he had conceived such an ambition in youth and had been
cherishing it all along. While Philip was in Thebes as a young man, old
Agesilaus, who first of Greeks had conceived the idea of invading the
inland East, was still seeking a way to realize his oft-frustrated
project; and in the end he went off to Egypt to make a last effort after
Philip was already on the throne. The idea had certainly been long in
the air that any military power which might dominate Hellas would be
bound primarily by self-interest and secondarily by racial duty to turn
its arms against Asia. The Great King himself knew this as well as any
one. After the Athenian warning in 341, his satraps in the north-west of
Asia Minor were bidden assist Philip's enemies in every possible way;
and it was thanks in no small measure to their help, that the Byzantines
repulsed the Macedonians from their walls in 339.
Philip had already made friends of the princely house of Caria, and was
now at pains to secure a footing in north-west Asia Minor. He threw,
therefore, an advance column across the Dardanelles under his chief
lieutenant, Parmenio, and proposed to follow it in the autumn of the
year 336 with a Grand Army which he had been recruiting, training and
equipping for a twelvemonth. The day of festival which should inaugurate
his great venture arrived; but the venture was not to be his. As he
issued from his tent to attend the games he fell by the hand of a
private enemy; and his young son, Alexander, had at first enough to do
to re-establish a throne which proved to have more foes than friends.
SECTION 5. ALEXANDER'S CONQUEST OF THE EAST
A year and a half later Alexander's friends and foes knew that a greater
soldier and empire-maker than Philip ruled in his stead, and that the
father's plan of Asiatic conquest would suffer nothing at the hands of
the son. The neighbours of Macedonia as far as the Danube and all the
states of the Greek peninsula had been cowed to submission again in one
swift and decisive campaign. The States-General of Greece, re-convoked
at Corinth, confirmed Philip's son in the Captain-Generalship of Hellas,
and Parmenio, once more despatched to Asia, secured the farther shore of
the Hellespont. With about forty thousand seasoned horse and foot, and
with auxiliary services unusually efficient for the age, Alexander
crossed to Persian soil in the spring of 334.
There was no other army in Asia Minor to offer him battle in form than a
force about equal in numbers to his own, which had been collected
locally by the western satraps. Except for its contingent of Greek
mercenaries, this was much inferior to the Macedonian force in fighting
value. Fended by Parmenio from the Hellespontine shore, it did the best
it could by waiting on the farther bank of the Granicus, the nearest
considerable stream which enters the Marmora, in order either to draw
Alexander's attack, or to cut his communications, should he move on into
the continent. It did not wait long. The heavy Macedonian cavalry dashed
through the stream late on an afternoon, made short work of the Asiatic
constituents, and having cleared a way for the phalanx helped it to cut
up the Greek contingent almost to a man before night fell. Alexander was
left with nothing but city defences and hill tribes to deal with till a
fuller levy could be collected from other provinces of the Persian
Empire and brought down to the west, a process which would take many
months, and in fact did take a full year. But some of the Western cities
offered no small impediment to his progress. If Aeolia, Lydia and Ionia
made no resistance worth mentioning, the two chief cities of Caria,
Miletus and Halicarnassus, which had been enjoying in virtual freedom a
lion's share of Aegean trade for the past century, were not disposed to
become appanages of a military empire. The pretension of Alexander to
lead a crusade against the ancient oppressor of the Hellenic race
weighed neither with them, nor, for that matter, with any of the Greeks
in Asia or Europe, except a few enthusiasts. During the past seventy
years, ever since celebrations of the deliverance of Hellas from the
Persian had been replaced by aspirations towards counter invasion, the
desire to wreak holy vengeance had gone for little or nothing, but
desire to plunder Persia had gone for a great deal. Therefore, any
definite venture into Asia aroused envy, not enthusiasm, among those who
would be forestalled by its success. Neither with ships nor men had any
leading Greek state come forward to help Alexander, and by the time he
had taken Miletus he realized that he must play his game alone, with his
own people for his own ends. Thenceforward, neglecting the Greeks, he
postponed his march into the heart of the Persian Empire till he had
secured every avenue leading thither from the sea, whether through Asia
Minor or Syria or Egypt.
After reducing Halicarnassus and Caria, Alexander did no more in Asia
Minor than parade the western part of it, the better to secure the
footing he had gained in the continent. Here and there he had a brush
with hill-men, who had long been unused to effective control, while with
one or two of their towns he had to make terms; but on the approach of
winter, Anatolia was at his feet, and he seated himself at Gordion, in
the Sakaria valley, where he could at once guard his communications with
the Hellespont and prepare for advance into farther Asia by an easy
road. Eastern Asia Minor, that is Cappadocia, Pontus and Armenia, he
left alone, and its contingents would still be arrayed on the Persian
side in both the great battles to come. Certain northern districts also,
which had long been practically independent of Persia, e.g. Bithynia and
Paphlagonia, had not been touched yet. It was not worth his while at
that moment to spend time in fighting for lands which would fall in any
case if the Empire fell, and could easily be held in check from western
Asia Minor in the meantime. His goal was far inland, his danger he well
knew, on the sea--danger of possible co-operation between Greek fleets
and the greater coastal cities of the Aegean and the Levant. Therefore,
with the first of the spring he moved down into Cilicia to make the
ports of Syria and Egypt his, before striking at the heart of the
Empire.
The Great King, last and weakest of the Darius name, had realized the
greatness of his peril and come down with the levy of all the Empire to
try to crush the invader in the gate of the south lands. Letting his foe
pass round the angle of the Levant coast, Darius, who had been waiting
behind the screen of Amanus, slipped through the hills and cut off the
Macedonian's retreat in the defile of Issus between mountain and sea.
Against another general and less seasoned troops a compact and
disciplined Oriental force would probably have ended the invasion there
and then; but that of Darius was neither compact nor disciplined. The
narrowness of the field compressed it into a mob; and Alexander and his
men, facing about, saw the Persians delivered into their hand. The fight
lasted little longer than at Granicus and the result was as decisive a
butchery. Camp, baggage-train, the royal harem, letters from Greek
states, and the persons of Greek envoys sent to devise the destruction
of the Captain-General--all fell to Alexander.
Assured against meeting another levy of the Empire for at least a
twelvemonth, he moved on into Syria. In this narrow land his chief
business, as we have seen, was with the coast towns. He must have all
the ports in his hand before going up into Asia. The lesser dared not
gainsay the victorious phalanx; but the queen of them all, Tyre,
mistress of the eastern trade, shut the gates of her island citadel and
set the western intruder the hardest military task of his life. But the
capture of the chief base of the hostile fleets which still ranged the
Aegean was all essential to Alexander, and he bridged the sea to effect
it. One other city, Gaza, commanding the road to Egypt, showed the same
spirit with less resources, and the year was far spent before the
Macedonians appeared on the Nile to receive the ready submission of a
people which had never willingly served the Persian. Here again,
Alexander's chief solicitude was for the coasts. Independent Cyrene,
lying farthest west, was one remaining danger and the openness of the
Nile mouths another. The first danger dissolved with the submission,
which Cyrene sent to meet him as he moved into Marmarica to the attack;
the second was conjured by the creation of the port of Alexandria,
perhaps the most signal act of Alexander's life, seeing to what stature
the city would grow, what part play in the development of Greek and Jew,
and what vigour retain to this day. For the moment, however, the new
foundation served primarily to rivet its founder's hold on the shores of
the Greek and Persian waters. Within a few months the hostile fleets
disappeared from the Levant and Alexander obtained at last that command
of the sea without which invasion of inner Asia would have been more
than perilous, and permanent retention of Egypt impossible.
Thus secure of his base, he could strike inland. He went up slowly in
the early part of 331 by the traditional North Road through Philistia
and Palestine and round the head of the Syrian Hamad to Thapsacus on
Euphrates, paying, on the way, a visit of precaution to Tyre, which had
cost him so much toil and time a year before. None opposed his crossing
of the Great River; none stayed him in Mesopotamia; none disputed his
passage of the Tigris, though the ferrying of his force took five days.
The Great King himself, however, was lying a few marches south of the
mounds of Nineveh, in the plain of Gaugamela, to which roads converging
from south, east and north had brought the levies of all the empire
which remained to him. To hordes drawn from fighting tribes living as
far distant as frontiers of India, banks of the Oxus, and foothills of
the Caucasus, was added a phalanx of hireling Greeks more than three
times as numerous as that which had been cut up on the Granicus. Thus
awaited by ten soldiers to each one of his own on open ground chosen by
his enemy, Alexander went still more slowly forward and halted four and
twenty hours to breathe his army in sight of the Persian out posts.
Refusing to risk an attack on that immense host in the dark, he slept
soundly within his entrenchments till sunrise of the first day of
October, and then in the full light led out his men to decide the fate
of Persia. It was decided by sundown, and half a million broken men were
flying south and east into the gathering night. But the Battle of
Arbela, as it is commonly called--the greatest contest of armies before
the rise of Rome--had not been lightly won. The active resistance of the
Greek mercenaries, and the passive resistance of the enormous mass of
the Asiatic hordes, which stayed attack by mere weight of flesh and
closed again behind every penetrating column, made the issue doubtful,
till Darius himself, terrified at the oncoming of the heavy Macedonian
cavalry, turned his chariot and lost the day. Alexander's men had to
thank the steadiness which Philip's system had given them, but also, in
the last resort, the cowardice of the opposing chief.
The Persian King survived to be hunted a year later, and caught, a dying
man, on the road to Central Asia; but long before that and without
another pitched battle the Persian throne had passed to Alexander.
Within six months he had marched to and entered in turn, without other
let or hindrance than resistance of mountain tribesmen in the passes,
the capitals of the Empire--Babylon, Susa, Persepolis, Ecbatana; and
since these cities all held by him during his subsequent absence of six
years in farther Asia, the victory of the West over the Ancient East may
be regarded as achieved on the day of Arbela.
CHAPTER VI
EPILOGUE
Less than ten years later, Alexander lay dead in Babylon. He had gone
forward to the east to acquire more territories than we have surveyed in
any chapter of this book or his fathers had so much as known to exist.
The broad lands which are now Afghanistan, Russian Turkestan, the
Punjab, Scinde, and Beluchistan had been subdued by him in person and
were being held by his governors and garrisons. This Macedonian Greek
who had become an emperor of the East greater than the greatest
theretofore, had already determined that his Seat of Empire should be
fixed in inner Asia; and he proposed that under his single sway East and
West be distinct no longer, but one indivisible world, inhabited by
united peoples. Then, suddenly, he was called to his account, leaving no
legitimate heir of his body except a babe in its mother's womb. What
would happen? What, in fact, did happen?
It is often said that the empire which Alexander created died with him.
This is true if we think of empire as the realm of a single emperor. As
sole ruler of the vast area between the Danube and the Sutlej Alexander
was to have no successor. But if we think of an empire as the realm of a
race or nation, Greater Macedonia, though destined gradually to be
diminished, would outlive its founder by nearly three hundred years; and
moreover, in succession to it, another Western empire, made possible by
his victory and carried on in some respects under his forms, was to
persist in the East for several centuries more. As a political conquest,
Alexander's had results as long lasting as can be credited to almost any
conquest in history. As the victory of one civilization over another it
was never to be brought quite to nothing, and it had certain permanent
effects. These this chapter is designed to show: but first, since the
development of the victorious civilization on alien soil depended
primarily on the continued political supremacy of the men in whom it was
congenital, it is necessary to see how long and to what extent political
dominion was actually held in the East by men who were Greeks, either by
birth or by training.
Out of the turmoil and stress of the thirty years which followed
Alexander's death, two Macedonians emerged to divide the Eastern Empire
between them. The rest--transient embarrassed phantoms of the Royal
House, regents of the Empire hardly less transient, upstart satraps, and
even one-eyed Antigonus, who for a brief moment claimed jurisdiction
over all the East--never mattered long to the world at large and matter
not at all here and now. The end of the fourth century sees Seleucus of
Babylonia lording it over the most part of West Asia which was best
worth having, except the southern half of Syria and the coasts of Asia
Minor and certain isles in sight of them, which, if not subject to
Ptolemy of Egypt, were free of both kings or dominated by a third,
resident in Europe and soon to disappear. In the event those two,
Seleucus and Ptolemy, alone of all the Macedonian successors, would
found dynasties destined to endure long enough in kingdoms great enough
to affect the general history of civilization in the Ancient East.
Seleucus has no surviving chronicler of the first or the second rank,
and consequently remains one of the most shadowy of the greater men of
action in antiquity. We can say little of him personally, except that he
was quick and fearless in action, prepared to take chances, a born
leader in war, and a man of long sight and persistent purpose. Alexander
had esteemed and distinguished him highly, and, marrying him to Apama, a
noble Iranian lady, convinced him of his own opinion that the point from
which to rule an Asiatic empire was Babylonia. Seleucus let the first
partition of the dead man's lands go by, and not till the first turmoil
was over and his friend Ptolemy was securely seated in Egypt, did he ask
for a province. The province was Babylonia. Ejected by the malevolence
of Antigonus, he regained it by grace of Ptolemy in 312, established
ascendency over all satraps to east of him during the next half-dozen
years, letting only India go, and then came west in 305 to conquer and
slay Antigonus at Ipsus in central Asia Minor. The third king,
Lysimachus of Thrace, was disposed of in 281, and Seleucus, dying a few
months later, left to his dynastic successors an Asiatic empire of
seventy-two provinces, very nearly equal to Alexander's, with important
exceptions in Asia Minor.
In Asia Minor neither Seleucus nor the Seleucids ever held anything
effectively except the main lines of communication from East to West and
the district in which these come down to the Aegean Sea. The south
coast, as has been said, remained in Egyptian hands almost all through
the Seleucid period. The southwest obeyed the island republic of Rhodes.
Most of the Greek maritime cities of the northwest and north kept their
freedom more or less inviolate; while inland a purely Greek monarchy,
that of Pergamum, gradually extended its sway up to the central desert.
In the north a formidable barrier to Seleucid expansion arose within
five years of Seleucus' death, namely, a settlement of Gauls who had
been invited across the straits by a king of Bithynia. After charging
and raiding in all directions these intractable allies were penned by
the repeated efforts of both the Seleucid and the Pergamene kings into
the upper Sakaria basin (henceforth to be known as Galatia) and there
they formed a screen behind which Bithynia and Paphlagonia maintained
sturdy independence. The north-east also was the seat of independent
monarchies. Cappadocia, Pontus and Armenia, ruled by princes of Iranian
origin, were never integral parts of the Seleucid Empire, though
consistently friendly to its rulers. Finally, in the hill-regions of the
centre, as of the coasts, the Seleucid writ did not run.
Looked at as a whole, however, and not only from a Seleucid point of
view, the Ancient East, during the century following Seleucus' death
(forty-three years after Alexander's), was dominated politically by
Hellenes over fully nine-tenths of its area. About those parts of it
held by cities actually Greek, or by Pergamum, no more need be said. As
for Seleucus and his successors, though the latter, from Antiochus Soter
onward, had a strain of Iranian blood, they held and proved themselves
essentially Hellenic. Their portraits from first to last show European
features, often fine. Ptolemy Lagus and all the Lagidae remained
Macedonian Greeks to a man and a woman and to the bitter end, with the
greatest Hellenic city in the world for their seat. As for the remaining
tenth part of the East, almost the whole of it was ruled by princes who
claimed the title "philhellene," and justified it not only by political
friendliness to the Seleucidae and the Western Greeks, but also by
encouraging Greek settlers and Greek manners. So far as patronage and
promotion by the highest powers could further it, Hellenism had a fair
chance in West Asia from the conquest of Alexander down to the
appearance of Rome in the East. What did it make of this chance? How far
in the event did those Greek and Macedonian rulers, philhellenic Iranian
princes and others, hellenize West Asia? If they did succeed in a
measure, but not so completely that the East ceased to be distinct from
the West, what measure was set to their several influences, and why?
[Plate 6: HELLENISM IN ASIA. ABOUT 150 B.C.]
Let us see, first, what precisely Hellenism implied as it was brought to
Asia by Alexander and practised by his successors. Politically it
implied recognition by the individual that the society of which he was a
member had an indefeasible and virtually exclusive claim on his good
will and his good offices. The society so recognized was not a family or
a tribe, but a city and its proper district, distinguished from all
other cities and their districts. The geographical configuration and the
history of Greece, a country made up in part of small plains ringed in
by hills and sea, in part of islands, had brought about this limitation
of political communities, and had made patriotism mean to the Greek
devotion to his city-state. To a wider circle he was not capable of
feeling anything like the same sense of obligation or, indeed, any
compelling obligation at all. If he recognized the claim of a group of
city-states, which remotely claimed common origin with his own, it was
an academic feeling: if he was conscious of his community with all
Hellenes as a nation it was only at moments of particular danger at the
hands of a common non-Hellenic foe. In short, while not insensible to
the principle of nationality he was rarely capable of applying it
practically except in regard to a small society with whose members he
could be acquainted personally and among whom he could make his own
individuality felt. He had no feudal tradition, and no instinctive
belief that the individualities composing a community must be
subordinate to any one individual in virtue of the latter's patriarchal
or representative relation to them.
Let us deal with this political implication of Hellenism before we pass
on to its other qualities. In its purity political Hellenism was
obviously not compatible with the monarchical Macedonian state, which
was based on feudal recognition of the paternal or representative
relation of a single individual to many peoples composing a nation. The
Macedonians themselves, therefore, could not carry to Asia, together
with their own national patriotism (somewhat intensified, perhaps, by
intercourse during past generations with Greek city-states) any more
than an outside knowledge of the civic patriotism of the Greeks. Since,
however, they brought in their train a great number of actual Greeks and
had to look to settlement of these in Asia for indispensable support of
their own rule, commerce and civilization, they were bound to create
conditions under which civic patriotism, of which they knew the value as
well as the danger, might continue to exist in some measure. Their
obvious policy was to found cities wherever they wished to settle
Greeks, and to found them along main lines of communication, where they
might promote trade and serve as guardians of the roads; while at the
same time, owing to their continual intercourse with each other, their
exposure to native sojourners and immigrants and their necessary
dependence on the centre of government, they could hardly repeat in Asia
the self-centred exclusiveness characteristic of cities in either
European Greece or the strait and sharply divided valleys of the west
Anatolian coast. In fact, by design or not, most Seleucid foundations
were planted in comparatively open country. Seleucus alone is said to
have been responsible for seventy-five cities, of which the majority
clustered in that great meeting-place of through routes, North Syria,
and along the main highway through northern Asia Minor to Ephesus. In
this city, Seleucus himself spent most of his last years. We know of few
Greek colonies, or none, founded by him or his dynasty beyond the
earlier limits of the Ancient East, where, in Afghanistan, Turkestan and
India, Alexander had planted nearly all his new cities. Possibly his
successor held these to be sufficient; probably he saw neither prospect
of advantage nor hope of success in creating Greek cities in a region so
vast and so alien; certainly neither he nor his dynasty was ever in such
a position to support or maintain them, if founded east of Media, as
Alexander was and proposed to be, had longer life been his. But in
western Asia from Seleucia on Tigris, an immense city of over half a
million souls, to Laodicea on Lycus and the confines of the old Ionian
littoral, Seleucus and his successors created urban life, casting it in
a Hellenic mould whose form, destined to persist for many centuries to
come, would exercise momentous influence on the early history of the
Christian religion.
By founding so many urban communities of Greek type the Macedonian kings
of West Asia undeniably introduced Hellenism as an agent of political
civilization into much of the Ancient East, which needed it badly and
profited by it. But the influence of their Hellenism was potent and
durable only in those newly founded, or newly organized, urban
communities and their immediate neighbourhood. Where these clustered
thickly, as along the Lower Orontes and on the Syrian coast-line, or
where Greek farmers had settled in the interspaces, as in Cyrrhestica
(i.e. roughly, central North Syria), Hellenism went far to make whole
districts acquire a civic spirit, which, though implying much less sense
of personal freedom and responsibility than in Attica or Laconia, would
have been recognized by an Athenian or a Spartan as kin to his own
patriotism. But where the cities were strung on single lines of
communication at considerable intervals, as in central Asia Minor and in
Mesopotamia, they exerted little political influence outside their own
walls. For Hellenism was and remained essentially a property of
communities small enough for each individual to exert his own personal
influence on political and social practice. So soon as a community
became, in numbers or distribution, such as to call for centralized, or
even representative, administration, patriotism of the Hellenic type
languished and died. It was quite incapable of permeating whole peoples
or of making a nation, whether in the East or anywhere else. Yet in the
East peoples have always mattered more than cities, by whomsoever
founded and maintained.
Hellenism, however, had, by this time, not only a political implication
but also moral and intellectual implications which were partly effects,
partly causes, of its political energy. As has been well said by a
modern historian of the Seleucid house, Hellenism meant, besides a
politico-social creed, also a certain attitude of mind. The
characteristic feature of this attitude was what has been called
Humanism, this word being used in a special sense to signify
intellectual interest confined to human affairs, but free within the
range of these. All Greeks were not, of course, equally humanistic in
this sense. Among them, as in all societies, there were found
temperaments to which transcendental speculation appealed, and these
increasing in number, as with the loss of their freedom the city-states
ceased to stand for the realization of the highest possible good in this
world, made Orphism and other mystic cults prevail ever more and more in
Hellas. But when Alexander carried Hellenism to Asia it was still
broadly true that the mass of civilized Hellenes regarded anything that
could not be apprehended by the intellect through the senses as not only
outside their range of interest but non-existent. Further, while nothing
was held so sacred that it might not be probed or discussed with the
full vigour of an inquirer's intelligence, no consideration except the
logic of apprehended facts should determine his conclusion. An argument
was to be followed wherever it might lead, and its consequences must be
faced in full without withdrawal behind any non-intellectual screen.
Perfect freedom of thought and perfect freedom of discussion over the
whole range of human matters; perfect freedom of consequent action, so
the community remained uninjured--this was the typical Hellene's ideal.
An instinctive effort to realize it was his habitual attitude towards
life. His motto anticipated the Roman poet's "I am human: nothing human
do I hold no business of mine!"
By the time the Western conquest of Asia was complete, this attitude,
which had grown more and more prevalent in the centres of Greek life
throughout the fifth and fourth centuries, had come to exclude anything
like religiosity from the typical Hellenic character. A religion the
Greek had of course, but he held it lightly, neither possessed by it nor
even looking to it for guidance in the affairs of his life. If he
believed in a world beyond the grave, he thought little about it or not
at all, framing his actions with a view solely to happiness in the
flesh. A possible fate in the hereafter seemed to him to have no bearing
on his conduct here. That disembodied he might spend eternity with the
divine, or, absorbed into the divine essence, become himself
divine--such ideas, though not unknown or without attraction to rarer
spirits, were wholly impotent to combat the vivid interest in life and
the lust of strenuous endeavour which were bred in the small worlds of
the city-states.
The Greeks, then, who passed to Asia in Alexander's wake had no
religious message for the East, and still less had the Macedonian
captains who succeeded him. Born and bred to semibarbaric superstitions,
they had long discarded these, some for the freethinking attitude of the
Greek, and all for the cult of the sword. The only thing which, in their
Emperor's lifetime, stood to them for religion was a feudal devotion to
himself and his house. For a while this feeling survived in the ranks of
the army, as Eumenes, wily Greek that he was, proved by the manner and
success of his appeals to dynastic loyalty in the first years of the
struggle for the succession; and perhaps, we may trace it longer still
in the leaders, as an element, blended with something of homesickness
and something of national tradition, in that fatality which impelled
each Macedonian lord of Asia, first Antigonus, then Seleucus, finally
Antiochus the Great, to hanker after the possession of Macedonia and be
prepared to risk the East to win back the West. Indeed, it is a
contributory cause of the comparative failure of the Seleucids to keep
their hold on their Asiatic Empire that their hearts were never wholly
in it.
For the rest, they and all the Macedonian captains alike were
conspicuously irreligious men, whose gods were themselves. They were
what the age had made them, and what all similar ages make men of
action. Theirs was a time of wide conquests recently achieved by right
of might alone, and left to whomsoever should be mightiest. It was a
time when the individual had suddenly found that no accidental
defects--lack of birth, or property, or allies--need prevent him from
exploiting for himself a vast field of unmeasured possibilities, so he
had a sound brain, a stout heart and a strong arm. As it would be again
in the age of the Crusades, in that of the Grand Companies, and in that
of the Napoleonic conquests, every soldier knew that it rested only with
himself and with opportunity, whether or no he should die a prince. It
was a time for reaping harvests which others had sown, for getting
anything for nothing, for frank and unashamed lust of loot, for selling
body and soul to the highest bidder, for being a law to oneself. In such
ages the voice of the priest goes for as little as the voice of
conscience, and the higher a man climbs, the less is his faith in a
power above him.
Having won the East, however, these irreligious Macedonians found they
had under their hand a medley of peoples, diverse in many
characteristics, but almost all alike in one, and that was their
religiosity. Deities gathered and swarmed in Asia. Men showed them
fierce fanatic devotion or spent lives in contemplation of the idea of
them, careless of everything which Macedonians held worth living for,
and even of life itself. Alexander had been quick to perceive the
religiosity of the new world into which he had come. If his power in the
East was to rest on a popular basis he knew that basis must be
religious. Beginning with Egypt he set an example (not lost on the man
who would be his successor there) of not only conciliating priests but
identifying himself with the chief god in the traditional manner of
native kings since immemorial time; and there is no doubt that the cult
of himself, which he appears to have enjoined increasingly on his
followers, his subjects and his allies, as time went on, was consciously
devised to meet and captivate the religiosity of the East. In Egypt he
must be Ammon, in Syria he would be Baal, in Babylon Bel. He left the
faith of his fathers behind him when he went up to the East, knowing as
well as his French historian knew in the nineteenth century, that in
Asia the "dreams of Olympus were less worth than the dreams of the Magi
and the mysteries of India, pregnant with the divine." With these last,
indeed, he showed himself deeply impressed, and his recorded attitude
towards the Brahmans of the Punjab implies the earliest acknowledgment
made publicly by a Greek, that in religion the West must learn from the
East.
Alexander, who has never been forgotten by the traditions and myths of
the East, might possibly, with longer life, have satisfied Asiatic
religiosity with an apotheosis of himself. His successors failed either
to keep his divinity alive or to secure any general acceptance of their
own godhead. That they tried to meet the demand of the East with a new
universal cult of imperial utility and that some, like Antiochus IV, the
tyrant of early Maccabaean history, tried very hard, is clear. That they
failed and that Rome failed after them is writ large in the history of
the expansion of half-a-dozen Eastern cults before the Christian era,
and of Christianity itself.
Only in the African province did Macedonian rule secure a religious
basis. What an Alexander could hardly have achieved in Asia, a Ptolemy
did easily in Egypt. There the _de facto_ ruler, of whatever race, had
been installed a god since time out of mind, and an omnipotent
priesthood, dominating a docile people, stood about the throne. The
Assyrian conquerors had stiffened their backs in Egypt to save
affronting the gods of their fatherland; but the Ptolemies, like the
Persians, made no such mistake, and had three centuries of secure rule
for their reward. The knowledge that what the East demanded could be
provided easily and safely even by Macedonians in the Nile valley alone
was doubtless present to the sagacious mind of Ptolemy when, letting all
wider lands pass to others, he selected Egypt in the first partition of
the provinces.
The Greek, in a word, had only his philosophies to offer to the
religiosity of the East. But a philosophy of religion is a complement
to, a modifying influence on, religion, not a substitute sufficient to
satisfy the instinctive and profound craving of mankind for God. While
this craving always possessed the Asiatic mind, the Greek himself, never
naturally insensible to it, became more and more conscious of his own
void as he lived in Asia. What had long stood to him for religion,
namely passionate devotion to the community, was finding less and less
to feed on under the restricted political freedom which was now his lot
everywhere. Superior though he felt his culture to be in most respects,
it lacked one thing needful, which inferior cultures around him
possessed in full. As time went on he became curious, then receptive, of
the religious systems among whose adherents he found himself, being
coerced insensibly by nature's abhorrence of a vacuum. Not that he
swallowed any Eastern religion whole, or failed, while assimilating what
he took, to transform it with his own essence. Nor again should it be
thought that he gave nothing at all in return. He gave a philosophy
which, acting almost as powerfully on the higher intelligences of the
East as their religions acted on his intelligence, created the
"Hellenistic" type, properly so called, that is the oriental who
combined the religious instinct of Asia with the philosophic spirit of
Greece--such an oriental as (to take two very great names), the Stoic
apostle Zeno, a Phoenician of Cyprus, or the Christian apostle, Saul the
Jew of Tarsus. By the creation of this type, East and West were brought
at last very near together, divided only by the distinction of religious
philosophy in Athens from philosophic religion in Syria.
The history of the Near East during the last three centuries before the
Christian era is the history of the gradual passing of Asiatic religions
westward to occupy the Hellenic vacuum, and of Hellenic philosophical
ideas eastward to supplement and purify the religious systems of West
Asia. How far the latter eventually penetrated into the great Eastern
continent, whether even to India or China, this is no place to discuss:
how far the former would push westward is written in the modern history
of Europe and the New World. The expansion of Mithraism and of
half-a-dozen other Asiatic and Egyptian cults, which were drawn from the
East to Greece and beyond before the first century of the Hellenistic
Age closed, testifies to the early existence of that spiritual void in
the West which a greater and purer religion, about to be born in Galilee
and nurtured in Antioch, was at last to fill. The instrumentality of
Alexander and his successors in bringing about or intensifying that
contact and intercourse between Semite and Greek, which begot the
philosophic morality of Christianity and rendered its westward expansion
inevitable, stands to their credit as a historic fact of such tremendous
import that it may be allowed to atone for more than all their sins.
This, then, the Seleucids did--they so brought West and East together
that each learned from the other. But more than that cannot be claimed
for them. They did not abolish the individuality of either; they did not
Hellenize even so much of West Asia as they succeeded in holding to the
end. In this they failed not only for the reasons just considered--lack
of vital religion in their Macedonians and their Greeks, and
deterioration of the Hellenism of Hellenes when they ceased to be
citizens of free city-states--but also through individual faults of
their own, which appear again and again as the dynasty runs its course;
and perhaps even more for some deeper reason, not understood by us yet,
but lying behind the empirical law that East is East and West is West.
As for the Seleucid kings themselves they leave on us, ill-known as
their characters and actions are, a clear impression of approximation to
the traditional type of the Greek of the Roman age and since. As a
dynasty they seem to have been quickly spoilt by power, to have been
ambitious but easily contented with the show and surface of success, to
have been incapable and contemptuous of thorough organization, and to
have had little in the way of policy, and less perseverance in the
pursuit of it. It is true that our piecemeal information comes largely
from writers who somewhat despised them; but the known history of the
Seleucid Empire, closed by an extraordinarily facile and ignominious
collapse before Rome, supports the judgment that, taken one with
another, its kings were shallow men and haphazard rulers who owed it
more to chance than to prudence that their dynasty endured so long.
Their strongest hold was on Syria, and in the end their only hold. We
associate them in our minds particularly with the great city of Antioch,
which the first Seleucus founded on the Lower Orontes to gather up trade
from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor in the North Syrian country. But,
as a matter of fact, that city owes its fame mainly to subsequent Roman
masters. For it did not become the capital of Seleucid preference till
the second century B.C.--till, by the year 180, the dynasty, which had
lost both the Western and the Eastern provinces, had to content itself
with Syria and Mesopotamia alone. Not only had the Parthians then come
down from Turkestan to the south of the Caspian (their kings assumed
Iranian names but were they not, like the present rulers of Persia,
really Turks?), but Media too had asserted independence and Persia was
fallen away to the rule of native princes in Fars. Seleucia on Tigris
had become virtually a frontier city facing an Iranian and Parthian
peril which the imperial incapacity of the Seleucids allowed to develop,
and even Rome would never dispel. On the other flank of the empire a
century of Seleucid efforts to plant headquarters in Western Asia Minor,
whether at Ephesus or Sardes, and thence to prosecute ulterior designs
on Macedonia and Greece, had been settled in favour of Pergamum by the
arms and mandate of the coming arbiter of the East, the Republic of
Rome. Bidden retire south of Taurus after the battle of Magnesia in 190,
summarily ordered out of Egypt twenty years later, when Antiochus
Epiphanes was hoping to compensate the loss of west and east with gain
of the south, the Seleucids had no choice of a capital. It must
thenceforth be Antioch or nothing.
That, however, a Macedonian dynasty was forced to concentrate in north
Syria whatever Hellenism it had (though after Antiochus Epiphanes its
Hellenism steadily grew less) during the last two centuries before the
Christian era was to have a momentous effect on the history of the
world. For it was one of the two determining causes of an increase in
the influence of Hellenism upon the Western Semites, which issued
ultimately in the Christian religion. From Cilicia on the north to
Phoenicia and Palestine in the south, such higher culture, such
philosophical study as there were came more and more under the influence
of Greek ideas, particularly those of the Stoic School, whose founder
and chief teacher (it should never be forgotten) had been a Semite, born
some three hundred years before Jesus of Nazareth. The Hellenized
University of Tarsus, which educated Saul, and the Hellenistic party in
Palestine, whose desire to make Jerusalem a southern Antioch brought on
the Maccabaean struggle, both owed in a measure their being and their
continued vitality to the existence and larger growth of Antioch on the
Orontes.
But Phoenicia and Palestine owed as much of their Hellenism (perhaps
more) to another Hellenized city and another Macedonian dynasty--to
Alexandria and to the Ptolemies. Because the short Maccabaean period of
Palestinian history, during which a Seleucid did happen to be holding
all Syria, is very well and widely known, it is apt to be forgotten
that, throughout almost all other periods of the Hellenistic Age,
southern Syria, that is Palestine and Phoenicia as well as Cyprus and
the Levant coast right round to Pamphylia, was under the political
domination of Egypt. The first Ptolemy added to his province some of
these Asiatic districts and cities, and in particular Palestine and
Coele-Syria, very soon after he had assumed command of Egypt, and making
no secret of his intention to retain them, built a fleet to secure his
end. He knew very well that if Egypt is to hold in permanency any
territory outside Africa, she must be mistress of the sea. After a brief
set-back at the hands of Antigonus' son, Ptolemy made good his hold when
the father was dead; and Cyprus also became definitely his in 294. His
successor, in whose favour he abdicated nine years later, completed the
conquest of the mainland coasts right round the Levant at the expense of
Seleucus' heir. In the event, the Ptolemies kept almost all that the
first two kings of the dynasty had thus won until they were supplanted
by Rome, except for an interval of a little more than fifty years from
199 to about 145; and even during the latter part of this period south
Syria was under Egyptian influence once more, though nominally part of
the tottering Seleucid realm.
The object pursued by the Macedonian kings of Egypt in conquering and
holding a thin coastal fringe of mainland outside Africa and certain
island posts from Cyprus to the Cyclades was plainly commercial, to get
control of the general Levant trade and of certain particular supplies
(notably ship-timber) for their royal port of Alexandria. The first
Ptolemy had well understood why his master had founded this city after
ruining Tyre, and why he had taken so great pains both earlier and later
to secure his Mediterranean coasts. Their object the Ptolemies obtained
sufficiently, although they never eliminated the competition of the
Rhodian republic and had to resign to it the command of the Aegean after
the battle of Cos in 246. But Alexandria had already become a great
Semitic as well as Grecian city, and continued to be so for centuries to
come. The first Ptolemy is said to have transplanted to Egypt many
thousands of Jews who quickly reconciled themselves to their exile, if
indeed it had ever been involuntary; and how large its Jewish population
was by the reign of the second Ptolemy and how open to Hellenic
influence, may be illustrated sufficiently by the fact that at
Alexandria, during that reign, the Hebrew scriptures were translated
into Greek by the body of Semitic scholars which has been known since as
the Septuagint. Although it was consistent Ptolemaic policy not to
countenance Hellenic proselytism, the inevitable influence of Alexandria
on south Syria was stronger than that consciously exerted by Antiochus
Epiphanes or any other Seleucid; and if Phoenician cities had become
homes of Hellenic science and philosophy by the middle of the third
century, and if Yeshua or Jason, High Priest of Jehovah, when he applied
to his suzerain a hundred years later for leave to make Jerusalem a
Greek city, had at his back a strong party anxious to wear hats in the
street and nothing at all in the gymnasium, Alexandria rather than
Antioch should have the chief credit--or chief blame!
Before, however, all this blending of Semitic religiosity with Hellenic
philosophical ideas, and with something of the old Hellenic mansuetude,
which had survived even under Macedonian masters to modify Asiatic
minds, could issue in Christianity, half the East, with its dispersed
heirs of Alexander, had passed under the common and stronger yoke of
Rome. Ptolemaic Alexandria and Seleucid Antioch had prepared Semitic
ground for seed of a new religion, but it was the wide and sure peace of
the Roman Empire that brought it to birth and gave it room to grow. It
was to grow, as all the world knows, westward not eastward, making
patent by its first successes and by its first failures how much
Hellenism had gone to the making of it. The Asian map of Christianity at
the end, say, of the fourth century of the latter's existence, will show
it very exactly bounded by the limits to which the Seleucid Empire had
carried Greeks in any considerable body, and the further limits to which
the Romans, who ruled effectively a good deal left aside by their
Macedonian predecessors--much of central and eastern Asia Minor for
example, and all Armenia--had advanced their Graeco-Roman subjects.
Beyond these bounds neither Hellenism nor Christianity was fated in that
age to strike deep roots or bear lasting fruit. The Farther East--the
East, that is to say, beyond Euphrates--remained unreceptive and
intolerant of both influences. We have seen how almost all of it had
fallen away from the Seleucids many generations before the birth of
Christ, when a ring of principalities, Median, Parthian, Persian,
Nabathsean, had emancipated the heart of the Orient from its short
servitude to the West; and though Rome, and Byzantium after her, would
push the frontier of effective European influence somewhat eastward
again, their Hellenism could never capture again that heart which the
Seleucids had failed to hold. This is not to say that nothing of
Hellenism passed eastward of Mesopotamia and made an abiding mark.
Parthian and Sassanian art, the earlier Buddhist art of north-western
India and Chinese Turkestan, some features even of early Mohammedan art,
and some, too, of early Mohammedan doctrine and imperial policy,
disprove any sweeping assertion that nothing Greek took root beyond the
bounds of the Roman Empire. But it was very little of Hellenism and not
at all its essence. We must not be deceived by mere borrowings of exotic
things or momentary appreciations of foreign luxuries. That the
Parthians were witnessing a performance of the Bacchae of Euripides,
when the head of hapless Crassus was brought to Ctesiphon, no more
argues that they had the Western spirit than our taste for Chinese
curios or Japanese plays proves us informed with the spirit of the East.
The East, in fine, remained the East. It was so little affected after
all by the West that in due time its religiosity would be pregnant with
yet another religion, antithetical to Hellenism, and it was so little
weakened that it would win back again all it had lost and more, and keep
Hither Asia in political and cultural independence of the West until our
own day. If modern Europe has taken some parts of the gorgeous East in
fee which were never held by Macedonian or Roman, let us remember in our
pride of race that almost all that the Macedonians and the Romans did
hold in Asia has been lost to the West ever since. Europe may and
probably will prevail there again; but since it must be by virtue of a
civilization in whose making a religion born of Asia has been the
paramount indispensable factor, will the West even then be more creditor
than debtor of the East?
NOTE ON BOOKS
The authorities cited at the end of Prof. J. L. Myres' _Dawn of History_
(itself an authority), in the Home University Library, are to a great
extent suitable for those who wish to read more widely round the theme
of the present volume, since those (e.g. the geographical works given in
_Dawn of History_, p. 253, paragraph 2) which are not more or less
essential preliminaries to a study of the Ancient East at any period,
mostly deal with the historic as well as the prehistoric age. To spare
readers reference to another volume, however, I will repeat here the
most useful books in Prof. Myres' list, adding at the same time certain
others, some of which have appeared since the issue of his volume.
For the history of the whole region in the period covered by my volume,
E. Meyer's _Geschichte Alterthums_, of a new edition of which a French
translation is in progress and has already been partly issued, is the
most authoritative. Sir G. Maspero's _Histoire ancienne des peuples de
l'Orient classique_ (English translation in 3 vols. under the titles
_The Dawn of Civilization_ (Egypt and Chaldaea); _The Struggle of the
Nations_ (Egypt, Syria, and Assyria); _The Passing of the Empires_) is
still valuable, but rather out of date. There has appeared recently a
more modern and handy book than either, Mr. H. R. Hall's _The Ancient
History of the Near East_ (1913), which gathers up, not only what was in
the books by Mr. Hall and Mr. King cited by Prof. Myres, but also the
contents of Meyer's and Maspero's books, and others, and the results of
more recent research, in some of which the author has taken part. This
book includes in its scope both Egypt and the Aegean area, besides
Western Asia.
For the special history of Babylonia and Assyria and their Empires, R.
W. Rogers' _History of Babylonia and Assyria_, 2 vols., has been kept up
to date and is the most convenient summary for an English reader. H.
Winckler's _History of Babylonia and Assyria_ (translated from the
German by J. A. Craig, 1907) is more brilliant and suggestive, but needs
to be used with more caution. A. T. Olmstead's _Western Asia in the Days
of Sargon of Assyria_ (1908) is an instructive study of the Assyrian
Empire at its height.
For the Hittite Empire and civilization J. Garstang's _The Land of the
Hittites_ (1910) is the best recent book which aims at being
comprehensive. But it must be borne in mind that this subject is in the
melting-pot at present, that excavations now in progress have added
greatly to the available evidence, and that very few of the Boghazkeui
archives were published when Garstang's book was issued. D. G. Hogarth's
articles on the Hittites, in Enc. Brit, and Enc. Brit. Year-book,
summarize some more recent research; but there is no compendium of
Hittite research which is really up to date.
For Semitic Syrian history, Rogers and Winckler, as cited above, will
probably be found sufficient; and also for the Urartu peoples. For
Western Asia Minor and the Greeks, besides D.G. Hogarth's _Ionia and
the East_, the new edition of Beloch's _Griechische Geschichte_ gives
all, and more than all, that the general reader will require. If German
is a difficulty to him, he must turn to J.B. Bury's _History of Greece_
and to the later part of Hall's _Ancient History of the Near East_,
cited above. For Alexander's conquest he can go to J. Karst, _Geschichte
des hellenistischen Zeitalters_, Vol. I (1901), B. Niese, _Geschichte
der griechischen und makedonischen Staaten_ (1899), or D.G. Hogarth,
_Philip and Alexander of Macedon_ (1897); but the great work of J.G.
Droysen, _Das Hellenismus_ (French translation), lies behind all these.
Finally, the fourth English volume of A. Holm's _History of Greece_
(1898) and E.R. Bevan's _House of Seleucus_ (1902) will supply most
that is known of the Hellenistic Age in Asia.