army he created included a _corps d’élite_ of noble horse-guards, the
Companions of the King. These were the earliest first-rate mounted
troops in history, and it was by their means that the dashing exploits
of Alexander were subsequently achieved. For the infantry his great
invention was the phalanx. This was clearly a modification of the deep
formation invented by Epaminondas. It consisted of sixteen ranks armed
with a spear 21 feet long. They stood in close order so that the points
of the first five ranks projected from the front to present a bristling
hedge of spears. The remaining eleven ranks, we are gravely informed,
held their spears obliquely in the air to ward off missiles! Let the
military reader find a military justification for this extraordinary
arrangement. To me it seems a further confirmation of my civilian view
that Greek tactics were primarily designed to prevent armies from
running away. We observe that when Alexander took Persian troops into
his phalanx he put twelve ranks of Persians into the lines, with a row
of Macedonians _at their rear_. In any case troops standing in close
formation armed with weapons 7 yards long must have been useless for any
but defensive purposes; and, as a matter of fact, the victories of
Alexander were generally gained by the lightning charge of the king at
the head of his knights.
We need not touch upon the shabby “Sacred Wars” which caused Philip to
enter Greece on the invitation of Thebes. It was at Chæroneia in 338
that Philip defeated a mixed Greek army in whose ranks Demosthenes was
fighting as a hoplite. Philip was generous to the Greeks, and especially
to Athens. Next year the darling wish of his heart was obtained, for he
was elected president of a Panhellenic union destined to fulfil his
great scheme of avenging the Persian invasions of Greece by a march to
Babylon. In the next year he was murdered, and his brilliant son
Alexander cannot be acquitted of complicity in the crime.
The grand idea was Philip’s, begotten perhaps from the study of
Isocrates, and certainly inspired by the examples of Xenophon and
Agesilaus. Unfortunately it was far from arousing any enthusiasm in
Greece. Persia was a long way off, and money could be had from the Great
King without fighting for it. There was a sordid scramble for bribes
among the Greek statesmen. As soon as they heard of Philip’s death they
broke into unseemly jubilation, and voted compliments to his murderers;
they hoped that things would return to their old routine, and that there
would be no more talk of antediluvian crusades. They had reckoned
without Alexander, for it is seldom that a Philip is succeeded by an
Alexander.
This young man who conquered the world and died at the age of
thirty-three has quite naturally captivated the imagination of posterity
and formed a model for ambitious generals of later days. Julius Cæsar
sighed to think of his inferiority in achievement. Augustus paid a visit
to his tomb, and wore his portrait on a ring. Napoleon consciously
imitated him. As a soldier he was not only an organiser of victory,
though of course he owed a great deal to his father in this respect, and
a strategist with an eye for a battlefield, but also a dashing cavalry
leader, the sort of man to ride straight for the enemy’s king, to be the
first in the breach, and to leap down alone into the enemy’s town. He
did this sort of thing with impunity; he never lost a battle. He was
chivalrous to ladies, Bayard and Bluebeard by turns. He married a
beautiful Eastern princess called Roxana, he rode a beautiful war-horse
called Bucephalus. If Lysippus and Apelles may be trusted, he had the
face of a Greek god. He had just that touch of dissipation which somehow
rounds off the conception of a popular hero. He had the good fortune to
die young, in the hour of victory.
And what is to be the sober historian’s estimate of this dazzling
person? We may minimise his triumphs by pointing out that the Persian
empire was helpless before him, like ripe fruit waiting to be gathered.
We may certainly charge him with conquering insanely without stopping to
organise, and with neglecting his own kingdom and failing to deal
adequately with the political condition of old Greece. We may point to
the extraordinarily rapid collapse of his empire. But then he died
suddenly in the midst of his work, and left no grown heir to succeed
him. In some respects I think we must all admit that he showed very
remarkable gifts of statesmanship. Though
[Illustration: Plate 82.--Alexander at Issus (Pompeii mosaic.)
_Brogi._]
half a barbarian by origin, he was an enthusiast for Hellenism, and his
plan was to spread it at the point of the spear all over the civilised
world. When he destroyed Thebes he spared one house--the house of
Pindar. It was as a missionary of Greek culture that he marched over the
burning deserts of Asia. He took poets and artists in his train. He
would stop his march every now and then to exhibit Greek athletics and
Greek arts to the wondering Orientals. He planted Greek cities wherever
he had time to stop, from Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile to
Candahar (another version of his name). He had the art which makes a
successful apostle, the gift of being all things to all men. In Egypt,
the land of religion and mystery, he made a solemn pilgrimage into the
desert, and got himself accepted as the son of the god called by the
Greeks Ammon. In Persia he recognised the merits of the Persian
provincial system, and appointed his own satraps, or even retained the
existing ones. He treated Persian women with the deference to which they
were accustomed, and added one to his household in the manner to which
they were also accustomed. His Macedonians murmured at his Oriental
dress and manners, but Alexander was always a Greek at heart, the lines
of Homer always rang in his ears, and he fancied himself a reincarnation
of Achilles pursuing his Phrygian Hectors over the dusty plains of Troy.
He was mad, no doubt, to march so far over those weary deserts into
Turkestan, through those dreadful defiles of the Hindu Khush. Only the
mutiny of his army turned him back when he reached the farthest of the
Five Rivers of the Punjaub. And then it was frantic lunacy to lead his
army home along the burning coasts of the Persian Gulf. That experience
taught him, it seems, a lesson which he might well have learnt earlier,
namely, the value of sea-power for conquerors and empire-builders. When
he died he was projecting a naval expedition along the coasts of Africa.
The disaffection of Athens had deprived him of the fleet which ought to
have belonged to a Panhellenic army, and Alexander had been forced to
destroy the Persian fleet by a siege of its arsenal and headquarters,
the island city of Tyre. Most conquerors have a touch of insanity, no
doubt. The sanest of them is Julius Cæsar, and the maddest is Charles
XII. But Alexander the Great had lucid intervals of consummate
statesmanship. It is in this respect that he differs from the vulgar
type of adventurer and stands among civilising conquerors like William
the Norman with his Domesday Book, Napoleon with his Code, and Julius
Cæsar with his Julian Laws and his calendar. This intellectual
suppleness was the mark of Alexander’s Greek education, though it still
remains a difficulty to trace in his career the influence of Aristotle,
his tutor.
On his death at Babylon in 323 the whole empire flew to pieces. He had
unwisely divided his veteran armies among his various generals, and each
of them found himself established as the monarch of a large territory.
Most of them naturally desired to emulate their master and secure as
much of his empire as they could for themselves. Out of the confusing
struggles of the next generation three great kingdoms gradually emerged:
that of Macedonia, warlike and turbulent under various shortlived
dynasties, that of Asia, huge and wealthy under a line of Seleucids, and
that of Egypt under a long family of Ptolemies. All these kingdoms were
mainly Greek. In the country, no doubt, Oriental life and language
continued, but in the towns and for purposes of government both the
language and the civilisation were Greek. Thus Alexander had done his
work. He had actually added the whole of Asia Minor, Phœnicia, and Egypt
to the Greek world. Curious traces of Hellenism are found even in
distant India.
In this world of “the Successors,” as they are called, the ancient
states of Greece are not altogether negligible. Rhodes continued to be
free, rich, and happy. Athens, as I have remarked, was occasionally
oppressed and sometimes enslaved by the Macedonian rulers to the north,
but for the most part she continued as a free democracy, conducting her
own affairs as vehemently as ever, though now, of course, as a
second-class power. Sparta stood sullenly aloof, joining no
confederacies,
[Illustration: PLATE LXXXIII. “THE SARCOPHAGUS OF ALEXANDER” FROM SIDON:
LION-HUNT
_Seban & Joaillier_]
but dreadfully shrunken in population. I have alluded to her notable
experiments at reform in the third century under Agis and Cleomenes. It
was ended by the crushing defeat at Sellasia from the Achæan League and
the Macedonians. Towns like Argos and Corinth preserved their liberties
by joining the Leagues. Epirus was a new Power rising to fame by the
same road as Macedon under an adventurous king called Pyrrhus. He
unfortunately turned west instead of east in his search for worlds to
conquer, and there met another rising power, a race of real soldiers who
made short work of the Greek phalanx, even when supported by heavy
cavalry in the form of Indian elephants. It was these Romans who, when
they came in due course to return his visit, put “Finis” to this chapter
of Greek history, and proceeded themselves to undertake the task of
writing the next.
ALEXANDER IN ART
We have numerous works of art which portray Alexander the Great, and as
he is said to have granted the sole right of depicting his royal form to
Lysippus the sculptor, and to have commissioned Apelles as his royal
painter, we may presume that most of the portraits go back to an
original by one of these artists. We have enough description of the
pictures by Apelles to show that he treated his model with all the
obsequiousness of a court painter. There was Alexander in the guise of
Zeus wielding the thunderbolt, Alexander in the company of Nike and the
Heavenly Twins, Alexander leading the god of war in triumph, Alexander
mounted on Bucephalus. The only relic which may give us an idea of the
treatment of such subjects in pictorial art is a very fine mosaic floor
at Pompeii.[107] It represents the conqueror charging bareheaded into
the press of the Persian bodyguard at Issus, his greatest victory. You
see Darius in his Oriental “mitre” anxious and terrified, just turning
his chariot out of the battle. The scene is represented with great
spirit, and Alexander’s face is happily preserved. The horses in
particular are most faithfully rendered. As part of the mosaic depicts a
Nile scene, with crocodiles, ibis, snakes, and a hippopotamus, we must
infer that the original picture was made in Alexandria.
The same scene is depicted with greater brilliance on the famous
sarcophagus from Sidon. On one side of it Alexander and Parmenio are
fighting the Persians at Issus, and on the other side they are engaged
in a lion hunt.[108] Few works of art can compare with this monument in
magnificence or in historical interest. It is especially interesting in
the history of art because it gives us the best example of the
application of colour to sculpture, and completely justifies that
process.[109] It also affords fine specimens of Greek mouldings and
designs. The material is Pentelic marble imported from Athens. This
sarcophagus is now in the museum at Constantinople.
Of the many busts and heads of Alexander, none gives us a very
favourable example of the work of Lysippus. The so-called Dying
Alexander is hideously strained and emotional. A head in the British
Museum, however, is probably nearer to the original, though the very
short upper lip and the heavy jaw make it a rather unpleasing
portrait.[110] We are told that Lysippus alone was permitted to make
portraits of Alexander, because “others desiring to represent the bend
of his neck and the emotional glance of his eyes, failed to render his
manly and leonine aspect.” It should be noted that Lysippus made a
famous group of Alexander’s hunting, and another of Alexander’s troop of
horse, so that the Constantinople reliefs may go back to Lysippean
originals.
[Illustration: Alexander the Great. From a Coin of Thrace]
Alexander was worshipped even in his lifetime as a god. He claimed,
among other divine claims, to be a son of Ammon. In this character he is
represented with the ram’s horns of that Egyptian deity on a coin of
Thrace cast by Lysimachus, one of his generals and successors.
[Illustration: Plate 84. PORTION OF THE EASTERN FRIEZE OF THE
SARCOPHAGUS OF ALEXANDER.]
Alexander was the first of mortals to have his portrait on Greek coins,
and it is only in virtue of the divine honours paid to him that this is
conceded even to the conqueror of the world. Many of the later kings
followed his example, and portraiture on the coins now becomes common.
ALEXANDRIA
In studying the early civilisation of Europe, which means the history of
the Mediterranean peninsulas, one must not forget that economically
Egypt is the key to the whole position. In natural resources it is far
the richest country in that region. Hitherto, however, it had been shut
off from the rest of the world by its own peculiar civilisation and
religion, though the Greeks had occasionally borrowed ideas from it and
sometimes interfered in its historical course. Now Alexander gives it a
Greek government and a Greek capital. In order to crush the Phœnician
fleet which had been the principal naval support of the Persian Empire,
he had been compelled to destroy the city of Tyre. But it was more than
a strategic move. He intended the commerce and sea-power of the Levant
to be henceforth in Greek hands. He succeeded brilliantly in his
purpose. Phœnicia passed away from the stage of history, and only
survived in her great colony of Carthage.
The city of Alexandria was laid out on a mathematical plan by Greek
architects. Its situation on the delta of the Nile was exceedingly
favourable to commerce, especially as the difficult navigation of its
waters was mitigated by the construction of a great lighthouse, one of
the Seven Wonders of the World. In the division of the empire Egypt had
the good fortune to fall to the share of Ptolemy, a wise and enlightened
ruler, as were most of his descendants of the same name. These all
pursued a policy of commerce and peaceful expansion. There was brisk
traffic between Alexandria, Rhodes, Pergamum, Athens, and Syracuse, and
Alexandria grew to be the greatest city in the world. It was
pre-eminently Greek, but tinctured also with some of the Orientalism of
its environment.
Along with commerce the Ptolemies cultivated literature by founding a
sort of university or college called the Museum. It consisted of a
temple of the Muses, rooms for its members, a common dining-hall,
cloistered walks for the peripatetic teacher, and above all of a
magnificent library, for which the kings of Egypt made it their ambition
to collect all the books in the world. Half a million MSS. were gathered
there in the third century. The chief librarian was the master of the
whole institution, which was a place of research and literary production
rather than of education. At the same time Ptolemy made a point of
attracting all the foremost literary men of the Greek world to his
court. It cannot be denied that the Alexandrian culture was rich and
vigorous. Great strides were made in science and mathematics, new and
promising forms of literature were invented, but at the same time the
sheltered air of the Museum tended to produce, as is inevitably the case
with collegiate institutions, a rather frigid and academic type of work.
At Alexandria, for instance, the first critics arose, and the first
literary scholars, whose task was mainly to elucidate and comment upon
the works of Homer. One of these scholars invented the Greek system of
breathings and accents to help in the recital of verse. The most famous
of all of them was Aristarchus, the Father of Criticism. In science and
mathematics we must mention our old friend Euclid, who reigned in the
hearts of schoolboys until the day before yesterday. Here worked
Archimedes, the great engineer and founder of mechanics, statics, and
dynamics. His researches in these directions remained unequalled until
the seventeenth century _anno Domini_. Wondrous stories are told of his
inventions and of his absent-mindedness. Once as he was entering the
bath the overflowing of the water gave him a valuable scientific hint.
He was so pleased that he forgot to dress, but ran home through the
streets crying, “Heureka! Heureka!” At Alexandria, too, lived
Eratosthenes, who first measured the circumference of the earth and
worked out a system of chronology for history.
[Illustration: PLATE LXXXV. ALEXANDER THE GREAT
_Mansell & Co._]
There were many other historians of lesser repute at the Museum.
In poetry Alexandria is connected with some important developments,
chiefly literary revivals of ancient modes. Thus Apollonius the Rhodian
attempted to revive the epic, and wrote a long poem in hexameter verse
on the Argonautic expedition of Jason. It is of course rather cold and
formal, it is a long way from Homer, but it is of considerable merit in
the field of poetry. Alexandria revived also the elegiac couplet,
chiefly for short epigrams, some of which have the beauty and colour of
a Greek gem. We may see for an example that epigram of Callimachus from
which I have taken the couplet at the head of my Introduction, and which
was so charmingly translated by William Johnson Cory. I quote another
elegiac epigram of Meleager’s to show how modern in tone and subject
these dainty lyrics had become in the first century B.C.:
“Poor foolish heart, I cried ‘Beware,’
I vowed thou wouldst be captured,
So fondly hovering round the snare,
With thy false love enraptured.
“I cried, and thou art caught at last,
All vainly flutterest in the toils.
Lord Love himself hath bound thee fast
And meshed thy pinions in his coils.
“And he hath set thee on his fire,
In drugs thy swooning soul immersed,
In stifling perfumes of desire,
With scalding tears to quench thy thirst.”
So far it is mainly a record of revivals, but in Theocritus, who, though
Sicilian by birth, passed most of his active career at Alexandria, we
have the inventor of a new and most important branch of literature. With
him pastoral poetry was a fresh and genuine creation. His Idylls are, as
their name implies, a series of cameo pictures of shepherd life in
Sicily. We have found no space here to speak of the later developments
of Sicilian history, which in the fourth and third centuries became
once more a desperate battleground between Carthaginian invaders and
clever Syracusan tyrants like Dionysius and Agathocles. It is strange to
think that the beautiful rustic life depicted by Theocritus could exist
among the hills and glens of Sicily in spite of all the turmoil of
history. Mr. Andrew Lang has completely vindicated Theocritus from the
charge of artificiality by pointing out that the shepherds of modern
Greece sing in language of refined and impassioned poetry that is
perfectly natural and spontaneous. Large parts of the Idylls sound like
quotations of such songs of Nature. Theocritus was, of course, the
source of that pastoral convention which has produced so much that is
artificial in art and literature amid much of supreme beauty. We think
at once of Vergil, Spenser, Sidney, Milton, Watteau, and the Dresden
shepherdess. Theocritus is the literary father of all these. In his
famous Fifteenth Idyll, which describes with exquisite humour the
conversation of a pair of Sicilian dames going to see a festival of
Adonis at Alexandria, we have the beginnings of another literary
form--the mime. This is a rudimentary style of drama which seeks to
portray little genre scenes of life with no attempt at a plot. Herondas
of Cos was the principal master of this art.
Two pupils of Theocritus were Bion and Moschus, both accomplished
elegiac poets. Bion’s dirge for Daphnis and Moschus’ lament for Bion
have provided the type for Vergil’s lament for Daphnis, for Milton’s
“Lycidas,” for Shelley’s “Adonais,” and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis.”
ATHENS AND HER PHILOSOPHERS
In Alexandria, then, the Hellenic genius was as fruitful as ever. But it
was growing under glass there, and it was not pure Occidental culture.
We have to think of the Greek Ptolemies, descended from Macedonian
generals, as on the one hand writing Greek poetry and inviting Greek
scholars to criticise it, but on the other hand accepting homage and
[Illustration: Plate 86.--Relief from Pergamum.
W. Titzenthaler, Photo. Berlin, W.]
adulation as Eastern potentates, and actually marrying their sisters
after the customary manner of Pharaohs. In Egypt Father Zeus took over
the horns of Amen-Ra and became Zeus Ammon. Aphrodite, the foam-born
goddess, assumed her Oriental nature once more and was mated with young
Adonis in weird and lascivious Eastern ritual. Adonis was no Grecian
youth, but a mystic personification of the spring, and his worshippers
tore their hair and made lamentation for him with the same frenzy as
made the priests of Carmel cut themselves with knives in honour of Baal.
All over Asia Minor Hellenism had to mingle with Asiatic elements,
losing in the contact all its fine austerity and sweet reasonableness.
Hence was born the worship of Cybele, an Oriental Great Mother, with
horrid mysteries performed by priestly eunuchs. Even the sculpture with
which the wealthy Attalids adorned their great altar of Zeus at
Pergamum, though Greek in plot and execution, is of almost Asiatic
luxuriance and voluptuous beauty.[111] Passion and effort replace calm
and dignity even as they do in the new Asiatic schools of oratory.
Alexander’s violent battering at the gates which separate East from West
had produced a strange hybrid in many of the cities of Eastern Greece.
But in some quarters the pure Greek spirit still produced lovely and
reasonable work in art and literature alike. It seems to me impossible
to think of degeneracy in connection with the Aphrodite of Melos, known
to the public as the Venus of Milo.[112] If she has the charm and
suavity of Praxiteles, she has the dignity and breadth of Pheidias.
Unless you follow the pedants who make some point of the arrangement of
her drapery, there is not a trait of vulgarity in her aspect. No doubt
if we had the original Lady of Cnidos we should know better, but at
present this superb statue rightly stands as the embodiment of feminine
loveliness in statuary. And yet all the archæological indications go to
prove that her author lived at the very end of the second century in the
Asiatic city of Antioch, on the Mæander. She was found in a cavern on
the little island of Melos, hidden there by who knows what devout
worshipper or terrified pirate? She is, in fact, surrounded with
mystery. No one has succeeded in restoring her missing arms, though far
the most plausible theory is that which would make her hold a shield for
a mirror in the same manner as the Victory of Brescia. No one has found
anything else in Greek sculpture which could belong to the same artist,
or even to the same phase of art. I name her here only to prove that you
cannot fairly close the history of Greek art with Praxiteles or any
other named sculptors, seeing that an unnamed artist living two
centuries later could produce a statue on the same plane of excellence.
One of the most interesting figures among the warriors who followed
Alexander was Demetrius, the Besieger of Cities, who gained his title
from a celebrated but unsuccessful siege of Rhodes. He gained the
kingdom of Macedonia and enslaved Athens. In celebration of a naval
victory gained by him in 306 B.C. he set up at Samothrace a wonderful
statue of Victory standing on the prow of a warship.[113] Her wings are
outspread, her drapery is blown back by the wind, she is all life and
motion. Along with the Venus of Milo she is the chief glory of the
sculpture galleries in the Louvre. The reader should compare her with
that earlier Victory fashioned by Pæonius. He will see that her drapery
is much richer and the whole conception far more sensational. Both are
very beautiful statues, but a pure taste will probably prefer the
earlier one.