AT BABYLON
The victory of Arbela was decisive. Alexander of Macedon was now, beyond
all question, the Great King. All of the hundred and twenty-seven
provinces out of which Cyrus and his successors had built up the huge
structure of the Persian Empire were not indeed yet subdued, and the
person of Darius had still to be captured; but the title was practically
undisputed. The first consequence of the victory was that Babylon
and Susa[64] the two capitals, as they may be called, were at once
surrendered by the satraps that governed them. Mazæus was in command
at Babylon. He had done his best, as we have seen, on the fatal day of
Arbela; but he had seen that all was lost, and that nothing remained
but to make such terms as was possible with the conqueror. He met the
Macedonian king as he approached the city, and offered him the keys; and
Susa, at the same time, was surrendered to the lieutenant who was sent to
take possession of it and its treasures.
It was indeed rather as a Deliverer than as a Conqueror that Alexander
was received by the inhabitants of Babylon. The Persians had never been
more than a garrison, and had made themselves as hated there as they
had elsewhere. Hence it was with genuine delight that the population
flocked out to meet their new master. Sacrifices over which the priests
prayed for his welfare were offered on altars built by the wayside, and
enthusiastic crowds spread flowers under his feet.
Among those who came out to pay their respects to the king was a
deputation from the great Jewish colony which had long existed in the
city, and which, indeed, continued to inhabit it, till almost the day of
its final abandonment. Alexander greeted them with especial kindness,
and promised that they should have his favour and protection. Charidemus
had been furnished by Manasseh of Damascus with a general letter of
introduction to the heads of the dispersed Hebrew communities. This
he lost no time in presenting, and he found that he had made a most
interesting acquaintance.
Eleazar of Babylon was indeed a remarkable personage. His family, which
was distantly connected with the royal house of David, had been settled
in the city for more than two centuries, tracing itself back to a certain
Gemariah who had been one of the notables removed from Jerusalem by
Nebuchadnezzar in the first Captivity.[65] He was now in extreme old age,
having completed his ninety-second year, and he had for some time ceased
to leave his apartments. But his intellectual faculties retained their
full vigour. He still held the chief control of a vast business which
had grown up under his care. The Jews had already begun to show their
genius for finance, and Eleazar surpassed predecessors and contemporaries
in the boldness and skill of his combinations. The Persian kings were
far too wealthy to need the help which modern rulers are often glad
to get from bankers and capitalists; but their subjects of every rank
often stood in want of it. A satrap, about to start for his province,
would require a loan for his outfit, and would be able to repay it, with
liberal interest, if he could hold power for a year. A courtier, anxious
to make a present to some queen of the hareem, a merchant buying goods
which he would sell at more than cent. per cent. profit to the tribes of
the remote east; in fact, every one who wanted money either for business
or for pleasure was sure to find it, if only he had security to offer,
with Eleazar of Babylon, or with one of his correspondents. The old man
had able agents and lieutenants, but no single transaction was completed
without his final approval. Even the little that Charidemus and his
friend could see, as outsiders, of the magnitude of his affairs, struck
them with wonder. Greek commerce was but a petty affair compared to a
system which seemed to take in the whole world. But there was something
in Eleazar far more interesting than any distinction which he might have
as the head of a great mercantile house. He was, so to speak, a mine of
notable memories, both national and personal.
Among the worthies with whom his family claimed relationship was the
remarkable man who had held high office under three successive dynasties
of Babylonian rulers—Nebuchadnezzar, the conqueror of Jerusalem;
Astyages[66] the Mede; and Cyrus the Persian. One of Eleazar’s most
precious possessions was a book of manuscript, written, it was believed,
by the great statesman’s own hand, which recorded the story of himself
and his companions. Eleazar, when he found that his young guests were
something better than mere soldiers of fortune, thinking of nothing but
fighting and prize money, and had a sympathic interest in great deeds
and great men, would read from this precious volume its stirring stories
of heroism, translating them as he went on from the original Hebrew or
Aramaic into Greek, a language which he spoke with ease and correctness.
The narrative stirred the two friends to an extraordinary degree, and
indeed may be said to have influenced their whole lives. They admired the
temperate self-restraint of the young captives who preferred their pulse
and water to the dainties from the royal tables, sumptuous but unclean,
which their keepers would have forced upon them.
“Why,” cried Charondas, when the story was finished, “the young fellows
might have won a prize at Olympia. ’Tis in the training, I believe, that
more than half of the men break down.”
The young man blushed hot as soon as the words had escaped him. It was,
he remembered, a painful subject, and he could have bitten his tongue
out in his self-reproach for mentioning it. The smile on Charidemus’s
face soon reassured him. Larger interests and hopes had made the
young Macedonian entirely forget what he had once considered to be an
unpardonable and irremediable wrong.
With still more profound interest did the friends listen to the tale of
how the dauntless three chose rather to be thrust into the burning fiery
furnace than to bow down to the golden image which the king had set up.
“Marked you that?” cried Charidemus to his friend, when the reader, to
whom they had listened with breathless eagerness, brought the narrative
to an end; “Marked you that? _If it be so, our God whom we serve is able
to deliver us out from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us
out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king,
that we will not serve thy gods._ How splendid! _If not_—I can understand
a man walking up to what looks like certain death, if he feels quite
sure that Apollo, or Poseidon, or Aphrodité, is going to carry him off
in a cloud; and I can understand—for of course we see it every day—a man
taking his life in his hand, from duty, or for a prize, or, it may be,
from sheer liking for danger; but this passes my comprehension. Just
to bow down to an image, which every one else is doing, and they won’t
do it. Their God, they feel sure, will save them; but in any case they
will stand firm. Yes, that _if not_ is one of the grandest things I ever
heard.”
Old Eleazar heard with delight the young man’s enthusiastic words. He had
no passion for making proselytes, and, indeed, believed that they were
best made without direct effort; but he could not help saying, “Ah! my
young friends, is not that a God worth serving? It is something to be
sure as these Three were sure, that He will save you; but it is still
more to feel, that whether He save you or no, anything is better than to
do Him any wrong.”
Eleazar had also recollections of his own which keenly interested the
young men.
“Your king’s success,” he said one day, “has not surprised me. In fact, I
have been expecting it for these last sixty years and more. When I was a
young man I saw something of events of which, of course, you have heard,
when the younger Cyrus brought up some ten thousand of your soldiers to
help him in pulling down his brother from the Persian throne, and setting
himself upon it. Mind you, I never loved the young prince; if he had
got his way, no one but himself and his soldiers would have been a whit
better for it. Indeed, I did all that I could to help the king against
him. We Jews have a good deal to say to the making of war, even when we
don’t carry swords ourselves; gold and silver, you may easily understand,
are often far more powerful than steel. Well; I was present at the
battle, and though I did not wish well to your countrymen’s purpose, I
could not help seeing how very near they came to accomplishing it. I saw
the pick of the Persian army fly absolutely without striking a blow when
the Greek phalanx charged it. Nor could there have been a shadow of doubt
that what the Greeks did with the left of the king’s army they would have
done with his centre and his right, if they only had had the chance. It
was only the foolish fury of the young prince that saved the king. If
Cyrus had only kept his head, the day was his. Well, what I saw then, and
what I heard afterwards of the marvellous way in which these men, without
a general, and almost without stores, made their way home, convinced me
that what has happened now was only a matter of time. For sixty years or
more, I say, I have been waiting for it to come to pass. Time after time
it seemed likely; but something always hindered it. The right man never
came, or if he came, some accident cut him off just as he was setting to
work. But now he has come, and the work is done.”
[Illustration: IN THE GARDENS OF BABYLON.]
The friends spent with their venerable host all the time that was not
required for their military duties; and these, indeed, were of the very
slightest kind. The fact was that his society was very much more to their
taste than that of their comrades. Alexander’s army had been campaigning
for more than three years with very little change or relaxation. If
they were not actually engaged in some laborious service, they had some
such services in near prospect; and what time was given them for rest
had to be strictly spent in preparation. Never, indeed, before, had the
whole force been quartered in a city; and a month in Babylon, one of the
most luxurious places in the world—not to use any worse epithet—was a
curious change from the hardships of the bivouac and the battle-field.
And then the soldiers found themselves in possession of an unusual sum
of money. An enormous treasure had fallen into Alexander’s hand, and he
had dispensed it with characteristic liberality, giving to each private
soldier sums varying from thirty to ten pounds, according to the corps in
which he served, and to the officers in proportion. Such opportunities
for revelry were not neglected, and the city presented a scene of license
and uproar from which Charidemus and his friend were very glad to escape.
For Charondas the household of Eleazar possessed a particular attraction
in the person of his great-grand-daughter Miriam. He had chanced, before
his introduction to the family, to do the girl and her attendant the
service of checking the unwelcome attentions of some half-tipsy soldiers.
The young Miriam began by being grateful, and ended by feeling a warmer
interest in her gallant and handsome protector. So the time passed only
too quickly by. There was no need to go for exercise or recreation
beyond the spacious pleasure grounds which were attached to Eleazar’s
dwelling. They included, indeed, part of the famous “hanging-garden”
which the greatest of the Babylonian kings had constructed for his queen,
to reproduce for her among the level plains of the Euphrates the wooded
hills, her native Median uplands, over which she had once delighted
to wander. The elaborate structure—terrace rising above terrace till
they overtopped the city walls—had been permitted to fall into decay;
but the wildness of the spot, left as it had been to nature, more than
compensated, to some tastes at least, the absence of more regular beauty.
In another part of the garden was a small lake, supplied by a canal
which was connected with the Euphrates. This was a specially favoured
resort of the young people. Water-lilies, white, yellow, and olive, half
covered its surface with their gorgeous flowers; and its depths were
tenanted by swarms of gold fish. A light shallop floated on its waters,
and Miriam often watched with delight the speed with which the friends
could propel it through the water, though she could never be induced to
trust herself to it. Days so spent and evenings employed in the readings
described above, and the talk which grew out of them, made a delightful
change from the realities of campaigning, realities which, for all the
excitements of danger and glory, were often prosaic and revolting.