The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

were distributed among the citizens of Athens as payment for

attending the law courts, the parliament, and the theatre. It was also

ordered that all cases of importance would be tried at Athens, and judicial

decisions then as now were looked upon at Athens as saleable articles

belonging to the court. The Greeks soon discovered that the Athenians

were harder masters than the Persians. They began to envy the fate of the

Ionian cities, whose municipal rights were undisturbed. They rose up

against their tyrant; long wars ensued; and finally the ships of Athens

were burnt and its walls beaten down to the music of flutes. Then Sparta

became supreme, also tyrannised, and also fell; and then Thebes followed

its example, till at last all the states of Greece were so exhausted that the

ambition of supremacy died away, and each city cared only for its own

life.

 

The jealousy and distrust which prevented the union of the Greeks, and

the constant wars in which they were engaged, sufficiently explain how it

was that they did not conquer Persian, and by this time Persia had

discovered how to conquer them. When Xerxes was on his famous

march he was told by a Greek that if he chose to bribe the orators of

Greece he could do with that country what he pleased, but that he would

never conquer it by force. This method of making war was now adopted

by the king. When Agesilaus the Spartan had already begun the conquest

of the Persian empire, ten thousand golden coins marked with the effigy

of a bowman were sent to the demagogues of Athens, Corinth, and

Thebes. Those cities at once made war upon Sparta, and Agesilaus was

recalled—driven out of Asia, as he used to say, by ten thousand of the

king’s archers. In this manner the Greek orators, who were often very

eloquent men but who never refused a bribe, kept their country

continually at war, till at last it was in such an enfeebled state that the

Persian had no longer anything to fear, and even used his influence in

making peace. The land which might have been the mistress of the East

passed under the protection of an empire in its decay.

 

It was now that a new power sprang into life. Macedonia was a hilly

country on the northern boundaries of Greece; a Greek colony having

settled there in ancient times, the reigning house and the language of the

courts were Hellenic; the mass of the people were barbarians. It was an

old head placed on young shoulders—the intellect of the Greek united

with the strength and sinews of wild and courageous mountaineers.

 

The celebrated Philip, when a young man, had passed some time in

Greece; he had seen what could be done with money in that country; he

conjectured what might be done if the money were sustained by arms.

When he became king of Macedon, he made himself president of the

Greek confederation, obtaining by force and skilful address, by bribery

and intrigue, the position which Athens and Sparta had once possessed.

He was preparing to conquer Persia and to avenge the ancient wrongs of

Greece when he was murdered, and Alexander, like Frederick the Great,

inherited an army disciplined to perfection and the great design for which

that army had been prepared.

 

Alexander reduced and garrisoned the rebellious Greeks, passed over into

Asia Minor, defeated a Persian army at the Granicus, marched along the

Ionian coast, and crossed over the snowy range of Taurus, which the

Persians neglected to defend. He heard that the Great King was behind

him with his army entangled in the mountains. He went back, won the

battle of Issus, and took prisoner the mother and wife and daughter of

Darius. He passed into Syria and laid siege to Tyre, the Cherbourg of the

Persians, and took it after several months; this gave him possession of the

Mediterranean Sea. He passed down the Syrian coast, crossed the

desert—a three days’ journey—which separates Palestine from Egypt,

received the submission of that satrapy and made arrangements for its

administration, visited the oracle of Jupiter Ammon in The Sahara, and

returned to Tyre. Thence making a long detour to avoid the sandy deserts

of Arabia, he entered the plains of Mesopotami, inhabited only by the

ostrich and the wild ass, and marched towards the ruins of Nineveh, near

which he fought his third and last great battle with the Persians. He

proceeded to Babylon, which at once opened its vast gates. He restored

the Chaldean priesthood and the old idolatry of Belus. He took Susa,

Ecbatana, and Persepolis, the other three palatial cities, reducing the

highlanders who had so long levied black mail on the Persian monarchs.

He pursued Darius to the moist, forest-covered shores of the Caspian Sea,

and inflicted a terrible death on the assassins of that ill-fated king. The

Persian histories relate that Alexander discovered Darius apparently dead

upon the ground. He alighted from his horse; he raised his enemy’s head

upon his knees; he shed tears and kissed the expiring monarch who

opened his eyes and said, “The world has a thousand doors through which

its tenants continually enter and pass away.” “I swear to you,” cried

Alexander, “ I never wished a day like this. I desired not to see your

royal head in the dust, nor that blood should stain these cheeks.” The

legend is a fiction, but it illustrates the character of Alexander. Such

legends are not related of Genghis Khan or of Tamerlane by the people

whom they conquered.

 

Alexander now marched by way of Mushed, Herat, and the reedy shores

of Lake Zurrah to Kandahar and Kabul. He entered that delightful land in

which the magpies fluttering from tree to tree, and the white daisies

shining in the meadow grass, reminded the soldiers of their home.

Turning again towards the north, he climbed over the lofty back of the

Hindu Kush, where the people are kept inside their houses half the year

by snow, and descended into the province of Bactria, a land of low,

waving hills, destitute of trees and covered only with a dry kind of grass.

But as he passed on, crossing the muddy waters of the Oxus, he arrived at

the oases of Bokhara and Samarkand, regions of garden-land with smiling

orchards of fruit trees and poplars rustling their silvery leaves. Finally he

reached the banks of the Jaxartes, the frontier of the Persian empire.

Beyond that river was an ocean of salt and sandy plains, inhabited by

wild Tartar or Turkish tribes who boasted that they reposed beneath the

shade neither of a tree nor of a king, who lived by rapine like beasts of

prey, and whose wives rode forth to attack a passing caravan if their

husbands happened to be robbing elsewhere—a practice which gave rise

to the romantic stories of the Amazons. These people came down to the

banks of the river near Khojend and challenged Alexander to come across

and fight. He inflated the soldiers’ tents, which were made of skins,

formed them into rafts, paddled across and gave the Tartars as much as

they desired. He returned to Afghanistan and marched through the

western passes into the open plains of the Punjab, where perhaps at some

future day hordes of drilled Mongols and Hindu sepoys will fight under

Russian and English officers for the empire of the Asiatic world. He built

a fleet on the Indus, sailed down it to its mouth, and dispatched his

general Nearchus to the Persian Gulf by sea, while he himself marched

back through the terrific deserts which separate Persian from the Indus.

 

So ended Alexander’s journey of conquest, which was marked not only

by heaps of bones on battlefields and by the blackened ashes of ruined

towns, but also by cities and colonies which he planted as he passed. The

memory of that extraordinary man has never perished in the East. The

Turkomans still speak of his deeds of war as if they had been performed a

few years ago. In the tea booths of Bokhara it is yet the custom to read

aloud the biography in verse of Secunder Rooni—by some believed to be

a prophet, by others one of the believing genii. There are still existing

chiefs in the valleys of the Oxus and the Indus who claim to be heirs of

his royal person, and tribes who boast that their ancestors were soldiers of

his army, and who refuse to give their children in marriage to those who

are not of the same descent.

 

He returned to Babylon, and there found ambassadors from all parts of

the world waiting to offer him the homage of their masters. His success

was incredible; it had not met with a single check. The only men who

had ever given him cause to be alarmed were his own countrymen and

soldiers, but these also he had mastered by his skill and strength of mind.

 

The Macedonians had expected that he would adhere to the constitution

and customs of their own country, which gave the king small power in

time of peace and allowed full liberty and even licence of speech on the

part of the nobles round the throne. But Alexander now considered

himself not king of Macedonia but emperor of Asia, and successor of

Darius, the King of Kings. They had supposed that he would give them

the continent to plunder as a carcass; that they would have nothing to do

but plunder and enjoy. There were disappointed and alarmed when they

found that he was reappointing Persian gentlemen as satraps, everywhere

treating the conquered people with indulgence, everywhere levying native

troops. They were disgusted and alarmed when they saw him put on the

tiara of the Great King, and the woman’s girdle, and the white and purple

robe, and they burst into fierce wrath when he ordered that the ceremony

of prostration should be performed in his presence as it had been in that

of the Persian king.

 

In all this they saw only the presumption of a man intoxicated by success.

But Alexander knew well that he could only govern an empire so

immense by securing the allegiance of the Persian nobles; he knew that

they would not respect him unless they were made to humble themselves

before him after the manner of their country, and this they certainly

would not do unless his own officers did the same. He therefore

attempted to obtain the prostration of the Macedonians, and alleged as a

pretext for so extraordinary a demand the oracle of Ammon—that he was

the son of Jove.

 

It is possible, indeed, that he believed this himself, for his vanity

amounted to madness. He could not endure a candid word, and was

subject under wine and contradiction to fits of ungovernable rage. At

Samarkand he murdered Clitus, who had insulted him grossly but who

was his friend and associate, and who had saved his life. It was a

drunken action, and his repentance was as violent as his wrath. For

Alexander was a man of extremes: his magnanimity and his cruelty were

without bounds. If he forgave it was right royally; if he punished he

pounded to the dust and scattered to the winds. Yet with all his faults it is

certain that he had some conception of the art of governing a great

empire. Mr. Grote complains that “he had none of that sense of

correlative right and obligation which characterised the free Greeks,” but

Mr. Grote describes Alexander too much from the Athenian point of

view. In all municipalities, in all aristocratic bodies, in all corporate

assemblies, in all robber communities, in all savage families or clans, the

privileged members have a sense of correlative right and obligation. The

real question is, how far and to what extent this feeling prevails outside