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

>the little circle of selfish reciprocity and mutual admiration. The

Athenians did not include their slaves in their ideas of correlative right

and obligation; nor their prisoners of war, when they passed a public

decree to cut off all their thumbs, so that they might not be able to handle

the pike, but might still be able to handle the oar; nor their allies, when

they took their money and spent it all upon themselves. Alexander

committed some criminal and despotic acts, but it was his noble idea to

blot out the word “barbarian” from the vocabulary of the Greeks, and to

amalgamate them with the Persians.

 

Mr Grote declares that Alexander intended to make Greece Persian, not

Persia Greek. Alexander certainly intended to make Greece a satrapy, as

it was afterwards made a Roman province. And where would have been

the loss? The independence of the various Greek cities had at one time

assisted the progress of the nation. But that time was past. Of late they

had made use of their freedom only to indulge in civil war. All that was

worthy of being preserved in Greece was its language and its culture, and

to that Alexander was not indifferent. He sent thirty thousand Persian

boys to school, and so laid the foundations of the sovereignty of Greek

ideas. He behaved towards the conquered people not as a robber but as a

sovereign. The wisdom of his policy is clearly proved by the praises of

the Oriental writers and by the blame of the Greeks, who looked upon

barbarians as a people destined by nature to be slaves. But had Alexander

governed Persia as they desired, the land would have been in a continual

state of insurrection, and it would have been impossible for him, even had

he lived, to have undertaken new designs.

 

The story that he wept because there were no more worlds for him to

conquer would seem to imply that after the conquest of the Persian

empire there was nothing left for him in the way of war but to go out

savage-hunting in the forests of Europe, the steppes of Tartary, or the

deserts of Central Africa. However, there still remained a number of

powerful and attractive states, even if we place China entirely aside as a

land which could not be touched by the stream of events, however widely

they might overflow.

 

Alexander no doubt often reflected to himself that after all he had only

walked in the footsteps of other men. It was the genius of his father

which had given him possession of Greece; it was the genius of the

Persians which had planted the Asia that he had gathered. It is true that

he had conquered the Persian empire more thoroughly than the Persians

had ever been able to conquer it themselves. He had not left behind him a

single rock fortress or forest den uncarried, a single tribe untamed. Yet

still he had not been able to pass the frontiers which they had fixed. He

had once attempted to do so and had failed. When he had reached the

eastern river of the Punjab, or “Land of the Five Streams,” he stood on

the brink of the empire with the Himalayas on his left and before him a

wide expanse of sand. Beyond that desert was a country which the

Persians had never reached. There a river as mighty as the Indus took its

course towards the sea through a land of surpassing beauty and enormous

wealth. There ruled a king who rode on a white elephant, and who wore

a mail coat composed entirely of precious stone; whose wives slept on a

thousand silken mattresses and a thousand golden beds. The imagination

of Alexander was inflamed by these glowing tales. He yearned to

discover a new world, to descend upon a distant and unknown people like

a god, to enter the land of diamonds and rubies, of gleaming and

transparent robes—the India of the Indies, the romantic, and half-fabulous Bengal. But the soldiers were weary of collecting plunder

which they could not carry, and refused to march. Alexander spent three

days in his tent in an agony of anger and distress. He established

garrisons on the banks of the Indus; there could be little doubt that some

day or other he would resume his lost design.

 

There was one country which had sent him no ambassadors. It was

Arabia Felix, situated at the mouth of the Red Sea, abounding in forests

of those tearful trees which shed a yellow, fragrant gum grateful to the

gods, burnt in their honour on all the altars of the world. Arabia was also

enriched by the monopoly of the trade between Egypt and the coast of

Malabar. It was filled with rich cities. It had never paid tribute to the

Persians. On the land side it was protected by deserts and by wandering

hordes who drank from hidden wells. But it could easily be approached

by sea.

 

On the opposite side of the Arabian gulf lay Ethiopia, reputed to be the

native land of gold, but chiefly attractive to a vain-glorious and emulative

man from the fact that a Persian emperor had attempted its conquest and

had failed. There was also Carthage, the great republic of the West, and

there were rich silver-mines in Spain.

 

And can it be supposed that Alexander would remain content when he

had not yet made the circuit of the Grecian world? Was there not Sicily,

which Athens had attempted to conquer, and in vain? Rome had not yet

become great, but the Italian city-states were already famed in war.

Alexander’s uncle had invaded that country and had been beaten back.

He declared that Alexander had fallen on the chamber of the women and

he on the changer of the men. This sarcasm followed the conqueror into

Central Asia, and was flung in his teeth by Clitus on that night of

drunkenness and blood, every incident of which must have been

continually present to his mind.

 

We might therefore fairly infer, even if we had no evidence to guide us,

that Alexander did not consider his career accomplished. But in point of

fact we do know that he had given orders to fit out a thousand ships-of-war; that he intended one fleet to attack Arabia from the Mediterranean

Sea. He had already arranged a plan for connecting Egypt with his North

African possession that were to be, and had he lived a few years longer

the features of the world might have been changed. The Italians were

unconquerable if united, but there was at that time no supreme city to

unite them as they were afterwards united against Pyrrhus. It is at least

not impossible that Alexander might have conquered Italy; that the

peninsula might have become a land of independent cultivated cities like

the Venice and Genoa and Florence of the Middle Ages; that Greek might

have been established as the reigning language, and Latin remained a

rustic dialect and finally died away. It is at all events certain that in a few

more years Alexander would have made Carthage Greek, and that event

alone would have profoundly influenced the career of Rome.

 

However, this was not to be. Alexander went out in a boat among the

marshes in the neighbourhood of Babylon and caught a fever, the first

symptoms of which appeared after a banquet which had been kept up all

the night and the whole of the following day. At that time the Arabian

expedition was prepared, and Nearchus the admiral was under sailing

orders. Day after day the king continued to send for his officers to give

orders, and to converse about his future plans. But the fever gradually

increased, and while yet in the possession of his sense he was deprived of

the power of speech. The physicians announced that there was no longer

any hope.

 

And then were forgotten all the crimes and follies of which he had been

guilty—his assumption of the honours of a god, the murder of his bosom

friend. The Macedonian soldiers came in to him weeping to bid him the

last farewell. He sat up and saluted them man by man as they marched

past his bedside. When this last duty had been discharged he threw back

his weary frame. He expired on the evening of the next day.

 

The night, the dark, murky night, came on. None dared light a lamp; the

fires were extinguished. By the glimmering of the stars and the faint

beams of the horned moon the young nobles of the household were seen

wandering like maniacs through the town. On the roofs of their houses

the Babylonians stood grave and silent, with folded hands and eyes turned

towards heaven as if awaiting a supernatural event. High aloft in the air

the trees of the hanging gardens waved their moaning boughs, and the

daughters of Babylon sang the dirge of the dead. In that sorrowful hour

the conquerors could not be distinguished from the conquered; the

Persians lamented their just and merciful master; the Macedonians their

greatest, bravest king. In an apartment of the palace an aged woman was

lying on the ground; her hair was torn and dishevelled; a golden crown

had fallen from her head. “Ah! Who will now protect my girls?” she

said. Then, veiling her face and turning from her grand-daughters, who

wept at her feet, she stubbornly refused both food and light. She who had

survived Darius was unable to survive Alexander. In famine and

darkness she sat, and on the fifth day she died.

 

Alexander’s body lay cold and stiff. The Egyptian and Chaldean

embalmers were commanded to do their work. Yet long they gazed upon

that awful corpse before they could venture to touch it with their hands.

Placed in a golden coffin, shrouded in a bed of fragrant herbs, it remained

two years at Babylon, and was then carried to Egypt to be buried in the

oasis of Ammon. But Ptolemy stopped it on the road, and interred it at

Alexandria in a magnificent temple, which he built for the purpose and

surrounded with groves for the celebration of funereal rites and military

games. Long afterwards, when the dominion of the Macedonians had

passed away, there came Roman emperors who gazed upon that tomb

with reverence and awe. The golden coffin had been sold by a degenerate

Ptolemy, and had been changed for one of glass through which the body

could be seen. Augustus placed upon it a nosegay and crown. Septimus

Severus had the coffin sealed up in a vault. Then came the savage

Caracalla, who had massacred half Alexandria because he did not like the

town. He ordered the vault to be opened and the coffin to be exposed,

and all feared that some act of sacrilege would be committed. But those

august remains could touch the better feelings which existed even in a

monster’s heart. He took off his purple robe, his imperial ornaments, all

that he had of value on his person, and laid them reverently upon the

tomb.

 

The empire of Alexander was partitioned into three great kingdoms—that

of Egypt and Cyrene, that of Macedonia, including Greece, and that of

Asia, the capital of which was at first on the banks of the Euphrates, but

was afterwards unwisely transferred to Antioch. In these three kingdoms,

and in their numerous dependencies, Greek became the language of

government and trade. It was spoken all over the world—on the shores of

Malabar, in the harbours of Ceylon, among the Abyssinian mountains, in

distant Mozambique. The shepherds of the Tartar steppes loved to listen

to recitations of Greek poetry, and Greek tragedies were performed to

Brahmin ”houses” by the waters of the Indus. The history of the Greeks

of Inner Asia, however soon comes to an end. Sandracottus, the Rajah