Such were the sentiments excited by Alexander’s career even in the middle of 330 B. C., more than seven years before his death. During the following seven years, his additional achievements had carried astonishment yet farther. He had mastered, in defiance of fatigue, hardship, and combat, not merely all the eastern half of the Persian empire, but unknown Indian regions beyond its easternmost limits. Besides Macedonia, Greece, and Thrace, he possessed all that immense treasure and military force which had once rendered the Great King so formidable. By no contemporary man had any such power ever been known or conceived. With the turn of imagination then prevalent, many were doubtless disposed to take him for a god on earth, as Grecian spectators had once supposed with regard to Xerxes, when they beheld the innumerable Persian host crossing the Hellespont.[621]

Exalted to this prodigious grandeur, Alexander was at the time of his death little more than thirty-two years old—the age at which a citizen of Athens was growing into important commands; ten years less than the age for a consul at Rome;[622] two years younger than the age at which Timour first acquired the crown, and began his foreign conquests.[623] His extraordinary bodily powers were unabated; he had acquired a large stock of military experience; and what was still more important, his appetite for farther conquest was as voracious, and his readiness to purchase it at the largest cost of toil or danger, as complete, as it had been when he first crossed the Hellespont. Great as his past career had been, his future achievements, with such increased means and experience, were likely to be yet greater. His ambition would have been satisfied with nothing less than the conquest of the whole habitable world as then known;[624] and if his life had been prolonged, he would probably have accomplished it. Nowhere (so far as our knowledge reaches) did there reside any military power capable of making head against him; nor were his soldiers, when he commanded them, daunted or baffled by any extremity of cold, heat, or fatigue. The patriotic feelings of Livy dispose him to maintain[625] that Alexander, had he invaded Italy and assailed Romans or Samnites, would have failed and perished like his relative Alexander of Epirus. But this conclusion cannot be accepted. If we grant the courage and discipline of the Roman infantry to have been equal to the best infantry of Alexander’s army, the same cannot be said of the Roman cavalry as compared with the Macedonian Companions. Still less is it likely that a Roman consul, annually changed, would have been found a match for Alexander in military genius and combinations; nor, even if personally equal, would he have possessed the same variety of troops and arms, each effective in its separate way, and all conspiring to one common purpose—nor the same unbounded influence over their minds in stimulating them to full effort. I do not think that even the Romans could have successfully resisted Alexander the Great; though it is certain that he never throughout all his long marches encountered such enemies as they, nor even such as Samnites and Lucanians—combining courage, patriotism, discipline, with effective arms both for defence and for close combat.[626]

Among all the qualities which go to constitute the highest military excellence, either as a general or as a soldier, none was wanting in the character of Alexander. Together with his own chivalrous courage—sometimes indeed both excessive and unseasonable, so as to form the only military defect which can be fairly imputed to him—we trace in all his operations the most careful dispositions taken beforehand, vigilant precaution in guarding against possible reverse, and abundant resource in adapting himself to new contingences. Amidst constant success, these precautionary combinations were never discontinued. His achievements are the earliest recorded evidence of scientific military organization on a large scale, and of its overwhelming effects. Alexander overawes the imagination more than any other personage of antiquity, by the matchless development of all that constitutes effective force—as an individual warrior, and as organizer and leader of armed masses; not merely the blind impetuosity ascribed by Homer to Ares, but also the intelligent, methodized, and all-subduing compression which he personifies in Athênê. But all his great qualities were fit for use only against enemies; in which category indeed were numbered all mankind, known and unknown, except those who chose to submit to him. In his Indian campaigns, amidst tribes of utter strangers, we perceive that not only those who stand on their defence, but also those who abandon their property and flee to the mountains, are alike pursued and slaughtered.

Apart from the transcendent merits of Alexander as a soldier and a general, some authors give him credit for grand and beneficent views on the subject of imperial government, and for intentions highly favorable to the improvement of mankind. I see no ground for adopting this opinion. As far as we can venture to anticipate what would have been Alexander’s future, we see nothing in prospect except years of ever-repeated aggression and conquest, not to be concluded until he had traversed and subjugated all the inhabited globe. The acquisition of universal dominion—conceived not metaphorically, but literally, and conceived with greater facility in consequence of the imperfect geographical knowledge of the time—was the master-passion of his soul. At the moment of his death, he was commencing fresh aggression in the south against the Arabians, to an indefinite extent;[627] while his vast projects against the western tribes in Africa and Europe, as far as the pillars of Herakles, were consigned in the orders and memoranda confidentially communicated to Kraterus.[628] Italy, Gaul, and Spain, would have been successively attacked and conquered; the enterprises proposed to him when in Baktria by the Chorasmian prince Pharasmanes, but postponed then until a more convenient season, would have been next taken up, and he would have marched from the Danube northward round the Euxine and Palus Mæotis against the Scythians and the tribes of Caucasus.[629] There remained moreover the Asiatic regions east of the Hyphasis, which his soldiers had refused to enter upon, but which he certainly would have invaded at a future opportunity, were it only to efface the poignant humiliation of having been compelled to relinquish his proclaimed purpose. Though this sounds like romance and hyperbole, it was nothing more than the real insatiate aspiration of Alexander, who looked upon every new acquisition mainly as a capital for acquiring more.[630] “You are a man like all of us, Alexander—except that you abandon your home (said the naked Indian to him[631]) like a meddlesome destroyer, to invade the most distant regions; enduring hardship yourself, and inflicting hardship upon others.” Now, how an empire thus boundless and heterogeneous, such as no prince has ever yet realized, could have been administered with any superior advantages to subjects—it would be difficult to show. The mere task of acquiring and maintaining—of keeping satraps and tribute-gatherers in authority as well as in subordination—of suppressing resistances ever liable to recur in regions distant by months of march[632]—would occupy the whole life of a world-conqueror, without leaving any leisure for the improvements suited to peace and stability, if we give him credit for such purposes in theory.

But even this last is more than can be granted. Alexander’s acts indicate that he desired nothing better than to take up the traditions of the Persian empire; a tribute-levying and army-levying system, under Macedonians, in large proportion, as his instruments; yet partly also under the very same Persians who had administered before, provided they submitted to him. It has indeed been extolled among his merits that he was thus willing to re-appoint Persian grandees (putting their armed force however under the command of a Macedonian officer)—and to continue native princes in their dominions, if they did willing homage to him, as tributary subordinates. But all this had been done before him by the Persian kings, whose system it was to leave the conquered princes undisturbed, subject only to the payment of tribute, and to the obligation of furnishing a military contingent when required.[633] In like manner Alexander’s Asiatic empire would thus have been composed of an aggregate of satrapies and dependent principalities, furnishing money and soldiers; in other respects, left to the discretion of local rule, with occasional extreme inflictions of punishment, but no systematic examination or control.[634] Upon this, the condition of Asiatic empire in all ages, Alexander would have grafted one special improvement: the military organization of the empire, feeble under the Achæmenid princes, would have been greatly strengthened by his genius, and by the able officers formed in his school, both for foreign aggression and for home control.[635]

The Persian empire was a miscellaneous aggregate, with no strong feeling of nationality. The Macedonian conqueror who seized its throne was still more indifferent to national sentiment. He was neither Macedonian nor Greek. Though the absence of this prejudice has sometimes been mounted to him as a virtue, it only made room, in my opinion, for prejudices yet worse. The substitute for it was an exorbitant personality and self-estimation, manifested even in his earliest years, and inflamed by extraordinary success into the belief in divine parentage; which, while setting him above the idea of communion with any special nationality, made him conceive all mankind as subjects under one common sceptre to be wielded by himself. To this universal empire the Persian king made the nearest approach,[636] according to the opinions then prevalent. Accordingly Alexander, when victorious, accepted the position and pretensions of the overthrown Persian court as approaching most nearly to his full due. He became more Persian than either Macedonian or Greek. While himself adopting, as far as he could safely venture, the personal habits of the Persian court, he took studied pains to transform his Macedonian officers into Persian grandees, encouraging and even forcing intermarriages with Persian women according to Persian rites. At the time of Alexander’s death, there was comprised, in his written orders given to Kraterus, a plan for the wholesale transportation of inhabitants, both out of Europe into Asia, and out of Asia into Europe, in order to fuse these populations into one by multiplying intermarriages and intercourse.[637] Such reciprocal translation of peoples would have been felt as eminently odious, and could not have been accomplished without coercive authority.[638] It is rash to speculate upon unexecuted purposes; but, as far as we can judge, such compulsory mingling of the different races promises nothing favorable to the happiness of any of them, though it might serve as an imposing novelty and memento of imperial omnipotence.

In respect of intelligence and combining genius, Alexander was Hellenic to the full; in respect of disposition and purpose, no one could be less Hellenic. The acts attesting his Oriental violence of impulse, unmeasured self-will,[639] and exaction of reverence above the limits of humanity—have been already recounted. To describe him as a son of Hellas, imbued with the political maxims of Aristotle, and bent on the systematic diffusion of Hellenic culture for the improvement of mankind[640]—is, in my judgment, an estimate of his character contrary to the evidence. Alexander is indeed said to have invited suggestions from Aristotle as to the best mode of colonizing; but his temper altered so much, after a few years of Asiatic conquest, that he came not only to lose all deference for Aristotle’s advice, but even to hate him bitterly.[641] Moreover, though the philosopher’s full suggestions have not been preserved, yet we are told generally that he recommended Alexander to behave to the Greeks as a leader or president, or limited chief—and to the Barbarians (non-Hellenes) as a master;[642] a distinction substantially coinciding with that pointed out by Burke in his speeches at the beginning of the American war, between the principles of government proper to be followed by England in the American colonies, and in British India. No Greek thinker believed the Asiatics to be capable of that free civil polity[643] upon which the march of every Grecian community was based. Aristotle did not wish to degrade the Asiatics below the level to which they had been accustomed, but rather to preserve the Greeks from being degraded to the same level. Now Alexander recognized no such distinction as that drawn by his preceptor. He treated Greeks and Asiatics alike, not by elevating the latter, but by degrading the former. Though he employed all indiscriminately as instruments, yet he presently found the free speech of Greeks, and even of Macedonians, so distasteful and offensive, that his preferences turned more and more in favor of the servile Asiatic sentiment and customs. Instead of hellenizing Asia, he was tending to asiatize Macedonia and Hellas. His temper and character, as modified by a few years of conquest, rendered him quite unfit to follow the course recommended by Aristotle towards the Greeks—quite as unfit as any of the Persian kings, or as the French Emperor Napoleon, to endure that partial frustration, compromise, and smart from free criticism, which is inseparable from the position of a limited chief. Among a multitude of subjects more diverse-colored than even the army of Xerxes, it is quite possible that he might have turned his power towards the improvement of the rudest portions. We are told (though the fact is difficult to credit, from his want of time) that he abolished various barbarisms of the Hyrkanians, Arachosians, and Sogdians.[644] But Macedonians as well as Greeks would have been pure losers by being absorbed into an immense Asiatic aggregate.

Plutarch states that Alexander founded more than seventy new cities in Asia.[645] So large a number of them is neither verifiable nor probable, unless we either reckon up simple military posts, or borrow from the list of foundations really established by his successors. Except Alexandria in Egypt, none of the cities founded by Alexander himself can be shown to have attained any great development. Nearly all were planted among the remote, warlike, and turbulent peoples eastward of the Caspian Gates. Such establishments were really fortified posts to hold the country in subjection: Alexander lodged in them detachments from his army; but none of these detachments can well have been large, since he could not afford materially to weaken his army, while active military operations were still going on and while farther advance was in contemplation. More of these settlements were founded in Sogdiana than elsewhere; but respecting the Sogdian foundations, we know that the Greeks whom he established there, chained to the spot only by fear of his power, broke away in mutiny immediately on the news of his death.[646] Some Greek soldiers in Alexander’s army on the Jaxartes or the Hydaspes, sick and weary of his interminable marches, might prefer being enrolled among the colonists of a new city on one of these unknown rivers, to the ever-repeated routine of exhausting duty.[647] But it is certain that no volunteer emigrants would go forth to settle at distances such as their imaginations could hardly conceive. The absorbing appetite of Alexander was conquest, to the East, West, South, and North; the cities which he planted were established, for the most part, as garrisons to maintain his most distant and most precarious acquisitions. The purpose of colonization was altogether subordinate; and that of hellenizing Asia, so far as we can see, was not even contemplated, much less realized.

This process of hellenizing Asia—in so far as Asia was ever hellenized—which has often been ascribed to Alexander, was in reality the work of the Diadochi who came after him; though his conquests doubtless opened the door and established the military ascendency which rendered such a work practicable. The position, the aspirations, and the interests of these Diadochi—Antigonus, Ptolemy, Seleukus, Lysimachus, etc.—were materially different from those of Alexander. They had neither appetite nor means for new and remote conquest; their great rivalry was with each other; each sought to strengthen himself near home against the rest. It became a matter of fashion and pride with them, not less than of interest, to found new cities immortalizing their family names. These foundations were chiefly made in the regions of Asia near and known to Greeks, where Alexander had planted none. Thus the great and numerous foundations of Seleukus Nikator and his successors covered Syria, Mesopotamia, and parts of Asia Minor. All these regions were known to Greeks, and more or less tempting to new Grecian immigrants—not out of reach or hearing of the Olympic and other festivals, as the Jaxartes and the Indus were. In this way a considerable influx of new hellenic blood was poured into Asia during the century succeeding Alexander,—probably in great measure from Italy and Sicily, where the condition of the Greek cities became still more calamitous—besides the numerous Greeks who took service as individuals under these Asiatic kings. Greeks, and Macedonians speaking Greek, became predominant, if not in numbers, at least in importance, throughout most of the cities in Western Asia. In particular, the Macedonian military organization, discipline, and administration, was maintained systematically among these Asiatic kings. In the account of the battle of Magnesia, fought by the Seleukid king Atiochus the Great against the Romans in 190 B. C., the Macedonian phalanx, constituting the main force of his Asiatic army, appears in all its completeness, just as it stood under Philip and Perseus in Macedonia itself.[648]

When it is said however that Asia became hellenized under Alexander’s successors, the phrase requires explanation. Hellenism, properly so called—the aggregate of habits, sentiments, energies, and intelligence, manifested by the Greeks during their epoch of autonomy[649]—never passed over into Asia; neither the highest qualities of the Greek mind, not even the entire character of ordinary Greeks. This genuine Hellenism could not subsist under the overruling compression of Alexander, nor even under the less irresistible pressure of his successors. Its living force, productive genius, self-organizing power, and active spirit of political communion, were stifled, and gradually died out. All that passed into Asia was a faint and partial resemblance of it, carrying the superficial marks of the original. The administration of the Greco-Asiatic kings was not hellenic (as it has been sometimes called), but completely despotic, as that of the Persians had been before. Whoever follows their history, until the period of Roman dominion, will see that it turned upon the tastes, temper, and ability of the prince, and on the circumstances of the regal family. Viewing their government as a system, its prominent difference as compared with their Persian predecessors, consisted in their retaining the military traditions and organization of Philip and Alexander, an elaborate scheme of discipline and manœuvring, which would not be kept up without permanent official grades and a higher measure of intelligence than had ever been displayed under the Achæmenid kings, who had no military school or training whatever. Hence a great number of individual Greeks found employment in the military as well as in the civil service of these Greco-Asiatic kings. The intelligent Greek, instead of a citizen of Hellas, became the instrument of a foreign prince; the details of government were managed to a great degree by Greek officials, and always in the Greek language.

Moreover, besides this, there was the still more important fact of the many new cities founded in Asia by the Seleukidæ and the other contemporary kings. Each of these cities had a considerable infusion of Greek and Macedonian citizens, among the native Orientals located there, often brought by compulsion from neighboring villages. In what numerical ratio these two elements of the civic population stood to each other, we cannot say. But the Greeks and Macedonians were the leading and active portion, who exercised the greatest assimilating force, gave imposing effect to the public manifestations of religion, had wider views and sympathies, dealt with the central government, and carried on that contracted measure of municipal autonomy which the city was permitted to retain. In these cities the Greek inhabitants, though debarred from political freedom, enjoyed a range of social activity suited to their tastes. In each, Greek was the language of public business and dealing; each formed a centre of attraction and commerce for an extensive neighborhood; all together, they were the main hellenic or quasi-hellenic element in Asia under the Greco-Asiatic kings, as contrasted with the rustic villages, where native manners, and probably native speech, still continued with little modification. But the Greeks of Antioch, or Alexandria, or Seleukeia, were not like citizens of Athens or Thebes, nor even like men of Tarentum or Ephesus. While they communicated their language to Orientals, they became themselves substantially orientalized. Their feelings, judgments, and habits of action, ceased to be hellenic. Polybius, when he visited Alexandria, looked with surprise and aversion on the Greeks there resident, though they were superior to the non-hellenic population, whom he considered worthless.[650] Greek social habits, festivals, and legends, passed with the hellenic settlers into Asia; all becoming amalgamated and transformed so as to suit a new Asiatic abode. Important social and political consequences turned upon the diffusion of the language, and upon the establishment of such a common medium of communication throughout Western Asia. But after all, the hellenized Asiatic was not so much a Greek as a foreigner with Grecian speech, exterior varnish, and superficial manifestations; distinguished fundamentally from those Greek citizens with whom the present history has been concerned. So he would have been considered by Sophokles, by Thucydides, by Sokrates.

Thus much is necessary in order to understand the bearing of Alexander’s conquests, not only upon the hellenic population, but upon hellenic attributes and peculiarities. While crushing the Greeks as communities at home, these conquests opened a wider range to the Greeks as individuals abroad; and produced—perhaps the best of all their effects—a great increase of intercommunication, multiplication of roads, extension of commercial dealing, and enlarged facilities for the acquisition of geographical knowledge. There already existed in the Persian empire an easy and convenient royal road (established by Darius son of Hystaspes and described as well as admired by Herodotus) for the three months’ journey between Sardis and Susa; and there must have been another regular road from Susa and Ekbatana to Baktria, Sogdiana, and India. Alexander, had he lived, would doubtless have multiplied on a still larger scale the communications both by sea and land between the various parts of his world-empire. We read that among the gigantic projects which he was contemplating when surprised by death, one was, the construction of a road all along the northern coast of Africa, as far as the Pillars of Herakles.[651] He had intended to found a new maritime city on the Persian Gulf, at the mouth of the Euphrates, and to incur much outlay for regulating the flow of water in its lower course. The river would probably have been thus made again to afford the same conveniences, both for navigation and irrigation, as it appears to have furnished in earlier times under the ancient Babylonian kings. Orders had been also given for constructing a fleet to explore the Caspian Sea. Alexander believed that sea to be connected with the Eastern Ocean,[652] and intended to make it his point of departure for circumnavigating the eastern limits of Asia, which country yet remained for him to conquer. The voyage already performed by Nearchus, from the mouth of the Indus to that of the Euphrates, was in those days a splendid maritime achievement; to which another still greater was on the point of being added—the circumnavigation of Arabia from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea; though here we must remark, that this same voyage (from the mouth of the Indus round Arabia into the Red Sea) had been performed in thirty months, a century and a half before, by Skylax of Karyanda, under the orders of Darius son of Hystaspes;[653] yet, though recorded by Herodotus, forgotten (as it would appear) by Alexander and his contemporaries. This enlarged and systematic exploration of the earth, combined with increased means of communication among its inhabitants, is the main feature in Alexander’s career which presents itself as promising real consequences beneficial to humanity.

We read that Alexander felt so much interest in the extension of science, that he gave to Aristotle the immense sum of 800 talents in money, placing under his directions several thousand men, for the purpose of prosecuting zoological researches.[654] These exaggerations are probably the work of those enemies of the philosopher who decried him as a pensioner of the Macedonian court; but it is probable enough that Philip, and Alexander in the early part of his reign, may have helped Aristotle in the difficult process of getting together facts and specimens for observation—from esteem towards him personally, rather than from interest in his discoveries. The intellectual turn of Alexander was towards literature, poetry, and history. He was fond of the Iliad especially, as well as of the Attic tragedians; so that Harpalus, being directed to send some books to him in Upper Asia, selected as the most acceptable packet various tragedies of Æschylus, Sophokles, and Euripides, with the dithyrambic poems of Telestes and the histories of Phlistus.[655]