raj

Continued from last post……. ( Sorry its too large but our world history is also not less

332 B.C. 

 

A siege of seven months ended in its fall; and Alexander hanged 2000
of the citizens, it is said, on the sea-shore. The survivors, with the
women and children, were sold as slaves. Before the catastrophe of the
great Phoenician city he had received a second letter, in which Darius
offered him his daughter in marriage, together with the cession of all
lands to the west of the Euphrates. “Where I Alexander,” said
Parmenion (if we may believe the story), “I should take these terms,
and run no further risk.” “So should I,” answered Alexander,
“if I were Parmenion; but as I am Alexander, I cannot.” “You
offer me,” he wrote accordingly to Darius, “part of your possession,
when I am lord of all. If I choose to marry your daughter, I will do
so whether you like it or not.”  

 

Darius sent no more letters. The issue, he saw, must be determined by
the sword. For the present he was left to himself. Alexander’s face
was turned towards Egypt. Gaza dared to resist; but a siege of two months
was followed by a ruin as complete as that of Tyre. From Gaza a march
of seven days brought him to Pelusium. The Persian governor opened its
gates to receive him; and the Egyptians expressed their delight at exchanging
a Persian for a Macedonian master. Marching in triumph to Memphis, he
offered solemn sacrifice to the calf-god Apis; and then, with the true
instinct of the ruler and the statesman, he hastened to found for his
new kingdom a new capital, which, after more than two millenniums, remains
a highway for the commerce of three continents. 

 

Success thus unparalleled was, it would seem, already producing its
effects upon him. Calmly reviewing the course of his march from Sestus
and Ilium to Memphis, he could explain it only the supposition that
he was no child of a human father, and he determined to obtain from
the oracle of Ammon, in the Libyan Oasis, a solution of this mystery.
The response greeted him as the son, not of Philip, but of Zeus; and
he returned, it is said, with the conviction that the divine honours
paid to Hercules and Perseus were his own by indubitable right.  

 

 

331 B.C. 

 

Marching back through Phoenicia, he hastened to Thapsacus and then crossed
the Euphrates. Thence turning northwards, he made a sweep which brought
him to the Tigris below Nineveh (Mosul), and there, without opposition , crossed
a stream where the resistance of a few hundreds might have destroyed
his army. After a few days’ march to the south-east, he received the
news that Darius, with all his host, was close at hand. Still convinced
that mere numbers must, with ample space, decide the issue of any fight,
and attributing his defeat as Issus only to the cramped position of
his troops, he had gathered a vast horde, which some represent as more
than a million, on the broad plain stretching from Gaugamela eastwards
to Arbela. His hopes were further raised by changes made in the weapons
of his troops, and more especially in the array of his warchariots.
For the Macedonians it is enough to say that they were led by a man
whose consummate generalship had never shone more conspicuously than
in the cautious arrangements which preceded the battle of Arbela, or
rather of Gaugamela. All went as he had anticipated. As at Issus, Darius
fled; and the bravery and even gallantry of the Persians opposed to
Parmenion were of no avail when the main body had hurried away after
the king. So ended the last of the three great battles (if such they
may be termed) which sufficed to destroy the Persian empire, or rather
to make Alexander king of Persia; and so ended the first act in the
great drama of his life. 

 

The victory of Gaugamela opened for the conqueror the gates of Babylon and Susa. The treasures found in the former
furnished an ample donation for all his men: those of Susa amounted,
it is said, to nearly twelve million of pounds sterling. The Persian
king had wasted men on the battlefield; he had hoarded coin which, freely
spent in getting up a Greek army under Greek generals, might have rendered
the enterprise of Alexander impossible.  

 

From Susa the conqueror turned his face towards Persepolis, the ancient
capital of Cyrus. Before him lay the fortresses of the Uxii, to whom
the Persian monarchs had been accustomed to pay tribute when they went
from the one capital of their kingdom to the other. The same demand
was now made of Alexander, who told them to come to the pass and take
it, and then, following a new track which had been pointed out to him
descended on their villages, and taught them that they had now to deal
with a sovereign of another kind. With Persepolis, Pasargadae, the city
containing the tomb of Cyrus, opened its gates to receive the avenger
of the iniquities of Xerxes. As such, he determined to inflict on Darius
a signal punishment. Five thousand camels and a crowd of mules bore
away the treasure, amounting, it is said, to nearly thirty millions
of pounds sterling, and then the citadel was set on fire. The men in
the city were killed, the women made slaves. 

 

 

330 B.C. 

 

For a month Alexander allowed his main army to rest near Persepolis;
for himself there could be no repose. With his cavalry he overran, and,
in spite of the rigours of winter, subdued, the whole region of Farsistan.
Then returning to Persepolis, he set forth on his march to Media, where
the fugitive king had hoped to be safe from his pursuit. Darius had
left Agbatana (Ecbatana) eight days before his pursuer could reach it.
In this ancient fastness of the Median and Persian sovereign Alexander
deposited his treasures, exceeding, we are told, forty millions sterling
in amount, under the charge of a strong Macedonian garrison headed by
Parmenion. He then hastened on towards the Caspian gates, and learnt,
when he has passed them, that Darius had been dethroned, and was now
the prisoner of the Bactrian satrap Bessus. The tidings made Alexander
still more eager to seize him. His efforts were so far successful that
Bessus felt escape to be hopeless unless Darius could be made to leave
his chariot and fly on horseback. He refused to obey, and was left behind,
mortally wounded. Before Alexander could reach him, he was dead. 

 

The conqueror now regarded, or professed to regard, himself as the legitimate
heir and successor of Xerxes. His course of conquest was still unbroken;
but successful forays against the Mardians on the northern slopes of
Mount Elburz, against the Arians of the modern Herat,
and the Drangians of the present Seistan, were followed by an exploit
of another sort.  

 

He had heard that a conspiracy against himself had been revealed to
Philotas, who for two days had kept the secret to himself. On being
asked why he had done this, Philotas answered that the information came
from a worthless source and deserved no notice. Alexander professed
himself satisfied with the explanation; but Philotas, it seems, had
spoken freely to his mistress Antigone of the large share which he and
his father had had in the conquests of Alexander, and Antigone had in
her turn become an informer. Of real evidence against Philotas there
was none; and a letter from Parmenion to his sons, found when Philotas
was treacherously arrested, could tell against them only in the eyes
of one who was resolved that Philotas should die.  

 

But Alexander could not rest content with his death alone. There had
been nothing yet, even in the way of shadowy slander, to criminate Parmenion,
and he resolved that the needful charges should be drawn by tortures
from his son. Hidden by a curtain, the conqueror of the world watched
the agonies and scoffed at the screams of the friend who had fought
by his side in a hundred fights. The issue was, or was said to be, what
he desired. Philotas had confessed; and Alexander sent off to Ecbatana
a man bearing two dispatches, one to cheat Parmenion into a false security,
the other carrying to the officers next to him in command the real order
for his assassination. The old man was reading the lying letter of the
despot when he received a mortal stab in his back. The soldiers, on
hearing of what had been done, furiously demanded the surrender of the
murderers, and were with difficulty withheld from taking summary vengeance
on seeing the written orders of Alexander. The command of Philotas,
who had been at the head of the companion-cavalry, was shared between
Clitus and Hephaestion; and Alexander turned from private murder to
public war. 

 

 

329 B.C. 

 

The autumn and winter were spent in overrunning parts of the modern Afghanistan and Cabul [Kabul], in the formation of the Caucasian
Alexandria, and in the passage of the Hindu-Kush. He was now in the
satrapy of Bessus. The surrender of Aornus and Bactra was followed by
the passage of the Oxus and by the betrayal of Bessus, who was sent
naked and in chains to the city which had been his capital.  

 

His next exploit (there is but slender ground for calling in into question)
was the slaughter, in Sogdiana, of the descendants of the Milesian Branchidae,
who, having incurred the hatred of their fellow Greeks by surrendering
to Xerxes the treasures of their temple, had followed the despot on
his retreat, and by him had been placed in these distant regions. Five
generations had passed away since that time, when Alexander gave the
order that not one of them, man, woman, or child, should be left alive.  

 

From the ruined city, by way of Maracanda (Samarkand), he reached
the Jaxartes (which he believed to be the Tanais or Don), and
having laid on its banks the foundation of another Alexandria, he crossed
the river to chase some Scythians who had shown themselves on the further
side. The end of this chase marked the northernmost point reached in
his campaigns. 

 

 

329-328 B.C. 

 

The winter was spent in the Bactrian city of Zariaspa, where Alexander,
summoning Bessus before him, had his nose and ears cut off, and then
sent him to be killed by his countrymen at Ecbatana. 

 

In the following summer his army was gathered again at Maracanda. Repose
from field-work left room for the display of the overbearing pride to
be expected from one who had convinced himself that he was a god, and
for the boundless flattery of those who found their interest in keeping
up the delusion. But there were not wanting others to whom this arrogance
and servility were intensely disgusting, and whose anger was the more
fierce from the necessity of avoiding all open expression of it; and
in the banquets of the divine son of Ammon there was always a risk that
these pent-up feelings might burst forth like a winter torrent.  

 

The catastrophe was not long in coming. In a feast at Maracanda, Alexander,
boasting of all that he had done since the death of his father, took
credit further for the victories of Philip in the later years of his
reign. The patience of Clitus had long been severely taxed, and in the
heat of the revel all thought of prudence was cast aside. He spoke his
mind plainly, telling Alexander that all his exploits taken together
were not equal to those of the man who had found Macedonia a poor and
distracted country, and had left it a mighty and coherent state; and
that his own greatest victories had been won through the aid of Philip’s
old soldiers, some of whom he had murdered. Stung to the quick, Alexander
gave utterance to his rage; but his retort only led Clitus to remind
him of the battle-field of the Granicus, where he had saved him from
death by cutting off the arm of the Persian whose sword was raised to
smite him, and to warn him that, if he could not bear to listen to the
words of truth, he should confine himself to the society of slaves. 

 

Alexander felt for his dagger: it had purposely been placed out of his
reach. He called to his guards to sound an alarm: they hesitated to
obey the orders of a raving drunkard. Some of the more sober and moderate
of the party held him in their arms, praying him to do nothing hastily.
By way of answer he reviled them for keeping him a prisoner as Bessus
had kept Darius, and shaking himself free, snatched a pike from one
of the guards, and thrust it through the body of Clitus, bidding him
go to Philip and Parmenion.  

 

The rage of the tiger was followed by a furious remorse, in which, with
considerable truth, he denounced himself as unfit to live. For three
days he would neither eat nor drink; and the army, alarmed at the threatened
starvation of their king, voted that Clitus had been justly slain, and
that his body should not receive the rites of burial.  

 

By reversing this vote, Alexander seemed to feel that he had gone a
long way towards acquitting himself; whatever might be yet lacking to
restore his self-complacence was supplied by the prophets, who assured
him that the disaster had been brought about wholly by the Theban wine-god
Dionysus, to whom he had offered no sacrifice on the day of the banquet. 

 

 

328 B.C. 

 

A few weeks after this murder Alexander captured the Sogdian rock, a
fastness from which common care would have sent him away baffled. Having
next reduced the rock of Chorienes, he returned to Bactra to celebrate
his marriage with Roxana, the daughter of Oxyartes, who had been among
the captives taken on the Sogdian rock.  

 

 

327 B.C. 

 

The feast was seized by Alexander as an opportunity for extracting from
his Greek and Macedonian followers a public acknowledgment of his divinity.
It was arranged that the sophist Anaxarchus (or, as some said, the Sicilian Cleon) should
make a speech, advising all to worship at once the man whom they would
certainly have to worship after his death. The speech was delivered.
The silence of most of the Macedonian officers showed their disgust;
but none ventured to speak until the Olynthian Callisthenes, the nephew
of Aristotle, insisted on the impiety of all attempts to confound the
distinctions between gods and men. Conceding to the conqueror the highest
place amongst military leaders and the first rank amongst statesmen,
he rebuked Anaxarchus for making a suggestion which ought to have
come from any one rather than from himself. The applause which his words
drew from the Macedonians taught Alexander that open opposition would
be useless; but he was none the more turned from his purpose, nor was
it long before he found a pretext for carrying it out. A conspiracy
was discovered amongst his pages. These unfortunate men were tortured
(but without extracting from them anything to implicate Callisthenes),
and then stoned to death, — as Alexander would have it, not by his
orders, but by the loyal impulse of his army. Callisthenes he was resolved,
he said, to punish himself, together with those who had sent him, —
an insinuation, manifestly, against his uncle Aristotle, possibly also
against all other Greeks, for whom freedom of speech and action had
not yet altogether lost its value. The philosopher who had extolled
Alexander as the greatest of earthly generals and statesmen was first
tortured and then hanged; and the conqueror went calmly on to subdue
the regions between the Hindu-Kush and the right bank of the Indus,
and to storm the impregnable rock of Aornus. 

 

 

326 B.C. 

 

The next river to be crossed was the Indus. The bridge was constructed
by Hephaestion and Perdiccas, probably near the present Attock. The
surrender of Taxila left Alexander an open path until he reached the
Hydaspes (Jhelum), where Porus was beaten only after a severe
struggle. The Indian prince was taken prisoner, and treated with the
courtesy which the family of Darius had received after the battle of
Issus. Here died Alexander’s horse Boukephalos (Bucephalus), and the
loss was commemorated by the founding of Bucephalia.  

 

The passage of the Acesines (Chenab), running with a full and
impetuous stream, was not accomplished without much danger; that of
the Hydraotes (Ravee) presented less formidable difficulties,
but he was encountered on the other side by Indians, who entrenched
themselves in their town of Sangala. Their resistance ended, it is said,
in the slaughter of 17,000 and the capture of 70,000.  

 

About 40 miles further to the south-east flowed the Hyphasis (Sutlej).
Alexander approached its bank, the limit of the Panjab, in the full
confidence that a few days more would bring him to the mighty stream
of the Ganges; but he had reached the goal of his conquests. The order
for crossing the river called forth murmurs and protests at once from
his officers and his soldiers, who expressed plainly their refusal to
march they knew not whither. Alexander in vain laid before his officers
his schemes of further conquest; and when he offered the sacrifice customary
before crossing a river, the signs were pronounced to be unfavourable.
The die was cast. Twelve huge altars remained to show that Alexander
had advanced thus far on his conquest of the world; and, in the midst
of deluges of rain, the army set out on its westward journey.  

 

 

Nov. 326 - Aug.
325 B.C. 

 

The reinforcements which he found on reaching the Hydaspes might, if
they had advanced as far as the Hyphasis, have turned the scale in favour
of progress to the east; they enabled Alexander to undertake with greater
ease a voyage down the Hydaspes to its junction with the Indus after
receiving the waters of the Acesines, Hydraotes, and Hyphasis, and thence
onwards to the Indian Ocean.  

 

From the mouth of the Indus he ordered his admiral Nearchus to take
the fleet along the shores of the ocean and the Persian Gulf to the
mouth of the Tigris. The army marched by land through the Gedrosian
desert, suffering more from thirst and sickness than they had suffered
in all their battles and forced marches. At length he reached Pasargadae,
to find the tomb of Cyrus broken open and plundered, and to avenge the
insult offered to the man whom he now regarded as the founder of his
own dynasty.  

 

Early in the following year he entered Susa, and there, celebrating
his marriage with Statira, the daughter of Darius and of Parysatis the
daughter of his predecessor Ochus, he offered to pay the debts of those
soldiers who would follow his example by taking to themselves Persian
wives — a strange mode of inviting sober and steady men who had no
debts, but an effectual argument for the spendthrifts and ruffians of
his army.  

 

His new levies of Persian youth, armed and disciplined after the Macedoanian
fashion, had now made him independent of his veteran soldiers; and his
declared intention of sending home the aged and wounded among them called
forth the angry remonstrances of their comrades, who bade him complete
his schemes of conquest with the aid of his father Ammon. Alexander
rushed into the throng, seized some and had them executed, and then
disbanded the whole force.  

 

For two days he shut himself up in his palace; on the third he marshaled
his Persian levies (Epigoni, as he called them) into divisions
bearing the Macedonian military titles, under Persian officers. The
spirit of the veterans was broken by this ignoring of their existence.
They threw down their arms at the palace gates, and begged forgiveness
with cries and tears. Alexander accepted their contrition, and the restoration
of harmony was celebrated by a sumptuous sacrifice. 

 

But for Alexander past victories were only a stimulus to further exploits.
Arabia still remained unsubdued, and for this conquest a large addition
was needed to his fleet.  

 

 

324 B.C. 

 

Orders were sent to Phoenicia for the construction of ships, which were
to be taken to pieces and sent overland to Thapsacus on the Euphrates,
while others were to be built at Babylon.  

 

His journey to Ecbatana was marked by a violent quarrel between Eumenes
and Hephaestion. Their reconciliation was soon followed by the death
of the latter from an attack of fever. The grief of the conqueror was
as fierce as that of Achilles, if we may not set it down as a manifest imitation
of it. For two days he neither ate nor drank; he cut his hair short,
and ordered that the horses and mules in his army should have their
manes docked also. Human blood could scarcely be shed with prudence
on his pyre; but he was resolved that his friend should begin his life
in the unseen world with unstinted wealth, and the precious things destined
to be consumed on his funeral pile represented, it is said, a sum of
nearly two millions and a half pounds sterling. Messengers were sent
to the Egyptian oracle to ask if the dead man might be worshipped as
a god, and Eumenes, with many others, took care to anticipate its answer
by offering him such honours as might fall in with the humour of the
divine mourner. His grief seemed only to render his bursts of passion
more fearful. None dared to address him except in language of the most
grovelling flattery; and, in the words of Plutarch, his only concolation
was found in his old habit of man-hunting. 

 

 

323 B.C. 

 

The diversion was this time furnished by some mountain tribes between
Media and Farsistan. His march to Babylon steeped him still more in the intoxication of
success. As he advanced on his road he was met by ambassadors not only
from Illyrians and Thracians, from Sicily and Sardinia, from Libya and
Carthage, but from Lucanians and Etruscans, and, as some said, from
Rome itself. The lord of all the earth could scarcely look for wider
acknowledgement or more devout submission; but his self-gratulation
may have been damped by the warning of the Chaldean priests that it
would be safer for him not to enter the gates of Babylon.  

 

For a while he hesitated, but he had more to do than to heed their words.
The preparations for his Arabian campaign must be hurried on; all that
might be needed must be done to improve the navigation of the Euphrates,
and a new city must be built to rival, perhaps, the Alexandria which
he had founded by the banks of the Nile. More than all, he had to celebrate
the obsequies of Hephaestion, whose body had been brought to Babylon
from Ecbatana. The feasting which everywhere accompanied the funeral
rites of the ancient world was exaggerated by the Macedonians, as by
other half rude or savage tribes, into prolonged revelry.  

 

Alexander spent the whole night drinking in the house of his friend
Medius, and the whole of the next day in sleeping off his drunkenness.
Throughout the following night the same orgies were repeated. When he
next awoke he was unable to rise. Fever had laid its grasp upon him,
and each day its hold became tighter, while he busied himself incessantly
with giving orders about his army, his fleet, his generals, until at
length the powers of speech began to fail. When asked to name his successor,
he said that he left his kingdom to the strongest. His signet-ring he
took from his finger and gave to Perdiccas. Throughout the army the
tidings of his illness spread consternation; old grudges were all forgotten;
his veterans forced themselves into his presence, and with tears bade
farewell to their general, who showed by signs that he still knew them.
A few hours later Alexander died, after a reign of less than thirteen
years, and before he had reached the age of thirty three. 

 

 

Summing Up: The
Life and Legacy of Alexander the Great 

 

That the schemes of conquest with which almost to the last moment he
had been absorbingly busied would, if he had lived, have been in great
part realized, can scarcely be doubted, unless we suppose that causes
were at work which at no distant period would have disturbed and upset
the balance of his military judgment, and deprived him of that marvelous
power of combination and of shaping means to circumstances in which
Hannibal and Napoleon are perhaps his only peers.  

 

It would be rash to say that such a darkening of his splendid powers
might not have been brought about, even before he could reach middle
age, by habits which, if we may judge from the history of his later
years, were fast becoming confirmed. In truth, except as a general,
he has lost the balance of his mind already. The ruling despot who fancied
himself a god, who could thrust a pike through the body of one friend
and sneer at the cries drawn forth from another by the agonies of torture,
was already far removed from the far-sighted prudence of the politic
statesman and ruler.  

 

His conquests served great ends; and before he set out on his career
of victory he may have had a distinct vision of these ends. Desire for
knowledge; the wish to see new forms of human and animal life; the curiosity
of traversing unknown lands, of laying open their resources, of bringing
them all within the limits and the influence of the Macedonian, or,
as he preferred to put it, the Greek world; the eagerness to establish
over all known, possibly over all unknown, regions a mighty centralized
empire, which should avail itself of all their forces, and throw down
the barriers which rendered the interchange of their wealth impossible,
– may have mingled with his alleged or his real purpose of avenging
on the Persian king the misdoings of Xerxes, Darius, and Cyrus.  

 

But there is little evidence or none that these motives retained their
power undiminished as he advanced further on his path of victory, while
there seems to be evidence, only too abundant, that all other motives
were gradually and even fast losing strength as the lust of conquest
grew with his belief or his fancy of his superhuman power and origin.  

 

During his sojourn with Aristotle he must have learnt that real knowledge
can be reached and good government insured only where there is freedom
of thought and speech, and where the people obey their own laws. A few
years later he had come to look on Aristotle as an enemy to be punished
with scarcely less severity than Callisthenes. But at the least it must
be remembered that his work was left unfinished; possibly he may have
regarded it as little more than begun.  

 

Looking at it from this point of view, we can neither shut our eyes
to the solid benefits accruing from his conquests both for the East
and the West, nor, in spite of his awful crimes, can we place him in
the rank of those scourges of mankind among whom Alaric and Attila, Genghiz [Genghis Khan], Timour, and Napoleon stand pre-eminent. Of
the several accounts of his career which have come down to us, not one,
unhappily, is strictly contemporary; and mere fairness calls upon us
to give him the benefit of a doubt, when doubt can be justly entertained,
in reference even to deeds which carry with them an unutterable horror
and shame.  

 

It is impossible to deny that with a higher sense of duty Alexander
would better have deserved the title of Great; but the judgment which
may be passed on some of his actions cannot affect his transcendent
glory as the most consummate general of ancient times, and perhaps even
of all ages.

335 B.C. 

 

Alexander was not eager to carry out his great design against Persia;
but he could not do so with safety until he had struck a wholesome terror
of his power into the mountain tribes which hemmed in his dominions.
His blows descended swiftly and surely on the Thracians of Mount Haemus
(the Balkan), on the Triballians, and on some clans of Getae,
whom he crossed the Danube to attack. But these expeditions led him
away from the world of the Greeks. Silence led to rumours of his defeat,
and the rumours of defeat were followed by more confident assertions
of his death. At Thebes and at Athens the tidings were received by some
with eager belief. The covenant made with Alexander was made only with
him personally.  

 

The Theban exiles at Athens were anxious to repeat the attempt which
half a century earlier had been made against the Spartan garrison of
the Cadmea by Pelopidas. With help in arms and money from Demosthenes and other Athenians, they entered Thebes, and
summoned the Macedonian garrison to surrender. The answer was a blunt
refusal, and a double line of circumvallation was drawn around the citatel,
envoys were sent to call forth aid from every quarter; but these efforts
could not affect the issue. The belief in Alexander’s death was to be
dispelled, by no gradual reports of his escape from the barbarians,
but by his own sudden appearance at the Boeotian Onchestus. He had just
defeated the Illyrians when he heard of the revolt, and he determined
to smite the rebels without turning aside to take even a day’s rest
at Pella. In little more than a fortnight his army was encamped on the
southern side of Thebes, thus cutting off all chances of aid from Athens.
It was his wish to avoid an assault, and he contented himself with demanding
the surrender of two only of the anti-Macedonian leaders.  

 

The citizens generally were anxious to submit, but the exiles felt or
feared themselves to be too deeply committed; and the answer took the
form of a defiance, accompanied by a demand for the surrender of Antipater
and Philotas. They had sealed their own doom. Personal bravery was of
no use against the discipline, the numbers, and the engines of the enemy.
The defenders were driven back into the city; the invaders burst in
with them; and the slaughter which followed was by no means inflicted
by the Macedonians alone. The Plataeans, Thespians, and Orchomenians
felt that they had old scores to settle. To these and to the rest of
his Greek allies Alexander submitted the fate of the city. The sentence
was promptly pronounced. The measure which the Thebans had dealt to
Plataeae, and would have dealt to Athens, should now be dealt out to
themselves. The whole town was razed to the ground, the house of the
poet Pindar being alone spared from demolition, and his descendants
alone allowed to retain their freedom.  

 

Alexander had gained his end. The spirit of the Greeks was crushed;
a great city was blotted out, and the worship of its gods was ended
with its ruin. These gods, it was believed, would in due time take vengeance
on the conqueror; but for the present the only hindrance to his enterprise
was removed from his path. Without turning aside to Athens, he went
on to Corinth to receive the adulations of the independent Greeks, and
to find, it is said, a less courtly speaker in the cynic Diogenes. From
Corinth he returned to Macedonia, having left Greece for the last time. 

 

 

334 B.C. 

 

Six months later he set off from Pella, crossed the Helles pont at Sestus,
to appease at Ilium by a costly sacrifice the wrath of the luckless
Priam; and them marched on, with not more perhaps than 30,000 infantry
and 4000 cavalry, and with a treasure-chest almost empty, to destroy
the monarchy of Cyrus. With him went men who were to be linked with
the memory of his worst crimes and of his most astonishing triumphs
– Clitus, Hephaestion, Eumenes, Seleucus, Ptolemy the son of Lagos,
and Parmenion, with his sons Philotas and Nicanor.  

 

The effects of Macedonian discipline were to be seen at once on the
banks of the Granicus, a little stream flowing to the Propontis from
the slope of Ida. Losing, it is said, only 60 of his cavalry and 30
of his infantry, he annihilated the Persian force, 2000 out of 20,000
foot soldiers being taken prisoners, and nearly all the rest slain.  

 

The terror of his name did his work as he marched southwards. The citadel
of Sardis might with ease have been held against him: before he came
within eight miles of the city, the governor hastened to surrender it
with all its treasure. At Ephesus he found the city abandoned by its
garrison. Miletus he carried by storm. Before Halicarnassus he encountered
a more obstinate resistance from the Athenian Ephialtes; but the generalship
of the latter was of no avail. Alexander entered Halicarnassus, and
the Rhodian Memnon remained shut up in the citadel.

 

 

The victorious Alexander the Great
in the Battle of Issus against Persian King Darius in 333 B.C. 

(Source: Roman mosaic found in the House of the Faun, Pompeii,
Italy.)

 

333 B.C. 

 

Leaving Ptolemy with 1000 men to blockade it, he spent the winter in
conquering Lycia, Pamphylia, and Pisidia, ending his campaign at Gordium,
on the river Sangarius. Here was preserved the ancient waggon of Gordius,
the mythical Phrygian king. Whoever could untie the knot, curiously
twisted with fibres of the cornel tree, which fastened its pole to the
yoke, was, so the story ran, to be lord of Asia. Alexander, as much
at a loss as others to unloose it, cut it with his sword; but the prophecy
was none the less held to be fulfilled.  

 

If he was thus favoured by sentiment, he was still more favoured by
the infatuation which led Darius to abandon the policy of defense by
sea for offensive warfare by land. From all parts of his vast empire
was gathered a host, numbering, as some said, 600,000 men; and the despot
was as much elated at the sight as Xerxes, when he looked down on his
motley multitudes at Doriscus. Like Xerxes he had one (the Athenian
Charidemus) by his side to warn him that Asiatic myriads were not to
be trusted in an encounter with the disciplined thousands of Alexander;
but he lacked the generosity which made Xerxes dismiss Demaratus with
a smile for his good-will. Darius seized the exile his own hand, and
gave him over to the executioner. “My avenger,” said Charidemus,
“will soon teach you that I have spoken the truth.”  

 

The Persian acted as though he wished to bring about the speediest fulfillment
of the prediction. The Greek mercenaries were withdrawn from the fleet
to be added to the land forces; but although a hundred of these could
have effectually barred the passage of Alexander across the range of
Taurus, and the passes of the Amanian, Cilician, and Assyrian gates,
the invader was suffered to cross these defiles without the loss of
a man. Nay, so great was the contempt of Darius for the few thousands
of the enemy, that he wished to give them a free path until they reached
the plain from which he would sweep them away.  

 

But he could not wait patiently for them in his position to the east
of the Amanian range. Alexander had been ill, and he had work to do
in subjugating western Cilicia. When at length he set out on his march
to the southern Amanian pass, Darius, with his unwieldy train, crossed
the northern pass, and entered Issus two days after Alexander had left
it. He had placed himself in a trap. In a space barely more than a mile
and a half in width, hemmed in by the mountains on the one side and
the sea on the other, Darius, in his royal chariot, in the midst of
multitudes who has scarcely room to move, awaited the attack of Alexander,
who fell suddenly on his right wing. The first onset was enough. The
Persians broke and fled. Darius, thinking himself in danger, fled among
the foremost. The Persian centre behaved well; but it mattered little
now what they might do. Even the Greek mercenaries were pushed back
and scattered. Four thousand talents filled the treasure-chest of the
conqueror, and the wife, mother, and son of Darius, appearing before
him as prisoners, were told that they should retain their royal titles,
his enterprise being directed, not against Darius personally, but to
the issue which was to determine whether he or Alexander should be lord
of Asia. 

 

The true value of armed Asiatic hordes was now as clear to all as the
sun at noonday. Parmenion advanced to attack Damascus but he needed
not to strike a blow. The governor allowed the treasure in his charge
to fall into his hands, and then surrendered the city. Alexander himself
marched southward to Phoenicia.  

 

At Marathus he replied to a letter in which Darius demanded the restoration
of his family and reproached him for his wanton aggression. His answer
repeated what he had already said to his wife, adding that, if he wrote
again, Darius must address him, not as his equal, but as his lord. “I
am now master of Asia,” he wrote, “and if you will not own
me as such, I shall treat you as an evil-doer. If you wish to debate
the point, do so like a man on the battlefield. I shall take care to
find you wherever you may be.”  

 

The island city of Aradus was surrendered on his approach. Sidon opened
her gates. From the Tyrians he received a submission which demurred
only to his entering their city.

TO BE CONTINUED……………..

RAJ

King of Macedon and
world conqueror

(356-323 BC)

ALEXANDER III,
commonly called “Alexander The Great,”
son of Philip II, of Macedonia,
and Olympias, daughter of the Molossian chied Neoptolemus, was born at Pella,
356 B.C. His father was a man of fearless courage and the soundest judgment;
his mother was a woman of savage energy and fierce superstition. Alexander
inherited the qualities of both his parents, and the result was the combination
of a boundless ambition with the most sober practical wisdom.



The child grew up with the consciousness that he was the heir of a king whose
power was rapidly growing; and the stories told of him attest at the least the
early awakening of a mind formed in the mould of the heroes of mythical Hellas.
Nay, the blood of Achilles was flowing, as he believed, in his veins; and the
flattery of his Acarnanian tutor Lysimachus, who addressed him as the son of
Peleus, may have strengthened his love of the immortal poems which told the
story of that fiery warrior. By another tutor, the Molossian Leonidas, his
vehement impulses were checked by a wholesome discipline.



But the genius of Alexander, the greatest of military conquerors, was moulded
in a far greater degree by that of Aristotle, the greatest conqueror in the
world of thought. At the age of thirteen he became for three years the pupil of
a man who had examined the political constitutions of a crowd of states, and
who had brought together a vast mass of facts and observations for the
systematic cultivation of physical science. During these three years the boy
awoke to the knowledge that a wonderful world lay before him, of which he had
seen little, and threw himself eagerly, it is said, into the task of gathering
at any cost a collection for the study of natural history. While his mind was
thus urged in one direction, he listened to stories which told him of the great
quarrel still to be fought out between the East and the West, and learnt to
look upon himself as the champion of Helas against the barbarian despot of Susa.

340
B.C.



The future conqueror was sixteen years of age when he was left at home as regent
while his father besieged Byzantium and Perinthus.





338 B.C.



Two years later the alliance of Thebes and Athens was wrecked on the fatal
field of Chaeronea, where Alexander, now eighteen years of age, encountered and
overcame the sacred Band which has been foremost in the victories of Leuctra
and Mantinea (see EPAMINONDAS); but the prospects of Alexander himself became
now for a time dark and uncertain. Philip had divorced Olympias and married
Cleopatra, the daughter of Attalus. This act roused the wrath not only of
Olympias, but of her son, who with her took refuge in Epirus. Cleopatra became the mother of a son. Her father,
Attalus, rose higher in the king’s favour, and not a few of Alexander’s friends
were banished. But the feuds in his family were subjects of serious thought for
Philip, who sought to counteract their ill effects by a marriage between his
daughter and her uncle, the Epirot king Alexander, the brother of Olympias. The
marriage feast was celebrated at Aegae. Clothed in a white robe, and walking
purposely apart from his guards, Philip was approaching the theatre when he was
struck down by the dagger of Pausanias.



It is certain that Alexander, if he mourned his father’s death at all, deplored
it only as involving himself in political difficulties; but he took care to act
as if he were grieved by it, and he revenged it, we are told, by putting out of
the way some whose claims or designs might clash with his own. The Greeks of
Thebes and Athens knew little what sort of man had taken the place of
Philip. Demosthenes,
who, although he was mourning for the death of his own daughter, appeared in
festal attire to announce the death of the Macedonian king, held up Alexander
to ridicule as a bragging and senseless Margites. But they had to reckon with
one who could swoop on his prey with the swiftness of the eagle. Barely two
months had passed from the death of his father before the youth of twenty years
stood with his army on the plains of Thessaly. The argument of the Macedonian phalanx was not to be
resisted. The Thessalians recognized him as the Hegemôn or leader of the
Greeks; and the young king passed on to Thebes, the citatel of which had been held by a Macedonian
garrison since the fight at Chaeronea. Thence he took himself across the isthmus to Corinth. Here he was met by Athenian envoys, who brought him
apologies more abject and honours more extravagant than any which had been paid
to his father. He received them in an assembly, from which he demanded and
obtained the title of supreme leader of the Hellenic armies, and to which he
guaranteed, at the utmost with a feigned reluctance, the autonomy or
independence of every Hellenic city. No one knew better than Alexander that
from the whole armoury of weapons which might be employed to reduce Greeks to
slavery, none could more effectually do his work than a theory of freedom which
meant dissension, and of self government which meant endless feud, faction, and
war.

TO BE CONTINUED……………..

RAJ