CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library DF 233.H71 Philip and Alexander of Macedon 3 1924 028 251 191 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 924028251 1 91 PHILIP AND ALEXANDEE OF MACEDON. a PHILIP AND ALEXANDER OF MACEDON. TWO ESSAYS IN BIOGRAPHY. By DAVID G. HOGAETH, SI.A., FELLOW OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD, F.S.A., F.R.G.S. "WITH MAP AND ILLUSTRATIONS. LONDON: . JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, IS,^^- ! 10 1; KM ' Pi4^io2>6o MJfEON PKINTED BT WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIIIITED, STAMFOKD STEE^f AND CHAEIK& CROSS. 1 1 1 : 1 vV ©lartsstmo tt ©artsstmo 23eataE JWartaE iTOagtialenae a 3 PREFACE The heroes of these essays need no introduction, and I have no excuse for making them my theme if this book supplies none. I treat the two Makers of Macedon, not in proportion to their respective bulk in history, but to the number of books written already about them. Philip, so far as I know, sup- plies the central figure to no extant biography ; Alexander has inspired a whole literature. My debts to previous students are obvious enough, even when not indicated in footnotes. I believe I have left very few works bearing on the subject unread, and my unconscious obligations must be many. I thank the authorities of the Departments of Coins and Medals and of Classical Antiquities at the British Museum, and also of the Cabinet des Medailles at Paris, for material supplied for my illustrations. To those who have criticized my book while in the press — Mr. E. W. Macan, Eeader in Ancient History in the University of Oxford, and Vlll PREFACE. Mr. C. H. Turner, Fellow of Magdalen— I can offer, by a mere expression of thanks in a Preface, no return in the least commensurate with, the acute and learned labour which they have bestowed. They have emended many things ; and if still many shortcomings remain, I can plead only the inter- ruptions which are inseparable from the life of an exploring scholar. D. G. H. London, December 14, 189G. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Philip. Prologue. The Man of tlie Age ... ... ... 1 Introductory. Macedonians and feudatories ... 4 Early liings ... ... ... 10' The Macedonian land ... ... IS Macedonian king and vassals ... ... 15 Early years of Philip ... ... 22 Thebes and Thebans ... ... 28 Accession of Philip ... ... ... 43 First campaign ... ... ... ... 4G Army-making .., ... ... ... 40 New military ideas ... ... ... ... 60 Getting ready for action ... ... ... G4 OiDen war with Athens ... ... ... ... 07 War in Thessaly ... ... ... ... 70 "War on the north and east ... ... ... 73 Olynthns and her confederacy ... ... 74 Athens and her statesmen ... ... ... 79 Peace between Athens and Phihp ... ... 8G Philip marches south ... ... ... ... 92 Macedonian supremacy ... ... ... 97' Troubles with Athens ... ... ... ... 99- Philip marches to the Danube ... ... 106 Rupture with Athens ... ... ... ... 110- Sieges of Perinthus and Byzantium ... ... Ill The young Alexander ... ... ... ... 116- CONTENTS. PAGE Philip marches south again ... .■• ••■ ^ "^ ChfBronea and its consequents ••■ •■• ••• '^-' The Panhellenic League ... ■■• ••• '^'-'^ Philip and his household ... •■■ ••• ^''^ Murder of Philip ... ... ••■ ■•■ l-^^ Ejjilogue. Limitations of Philip ... ■•• ••• ^'^^ Philip and Athens ... ■•• ■•■ I'^S The expansion of Hellas ••• •.• 15o IL Alexaxder. Prologue. Alexander and his inheritance ... ... 159 First campaigns in Europe ... ... ... 1G8 Alexander and Panhellenism ... ... ... 171 The vengeance of Hellas ... ... ... 173 Alexander starts for Asia ... ... ... 177 The coast campaigns ... ... ... 181 Issus and its consequents ... ... ■•. 183 Alexander the Founder ... ... ... 187 Ammon and his Son ... ... ... ... 103 The advance resumed ... ... ... 200 Arbela ... ... ... ... ... 202 Development of Alexander's ideal ... ... 206 Eeorganization of the expeditionary force ... ... 212 Last pim'suit of Darius ... ... ... 213 The Army of the East ... ... ... ... 217 ■Colonization of the East ... ... ... 225 Afghanistan and Turkestan ... ... ... 228 Alexander Emperor ... ... ... 234 The march into India ... ... ... ... 236 Mutiny and retreat ... ... ... 241 The spirit of India and Alexander ... ... 242 Exploration of Ocean ... ... ... 249 (Ecumenic Scheme ... ... ... ... 259 Alexander and Eome compared ... ... 263 Alexander goes north ... ... ... ... 2G6 Arrival at Babylon .. . ... ... ... 269 CONTENTS. XI FAGS The Army of the "West ... ... ... 271 The last days ... ... ... ... ... 27.! E2jilo(jue. Alexander's permanent work ... ... 27G' His personal immortality ... ... 278 Appendix. The cardinal dates of Alexander's life ... ... 284 Intermediate events ... ... ... 288 The latter half of Alexander's rei^n ... ... 291 Three donbtful years ... ... ... 295 Table of results ... ... ... ... JXil Index ... ... ... ... ... ... .'!or LIST OF ILLUSTEATIONS. TO FACE PAGE Alexander is Battle (from the Sarcophagus of the Satraps, Constantinople) ... Frontispiece Philip (?) — Tarsus Medallion (Cabinet de France) 1 Copt of a Portrait Bust of Alexander Tivoli Herm IN the Louvre ... ... ... ... 159 Copt of a Portrait Bust op Alexander in the British Museum ... ... ... ... IGl Alexander deified as Ammon — Coins of Ltsbiachus (British Museum) ... ... ... ... 278 Alexander deified as Heracles in Koman Times — Taesus Medallion (Cabinet de France) ... 280 Alexander Immortal — Tarsus Medallion (Cabinet de France) ... ... ... ... ... 282 ]\Iap of tee Area of Alexander's Asiatic Conquest At the end. PHILIP (?) [TAliSUS 31EDALLI0X, CABINET HE FRANCE.] [To face p. 1. PHILIP. The Mau of an Age is judged least justly by those who have lived in the Ao;e ; for historical vision can adjust its focus to the nearest objects no better than the natural eye. Posterity, therefore, while taking contemporary evidence for fact, naust reserve the verdict to itself, and most jealously in an epoch of great change. AVhile an old order is passing into a new, the destruction of the one obscures the construction of the other ; and those who watch the great man to his grave seldom attain to more than a dim suspicion that he has been neither wholly dreamer nor wholly devil. Thus, although Theopompus condemned Philip of Mace- don with utter condemnation, none the less his chronicle of the king's deeds, so far as preserved, makes it clear that, had we it all, we should say of the hostile historian, as has been said even of Demos- thenes, " personne mieux n'a fait ressortir les grandes qualites du fondateur de la puissance Macedonienne." ^ ' Weil : introduction to his Plaidoyers de Demosth'enc, p. 1 8. B 2 PHILIP. Every cloud tliat can gather about a great man has darkened the fame of Philip. No work of a contem- porary historian has come down to us except in frag- ments ; and until some Egyptian grave gives up the Philijyjnca of Theopompus, or the Macedonica of Anaximenes, we must be content to glean the facts of Philip's life from late epitomes of late historians, from scanty narratives of universal chroniclers, and from gossips and retailers of anecdote ; while for first-hand evidence we have only the partial utter- ances of the Athenian orators, his enemies or his hirelings. The eyes of posterity, both in ancient and modern times, have been dazzled by Alexander, and hardly have remarked the great figure which stands behind him ; and enthusiasm for Hellas in a cultivated modern aa;e has begotten bitter hatred for the name which is associated with the fall of Greek autonomy. Grote, for example, insensible to the fact that he himself has described with masterly skill the process of inevitable decay, at the end, not the beginning, of which stands Macedonian supremacy, seconds the champions of a shadow of liberty as though they were fighting still for a Periclean Athens. Even Thirlwall, most judicious historian of the last age of free Greece, feels constrained to deny personal merit to Philip, " great, not for what he was, but for what it was given him to do ! " What is this distinction between a man and his acts ? Philip is the great individual, who stands in the gap between two stages of human progress and is himself the link. He recognized entirely neither what was passing away TEE MAN OF THE AGE. 3 nor what was coming to pass, but lie was not therefore more a blind tool of Heaven than all human agents of destruction and construction have been and must be. Few m.en have seen so surely as he the faults of a dying order, and set themselves so consciously to create a new. The defects of the city-state, its premature senility, resultant on too intense political life, its incapacity for growth and combination, and its weakness in the face of wider unions — these things Philip discerned, and history warrants us in crediting him with a reasoned conviction that the city was to pass away before the nation ; that division of labour and mutual assistance must take the place of the direct fulfilment of all functions by all ; and that spasmodic individual effort would be superseded by permanent organization. Reading the lesson of his times, and marking the proved inferiority of citizen militia to standing forces, and of the capricious rule of the many to an imperial system under a single head, he evolved the first European Power in the modern sense of the word — an armed nation with a -common national ideal. This, his own conception, he understood clearly and pursued consistently through twenty-three years. Surely such a man may be called great for what he was. PHILIP. Philip was born in the year 382 before our era. The baby's prospect in life was not brilliant. He was third son of Amyntas of Macedonia, a petty king of no account in the world as it was then, who had been chased once to the last hold in his kingdom and compelled to see a rival sit on his throne ; who had been restored by foreign swords, and was still in direst danger from barbarians on the north and Greeks on the south, but most of all from his own sul ejects. To understand both the position of this man's son, and his conduct when, twenty-three years later, he succeeded to a throne whose occupants hardly ever had died in their beds, it is necessary that we examine brieiiy the conditions under which Macedonian monarchy existed. The origin of the peoples who in the dawn of history inhabited the part of south-eastern Europe since called Macedonia,-^ is a question singularly obscure and perhaps insoluble. Fortunately the point really important for later history is neither insoluble nor obscure, namely, the belief held and ' I iise the name in its ordinary, not its Roman, sense, to include onlj' the country between the mouth of the Nestus, Olympus, the Camlninian range, and the vague northern frontier of Paeonia. THE MACEDONIAN PEOPLE. 5 acted upon in ancient times. Tradition asserted that the population of " Macedonia " had neither one source nor one history ; for one element in it was (as Hellenes said) " barbarian," another Hellene. The first element it pleased antiquarians to call " Pelasgic," ^ but that name, meaning, in the first instance, probably no more than " the old folk," had come to be used of any early people of doubtful origin who had lived where in later times Hellenes were found. It is certain now that the element in cjuestion was largely composed of that race, to which the Bryges and many other European tribes pertained, together with their myths -^ of Gordius and Midas, whose final home is Phrygia. Its progress across Europe and its overflow into Asia have been traced by ethnologists, and the wanderings of its groups at various epochs account perhaps for those traces of " Thracian " and " Carian " occupation in Hellas and the isles which have puzzled antiquarians in all ages.^ This race was Aryan, but in the eyes of the Hellenes " barbarian." Tradition held the other element to 1)6 Hellenic, and no one in the fourth century seriously (juestioned its belief.* We meet with it in legends of the ' ride, e.g., Jastiii, \ii. 1. - AVe have tlie early iiuthoiity of llerodutns for these myths (viii. 138) ; cf. .Justin, vii. 1, etc. ^ Strabo (p. 44r.) quotes Aristotle for " Thracians " iu Euboea and PLocis. Tlie " Carian question " is well known. The best views on the whole matter arc Professor W. M. Piamsay's, in " A Study of Phrygian Art " {.lourn. HeU. Simlics, vols. ix. and x.). ■■ The taunts of a hostile orator levelled against Philip are no evidence at all of popular incredulity on the point (Demosth., Phil. i. 10 ; Olyiifh. iii. 24 ; /'. L. 027, etc.). The fact that Philip 6 PHILIP. migrations of " Macedonian " peoples out of Hellas, such as Bottiaeans from Crete/ or Athens, and Dorians from Histiaeotis of Thessaly,' or Argos. The evidence that the latter city was believed to be the earliest home of the Macedonian kings and their immediate followers (for kings do not establish them- selves on thrones without strong battalions behind them) is overwhelming ; ^ on the strength of that belief the Macedonian kina-s obtained admission to the common festivals of Hellas, and consistently acted in the government of their realm. To the second element it was believed that the dominant race, the Macedonians properly so called, belonged. They were (in Greek opinion) an immi- grant people from the south, whose leader " conquered land for his subjects and became king ; " '' they settled in the fertile plains about the mouths and lower ruled over many barbarians would give those taunts quite point enough for the occasion. Herodotus (v. 22) tells us that Alex- ander I. was called /Sap^Sapos when he tried to enter the stadium at Olympia early in the fifth century, but triumphantly refuted the libel. ^ A view strongly supported by place-names like Gortynia, Idomenaea, etc., found in historical times in the Vardar valley. See Strabo, pp. 380, 279, 282 ; Pint., Tim. IG (quoting Aristotle), and Qu. Gr. 35, etc. ^ Hdt. (i. 5G) calls this race MaKeSi-oV. Abel thinks that the root MttK is also that of May-v-qn^. 3 See, e.g., Hdt., v. 22 ; viii. 137 ; Thuc, ii. 99 ; Isocr., Phil. 32 ; Theopomp., fr. 30 ; Justin, vii. 1 ; Strabo, p. 329 ; Paus.,vii. 8, 9 ; Appian, Sijr. 03 ; Diod., xvii. 1 ; Pint., Alex. 2, etc. Abel's ingenious theory that another Argos in Lyncestis was the real source, even if proved, makes no difference to Greek Mipf, which unquestionably looked to the Peloponnesian city. " Cf. Thuc, ii. 99. HELLENIC AND BARBARIAN ELEMENTS. 7 courses of the Kara Su and the Vardar, which were called in ancient times Pieria and Emathia (or earlier Bottiaea)/ and they pushed the older peoples into the western and northern highlands, where they continued to subsist under many titles — Orestians, Lyncestians, Elimiotes, Paeonians, and so forth. So far as we can tell, the belief that the "Macedonians" of the coast-plains and the men of the hills were distinct peoples with distinct traditions and claims was held not only in Greece but in Macedonia as well. The clearest distinction is always drawn between "Mace- donians " and all other components of the national phalanx in the Asiatic army of Alexander.^ I have said already that we are not concerned with the truth or falsehood of these opinions. In this matter, as so often in history, it imports infinitely less that an event did not happen than that it was believed to have happened. We even need not have definite views as to the exclusively Hellenic character of one element,^ or the exclusively barbarian character of the other ; probably much intermixture took place.'' ' Strabo, p. 330 ; cf. also .Justin, vii. 1. ' Cf., e.(j., Arr., iii. 18, 20, 23, with vii. 4 ; and Plut., Eum. 4. ^ It is beyond the scope of this essay to attempt any inquiry into the real ethnic affinities of the Macedonian people, based on philological or archaBological evidence. In point of fact, there is not nearly enough evidence available to lead to any useful result ; in proof of which I will only refer the curious to such inquiries as that in Parts I., II., of Abel's Mahedonieii vor Kiinig Philip, and Pick, in Kuhn's Zeitsclirift, xxiii. p. 193. ^ Thucydides, indeed, includes the Lyncestians and Elimiotes among " Macedonians," at the same time insisting on their separate political status (ii. 99) ; and we know the Lyncestian princely house to have been Bacchiad, and to have borne Greek names like 8 PHILIP. Our cardinal point is this — that between the " Macedonians " of the coast-plain and the free men of the hills before the time of Philip the Second there was not that community of tradition and hope, which alone consummates the identity of a nation. There were hostile elements in the political whole, one element having been conquered by another, but not completely enough to lose its independent con- stitution and to become absorbed or enslaved, as was the case in Laconia, the second of the three monarchical realms surviving in Greece in the time of Aristotle.-^ The key to the history of Macedonia lies in this disunion of tradition. The kins; was chief in the first instance of a race of plain-dwellers, who held them- selves .to be, like him, of Hellenic stock, and were his faithful Companions (erat/aoi), retained by ties of common interest and common danger. In the second place he was over-lord of a more numerous but less united body of hill-tribes, whom he had forced to acknowledge his power, but not to give up their princes.^ There had been some kind of compromise between two not very unequal forces, with a result so near equilibrium that a little weight thrown into one scale or the other made always peace or war. The king ever and anon is struggling with hostile Alexander and Eurydicc. Eordaea, Thucydidcs says, \vas com- pletely conquered, like Bottiaea. Of. Strabo, p. C2G. ' Pol. V. 8. 5. - There were still semi-independent kinglets in the extreme west after Philip's death. Arr., i. u. THE FEUDATORIES. 'J feudatories, who try to regain their lost autonomy or even to establish a supremacy in place of his. All we know^ of the earliest reigns is the fact of recur- ring wars with " Illyrians." ' Now, that nationality, as Abel ^ has observed, to reach Emathia must pass through the lands of the feudatory hill-tribes, with whom we find it often allied during the fourth century. Indeed, there is some evidence ^ to show that Greek historians did not clearly distinguish between the allies, and a probability that in nine out of ten cases, when Macedonian kings went out to battle with " Illyrians," they were at war first and foremost with their own great feudatories of Lyncestis, Orestis, Elimiotis, or Paeonia. Furthermore, when the suc- cession to the Macedonian throne was interrupted— as, for example, after the death of Archelaus — or when "pretenders " arose, as in the reign of Amyntas or the first year of Philip himself, then a subject hill-people or a group of tribes was asserting itself successfully against the hereditary foe. The Macedonian therefore came to learn that he must cultivate the Hellene, and identify himself and his interest with the south. From Alexander I., who rode to the Athenian pickets the night before Plataea and proclaimed himself to the generals their friend and a Greek, down to Amyntas, father of Philip, who joined forces with Lacedaemon in 382, the kings of Macedon bid for Greek support by being more ' Justin, vii. 2. - Page 20G. ■' E.ff. Eurydice, Philip's mother, a Lj'ucestian princess, is called an Illyrian. 10 PHILIP. Hellenic than the Hellenes. Alexander I. contended in the stadium at Olympia, and earned, like Amasis of Egypt, the epithet " Philhellene." Archelaus patronized Athenian poets and Athenian drama,^ and commissioned Euripides to dramatize the deeds of his Argive ancestor.^ Even those kings who, like Perdiccas and Amyntas, were prevented by internal difficulties from cultivating the peaceful arts of Hellenism/ maintained alliances and friendship as consistently as their necessities or their interest would allow. " Macedonia," therefore, throughout historical times until the accession of Philip the Second, presents the spectacle of a nation that was no nation, but a group of discordant units, without community of race, religion, speech, or sentiment, resultant from half-accomplished conquest, and weak as the several sticks of the faggot in the fable. The history of its stronger kings is a history of attempts to complete the original conquest, and with Greek help to bind the faggot together ; the history of its weaker kings is a history of a series of successful reactions by the hill-men, aided by lUyrians or Thracians from beyond the border. The work done by that Aeropus, who as a child was placed in a cradle behind his army, to force it to face the " lUyrians," * and as a man broke the " lUyrian " power, was continued by his successors, Amyntas and Alexander, with the aid ' Agatharcli. ap. Phot., s.r. 'ApxeXao';. ^ Archelaus also instituted a Macedoniau festival of Zeus Olympius. Arr., i. 11. See Holm, Gr. Gesch. iii. 1-1, p 230. ' See Isocr., Fhil. 107. ' Justin, vii. 1. EAKLY KINGS. 11 of Persia, whose satraps they consented for the time to be. When the Persian was gone, Alexander allied himself openly to the Greek, and his son, Perdiccas, a diplomat of the first force, played with masterly skill a double game to gain Greek support without risking Greek encroachment. For nearly a hundred years the great feudatories were coerced ever more and more boldly until Archelaus, succeeding in 413 B.C., hoped to complete the process and indissolubly to bind the faggot together. He seems to have been an enlightened strategist, for he instituted great works of communication and centralization, cut direct roads through the mountain passes to tie the tribes together and to promote trade, laid out chains of forts, and perhaps began to form a national army,^ the best unifier of all, as a o-reater kins; was to find half a cen- tury later. But, overstrung, the bow snapped ; and Archelaus' murder "^ in 399 was the beginning of forty years of turmoil and trouble. The feudatories warred against their Macedonian over-lord, and either openly seized his throne, as Argaeus did that of Amyntas II., or forced their " guardianship " on a young king, as Ptolemy Alorites, after murdering Amyntas' eldest son, intruded with the queen-mother's connivance on the independence of the second brother. The relation of the " Steward " Aeropus in 399 to Archelaus' son, Orestes, whom he afterwards murdered and ^ See a remarkable passage of Thncydides (ii. 100). - The result of conspiracy, according to the contemporary Plato {Alcib. p. 141 d.), and Aristotle {FoJ. v. MACEDONIAN KINGSHIP. 15 cavalry or infantry in war. If ever the Tombs of the Kings be found at Vodhena (Aegae or Edessa), we may learn something of this primitive ilacedonian life. At present so little has the land been explored, that we know far less of its civilization than of that of far remoter parts of the classic east : no remains of early native art, either decorative or industrial, have been found ; there is not an early tomb nor an archaic inscription to teach us anything at all. Surrounding perils apart, the valleys of Haliacmon •and Axius were goodly heritage enough for a king as absolute as the Macedonian. A "constitution" the Macedonians had no more than Highland clansmen. Their land seems to have been all property of the king,^ to be granted by him in fief ; Alexander dis- tributed estates broadcast before he crossed the Hellespont,^ and remitted by a word all imposts on the land as well as all obligations of personal service to himself^ in favour of the families of those he delighted to honour. The king levies whom he will for military service,* and can depute to another in his absence functions as absolute as his own.'* Eesents ' See au inscriptiou of Potidasa cited in the French edition •of Droysen, HeUenismns, i. p. 7G. ■ Pint., Alex. 15. " Arr., i. 10 ; vii. 10 : ol Kara Tas kttJctw; ilcrcjjopai, and al XctToupyi'ai Tui o-w/j-aTi. The families of the iTolpoi who fell at ■Granicus were so honoured. ^ Arr., i. 24 ; vii. 12. ^ So Antipater, authorized by Alexander's seal, collects fleets (Arr., ii. 2), makes war, and holds a royal court (Arr., vii. 12), supreme even over the queen-mother. 16 rniLip. and governors he appoints and removes at will/ Ho can do no wrong ; " he marries and puts away wives, apparently as it pleases him," and is the sole fountain of honour.* Seldom can the principle of absolute submission to a monarch have been implanted deeper than in the Macedonians. When Eumenes, the only Greek of pure blood among Alexander's Successors, wished to exalt his authority over that of the Eegent and the Generals, he erected an empty tent, placed within it the emblems of Macedonian royalty, and commanded unquestioned obedience, as the repre- sentative of the presence within.^ In the words of Demosthenes, comparing the centralized and silent rule of Philip with the dift'used and loquacious sovereignty of Demos, the Macedonian king was, " in his single person, lord of all things, both open and secret, at once General and Lord Absolute and Treasurer." * He was, in short, a clan-chieftain. The greatest of his subjects had no rights against him, but only privi- leges,' as children may have by favour of a father. They were proverbially free of speech ^ in his pre- sence, and the alisenee of servility, which emboldened ' See esp. An-., vi. 27 and vii. 11. •■^ Arr., iv. !). 7. •' Plut., Alp.r. <1. ■* Compare the institution of the Pages, Arr., iv. 13 ; Acl., r. H. xiv. 41). •' Plut., Earn. 1 Tk So Eumenes also distributed royal gifts (c. 8). ■ '■ De Cor. 235. " Polybius' statement (v. 27. G) that the Macedonian king ruled [ian-ikiKm ov TvpavviKm'i, implies no more than this. " Polyk, V. 27. G. THE VASSALS. 17 them to refuse his gifts ^ or give advice unasked, earned for them in antiquity the repute of iXevdepoL av^pe?. But it was no more than a '" shadow of liberty ; " ^ they must follow whenever and wherever the king might lead, and leave farm or market to fight his battles.^ One constitutional right, and one only, can we trace in Macedonian history. If we are to believe that Curtius uses good authorities, the Macedonians, strictly so called, were summoned by the king to general assembly if a charge were in ques- tion involving the life of one of their number : " De capitalihus rebus vetusto Macedommi inodo inquirehat exercltus — in pace erat vulgi — et nihil potestas regum valehat, nisi p>rius valuisset auctoritas." * This state- ment is confirmed in the main by Arrian, who narrates that Alexander accused Philotas " before the Macedonians," while another suspect of conspiracy, Amyntas, made his defence eV ry iKKXrja-ia, and obtained leave from the latter body to bring his brother Polemon before the king to be exonerated from the charge.'^ If condemnation ensued on such an accusa- tion, the Assembly itself appears to have executed its ' So Parmenio and others refused Alexander's gift of lands, offered before he crossed the Hellespont. Plut., Alex. 15. Unasked advice is offered commonly enough by Alexander's anarshals. ■^ Lucian, Dial. Mort. 14. •' Cf. Demosthenes' descriptions of Macedonia tired of, but helpless to protest against, Philip's many wars {Ohjnih. ii. 1.5 ; Ad Epist. Phil. 9, 10)— tirades hardly, however, to be taken au pied de la lettre. ' Curt., vi. 8. ?y2. ' iii. 2G. il. c 18 PHILIP. own sentence— or rather that of the king, who was the actual judge — by overwhelming the culprit with javelins or stones.^ These cases, however, do not warrant us in supposing that a Popular Assembly met for any but very special purposes in Mace- donia ; as, for instance, if one of the great Com- panions was accused of high treason in time of war. We have no warrant for supposing (and it is highly improbable) that in the case of meaner men such a cumbrous court had to be constituted, nor for a less crime than treason against the king's majesty. In ordinary cases the king was judge alone.^ In all monarchical states we expect gradations of rank, an aristocracy of birth or of honours conferred by the king, and a lower class which tills the lancL In Macedonia there was no serf-population. The original conquest had not been complete enough to produce Helots or even Perioeci ; and the Emathian and Pierian farmers tilled their fields with the aid only of such slaves as they could buy or make prize of war.^ It appears that the whole body of Macedonians (in the restricted sense of the original settlers in Emathia and Pieria) distinguished themselves from the semi-subjugated " Macedonians " of the hills as the king's kToipoi, or Companions ; but that within this ^ Arr., iii. 20. 27 ; cf. also the case of Hermolaus the Page (iv. 14). ^ Plut., Alex. 42. " E.g. the Greeks captured at Granicus were sent to till the soil in Macedonia (Arr., i. IG). THE COMPAKIOXS. 19 large class, considering itself privileged, there were narrower circles of privilege, based on property — tliat is to say, in the first instance, on the favour of the kins, who granted lands. In ancient states the outward and visible siojn of a higher class con- sisted often in the providing of a war-horse, and in service therewith in the cavalry. So in Macedonia we find a smaller body of eraipot, especially so called, who are the flower of the cavalry, and a larger body of Tre^eVatpot,^ who are the flower of the infantry ; and it is probable that under these two names was included (either on the active list or in the reserve) every able-bodied man among the descendants of the orio-inal settlers who followed the Temenid kino;s to Pieria. The superior class of horsemen in Philip's time was almost certainly identical with those eight hundred landed proprietors who, as the contemporary Theopompus^ tells us, enjoyed estates as large as those of ten thousand Greeks ; but the same autho- rity and Anaximenes ^ state that their original numbers had been swelled somewhat before this period, not only by Philip's admission of foreigners to their ranks,^ but by the policy of his eldest brother, Alexander II., who added also to the Tre^eVat/oot. ^ I have discussed tliis disputed term, in aa article on the "Army of Alexander," in Journal of Philology, vol. xvii. No. 33, pp. 10 ff. ; but must modify now many of my early views. See note infra, p. 50. "■ Fr. 249. ^ Fr. 7. * Philip freely made such men as Callias of Chalcis (Aesch., GUs. 89) Hetaeri in the later years of his life ; and probably Theopompus is here reviewing his whole policy. 20 PHILIP. The latter king, however, during a reign of hardly twelve months, could not have effected much change, and the total of Philip's earliest body of cavalry — six hundred ^ — is probably as near as may be to that of the Companions. Within even this circle was one .still more select, that of the court, the intimates — Com- panions in the strictest sense — of the king himself, in war-time his staff — ol dfji(j)' avTov eraipot, as Arrian often calls them, — whom, to the number of something less than a hundred, Alexander married at Susa to the noblest of the Persian ladies.^ They formed a natural council for the king to consult on great matters,' and in order to qualify for this high honour, the noblest youths were glad to become Pages of the Body, according to Philip's institution, and perform menial offices about the king's person.* The highest distinction of all was still one of immediate personal service, the rank of Guard of the Person, only attained, it appears, after some signal service rendered directly to the king. Of eight Guards of Alexander's Person, two are known to have saved his life, one to have been his ally against his father, and one his second self ^ ' Diod., xvi. 4. - Arr., vii. 4. I dare not suggest a number for the lower class, the TrcfcVatpoi. The scanty data we have apply only to post-Philippian days, and, as I hope to show, to a wholly changed national system. Herein lies the cardinal difficulty of determining anything whatever with regard to early Macedonia. ^ E.g. the policy of marching to Issus (Arr., ii. G). * Arr., iv. 13 ; Curt., viii. C. ^ See the article quoted above (p. 19). The qualification must have been as stated, for the list does not include Alexander's THE CLAN. 21 Thus we find privilege within privilege, ascending to the fountain of all honour, the king. The lowest Macedonian felt himself exalted above the highest Orestian, as a king's Companion : the highest in rank was the nearest to the king's person. If such a system tended to breed insolence towards the un- privileged,^ it implied also an inherent unity which in master-hands was capaljle of much. The clan- spirit makes for strength almost as much as the political self-subordination of the Greek city-state, but is not, like the latter, incapable of expansion. _i)caH5re present, the Macedonian community had the same fault as the city-state — it was too small ; and no way had been found to increase it, and at the same time preserve its unity. It had further a fault, natural to landed aristocracies, that, while possessing a narrow territory, it did not increase its wealth by sea-going trade. Macedonia was a poor land,^ and its clansmen a numerically insignificant unity in the midst of hordes in political disunion. How could greatest marshals, f.g. Antipater, Parmeiiio, or Cratcrus, while it does include men too old to have been his " aequales." The eight were : Lysimachus and Peucestas, Ptolemy Lagus, Hephaestiou, Perdiccas, Leonnatus, Aristinous, and Peithon. ^ As proved to be the case when first Macedonians were set over subjugated races. See Arr., vi. 27. - 'H ovhl /Sdo-Kowo-a v/xS; koAuis, says Alexander to the mutineers (Arr., vii. 9). The mines of Pangaeus were in Thracian or Amphi- politan hands ; the rich corn-lands, forests, and ports of Chalcidicc under the Olynthian power. (See the speech of the Acanthian at Sparta in the year .383, Xen., Hell. v. 2. IC, and an inscription relating to a treaty between Philip's father and the Olynthians about B.C. 389, H. Sauppe, Inscr. Mae. Quaflmr, in Jahreshericht , etc., Weimar, 18i7.) 22 PHILIP. a source of wealth and a way of expansion be found ? It looked little likely in the year 382. Of Philip's father, Amyntas, we know little but his misfortunes and his death. Philip's mother, Eurydice, belonged to the Bacchiad house of Lyncestis ^— that is, to the enemy — and in after years she was to betray her husband.^ Marriage may have been the price paid by Amyntas for the recovery of his throne from the pretender Argaeus, perhaps the reigning Lyn- cestian of the time.^ If ever the veil be lifted from the events of early Macedonian history, we shall find, perhaps, that the vicissitudes of the royal house were connected directly with changes in the balance of power in Greece. The Athenian Aeschines * once claimed, in Philip's presence, that it was Athens that had supported the king's predecessors. The orator reminded him of the good will shown and good deeds done by the Athenian city towards his father, who in his turn had adopted the Athenian Iphicrates as his son. From an Attic inscription ^ we know that Macedonian envoys were at Athens about 382, and a scholiast '^ alleges that Amyntas owed his re- covered throne in some sense to Athens. In the ^ Strabo, p. 82G. ^ Justin, vii. 4. ^ Philip, bom in 382, had two brothers, and perhaps a sister, older than himself. The marriage of his parents must be put back, therefore, to 386, or earlier. Amyntas regained his throne in 3G0, according to Clinton's chronology {Fasti Hell, ii., App., ch. 4). * F. L. -li^ ff. = C.I.A. ii. lU, and Add. ^ On ^sch., F. L. 2G. PHILIP'S EARLY YEARS. 23 . turmoil which followed the murder of Philip's eldest brother, it was Iphicrates, says the orator, who secured the throne for the second son ; and the latter, when he had slain his " Thebizing " guardian, allied himself with Timotheus, newly come against Amphi- polis. Certainly there are notable coincidences. The fall of Athenian power on the Thracian coasts succeeds a long peace in Macedonia, and is followed by the murder of Archelaus and ten years of turmoil. Amyntas establishes his throne ever more firmly as the second Athenian leas-ue is formed. Leuctra is followed by the murder of Alexander II., by Pau- sanias' rebellion, and by the domination of the " Thebizing" Ptolemy Alorites. In the face of the statements of Aeschines it is impossible to doubt that it was a maxim of Athenian policy to support the Macedonian House,^ and it ceases to be wonderful that, in years to come, Philip himself, when Athens had most provoked his ven- geance and was most at his mercy, so signally stayed his hand. The boy was brought up at Pella ^ — a mean place then, compared with its after splendour, but still the ^ See Schiifer, Dcmostlienes, ii. p. G, for evidence of connection between Athens and Macedon. ^ Strabo, p. 330. He may have been bom there ; for although, in 383, Pella was in Olynthian hands (Xen., HeM. v. 2, 13), the appearance of Eudamidas with his Spartan expeditionary force in the Avinter of that year (which was followed by the revolt of Potidaea from Olynthus), most probably caused the Olynthians to retire within their own territory, where Teleutias seems to have found them on his arrival in the spring of 382. 24 PHiLir. greatest of Macedonian cities.^ It had a beacli on the Ludian lake, and an outlet to the sea — not, in those days, the sluggish creek, lost in pestiferous marsh, which the traveller sees now — and it was the centre of such trade and civilization as existed in the Emathian plain. There the young Philip learned the rudiments of Greek letters, and grew to be, even among Hellenes, cultured and polite. It was a time of peace and comparative security under the shelter of Greek supremacy. Sparta had broken the Olynthian power when Philip was three years old, and given back to his father the lands and cities about the Thermaic gulf. Jason of Pherae also became Amyntas' ally and friend." Philip had reached the age of six when the battle of Naxos was won by Athens, and Spartan influence replaced by hers ; but the royal house of Macedon became probably only the more secure by the change, for strong Athenian fleets, maintaining friendly relations with Amyntas,^ were constantly about the coasts till 371. In that year an event, of far graver import than the sea-fight at Naxos, shook Greece from end to end — the battle of Leuctra. 1 Cf. Strabo, l.r., with Xeii., I.e., and Dem., De Cor. G8. The old capital and royal burial-place was Aegae, or Edessa, a short day's journey higher up the plain ; but Pella had long been, it appears, the mint and home of the coiu't. I visited its site in 1887, but found that the city had vanished as though it had never been. The plateau above the marsh, on which it stood, is now plough- land, where a few fragments of marble and mouldings and many coins have been turned up from time to time. See for descrip- tion, H. F. Tozer, Highlands of Turlceij, vol. i. p. 153, and an article of mine in 3[anniUa/i''s llagazine, 1889, Aug., p. 287. ^ Diocl., XV. CO. 3 Aesch., F. L. 20. ALEXANDER THE SECOND. 2i)' Its wave of disturbance did not travel at once northwards. Amyntas reigned for two years more, beset with domestic trouble, but died after all in his bed, leaving his throne to Alexander, his firstborn, when Philip, his youngest, was barely thirteen years old. The passing of a sceptre from old hands to young in a half-barbarous land seldom is effected in peace ; and in Macedonia in 3G9 the times were ripe for trouble. The repressive influence of the old imperial cities of Hellas, whose interest it had been to main- tain peace in the inner country, operated no longer, for they were overshadowed now by a new power — - that of Thebes — which had no foreign empire, and a policy directly contrary to theirs. Accordingl}', the old feud between suzerain and feudatory broke out again, and the more bitterly for long repression. We know almost nothing of this stormy year, 369. The young king appears to have courted southern help by rendering service to the great Larissan house of the Aleuadae,^ and perhaps he enrolled some of their Thessalians among his " Companions ; " ^ but to no good purpose. The kingdom was torn between rival forces. On the one side was a " pretender," Pausanias, backed by Greek swords, drawing half ' Diod., XV. 01, 07. - Anaximenes (fr. 7) says that he increased his ira'tpoi and ire^eTaipoL. As these terms, I believe, inclnded ah-eady all true Macedonians, Alexander must have enrolled members of other races, and was little likely to include his feudatories. 26 PHILIP. jVIacedouia after him ; ' im the other, stood the Lyn- ■cestian queen-mother, already enamoured during her husband's lifetime of her son-in-law, Ptolemy of Alorus, and now plotting against her son. Heedless of the advance of Pausanias, she and her paramour put their plot into execution. A troop of dancers was introduced to the king's presence, and in the midst of the performance of a war-dance,'^ they fell upon and slew him. The immediate result, however, was disastrous to the plotters. If we are to interpret closely Aeschines' speech to Philip, Pausanias at once advanced with giant strides, supported now by the infuriate adherents of the murdered king.^ Anthemus, Therma, Strepsa, and other strong places opened their gates to him. But once more Athens, anxious for her remaining dependencies, interfered on behalf of the royal house. Invited by Eurydice, the famous Iphicrates, who was on the coast, went up to the court. The murderess of Amyntas' firstborn besought the Athenian, by the memory of Amyntas, to save Amyntas' children, and she bade the elder boy, Perdiccas, take the old man's hands, and the younger, Philip, embrace his knees. Thus Aeschines describes the scene, veiling the fact that the chief actress was ^ Aesch., F. L. 27 ; cf. Justin, vii. 4. - Marsyas, fr. ap. Atlien., xiv. p. G29 D. The name of one assassin, Apollophanes of Pydna, is preserved by Dem., F. L. 195. " This must have been the meaning of ot SokoSvtcs dvai cj>i\oi, who "betrayed" Eurydice after the murder (Aesch., F. L. 26). There is no means of teUing whom or what this " pretender " Pausanias represented. Aeschines describes him as 4>vya<; jxlv tav, T<3 KMpi^ 8' laxvoiv. About the time of Perdiccas' death, in 360 or 859, he reappeared with Thracian backing. PERDICCAS. 27 an adulterous mother who had slain her child. The veteran general could hardly have felt much emotion, but he knew that his best policy lay in supporting the legitimate succession. He took up the c[uarrel, chased Pausanias beyond the border, and set Perdiccas on the throne. In the councils of the minor the Lyncestian mother and her paramour continued to rule, and the latter, whom Aeschines calls Eegent, others call King.^ The favour of Athens was worth much, but of more worth in those days was the favour of Thebes. Pelopidas chanced to march with a Theban force into Thessaly early in 367 ; ^ Ptolemy opened negotiations, and invited the famous captain to Pella. Terms were agreed to, but a substantial guarantee of good faith was demanded of the slippery Eegent. The young- king's brother, Philip, was already a pledge in the hands of Eurydice's kinsmen, as security for certain payments, probably blackmail levied on the plainsmen, whose obedience to the Regent and the Lyncestian adulteress was far from assured. Pelopidas agreed to support the Lyncestians, and their illustrious ^ Diodorus, xv. 71, 77, and Dexippus, ap. Syncell. p. 263 B. - It must have been in very early spring, for Pelopidas went up to Susa also in 3G7. If he took the usual overland route through Asia Minor, he would start not later than April, for the passes are open then. He would pass the summer in Susa and return in the cool of autumn. I cannot follow Clinton in assigning more than one year to Alexander II. Surely Aeschines implies that the interval between the deaths of father and son was of the briefest. Allow a few months for the establishment of Perdiccas and Ptolemy, and for the latter's change of policy, and we reach 3C7 for the year of Philip's removal to Thebes. 38 PHILIP. hostage was transferred to his custody together with twenty-nine other noble youths ; and thus at the age of fifteen Philip came to spend three most momentous years of his boyhood at the house of Pammenes in Thebes/ Thebes, in 308, w^as the most powerful state in south-eastern Europe. Her title to pre-eminence rested singly on her citizen soldiery, and she instilled into the young prince, during his sojourn within her walls, the lesson that nothing need be impossible to a worthy and confident leader of big battalions. 1 As is well known, our autliorifcies for the circumstances of Philip's transference to Tliebes cannot be reconciled altogether. Diodorus (xvi. 2) says it was Amyntas who placed him with the " lUyrians ; " Justin (vii. 5) that it was Alexander II. Diodorus says that the Illyrians passed him on to Thebes ; Justin, that Alexander did so " interjecto . . . tempore ; " Aeschines {F. L. 2(1, 28) that he was still with his mother when Alexander had just died; Plutarch {Pel. 2C) that Ptolemy gave him to Pelopidas. The last two are the best authorities, and the coincidence they show with Pelopidas' well-known Thessalian expedition is strong. Philip stayed three years in Thebes, and returned therefore in 864, just when his brother had slain Ptolemy and reasserted himself in Macedonia — also a strong coincidence. A further question arises, why " Illyrians " should have sent their hostage to Thebes ? I believe (with Abel, though I differ from him in one or two details) that much of the confusion is due to the common use of the name " Illyi-ians " for Lyncestians. The " Illyrians " here are Eurydice's kinsmen, holding Philip as hostage for the good faith of Perdiccas and Ptolemy (a Pierian of Alorus), whom they were allowing to reign on sufferance. Their interest and that of Thebes were identical : both were anti- Athenian, and wished to keep Mace- donia out of Iphicrates' hands ; and it is the Lyncestians who therefore hand over Philip, with Ptolemy's consent. Diodorus and .Justin, finding that Philip was given to " lUyrians," and not aware that Lyncestians are meant, have to go back to the reigns of Alexander or ilmyntas to find an " Illyrian " invasion. THE THE BANS. 29 The Thebau of the fourth century (with certain brilliant exceptions) was of an animal type, common in aristocratic states. Generations of his forefathers had devoted every energy of mind and Ijody to the pleasures of the flesh. The Boeotian plains gave the Theban citizens meat and corn, wine, women, and horses, in abundance ; the nearest hills aftbrded them the varied excitement of the chase. They were well- grown, evppojcTTOL Tois awfjiaa-Lv,^ fond of extending exuberant muscles in the gymnasium,^ and they fought for the love of fighting. A full-blooded, boisterous race, proud of their past,^ fhey were determined to enjoy the present. Born to domineer, and bend to their purposes all who could subserve their pleasures, they became a menace to their neighbours whenever they needed space for their healthy stock, but bounded ambition by the satisfaction of appetite. For the barren glory of leading Hellas they cared not a jot. They despised commerce as men who know that their internal resources are amply sufli- cient to supply internal wants. Handicraft they held beneath the dignity of gentlemen, and denied Diod., xvi. 3. = Id. Lc. Cf. Strabo, p. 331. 46 PHILIP. month and full baggage/ No personal effects -would the king allow any foot-soldier to place on a vehicle ; ^ and his discipline was more than Spartan. He once heard that a Tarentine captain had taken a hot bath. "A Macedonian woman washes in cold water in childbed ! " exclaimed the king, and dismissed him from his command ; and at a later period, we hear that two distino-uished officers were banished their country for introducing a prostitute into camp.^ Knowing Philip's discipline of self, we may say safely that he asked his men to do nothing that he did not do habitually. Emulation was awakened by the institution of contests in military gymnastics, which Alexander copied at a later period.* Philip himself wrestled and boxed in the common arena/ drank with his knights, and was prodigal of good- fellowship and bounty.^ Little by little he welded all together and to himself, taught the foot-soldiers to stand firm as a Theban phalanx, and the knights to manoeuvre at his will, not merely to skirmish or pursue : and by this means and that, when the season of 358 opened, he was at the head of six hundred knights and ten thousand infantry, the like of which for discipline had not been seen north of Olympus. -'■ The Paeonians surrendered after a single engage- ment. Bardylis, leader of the Lyncestian-IUyrian ^ Diod., xvi. 3 ; Polyaen., iv. 2. 10 ; Frontin., iv. 1. 6. - Frontin., I.e. ^ Polyaen., iv. 2. 1 and 3. ^ Diod., xvii. 2. = Polyaen., iv. 2. 6. Cf. Theopomp., fragments 27 and 249 ; Diod., xvi. 3 ; Polyaen., iv. 9. THE ILLYEIAN CAMPAIGN. 47 host, proposed peace on terms uti possidetis. Philip demanded that the Lyncestian towns be surren- dered at discretion and the lUyrian allies be sent away. The armies met, and Philip experimented for the first time in the new tactics, which were to crush Oreece and conquer Asia. The foe was in solid formation ; Philip opposed to them the phalanx, strengthened especially on the left by the cavalry. He led his solid centre and right to engage the whole barbarian front, keeping his left in reserve, till the foe's formation became somewhat disordered. Then the real attack was developed ; the Macedonian Knights galloped forward and fell on flank and rear ; the phalanx pushed into the front of the disordered mass, while the cavalry rode in from the left. The lUyriaus turned and fled. Hundreds were cut down in the pursuit, and when it was over, and the barbarians came to fetch their dead under flag of truce, Philip, with callous treachery, attacked again.' They left more than seven thousand dead on the field ; and Philip swept the lands of the feudatories as far as the Lake Ochrida and the watershed of the Adriatic.^ In one short campaign Philip had restored the ' Macedonian monarchy to a position that it had not held since the days of Archelaus. The king was once more lord undisputed over the greatest of his feudatories. It remained to secure the mines. Philip ^ Diod., xvi. 4 ; Frontin., ii. 3. 2. I have used also Polyaenus' thoroughly characteristic story (iv. 2. 5) of the second rout. "■ Died., xvi. 8. 48 PHILIP. marched across his kingdom, gathered up a siege- train prepared during the winter, and incontinently . summoned Amphipolis to surrender. The townsmen shut their gates, and sent to apprise Athens ; Philip countermoved by courteously informing the Athenians that he was acting on their behalf, and would hand over the town to their representatives, and in the mean time he brought up his engines. The Athenians hesitated ; Philip's rams broke the wall ; Amphipolis fell in the autumn of 358, and all sympathisers with Athens were expelled from her gates. ^ The news caused a panic among the Greek towns of Chalcidice, and their leader, Olynthus, sent at once to Athens. But the latter had more on her hands now than she could deal with. Her great dependencies had declared the Social War against her, and she was fain to content herself with Philip's studious courtesy to her captured citizens, and a vague understanding ^ that in his own good time he would exchange his new conquest against their holding of Pydna, the outlet of Pierian trade. For the present Philip openly ac- knowledged as his men the Thasian miners of Cre- nides, and built up their settlement into a great frontier-fortress, called after himself Philippi, which, with Amphipolis, should command not only the mines, but the Thracian coast from Galepsus to the Nestus.^ He had found at last his sinews of war. The gold ore of Pangaeus presently brought in more ' Dem., Ohjnth. i. 8. •^ The famous airopp-qTov, Dem., Olynth., ii. 6. ^ Strabo, p. 831. ARMY MAKING. 49 than a thousand talents yearly, a much larger revenue than was accruing at this time from external sources to any state except Persia ; and he began to strike that extensive coinage ^ of staters which pene- trated to Britain, and originated the types of certain of our early coins.^ In the winter of 358 Philip could begin in earnest the great work which he had conceived at Thebes — the creation of a national standing ^aTrmy. He cannot have been unconscious that his work would prove in the event not merely military. If his national army was to be more than an organiza- tion of his own clansmen, he must incorporate the feudatories ; and whenever the army should become an accomplished fact, there would be in Macedonia no longer a disunion of tribes, but the unity of a nation. It is not to be supposed that his main object was the promotion of a political union, nor indeed that in 358 he had that end more consciously in view than had the organizers of the Prussian military system in 1864; nor, on the other hand, that he was more ignorant than they of the unifying influence of common service in a great war. Salamis had consolidated the Athenian Demos, and Leuctra made Boeotia almost one in sentiment with Thebes. Community of hope passes in very short time into community of tradition. ^ Diod., xvi. 8. ° The remarkable series, illustrating the degeneratiou of the (type, is well known. Philip's original staters have been found in greater numbers than almost any other gold coins of antiquity. E 50 PHILIP. As the Germans in 1870, so the Macedonians in 352 marched out an Alliance to return a Union. Philip's claim to rank among great creative statesmen is not that he foreknew all the ultimate results of his action, but that he seized in their inception and directed successive developments. Both his ideal, and his knowledge of the means to attain it, grew with the growth of events. If in 358 it did not rise above the consolidation of the military strength of Macedonia, and chance in the main made him the creator of Macedonian political unity, it is very certain that he had come to be possessed by a clear conception even of the unification of all Hellas,' when he spent his last two years in enlisting the Greeks for common service with Macedonians in a great war. Twelve years later again his son, rising to a con- ception of world-wide empire on the stepping-stone of his father's panhellenic kingdom, dreamed of effacing the distinction of Macedonian, Hellene, and Asiatic, by making all march shoulder to shoulder to the con- c[uest of Africa and Europe. A national standing army was a new thing in those days. The world was familiar with armies, national, but not standing, levies of citizens, or the subjects of a king, called out for particular cam- paigns and relegated presently to private occupations. Even the most professional of such armies, that of ^ Holm {Gr. Gesch, iii. ch. xvii. p. 278) and others date this conception and Philip's Asian schemes almost to the beginning of his reign, but on no evidence. Both evidence and probability arft all for later development. GREEK ARMIES. 51 Sparta, ;was not kept constantly under arms, and took a more soldierly than civic character only through constantly mounting guard over a dis- affected population. The world was becoming familiar also with armies, standing, but not national, maintained at various epochs by kings and governors of Persia or Egypt, commercial cities like Carthage, or individual adventurers such as the elder Dionysius of Syracuse, or Jason of Pherae. Such forces as theirs were difficult to control, devoid of esprit de corps, liable to seduction, and withal enormously expensive. The citizen army, on the other hand, was either sheer militia, incapable of any but the simplest manoeuvres, or very small in numbers, and in both cases difficult to retain in the field. Philip's new army was to combine the merits of both the civic and the mercenary ; its chief constituent was to be a large force, derived from his own subjects, imbued with national spirit, and induced by rewards and prizes of war to make soldiering a profession, and remain long enough with the colours to acquire drill and discipline superior to the best mercenary armies. A professional army with a national spirit — that was the new idea ; and Philip, equally great in practice and theory, intended to add later a new organization, a new weapon, and new tactics. But the introduction of those novelties in detail must depend on the successful realization of the main principle ; for only an army perfect in cohesion, temper, and drill can profit by an elaborate organiza- tion, make eflTective use of a weapon of abnormal 52 PHILir. character, or be depended upon to execute rapid scientific evolutions in the face of an enemy. Neither an army nor a nation is made in a day. The six years which succeeded the capture of Amphi- polis and preceded the first serious attempt on Greece, probably saw in Macedonia the birth of both one and the other ; but Philip was engaged all his life in completing his work. Time alone could cause the- all-important tradition to grow. At the beginning of his reign, Alexander had still to face some political reaction on the part of the feudatories, and to beware a little longer of the Lyncestian ; but in his army of Asia there is left hardly a trace of race hatred. . Philip, in fact, had completed his military creation ere his death. In many details of organization his system was modified by both his son and his son's successors, till it became crystallized in the corps d'armee known as the Macedonian to the tactical writers of Roman times ; but it is practically certain that the army which won Grranicus, Issus, and Arbela was the army of Philip, and that we may use the authorities for the early campaigns of Alex- ander as evidence for the father's work. We have detailed information of the reorganization of certain corps at Susa, and of the whole force after Alexander's return from India, but no hint of any earlier changes. It was the opinion of antiquity that Alexander received his Asian army from his father ; ^ and it must be our opinion also if we reflect on the little leisure enjoyed by Alexander from the first moment ^ Frontin., iv. 2, 4. PHILIP'S CREATION. 53 he ascended his throne, and on the reputation already possessed far and wide by his Macedonian soldiery before he had met any Persian army in the field.' It was the unanimous opinion of antiquity also that Philip did his work alone. No one of his marshals is ever credited with a share. Parmenio, of whom his king said that he was the only general he had ever known,^ and Antipater, the future regent of Europe, alone among them rose above mediocrity. The rest of the elder marshals of Alexander — • Perdiccas, Craterus, Leonnatus, Polysperchon, Anti- gonus — shone only with reflected light. The one man, whose after-career warrants the supposition that he may have helped in a great work of organi- zation, is Eumenes, whom Philip found a boy at Cardia,^ and made his secretary in later years. Already, before Philip's time, there had existed the levy of the Macedonian clan, a race long inured to guerilla warfare,* and organized to some extent by Archelaus ^ and by Philip's eldest brother." The problem was, how to incorporate with the clan the feudatories who had been regarded hitherto at best as its allies ? ' The clan-spirit lives only in the clan ; ^ See Memnon's advice to the Persians before Granicus, Arr., i. 12. '' Pint., Apophth. Phil. 2. ' Id. Eton. i. * Justin, vii. 2. ' Thuc, ii. 100. " Anaxim., fr. 7. Vkle supra, p. 19. ' Such as Derdas of Elimia, whose excellent cavalry joined Amyntas in 382. HeU. v. 2, 39. 54 \ PHILIP. < civic patriotism was exotic outside the city-states of Hellas ; national patriotism as yet did not and could not exist. Philip knew that what he must create was a purely military esiJrit de corps, and his army must be induced to set up itself and himself as gods. He began by enrolling all his subjects according to their local and tribal divisions, and assigning them to standing territorial regiments. Of the infantry we can only infer the fact ; ^ but the names of certain squadrons of the cavalry are actually recorded, for example, r] ' AvdeixovcrCa. and rj Aevyaia, and so are the homes of others, " the horsemen from Upper Macedonia," or " Bottiaea and Amphipolis." ^ These standing regiments are known each by its colonel's name, and quoted thus by Arrian, who reflects the military usage of his authorities. A ra^'is of foot, whose colonel is absent, is still referred to as his, though led by another ; and Clitus' cavalry com- mand bears his name after his death. ^ All were called alike " Macedonians ; " the only general distinction, made hereafter, is between Mace- donians and Greeks, Thracians or lUyrians.* Philip knew, however, that it was not enough to make distinct territorial regiments ; he must endow ^ From Arr., iii. IG, wliere the recruits (foot) from Macedonia are distributed into ralcis. Cf . Curt., v. 2. C, where we are told that Alexander's main innovation at Susa was the abolition of all local and national divisions throughout the army. - Arr., ii. 9 ; i. 2. ' Id. iii. 11 ; vi. 6. ■* So in Diodorus' catalogue of the army about to cross to Asia (xvii. 17) ; and passim in Arrian, where the common phrase, ol TTc^oi Tuiv MttKcSoVcov (e.fi. as Barly as i. C), includes every one — Lyncestian, Orestian, Elimiote, and the like. CORPS D'ELITE. 55 them witli common emulation. He conceived there- fore for different corps a scale of honour rising towards the person of the king. Service in the heavy cavalry ranked above service in the foot, for the former were more especially the eraipot, or " Companions " of the king ; their generals have the most important com- mands in Alexander's army, and their troopers enjoy treble share of prize money. ^ Philip promoted whom he pleased to this service/ Macedonian or Greek, and thus in time swelled the six hundred who accom- panied him on his first campaign, to the two thousand who followed his son to Asia.^ The whole body of €Talpoi were " Eoyals," but one squadron was of greatest honour, the " Eoyal," or " King's Own," sometimes called the "Ayrjixa,'^ which took the right of the whole line at Arbela.' Most honoured among the Foot was the Corps of Guards (vTrao-Tncrrat), specially attached to the person of the king. They became very famous in Alexander's wars, and later under the name of the Silver Shields ('Apyvpao-TTtSes)." Like the cavalry, they were all " Eoyals," but there was among them a special corj^s d'elite (to ay-q^ia to ^aa-CkLKov) ' one thousand strong, ' Cf. Diod., svii. C3, 74 ; Curt., vii. 5. 23. ' Theopomp., fr. 249. ^ Perhaps even more, if the fifteen hundred horse left with Antipater be reckoned into the calculation. •* Ait., iii. 11. ^ Also at the crossing of the Hydaspes (Arr., v. 13). " Pint., Eum. IC ff. For the grounds of the certain identifica- tion of the Argyraspids and Hypaspists, see "Army of Alexander," in Jovrn. of PI dialog ij, xvii., No. 33, p. 14. ' Cf., e.(j., Arr., iii. 11 ; v. 13. 56 PHILIP. a third of the whole. This force took the right of all the infantry at Arbela. As Philip had extended the honourable title of " King's Followers " to all his native cavalry, so he took the corresponding term Tre^eVaipot, and applied it to all the Macedonian infantry, whether of his clan or no : thus distins-uishine; the new nation from the Greeks, as the clan had once distinguished itself from the feudatories.^ ' This is the view to which I am compelled, on reconsideration of the passages in which the term Tre^iracpoi (already in dispute in the days of Ulpian) occurs. When I wrote the article on Alexander's army, referred to above, I was inclined to regard it as equivalent only to the one ra^is of Coeiius (on the strength of Arr., ii. 23). In some sense a distinction is implied in the term, or the mutiaeers at Opis would not have coupled it with the ay7jp.u. and apyupdo-TTiSes (Arr., vii. 11). But I now believe that Demos- thenes is approximately accurate when he uses the term to express all the constituents of Philip's Phalanx that were not $ivoi. {OJifiith. ii. 17). Such a distinction would be sufficient to account for the phrase ol tt. ol KaXovfjLivoi, used by Arrian four times out of seven. One of Ulpian's explanations is that the tt. were the pick of the infantry ; but care must be taken not to include in the term the Hypaspistae, if Arrian is to be credited with any precision of nomenclature at all. Droyseu and Grote go wrong on this point. I conceive, therefore, that each of Alexander's great regiments of foot (e.ff. the six enumerated at Arbela, Arr., iii. 11) was made up of tw"o battalions— one of most honour, containing only Macedonian -n-t^cVaipot, one of less honour, made up of allies and mercenaries. The second composed the Sevrcpa (jxiXay^ at Arbela — the line of reserve designed to face about and meet an attack— and also probably formed the rear of the BiirX^ <^a\ay| before Granicus (Arr., i. 13). "Whenever Alexander, therefore, takes ol Tret,iTaLpoi. ol KaXovfievoc on Special expeditions, he is picking the first battalions of his regiments. Not infrequently these regiments are credited with two commanders by Arrian {f'./J. iv. 2'J, Ti-jv [rdfii/] noXvo-7rep;^oi'70S koI 'AttoAou ; iv. 21, Tqv EEWAEDS AND DISTINCTIONS. 57 Here, then, is a system of honourable nomenclature • — pacrikiKoi, fiacnXiKal IXai, dyijixaTa, eToipoi, Tre^e- ratpot — designed to give the army pride in itself, and to attach it to the person of the king. We cannot doubt that promotion into the distinguished corps was made possible for all Macedonians who should win the king's favour ; it could even be granted to aliens. Further, there was, of course, a sca,le of military honour for individuals ; this man takes the lead of his file and faces the foe in the front rank ; that one brings up the rear, and is important as a pivot. One private receives double pay ; another ten staters ; ^ and so forth, up to the culminating distinction of Guard of the Person, which in Alex- ander's time was enjoyed by four natives of Pella, one of Orestis, and two of Eordaea.^ If military service is to be accepted readily as the main reason and object of existence, the soldier must be caught young. Philip, therefore, enacted that all KoLvov T€ Koi 'AttoA-ou Tu^iv ; V. 12, Tyjv KActTOD re kol KoiVou), as are also the cavalry iTnrap^iai {e.g. \. 12, t^v IlepStKKoi) rt koX i^rnxrjTpiov). Unfortunately Arrian is not exact in his use of the names of corps, especially tuJis ; but still some value may be attached to these twin commands, in view of the other evidence for the dual nature of the regiments. If Diodorus' figures (xvii. 17) are accurate, the irc^eVaipot in Alexander's force, when he crossed to Asia, numbered 'JOOO ; each first battalion, therefore, at Arbela would be 15(»0 strong. The allies and mercenaries numbered 12,000, and the second battalions may therefore have been 2000 strong, but more probably 1500 also, 3000 men being reserved to counterbalance the 3000 Hypaspista;. ^ Arr., vii. 23. ^ Id. vi. 28. The home of one— Peucestas, added in 324— is. unknown. 58 PHILIP. sons of the upper classes of his subjects should be sent to the court to serve as Pages of the Body, in peace to be Ec^uerries or Gentlemen of the Chamber, in war to follow the campaign as an inner Guard, and always to study those military duties which they would have to perform presently as officers of the Cavalry or the Line.^ If he made any special pro- vision for the boys of the lower classes, we do not know it ; but we do know that the child born or bred in barracks grows up in the military tradition, and there must always be many such children where there is a standing army. It is noteworthy that Alexander, when he sent the time-expired veterans home in 324, retained all their children born in Asia.^ ^ '■■ ■■' :^^'H. By such means did Philip hope to make the pride ■of service in a great army the ruling passion of his people ; and he must have foreseen that, if he was successful, the small race divisions among his sub- jects would fade little by little into a common distinction of all from the rest of the world. In the event the Macedonians became one people, and their common military pride and exclusiveness barred even Alexander's way when he dreamed of a wider union. He could abolish the territorial regiments without trouble at Susa in 330, as having become already superfluous divisions, but his first attempts ' Such an institution at a court half Greek, half barbarian, gave, of course, many occasions to scandal ; but Arrian (iv. 13) and Ourtius (viii. G) agree as to the object which Philip had in view when he instituted it. - Arr., vii. 12. THE CORPS D'ARMEE. 59 to expand the great Macedonian union provoked open mutiny. The ancient treatise on Tactics, which has come down to our times in two recensions, to which the names of Arrian and ^lian have been attached, furnishes elaborate detail of the Macedonian military organization ; but so seldom do either the names or strength of the corps agree with our authorities for Alexander's army,^ that we must suppose them to be of later times. Furthermore, the system described in that treatise, of units ascending in arithmetical pro- gression from the file of 16 to the full brigade of 16,384,^ belongs to a time when the territorial battalion had ceased to be the unit. It is more probable that Philip organized his new army by regiments than by brigades ; and that Alexander first began to work towards the latter system at Susa in 330. Contemporary authority makes it clear that Philip's army was a standing force of men with arms always in their hands,^ ready to march in summer or winter alike ; * and that it was organized as a corjjs d'armee, the phalanx of Macedonian foot having a regular complement of all arms, light troops, cavalry, and archers, attached to it, and both siege and field artillery. ° It was in the strictest sense a professional ^ Sec article on "Army of Alexander," p. 20, cit. supra. The coincidence of names is about fifty-five per cent., that of numbers not above thirty per cent. ' Tact. 10. '^ Bern., de Cor. 2S5. Id. PhiJ. iii. 48 ff. ° Cf. Diod., xvi. S and 74 ; Arr., i. G. 60 PHILIE. army, elaborately trained to march under heavy arms and baggage/ highly paid and rewarded, and as capable of fortifying a camp or mining a wall as of executing every movement in the face of the enemy. Eelying on its training and discipline, Philip could introduce it to new fighting methods. He taught his Cavalry to charge, not in line, but in wedge-shaped formations,^ a device destined to be resorted to by his son at Arbela. For the In- fantry, he perfected the famous phalanx. Though in conception this phalanx was not different from the existing Greek fighting array, Philip so far developed and systematized it that he came to be regarded as its inventor. His new ideas seem to have been two : First to render bodies of pikemen more mobile and pliable than the Tlieban w Spartan. So far as we can judge, the idea of the Greek formations had been to range pikemen together in one compact mass, and win by sheer weight of man pushing on man, breast to back and shoulder to shoulder. It was hardly possible in such formation for the man at arms to make play with his pike, and uneven ground or any accident caused serious con- fusion. With highly disciplined soldiers like the Spartan, able to re-form quickly, and knowing how to use their weight, a considerable advantage might be gained ; but, nevertheless, as was proved in 394 at Coronea, training in this formation could not over- come sheer weight sturdily applied. Epaminondas saw ^ Vide supra, p. 45. " 'fact. IC. NEW IDEAS. 61 that tlie traditional deep formation ^ of the Boeotians, if practised by trained and resolute men on good ground, must break a thin line opposed to it ; but only able to find enough trained men to strengthen one wing, he conceived the idea of attacking with one part of his line only, and trusting to the moral effect upon all the foe of the breaking of their formation at an important point. The Leuctran "Wedge" marked the extreme that could be attained in the use of sheer weight. It was obvious, however, that, if opposed to a mobile and ready foe, its clumsy mass would be in grave peril, the weak part of the line might be cut off, and a very little movement over uneven ground would cause disorder. Philip, therefore, in search of a new idea, did not proceed on Theban lines, but reverting to shallow formations of eight, ten, or perhaps sixteen deep at the most, drilled his pikemen to stand in open order, in which they could ply their pikes easily and move quickly. If we can trust the Tactica, there were usually three feet between each man, both in rank and file interval, and in the closest order a foot and a half. Ample room therefore was left for individual and sectional movement, such as that implied in the opening of lanes in Alexander's array on the Balkans to allow passages for the Thracian waggons, or at Arbela to give the frightened horses yoked to Darius' scythed chariots a chance to bolt clear through the lines. All tacticians know that soldiers must be more thoroughly ' Cf. their depth of twenty-five shields as early as -124, at Delium (Thuc, iv. 93). 62 PHILIP. drilled and of better temper to preserve their forma- tion and steadiness in open than in close order ; but Philip had secured those essential first requisites, and thus could form a fighting force able to charge over bad ground and engage formations much deeper than their own. His second idea was the " sarissa" or long pike, tvhich u'oidd enable his 2'>hcdanx to strilie the first hloic. To the efiicient using of such a weapon, training and discipline were all essential. Macedonian armies of the third and second centuries plied a sarissa even twenty-four feet long,^ and six points protected the front rank man. It is needless to credit Philip's pikeman with so monstrous a weapon as this ; it belongs to the days of decline when generals, deficient in tactical ability, had reverted to solid immobile formations as more within their power to handle.^ No allusion is made by any historian of Alexander's wars to so abnormal a weapon as the sarissa, which astonished Polybius and Livy. On the contrary, the mobility, which stands out as the most striking virtue of Alexander's phalanx, witnesses that its weapon was not unwieldy. His formations are never ^ The coincidence of Polybius (xviii. 12) with Polyaenus (ii. 29. 2) and the second recension of the Tacfka (15) puts this beyond doubt. Cf. also Livy's remarks on its unwieldy length (xliv. 41). The first recension of the Tadka reads TrdSas- for TT-^x^'^j reducing the length to fourteen or sixteen feet ; but either this is a manuscript error or correction, or it is a remi- niscence of the earlier sarissa. " In the same way, heavy body armour was introduced in the Middle Ages, to compensate for degeneracy in drill and tactics. THE PHALANX. G3 (like those wliicli the Eomans met) at the mercy of uneven ground. They even crossed the Pinarus at Issus and re-formed in the face of the enemy. The Greek weapon may be assumed not to have exceeded the greatest length assigned by the author of the Tactica to a practicable pike, viz. twelve feet.^ Let a foot or two more be allowed to the phalangite of Philip and Alexander, and we save the indubitable fact that a longer weapon than the Greek was intro- duced, and do not render the attack at Issus a practicable impossibility. This Phalanx, however, be it observed, did not prove instantly superior to the Greek infantry formations that it encountered ; and it is a frequent error, derived from the Eomans, to attach to it a supreme import- ance in the Macedonian fighting line. Its inventor and his son used it to play a great but subordinate part ; secure of its discipline and steadiness, they could engage with it the whole front of a superior enemy, while the real attack was developed by the cavalry on the flanks. We have seen already the first outcome of these tactics against the Illyrians : they were to win Chaeronea, and be used with signal effect at Issus. The secret of the success of Philip and Alexander in their pitched battles lies in their handling of the magnificent horse, Macedonian and allied, and, in lesser affairs, of the lighter Guards ^ ^ 12. ^ The Guards (vTraa-irLa-Tai) are often reckoned into the Phalanx, e.ff. in Arrian's catalogue of the array at Arbela (iii. 11) ; but they are also distinguished clearly from the heavy phalangites 64 PHILIP. and archers. In later days only, when tliere was no longer a general to handle them, did these corps sink in repute below the automatically moving Phalanx. The perfected military system must have been the work of many years. For a long time Philip's national army was supplemented largely by mer- cenaries,^ and the use of such auxiliaries was not abandoned entirely even by his son.^ But we know that Philip at his death left to Alexander forty thousand seasoned men, and a system established so firmly that Phocion was moved to warn the exultant Athenians that the belauded poniard of Pausanias had done no more than diminish the army of Chaeronea by just a single man.^ Four years passed while Philip organized, plotted, and planned, but made hardly a sign to the outer world. In that obscure interval not only an army of soldiers was created, but another army with golden weapons sent forth to serve within the walls of every city-state of Hellas.* Fraud before force, but force at the last — such was Philip's principle of empire. Once only he aggressed, and that, perhaps, in reply to a hostile move. Athens, who still included in her ■whenever any occasion arises for distinction, e.g. on Alexander's rapid march to the Ciliciau gates (ii. 4). ^ Cf. Diod., xvi. 8 ; Dem., Ohjiiih. ii. 17. ^ There were 5000 in Alexander's Asian army (Diod., xvii. 17). Of. the corps of dpxaloi KaXou/Atvot ^eVoi at Arbela (Arr., iii. 12). ' Pint., Fhoc. 16. " Demosthenes (Be Cor. 19) implies that there were already paid agents of Philip at Athens in 356. YEARS OF WAITING. 65 League some of the ports round the Thermaic Gulf, had begun a year or two before this date to intrigue with cities and chieftains of Thrace/ Now, however, she was struggling with revolt elsewhere, and the allegiance of all her dependencies was shaken. At such a favourable moment secret overtures were made by certain citizens of Pydna and Potidaea. Philip accepted their conditions, the gates were opened, and both towns passed unresisting into his hands. He was not, however, ready either to use them or to fight for them, and with cool perfidy he handed them over, together with Anthemus, to the keeping of a local Greek confederation, which Olyn- thus was striving to increase at the expense of Athens. For he knew that the gift would be guarded gratefully, till in his own good time he might swallow that confederation and his gift at a gulp. For the rest, Philip lived in comparative peace, doing no more than egg on a Thracian neighbour, Kersobleptes, to loosen the grip of Athens on his -coasts,^ and harry the Illyrians by deputy.' Visit- ing the isle of Samothrace, to be initiated into the mysteries of the Cabiri, he met another royal novice, Olympias, daughter of a dead Epirote king and reputed of the Greek stem of Aeacus.* Her fierce ' Neopolis, C. I. A,, ii. G6 ; Ketriporis and Lykkeios, ii. 66 h. - But cf. Diod., xvi. 22. Cf . also Isoci'., De Pace, 22 (spoken in 355) with Dem. in Arist. 183. ' Plut., Alex. 3. * Id. Alex. 3. Cf. Pans., i. 9. 8. The Alexander Eomance ^aillndes to a former marriage and an earher offspring (Ps. Callisth., i. 13), but there is no corroborative evidence. P 66 PHiLir. fantastic nature appealed to the Macedonian in the common excitement of the orgies, and as soon as miorht be he wedded the wild woman. Men believed that portents marked her bridal night, and visions and strange dreams the early months of her pregnancy ; and on a stormy night of October, 356, while the Ephesian fane of the Goddess of Asia was aflame, she bore Philip a son. In the spring of 353 the king was ready at last with soldiers and plans. He came out to war with a double purpose — to free his new-made nation from all frontier dano;er once and for all, and to increase to a sufficient degree its internal strength and wealth. He had chastised already the lUyrians and Paeonians, and allied himself by marriage with Epirus. Thracian chieftains, whom he had courted hitherto to keep them indiff"erent to the seductions of Athens,^ must be crushed now to secure the northern and eastern marches. The Greek cities on his southern coasts from Olympus to the Chersonese were a stand- ing peril ; while Thessaly contained the menacing Pheraean power, and withal the finest cavalry in Europe next to his own.^ He seems to have tried his strength first on certain ^ Cf. Diod., xvi. 34, with Dem. in Arhi. 183. 2 Cf. Justin, vii. 6. " Hinc Thessaliam non praedae cupiditate, sed quod exercitui suo robur Thessalorum equitum adjungere gestiebat, nihil minus quam bellum metuentem improvisus ex- pugnat ; unumque corpus equitum pedestriumque copiarum invicti exercitus fecit." SIEGE OF METHOXE. 67 of the Greek cities ; ' but his Thracian allies took fright and called in Chares the Athenian. Philip eluded his fleet, and came back west to Methone, the one port of importance which Athens held still on the inner Macedonian sea. The imperial Republic was appealed to, but sent no help ; Philip pressed the siege, and when his men had scaled the wall, took away their ladders and so forced them into the town.^ The citizens — men, women, and children— were sent forth in the clothes they wore to find another home, and their city was razed to the ground ; it had cost Philip an eye.^ It marks an era in Philip's life, this siege of a little port in Pieria, for it meant war open and declared with Athens. Amphipolis, indeed, had not been forgotten by the jealous Eepublic, but Philip could allege that for long it had not been an Athenian dependency de facto, and he made feint of debating still the question of exchange. Pydna and Potidaea had invited him of their own motion, and, though he took them, he did not keep them in his hands. Ancient states often hovered long between peace and war, inflicting and receiving minor injuries, tantamount ^ Cf. Ohjiiih. iii. 4. Abdera and Maronea, at any rate. Cf. Dem. ill Arist. I.e., with Polyaen., iv. 2, 22. ^ Polyaen., iv. 2, 15. " Callisthenes {ap. Sfoh. vii. § G5) says tlie eye was shot out by one Aster, as Philip was marching to the siege of Olynthus ; but Callisthenes seems to have confused the siege of Methone with the later operations against Chalcidice. Cf. Diod., xvi. 8-4 ; Strabo, p. 33 a ; Justin, vii. G ; Pliny, N'at. Hist. vii. 87 ; Plut., Parallel, ch. viii. ; and Suidas, s.v. MiOwv-rj. The latter says that Aster was a Methonaean. 68 PHILIP. to casus helli, but sent no heralds. Philip knew well this practice and how to use it ; ^ but Methone made nothing possible but open war ; and the Athenians always looked back to that siege as a point of departure in the Macedonian's deliberate scheme to humble their country. Nevertheless, in 353, Philip had no wish to humble Athens, except on his own coasts. Throughout life his rude nature hankered after the approval of the city which he called the " Theatre of Glory," ^ and always he was more than half ashamed to use his brute broadsword aojainst her wit. Athenians alone among his captives he freed unransomed, when the chance of war threw them into his hands ; their land alone in Greece he neither entered himself nor allowed a single soldier to violate, even after Chaeronea. Had Athens not clung to her imperial relations wrtfr^ the coasts of Macedonia and Thrace, her orbit would never have disturbed that of Philip. It was the ' western ports which first embroiled the two ; it was Halonnesus and the Chersonese which strained their newly made Peace ; it was Athenian support of the cities on the Sea of Marmora, which indirectly brought Philip down at last to Chaeronea. Neither his last acts nor his first can be justified by international right, as commonly understood ; the attempt to acquit him by the laws of individual morality would be as futile as absurd. Let those that are without sin arraign by which code they will this architecFof a nation. ^^ '"^ ^ Cf. Dem., Phil. \y. G1. '' Plut., AjwpJM. Phil. 11. THESSALY. 69 It was late in that summer ere Philip could put hand to his dearest project. The great knightly house of Larissa had invited him to interfere in their quarrel with the rival house of Pherae.' An intriguer could wish no fairer field than Thessaly. One in name, it was divided from end to end by the fatal feuds of families. The great houses of Larissa, Pherae, Crannon, Pharsalus, and Pelinna, idle and luxurious feudal Barons with no overlord, rode and fought and oppressed their serfs. They knew no voluntary union ; but sometimes one house would so far increase its power as to force submission or unequal alliance on others, as the Aleuadae of Larissa had done in time past, and to claim for its chief the title of tagus of all Thessaly. More than twenty years before the Larissan family sent their invitation to Macedonia, a great Baron, one Jason, had arisen in Pherae — a man of a genius unscrupulous and masterful as that of Philip himself. This man, noting the success of professional armies in Asia, used the revenues of his cornlands and his port of Pagasae to buy soldiers of fortune ; and ere he died, in the year after Leuctra, lord of all the six thousand Thessalian knights ,^ ^ Both Diodoms (xvi. 14) and Justin (vii. G) possibly imply that Philip made an expedition to help these Aleuadae of Larissa earlier than 353. Demosthenes, however, reckons {Phil. iii. 25) that up to 341 Philip had been marching about Greek soil for less than thirteen years. I prefer to rate this explicit contemporary statement above the very vague indications of the chroniclers ; but it is quite possible that the invitation reached Philip earlier than 353, but was put aside till it could conveniently be com- plied with. ^ See, for Thessaly under Jason, the speech of Polydamas of Pharsalus at Sparta in 374. Xen., Hell. vi. 1. 70 PHILIP. lie could marshal with his mercenaries and allies the most formidable force in Greece. But by 353 he and his sons had met tyrants' deaths. A shadow of their power alone survived at Pherae ; and the Aleuadae of Larissa had fair hope of tasting full vengeance for the wrongs of twenty years, when Philip marched south from Methone to gain a footing in Thessaly. He appears to have underrated his foes, or over- rated his friends. The Pheraean Baron called up seven thousand mercenaries from the spoilers of Delphi, and against these Philip could make no head. A second check disheartened his men, and with much ado he drew them back to Macedonia. Durins; the winter he pressed the Thessalians to supply better support, and when he came south again in the spring of 352 he was able to take the field with more than twenty thousand foot and three thousand horse. A host of knights and mercenaries, superior to his own, was awaiting him, and in the plain of Volo Philip fought his first great battle on Greek soil. As champion of outraged Apollo against the impious Phocian hirelings, he exalted the superstitious confidence of his soldiers by wreathing their helmets as for a festival. They charged with the fury of fanaticism : the Phocian mercenaries and their leader Onomar- chus,' stricken with panic, hardly awaited the onset of the phalanx ; and the Companion and Larissan cavalry bore down on the Pheraeans until all broke and fled together towards the sea. An Athenian fleet was standing in-shore, and those that had fled first ^ Cf. Justin, viii. 2 ; and Pans., x. 2, 5. BATTLE OP PAaASAE. 71 stripped off their armour and waded out towards the ships, but ere Onomarclius was out of his depth he was killed by ruissiles. The victor crucified the body, and put to death three thousand of his prisoners, as sacrilegious men outside the pale of international right. The results of the victory were grave indeed ! The Pheraean army had lost nearly half its numbers, and its best ally. The Baron surrendered his city without another blow, flying south of Ther- mopylae with the last of his mercenaries ; and his port of Pagasae fell. The power which Jason founded had received its death-blow, and it was for the Macedonian now to be tagiis of Thessaly. ■ Flushed with success, Philip conceived the idea of pushing his pious championship of Apollo even to Delphi. Perhaps already he craved for Hellenic recognition ; certainly he wished to secure Thessaly on the south by breaking up the main Phocian force and seizing the southern Gate. He was not, however, to pass Thermopylae yet. News came up that it was held by a strong force, not of Phocians, but Athen- ians. Chares had sent home word of Philip's project, and the Republic that had been dashed too severely by the disastrous result of the Social War to make any serious effort to stay the Macedonian, started at last from lethargy at the news that an army greater than any since that of Xerxes was making for the pass. Philip had no idea of forcing his passage against serious opposition. So he turned back to Thessaly, and by the space of two years used 72 PHILIP. all His arts to make it his own. Nowhere, except at Pherae, whose last shadow of a tyrant he expelled in 351, did he cry Vae victis ! He would be, forsooth, no more than tagus, with harbour-dues to recoup expenses, and the good will of free Thessaly for reward. He won the land " by wiles rather than by arms," ^ fostering every weakening quarrel and supporting the masses against the Barons. To only one district, that of Magnesia and its port of Pagasae, did he lay imperial claim ; for there his gar- risons could command the harbour of Volo, match- less shelter for his own privateers, and dangerous inlet for those of his foes. Jason and his sons already had proved its value, and Philip's successors reckoned the fortress, which they built on its shore a mile from the modern town, to be one of the keys of Greece. It was largely this claim that so long delayed the settle- ment of Thessaly ; protest upon protest was made by the Thessalians, and we find Parmenio engaged still in 346 in reducing one of the towns on the gulf. The filaments of Philip's web stretched even to the long island of Euboea, whence Athenian influence could always threaten Thessaly. Gold and promises gathered a Macedonian party in Chalcis and Eretria, and fomented civil war. The opponents of Philip called upon Athens ; but when Phocion, her general, arrived in 349, it was to find that Philip's gold had debauched even the leader of his own allies. Deserted on the field of Tamynae, he saved himself and his army, and chastised his betrayer ; but the Athenians ' Polyaen., iv. 2. 19. PAEOKIA AND THEACE. 73 never recovered again all their prestige in Euboea. Thenceforward tyrants ruled the cities in the interests of Philip, or at best of themselves, and Athens felt that she might be threatened at any moment from vantage points whose possessors could turn both Thermopylae and the passes of Cithaeron. For half a dozen years after Pagasae we are allowed no more than glimpses of Philip. His agents appear in Greek towns,' and his privateers in Greek waters ; but of himself, so soon as he has left Thes- saly, we hear only that he is on his own confines.^ He had set himself to finish that task which was but half done when he marched into Thessaly, viz. the reduction once for all of the western half of the Balkan Penin- sula. The northern lUyrians and Paeonians, and his ownEpirote kinsman, Arybbas, still professed independ- ence.^ The most part of the Greek coast towns, from the Hebrus to the Axius, had yet to acknowledge Mace- donian sway. Whenever the cloud lifts, we descry the restless king- warrina; far inland, now stricken with sickness, now reported dead. At one moment he is besieging Heraeonteichos by the Hebrus, at another sweeping back through Geira to Stagira, Mecyberna and Torone.* This much, at least, is certain — that, the six years completed, Philip had only the east of the Balkan peninsula to conquer, and hardly a ^i)em., Phil. i. 17, 41 ; Ohjnth. ii. 18 ; De Pace, ii ; F. L. 10. ^ PhiJ. i. 11. » Ohjnth. i. ly. Cf. Plufc., Alex. 2 ; C. I. A. ii. 115, which proves that Arybbas, when beaten, sought refuge at Athens. ^ Olijaih. iii. 5 ; Diod., xvi. 52 ; Ael, V. H. xii. 54. 74 PDILIP. Tliracian port west of Hebrus is reckoned thereafter independent of him. It was estimated that ere he came down to Olynthus in 349, he had suppressed the freedom of thirty-two Hellenic cities of Thrace ; ^ and a later age interpreted as portents to Hellas the comets and earthquakes which marked the year 350.^ Philip, who had threatened Olynthus already three years before and driven her to compound her quarrel with Athens,^ drew at last towards her walls in the spring of 349. The capital of Chalcidice, although not comparable with the greatest maritime cities of Ionia, Greece, or Sicily, could offer a resistance more serious and a prize more valuable than any port of Thrace, except Byzantium. She had risen to her dignity on the ruins of the first maritime empire of Athens, by forcing into an unwilling federation most of the towns on the trident-peninsula,* and opposing herself consistently to the enfeebled leaders of the southern Hellenes. Sparta, indeed, at the zenith of her own power, had read her one rude lesson ; but relying first on the Thracian tribes, and latterly on the Macedonian king himself,^ Olynthus had persisted in asserting her headship ; and the fitful efforts of Athenian admirals to re-establish their dominion in Thrace had gone far to unite her confederacy with her ^ Callisfch., fr. 42 ; Suid., s.v. Kapavos. - Pliny, iV. If. ii. 27. ^ U. I. A. ii. 105. Of. Libanius, arg. to Olynthiac orations. ' See Xen.,HcU. v. 211 ff, for a contemporary statement of the nature of her " federation." ^ Dem. i/i Aristocr. 107. CHALCIDICE AKD OLYNTHUS. 75 in common resistance. To panhellenic sympathy, therefore, Olynthus had established no claim, nor indeed did she obtain it either before or after her fall. Only it chanced, as we shall see, that her in- terests were made the cry of a certain Athenian party, and that its leading spokesman saw fit to suppress her early record, to exaggerate both what she was and what she might have been, and to paint in vivid ■colours the dolorous impression caused by her cata- strophe — a picture which the subsequent attitude of the Athenians towards the oppressor of Olynthus, and of the Peloponnesians towards Olynthian captives (to take the orator's own story) signally fails to support. In the trident Philip played his usual ruthless game. He broke into the confederate cities one by one, but, assuring Olynthus that he was not at war with herself,^ contrived to convince her that he, her old ally, would hand over once more to her keeping the fractious members of her confederacy, chastened and subject as Potidaea seven years before. His spears moved stage by stage nearer the capital. The Olynthians suspected nothing, or lulled their suspicions ; when lo ! a Macedonian herald appeared at their gates, and throwing it in their teeth that they were sheltering two of his master's half-brothers, destined lone; ago to death at their kinsman's accession,^ proclaimed his brutal ultimatum, that Macedonia was not wide enough for Olynthus and for Philip.^ It was a bolt from the blue. No room ^ See Phil. iii. 11. " Justin, viii. 3. ° Dem., Plul. I.e. 76 PHILIP. was opened for grace, and the citizens could hut shut their gates and look round the Hellenic world for help. One state only was there, independent of Persia and already embroiled with Philip, which pos- sessed any considerable fleet. That state was Athens, and for the second time to Athens must Olynthus go. The Olynthian envoys were received in the summer by the Athenian people, without, it seems, great enthusiasm — but they were heard. In the exhausted Republic an imperial policy had not been popular since the Social War, and now that there was trouble in Euboea, a majority of the citizens were disposed to accept the statements of Philip's agents that the Macedonian king's ambition was not directed against the Athenian state, which indeed, they protested, he held in high esteem. The loss of the Thracian mines, however, rankled in the soul of Demos, who had come to love free shows and to hate taxation as heartily as a Eoman state-pensioner ; and withal individual Athenians of position, like Eoman nobles, foresaw in foreign commands very pretty opportunities for loot and blackmail. There- fore, rather perhaps because they did not love Olyn- thus than because they did, the Athenians acceded to the envoys' prayer so far as to despatch a half- piratical expedition of two thousand hired soldiers in thirty ships of war under their notorious con- dottiet-e, Chares. How this force conducted itself we may infer from Demosthenes' complaints in the second Olynthiac oration,^ and also from the fact M 28 ; cf. Phil i. 45. ATHENS AND OLYNTHUS. J' 7 that it appears to have done no sort of harm to Philip. Chares was back in Athens by October ; and already, in response to a second appeal from Olynthus, the still more notorious pirate Charidemus ^ had taken eighteen Athenian ships of war, four thousand light troops, and a small force of cavalry, drafted from the Euboean army of Phocion,^ and gone off to Chalcidice ; where he raided the lands of the Greek towns in Pallene and Bottiaea to the no small satisfaction of himself and his men, but neither to the serious hurt of Philip nor to the conspicuous advantage of Olynthus. The latter, in fact, sent presently to complain of these hireling hordes, but only obtained early in 348 ^ the loan of Chares again, followed this time by a citizen force of two thou- sand spears and three hundred horse, together with seventeen ships of war. But we are not led to suppose that any good result followed ; Chares returned probably ere the Olympic Truce was proclaimed,* Philip not having been driven back a single foot. Already the lesser Chalcidic cities were under the Macedonian's heel, and the Olynthian forces, after two hard-fought but unsuccessful engagements,^ were ' See Dem. in ArMocratem, juifisim ; and Theopompus, fr. 155. - Dem. in Mid. p. 197. " Such an interval before the third expedition is in itself probable, and not at all inconsistent with the words of Philochorus as quoted by Dionysius {ad Amm. 9). Holm {Gr. Gesch. iii. ch. 17, p. 280) anticipates me in this view. '' Aesch., F. L. 12. '' Cf. Theopomp., fr. 155, for their partial success. 78 PHiLir. penned within their walls. Ancient sieges were slow and painful if there was no traitor to open a gate, and the besieged had access to the sea ; and Olynthus might have kept Philip without its walls for long enough, had he depended on force alone. The Macedonian, however, had his agents within the gates as well as his pikes outside, and was working to corrupt some leader of the aristocratic faction, which, it seems, inspired the defence.^ During the winter the stalwart ApoUonides came to be disgraced, and traitors, Lasthenes and Euthycrates,^ to be put in his room, and from them the surrender was bought at last in the early spring of 347. The aristocratic knights were betrayed ; the commons ceased to resist ; and more by fraud at the last than force Philip found himself in Olynthus. He razed the city to the ground, sold its citizens for slaves, after the brutal Macedonian manner, which even his. hellenized son used, executed his two half-brothers, and went off to Dium to give thanks at the great festival of Macedonian Zeus * for the crowning mercy of a united Macedonia. Winter had set in when a herald appeared at the court of Pella, announcing that an embassy was on its way from Athens with overtures of peace. Philip had still to realize two schemes in his earliest programme of ambition. The eastern half of the Balkan penin- sula remained to be subdued ; and his supremacy 1 Phil. iii. 50 ff. = Dem., Chers. 40. ' Diod., xvi. 55. STRENGTH OF ATHENS. TO' must be establistied south of Thermopylae. He was meditating on the immediate prosecution of the first of these schemes, with its implied assault on Athenian interests in the Thracian Chersonese/ and on an aggressive movement in Euboea, designed, doubtless, to check the Attic privateers ; ^ but the appearance of the Athenian herald induced him to postpone all this in favour of the second scheme. It was a singular opportunity. Athens, so devoutly desiring peace, might well let him pass Thermopylae without a battle ; and for the rest he would answer himself with his diplomacy and his spears. The Macedonian had been looming large in the Athenian sky these seven years past. Athens also,, beyond question, had occupied no small place in the thoughts of the Macedonian. But it is a grave error in historical perspective to represent Philip as engaged consciously during all his reign in a great duel with Demosthenes. A right understandino- either of that orator's position in Athens, or of the part played at this epoch by the Republic herself in the political arena of eastern Europe, will supply salu- " tary correction. For fifty years past Athens had been hardly superior in naval strength to Rhodes, and for half that time distinctly inferior in military power to Thebes ; and it is clear that Philip rated her capacity for offence hardly higher than that of Olynthus or Byzantium. As a military power, Athens, never the equal even ' .aisch., F. L. 82. " Dem., F. L. 315. 80 PHILIP. of such little city-states as Sparta and Thebes, was worth consideration now only in so far as she could hire soldiers of fortune. For, like Venice in the Middle Ages, she possessed but an insignificant peasant class, the most part of her citizens being townsmen of one town, engaged in commerce or sea- going trade. The size of her army, therefore, would depend directly on the measure of her' revenues ; and these had sunk by 34 G to a figure not more than commensurate with her internal needs. Since the Social War, the tribute paid annually to her by other states had fallen to less than fifty talents ; and even that insignificant sum could not always be realized. Internally, she seems to have been still very wealthy ; but since her citizens seldom or never submitted to direct taxation, and had come, with the spread of free thought and philosophic scepticism, to be but lukewarm in voluntary bounty, the State was scarcely tapping private capital at all. Accordingly, we find that the forces which from time to time Athens sends to Thrace or to Euboea are hardly worthy of mention beside Philip's effective armies, even had the Athenian bands been (as, indeed, they were not !) properly paid and equipped, and of assured loyalty to their mistress. On the sea, Athens was hardly more formidable than on land. For although she had still a larger fleet than any single state in the Aegean, and presently, under careful administration, brought the tale of her ships up to three hundred (as the marble navy records still bear witness), it is manifest that ATHENIAN ARMY AND FLEET. 81 she could neither put in commission any large number of vessels at one time, nor keep such as she did commission long on the sea. Men and money were wanting to her fleet as to her army ; and the requisite ship-furniture was not in her arsenals. There is no evidence that she ever had more than fifty ships on active service after the Social War. And, moreover, it must be pointed out that, although it might be irksome to Philip not to have the com- mand of the Aegean, that disability was not more fatal to him than it proved two centuries later to Rome. His was a land power resting on a continental basis, and, in the main, independent of sea-going trade ; and even had Athens not had rivals on her own element, such as Rhodes, Chios, Byzantium, and Syracuse, the geographical position of Philip's realm would have placed him beyond the reach of anything but irritation from her admirals. Weak as Athens was herself in offensive force, she stood also practically alone. After the Social War she never resumed an imperial position, nor was able to count on the men or money of others. Her writ ran only where her squatters had been planted, in Lemnos, Imbros, Scyros, Samos, and the Thracian Chersonese. On the cities of Thrace, and even on Euboea (as the demands made by Callias in 342 suffice to prove), her hold was very weak, and only if in a moment of common fear she came to be added to some independent power, equal or superior to herself, would she cease to be negligible. That moment came in 338 ; but even then she could not G 82 THILIP. outlast a single pitched battle, and fifteen years later, after the Lamian War had flickered out, Athens was forced to confess that she had not a single army to put in the field. As it had been given to Thucydides to exalt a series of raids into a great national war, so the transcendent oratory of Demosthenes has led historians to invest his opposition to Philip with an importance of which assuredly Philip was not aware. But since Athens, through her letters and her art, takes a place in universal history far above that due to her politics or her arms, the historian to-day is bound to esteem her by the former and not the latter standard, She may be a weakling compared to Thebes, and a pigmy beside Persia, but she has aff"ected our world so much more than either, that small events in her history possess an interest far greater than the great events of theirs. To ignore her, or even to relegate her to lesser importance in relation to Philip, is to forget that Philip himself, .little as he regarded her fleets or her armies, bowed himself none the less to her culture as he bowed to the arms of no other state. Consistently he modified his policy and excused his actions, for fear of forfeit- ing irretrievably her good will ; and he looked to a recognition by her as more to be desired and more pregnant of advantage than twice a victory of Chaeronea. Therefore, every relation which Philip has with Athens is worthy of more than ordinary note in his biography, and it is no paradox to say that the ATHENIAN PARTIES. 83 chance that we know so much of those relations, and so little of his intercourse with the Great King at Susa, and the princes of the Balkans and Albania with whom he was intriguing or warring all his life, implies no iniquity of fate. Certainly there is no more notable moment in his career, historically regarded, than this at which he became for the first time the theme of a supreme Athenian orator. He had been mentioned, indeed, as early as 355 by Isoerates, who, in a speech recommending peace with the confederate rebels of the Social War, assured the Athenians that the Macedonian king would not oppose rfcheir claim to Amphipolis ; ^ and, in the same year, he was alluded to first by the great Demosthenes.^ But it is not till after the battle of Pagasae that Philip inspired a whole oration. It had been the policy of Athens for some years past not to intervene in foreign affairs. The minis- terial majority, led by a few able men like Eubulus and Phocion, found the ground of their faith in the lesson of the Social War, in a depleted treasury, and in a just estimate of the present capacity of the over- politicized Athenian people ; for practical support tthey relied on an idle populace and on a cultured landed class desirous only to possess its soul on its Attic estates. Opposed to these responsible statesmen was a fervid minority all for empire and for war, certain members of it being imbued with a genuine desire to arrest the slow decay of the state, more •descrying in Opposition the road to political fame. ' De Pace 22, ^ Lept. 61. , 84 PHILIP. Partly of one class and partly of the other was Demosthenes, now just thirty years of age, crying in season and out of season against the smug ministerial majority.^ In this year, o52, the foreign potentate most con- cerned with the traditional area of Athenian empire was Philip, and upon him accordingly the attention of the Opposition is concentrated. Therefore we are the richer for a series of speeches of surpassmg merit as oratory, but neither convincing nor convinced. They were not productive, perhaps were not intended to be productive, of any result beyond that of bring- ing their author to the front of the political stage. There is the First Philippic, which impugns the slack military methods of the Ministry, and makes Philip's restless aggression occasion to call for a signal re- versal of the ministerial peace policy. There is the speech for the Freedom of the Rhodians, spoken iu 351, in which the orator lashes out, in passing,^ at the official apathy about Philip's movements. There are the three Olynthiac orations, all delivered pro- bably late in 349 (one perhaps early in 348) in the debates excited by the successive appeals of the Olynthians. This group of great orations is not to be taken too seriously. The orator knew very well that it was not among the practical possibilities of politics that the Olynthian quarrel should be taken up very strenuously, or the Sacred Fund, set apart for the providing of free shows, be voted for the war. ' ' Cf. Dfi rare C ; Deinarcb. in Bern. pp. 12, 102, 99 ; Pint., Dem. ' § 24. DEMOSTHENES. 85 Secure, therefore, in irresponsibility, lie can flout the majority, and extol or depreciate Philip's power and character, according as the Ministry finds its excuse for inaction in contempt or fear of the foe. The three speeches have been placed in this sequence or in that, according as the necessities of Olynthus are pressed or ignored, as Philip bulks small or large, and as the recommendation of a financial expedient is tentative or precise. '^ But it is to be remarked that since the references in these orations to the Olyn- thian war are in the last degree meagre and vague, and those to Philip merely general, the Olynthiacs would possess for the historian only an academic interest, even did not the position of the speaker and the character of the action taken by the Ministry make it impossible to invest them with any respon- sibility for the Athenian expeditions.'"' No sooner was Demosthenes on the road to recog- nition and office, than he rounded towards the policy of the majority, and was found among the ten envoys at Pella in the winter of 347. He was destined presently to revert to his former policy, thanks to circumstances beyond his own control, and to intensify it into that persistent Philippic Crusade which we associate with his name. In brief, it was the rare fortune of Demosthenes to be forced into consistency with himself ; yet, nevertheless, there is no need to call him trimmer or opportunist. The young party - politician always must begin ' On such principles, II., I., III., must be the order. - Cf., per contra Ulpian, ail Don. OTijnih. I. 86 PHILIP. uncertainly ; and if it be iDorne in mind that Demos- thenes was not, as some have loved to represent him, a voice crying in the wilderness, but essentially and always a man of partyj spokesman of one strong faction against another, we shall not degrade him to a political rogue,' any more than exalt him as political saint. His conduct of the embassies should make that last exaggeration impossible, although the conspicuous correspondence of his later action with the magnificent principles, that he enunciated so magnificently, set him as high as a politician has ever stood in a democratic state. The reason of the herald's coming to Pella was on this wise. The Athenian people, seeing itself as far as ever from recovering the mines,^ had left Olynthus to its fate a full year before ; and now the destruction of its Chalcidic ally released it from its oaths of alliance and all lingering doubts. Already, in 349, Philip had been reported to desire peace, and latterly one Ctesiphon had brought a verbal message from him to the Athenians that he warred unwillinglv against their city.^ A motion even had been made in the Assembly at the end of 348, to invite Philip to make first move. Philip did not respond. It was hardly his part to come a-courting now ! Therefore, ' " Malum virum accepimus " (Quintilian, xii. 1. l-t). - That this was the sole object which aroused any public interest at Athens in the Olynthiau war, is proved abundantly by all the authorities. The war with Philip is called consistently " for Amphipolis." Cf. especially, Libanius, arg. to Dem. F. L. " ^Esch., F. L. l;!. NEGOTIATIOKS FOR PEACE. 87 the first panic over, and their envoys recalled from the Greek states, the Athenian Ministry, hearing a renewal of Philip's expression of goodwill in the mouth of Aristodemus, an actor, put up one Philo- crates to move for a commission to negotiate peace. Ten members were proposed — the mover himself and Ctesiphon, and six elderly colleagues, together with the two free lances, Demosthenes and iEschines,^ whose inclusion would muzzle the Opposition. This motion being agreed to, a herald was despatched, as we have seen ; and late in the autumn the Commis- sioners crossed to Euboea, and journeyed overland up to Oreus, in order, doubtless, to avoid the privateers in the Aegean and the Thebans on the mainland. At Oreus they proposed to await their herald's return ; but he not appearing, and the season being late, they took ship to the Bay of Pagasae, where Parmenio was beleaguering Halus, obtained his safe conduct, and so came in peace through his lines to Larissa, where at last the herald brought word that all was well. Philip was lying at Pella, and a few days later received them there with all honour. This first audience, which the architect of the new order gave to the last brilliant spirits of the old, is one of the very few events of Philip's life that we can invest with circumstance. iEschines, giving three years later an account of his acts to an Athenian jury, has left us a suggestion of the scene — the king seated on his throne in the public assembly of his ^ These two were not on distinct sides of the honse at this period. Cf. ^Esch., F. L. 79, with Dem., F. L. 10, 11, 302, 310. 88 : PHILIP. vassals, and of those famous knights whom Demos- thenes had disparaged as "no better than other men;" ^ standing before him a little group of unarmed strangers with their sponsor and their herald, who represented the crown of civilization in their time. The older men first addressed the king, stating briefly the griefs and proposals of their city, and made way for the two young immortals, who behaved, however, very much as mortals conscious of budding reputa- tions. For we gather that they launched out into lengthy harangues about the ancestors of the king and of themselves, and the eternal laws of wrong and right ; and the greater Immortal of the two forgot his notes, and breaking down in mid-air, had to be handled kindly by the " barbarian," and encouraged to collect himself ; but all to no purpose. Thereupon the herald bade the ambassadors withdraw out of the presence ; and the Commission fell to wrangling about the success or failure of this member and that, but in the midst of the dispute came the king's men to lead them back to the presence. And when they were seated, Philip replied to them severally with such courtesy and address that those masters of debate knew not afterwards which to admire most, his temper or his wit.^ Thereafter he bade them to a feast, and entreated them so well at his table and always while they stayed at his court, that they went back to Larissa vying in praise of him, but agreed, nevertheless, when they should come to Athens, to assume a more discreet reserve. ^ Ohjnth. ii. 17. - iEsch., F. L. 41 ff. ATHENIAN COMMISSION AT PELL A. 89 When the relative strength of the two powers is considered, and regard is had to the terms of the subsequent peace, it is evident that in all this matter Athens had done the kissing, and Philip but offered his cheek. And the mutual contradictions of the rival orators in the famous Embassy Speeches leave no room for doubt that the question of Amphipolis and the mines had not been insisted upon by the Com- mission, probably not advanced at all, for fear negotiations should miscarry from the very outset/ Philip commissioned his herald to go to Athens with the envoys and bear a courteous letter, agree- ing to a peace on the terms uti ^Mssidetis, with a guarantee that he would not attack the Chersonese, and adding, it seems, even a proposal of alliance. The Athenian Ministry asked no better terms, and received with all good will a few days later Philip's Commissioners, among whom were two destined to a wider fame, Parmenio, future lieutenant of Alex- ander in the conquest of Asia, and Antipater, the coming Ptegent of Europe, who was to return to Athens in very different case. Meanwhile Philip himself did not rest on his oars. When the events soon to happen are considered, there ea]\ be little doubt that now or earlier he made secret overtures to the Phocians and to Thebes, and invited the deputations from those states which met him on his return to Pella. A man of Philip's clear ' Cf. Demosthenes' own view of the hopelessness of entertaiu- in,i>' any idea of recovering Amphipolis, expressed long before this date {Phil. i. 12). 90 PHILIP. purpose leaves as little as may be to chance. But in the interval he betook himself to the Hebrus, and turned his hand to reducing an old foe, or old ally, now leagued with Athens, the chieftain Kersobleptes, whose dominions, lying very near to the Chersonese, might be put out of Macedonian reach by the terms of the peace, if not annexed before its ratification. We know no details of this campaign ; we hear only vaguely of the Macedonian armies as now on the coast of Thrace, now on the Holy Mountain, which over- looks the Sea of Marmora, and in May Philip returns, to Pella with Kersobleptes at his chariot wheels. There a crowd of envoys from the Greek States was waiting, together with the Athenian Commission, returned with full powers to ratify peace and alliance. A biographer of Philip may resign with heartfelt thankfulness to the historian of Greece the minute examination of what had taken place at Athens ere the Commission started again for Pella. And, indeed it may be questioned whether such history as can be written from the forensic assertions of two rival orators, each concerned to falsify his own and his opponent's part in a negotiation which had come in three years to stink in Athenian nostrils, does not fill, as it is, too large a place in standard works, to the wearying of the reader and the distortion of perspective. The sum of events is this. The majority of Athenians were plainly for peace at almost any price, and both yEschines and Demosthenes, then stepping on to the threshold of ofiice, went with the majority. Certain difliculties arose from the fact that AFFAIRS AT ATHENS. 91 the city had allies, who must be included, and that the Macedonian Commission declined on Philip's behalf to admit all of these to the Treaty. The Macedonians gave way in the matter of Kersobleptes (a concession which availed the Thracian not at all), but set their faces as adamant against the Phocians, now impiously holding Delphi and Thermopylae, and lying under ban therefor. But the Athenian Ministry, in its present mood, was not prepared to stand out for Phocians any more than for Amphipolis, and having put off its allies with vague assertions (for the allies, it seems, did not wish to meet Philip so far beyond half way as the dominant partner), took the oaths on the Macedonian terms. Philip's Commission, greatly complimented, left for Pella, and the Athenian envoys were reappointed and sent out again by way of Euboea. Much was said afterwards about their delays ; they should have gone direct to Thrace, and by swearing Philip then and there, have saved many towns ; but evidently the Ministry had no mind to tax Philip's forbearance, and had indeed bidden their Com- mission take the usual road, and wait at Pella till the conqueror should be pleased to come back from Thrace. Historians have laboured to account for this humble attitude of Athens by laying stress on her uneasiness for her citizens held captive since the fall of Olynthus, on her hatred of Thebes, and on the deception practised by Philip's agents. But, surely, no further explanation is called for (if we look at the acts of her responsible statesmen, Eubulus or Phocion, and not only listen to the grandiose 92 PHILIP. utterances of Demosthenes) than her own conscious- ness that her efiective forces had become, in 346, feeble indeed compared to those of the Macedonian. Never did Philip hold better cards than at Pella in May, 346, and never better did he play his game. Encamped about him in the plain of the Vardar was such an army as united Greece could not excel ; and embassies from Athens, from Thebes, from the Phocians, from the Thessalian synod, from Aetolia, were bidding for his favour, each interpreting in their own sense the purpose which alone he knew. His whole soul was set on one afreat end — uncon- ditional supremacy over the Hellenes — and he had the most definite plan of action. First, he must secure the command of the land route into central Greece ; second, he looked to obtain a recognized position in the inner communion of the Hellenes;^ and third, he proposed to reduce the Greek states to an inno- cuous equality. In effect, he would seize and hold Thermopylae ; he would assume the double rdle of champion of the Delphian Apollo and patron of Athens ; and he would crush the Phocian " Grand Company," Sparta, and eventually Thebes. The game must have been pretty playing for Philip. It had leaked out that he was going to march south ; but whether to do more than help Parmenio against Halus, the envoys were not agreed. Collectively the Greek states, represented at Pella, had suspicions of Philip's ultimate intentions ; ' Cf. Dem., de Pace 19, 22. PHILIP GOES SOUTH. 93 individually, they cherished immediate aims which he could advance. The one thing needful for the IMace- donian was to keep doubt of his destination from becoming certainty till his goal was in sight, that he might arrive within touch of the venal Phocians in Thermopylae before any one could forestall his bid. It was easy to retain the Greek envoys, who knew well enough that their safe conduct through Thessaly depended on the king's advices to his lieutenant ; '- nor was it difficult, by giving secret pledges to their several enmities, to prevent their concerted action. The Athenians were talked to privily about the Thebans, the Thebans about the Phocians, the Phocians about the Thebans. Late in May, the peace with Athens being still unratified and no decisive answer having been given to anybody, Philip issued marching orders, and came through the pass of Tempe with all the envoys intriguing and back- biting in his train ; and so to Pherae, the scene of his triumph six years before. There he called a halt, as though to breathe before assaulting Halus. And at last in a khan, which stood on the great south road, over against a temple of the Twin Brothers, Philip swore a solemn oath to observe peace with the Athenians, and with their children's children, and put forward representatives of all his " allied " cities, from Epirus to Cardia in the Chersonese, to do the like. The final terms implied the abandonment of Amphi- polis to Philip ; the recognition that Cardia was his ^ Needless here to listen to the eternal cry of bribery— the Athenian " Nous sommes trabis ! " (Dera., Cor. n2). '94 riiiLir. :ally; the relinquishing of the great eastern islands, [Rhocles, Chios, and Cos, to the satrap of Caria ; and the acknowledgment of the right of the Byzantines to levy their own tolls in the Bosphorus. In effect, Athens accepted the fact that she was no longer imperial. Nevertheless, the ten Athenians received Philip's oaths and accepted a safe conduct, and, not a little relieved, took ship to Euboea, and came again to Athens early in June. In time to come the Athenians were to repent that their envoys had accepted the oaths of Philip's allied towns by their proxies. They had bidden, said they, their Commission visit each several "allied" town in turn and judge its claim to be included or excluded ; and the failure to obey led to wild accusa- tions of venality and bad faith, culminating in one famous charge. But all that can be said nowadays is, that manifestly at the time of ratification the Athenians were too well pleased with peace at any cost to press such a point. And, indeed, it is difficult to see how better the envoys could have acted. If the master of so many battalions would not take oaths but at his own good time, who was to force him ? And until he had taken them and given the envoys safe conduct, how should they go to the Thracian cities ? At Pherae Philip was too strong and too nigh for the Athenians to be other than thankful to obtain full ratification of their peace without another day's delay. The cry about Cardia and against the Peace comes later in time, when the impunity which; the Macedonian's ambition, not his ' PHILIP AT THEEMOPYLAE. 95 fear, secured to Athens, while she lay at his mercy, had restored her assurance. For from first to last the Athenian ascribed to fear rather than to generosity any act of grace. Whether Philip took Halus now or later, we know not ; ^ in any case it held out but little longer before laeing dismantled and given to the keeping of the Pharsalians. At any rate, it is clear that he delayed the shortest possible time before rounding Othrys, and confronting the eight or ten thousand merce- naries ranged under the Phocian banner at Thermo- pylae. A small Lacedaemonian force was with these, and a weak Athenian squadron watched events from Oreus. For the temper of the mercenaries was very doubtful ; their pay was in arrear, and their leader had quarrelled with the Phocian government.^ Philip halted, and sent a herald into the Pass. Phalaecus, the condottiere, asked for time. He had envoys at Athens, and wished to know whether that city meant to support him. Should she not send help, his posi- tion would be scarcely tenable, with the Thebans in his rear, and the best army in Europe ready to assault Tiis front. So the pickets of Phalaecus and Philip watched each other across the Asopus until the seventh day, or thereabouts, when the Phocian envoys returned to say that the Athenian assemblies -were passing idle votes against Philip, and idle votes ' Demosthenes says {F. L. 30) that Philip had professed to •detaia the Athenian envoys, that they might mediate in the flatter of Halus. - ^sch., F. L. 132. ■ ■ 96 PHILIP. of sympathy with his opponents," but plainly did not intend to send a lance or contribute a drachma. The Lacedaemonians decamped then and there ; the Athenian fleet made no sign ; and three days later Phalaecus had sold the Pass and the Phocian cause to Philip, and marched his sacrilegious bravos into the Peloponnese ; whence they betook themselves to Elis, Crete, and Sicily, and as the Greeks loved to believe, perished to a man miserably by the wrath of Apollo. Philip was within the gates of Greece. What would he do ? For whom, against whom, would he be ? All Greece waited, hoping somewhat, fearing more, Athens especially looking to her walls, and calling in her country folk, though it was near the season of the rural feast of Heracles. With masterly duplicity, Philip held out the hand of frank fellowship tO' Thebes,^ who had been on the right side in the Sacred War when Lacedaemon and Athens had been on the wrong. The Boeotian cities, Orchomenus, Coronea, and Corsiae, whilom allies of the Phocians, were handed over to Theban mercies,^ and Philip marched into the mountains to avenge Apollo. Fire and sword went through Phocis, as through no Greek state since Epa- minondas had raided Laconia. Twenty-three cities were dismantled, and broken up into open villages,* a device learned from the great Theban, and after ten years the Delphians were led back to their Delphi, and put in possession of its spoiled and violated shrine. ' Bern., F. L. 50, 181. ^ Qf_ p^^^g^^ ^^ 9, 5. ^ Dem., F. L. U9. ' Diod., xvi. 60. PAKHELLEKISM. 97 The God who sat on the navel of Hellas acknow- ledged his new champion through the mouth of hi'^' Prophetess. The ancient and venerated union of the Amphictyons elected him by acclamation to the empty seat of the Phocians, receiving him thus int^^ the innermost circle of the Hellenes. And in the character of the greatest Hellene of them all he sat in the Pythian chair of presidency that autumn, and gave the bay-leaf crowns to the victors at the games. With the noise of him all Greece was filled, even as the brain of that half-witted Arcadian, who, arrested at Delphi, cried that he was running, and would run still, until he came to a people that knew not Philip.' For the six years or more that follow, Philip's life, alas ! is withdrawn, except at rare intervals, from our knowledge. Alas, indeed ! for these are the years in which his men at arms marched, the first foreigners since history had begun, into the Pelo- ponnese, and he himself besieged and took cities on the Adriatic, and led his spearmen up to, or even beyond, the Danube ; years, too, in which his final ambition took shape, " for it was coming to be his desire to be designated Captain-General of Hellas, and to wage the War against the Persian." ^ To such a purpose did the old Isocrates incite him now,^ fired in the evening of his long life with a vision of a panhellenic Union, in which the petty quarrels 1 Theopomp., fr. 235. ' Diod., xvi. 60. ' His Letter to Philip was written about 345. 98 PHILIP. of cities, whicli had made history duriog all his days, would be forgotten. Years, finally, in which the father beo-an to educate the son to be not less a warrior and more a Hellene than himself, little thinking how entirely the execution of the great project, with which his own soul was filled, was to fall with all its glory to the boy. It seems that Philip himself went back to his capital to spend the winter of 346-345,' leaving garrisons in Phocis and Thermopylae,^ and orders to his lieutenants to watch Thebes and obtain a footing in Euboea, disposed already in his favour ; and that in the spring of 345 he sent out agents and troops to secure to himself almost all the states of Greece, except Attica. Everywhere his game was to divide, a policy which he may have learned from Epaminondas. Thessaly, so apt to be united by a powerful Baron, was split in four, and Councils of Ten, acting for Philip, and paying to him the revenues of the land,^ replaced the baronial rule in the cities. Euboea was won over with the single doubtful exception of Chalcis, and Macedonian garrisons were placed in Porthmus and Oreus,* the points of entrance and departure on the north road from Attica, which the embassies were used to follow. In the previous autumn the king seems to have gone to Thebes, to be received as a gracious benefactor, where twenty years before he ' Diod., xvi. 60. - Dem., Ad Ep. Phil. 4, says that Philip garrisoned Nicaea, near Thermopylae. '' Phil ii. 22 ; iii. 26, 33. ' Dem., Phil iii. 12, 57, 58 ; F. L. 219. THILIP AND ATHENS. 99 had lived in exile. In 345, however, the most part of Philip's intrigue and coercion was exercised within the Isthmus to the breaking-up of the traditional supremacy of Sparta, against whom he could allege that she had ranged herself in Thermopylae with the violators of Delphi. But, although compelled now by superior force to swallow peace with Argos,^ and to see Arcadia set up again,^ and to resign Mes- sene,^ Sparta never submitted herself altogether, but in years to come alone of all the Greeks refused to serve under Philip's banner against Persia, and broke out against his son, so soon as he was gone into Asia. Furthermore we hear now of Philip's agents in Elis as the first cause of intestine dissensions in all its cities and of faction fights and massacres ; * and also that he projected the seizure of Megara. Athens herself, however, Philip did not touch. ^ Determined as he was to end her claims to imperial dominion on the coasts which he conceived to be his own, he respected nevertheless the soil of Attica more than if it had been holy ground. And not only so, but by letter after letter, and envoy after envoy, he tried to soothe the fears of the city and heal her wounded feelings. First he sent her two invitations = Paus., ii. 20, 1 ; vii. 11, 2 ; Dem., F. L. 2G0. - Paus., viii. 7, 4, 27, 10. ^ Dem., Phil. ii. 13, 20, 26, and arg. ' " Dem., F. L. 260, 204 ; Phil. iii. 27 ; Paus., iv. 28, 4. ^ There is a loose rhetorical passage in Phil. ii. ;JC, which might imply that Philip made a descent on the Attic coast ; but we may be sure that, if a fact, we should have heard of it again and again. 100 PHILIP. to participate in the pious task of vindicating Apollo ; ^ then, taking no umbrage that she did not comply, he communicated his own success in a third letter, with many expressions of good will.^ All the Athenians taken at Olynthus returned unransomed to their country, — and indeed Philip prided himself oa taking no money for an Athenian. Furthermore by the mouths of his agents he promised constantly that Athens should reap no small advantage from the Peace she had made ; ' and doubtless he promised sincerely, and withal fulfilled his word, as it seemed to him, by crushing her old foes in Greece, and exalting her as the one inviolate Queen of civili- zation. Lastly, most signal act of all, some time in 344, when master of all Greece beside, Philip sent one. Python, to plead against the evil things said constantly of him in Athens, and to bid for the goodwill it seemed so hard to win, by proposing to amend the Peace in those clauses which had vexed the Athenians most. And all this labour of con- ciliation, is it to be referred to no nobler an instinct than fear ? It can scarcely be thought to spring from that in 34G, but what are we to say in 338, when point for point it was taken up again after Chaeronea ? Eather to Philip's honour let it be recorded, as to the honour of any warrior-statesman, that sword in hand he paid homage to the arts of peace. And not less be it recorded to the honour of Athens, that she did not accept his homage. For ever since her third ' Bern., F. L. 51. - Dem., F. L. 3G. ^ Dem., Halonn. S3. THE PHILIPPIC CRUSADE. 101 Embassy had broken up on its way north, hearing that Philip was already within Thermopylae, she had protested against this great armament that paraded Greece, sparing only herself with an intolerable sufferance. Chafing at Philip's reception among the Amphictyons, she would have disowned even the Treaty she had sworn, had Demosthenes not inter- vened.^ Checked in this act of folly, she was fain to console herself with decreeing exile against the chief authors of the Peace, and with harbouring all men disaffected to Philip, and with applauding Demos- thenes when he flouted Philip's envoys, and with proposing preposterous amendments to the Treaty, and with sending Diopithes and a fleet to the Chersonese to sail as near to war as he might in time of peace. Now is the time when Demosthenes emerges finally from his uncertain youth, and, winning the ear of the citizens, adopts a strong- policy to be maintained more or less till the day of his death. No longer is he " unstable in his ways, incapable of constancy to one policy or to one party," as Theopompus said of him in one of those vigorous sentences,^ which show how much we have lost in losing the " Philippica." It is easy to sit in judgment now on this policy of Demosthenes, easy to prove that resistance to Philip was worse than useless, and that Athens had not the internal resources to enable her to assume again an imperial position. She lost, maybe, the full favour of the master of her fate, and she should ' JJeFace 13. - Fr. lOG. 102 PHILIP. have been urged to take a less selfisli and more panhellenic view of the great king, who only aspired to lead united Hellas against her ancient foe I Demosthenes was unjust, improvident, blind to the lesson of his age — be it so ! Cicero too was blind when he opposed Caesar and supported Octavian. The greatest statesmen have been just as blind in every age of change. But just as individual character gains more by fighting out a battle than by a cunning surrender, so the character of a people purges itself in strenuous resistance of base elements that would increase perilously, did it subordinate wholly its choleric emotions to its pure reason. And inas- much as this is so, the sympathy which has always gone out to the leaders of forlorn hopes, and to those who butt against stone walls, and to those who will not take quarter, can be justified of its unreason. And, moreover, it may well be doubted if the tradition of Attic letters and art, with which the Hellenistic age began, would have been near so vivid without this last flash of Athenian freedom. In any case, there would have been no such en- samples of style and Atticism as the second, third, and fourth Philippics, the speeches on the Chersonese, the Embassy, and the Crown. After 346, there was to be no more fruitless epideictic oratory. Demosthenes and his party were terribly in earnest, and by their deeds, as much as by their words, laid up the store of hate which Philip bequeathed to Alexander. Now Demosthenes is making a tour of the Peloponnese, in the vain hope of HALONNESUS. 103 detaching the Arcadians and the rest from Philip ; now at Athens he is urging the Messenian envoys to disobey Macedonian orders and stand by Sparta ; Ijut once more in vain. Then his partisan Timarchus moves that it be penal to supply Philip with muni- tions of war ; and when the king sends his envoys to protest against all this covert hostility, Demosthenes retorts with the second of his Philippics, a master- piece of invective against this sacker of cities, who cried peace where there was no peace, and suborned a great party to aid " in putting all the world under his feet." With the winter Philip was gone north again, and, so far as we know, came south of Thermopylae neither in 344 nor in five succeeding years. He was in Ambracia and Epirus, perhaps, too, in the western isles. He conducted a campaign against the races of the north, practising the Persian policy of trans- ferring wholesale populations from mountain to plain, and plain to mountain, the better to break tribal traditions ; ^ and coming down to Cardia, he made the Athenian farmers in the Chersonese shake in their shoes, and send urgent appeals to Piraeus. Of his direct dealings with Greece, if indeed he had many in these years, we know only his disputes with Athens about Potidaea and in the matter of Halon- nesus, a wretched rock north of Euboea, which had become a nest of pirates, and been smoked out by a Macedonian admiral. Whereupon the neighbouring Peparethians, pirates also no doubt, settled on it, ^ Jmfcin, viii. 5, referring obviously to Paeonia. 104 PHILIP. but were ousted promptly, and their own island was raided. In which matter no one outside would have concerned themselves, had it not chanced that Athens, conceiving herself to have a lien on both Halonnesus and Peparethus, took occasion to revive a dispute as to the ttti possidetis clause in the treaty of 346. The said clause had not proved efficacious in the sense intended by the Athenian Ministry of the time ; for in addition to the difficulty about the Thracian cities, taken by Philip in the interval between the ]Droposal and the conclusion of the Peace, there were, on the one hand, many Greek cities, such as the Elean colonies in Ambracia, independent of either party to the treaty, and open, therefore, to sub- sequent absorption by Philip, to the prejudice of Athens ; and, on the other, certain cities and islands existed which Athens considered to be in her own " empire," but for so many years had neither occu- pied nor done anything to protect, that her claim was scarcely to be maintained. Halonnesus was just such a case. Philip asserted, with some show of equity, that the Athenian right to that island had lapsed, but, for the sake of peace and quietness, he offered now to " present " it to Athens. The Ministry of the Eepublic stipulated, however, that it be under- stood clearly that Philip " restored " the island — a quarrel about words, or, as it happens in the Greek speech, about syllables, which raised the whole issue. Thereupon Hegesippus was sent up to Pella in 343, to press on Philip certain comprehensive amendments AMENDMENTS TO THE PEACE. 105 to tlie orio-inal Peace, designed to cover this case and those of all Hellenic cities not defined clearly in 346. He was instructed to propose that : (1) the phrase uti jyossidetis be amended to a declaration that each party do retain his lawful property ; (2) all Greeks — being not parties, and still independent — be recognized as independent, and guaranteed by both parties ; (3) Philip do restore the Thracian cities, taken after his envoys had accepted the treaty in March, 346. These amendments had all been proposed to, and received in silence by. Python and his fellow Macedonian envoys at Athens in the previous year ; and it pleased the Athenians, therefore, to assume that Philip had accepted them in principle. The king, however, irritated by the attitude of Athens, brusquely removed any such illusions from Hegesippus' mind. Amendment number one he re- jected flatly ; it was designed to cover a claim for the cession of Amphipolis and Potidaea, and other places which he, Philip, had held these ten years. To number two he made no demur : there was nothing in Greece worth speaking of still absolutely independent of himself, and the proposed clause seems not to have been framed to be retrospective. On number three he offered to accept the arbitration of some umpire mutually acceptable. No such umpire, however, was to be found, and the whole negotiation led to nothing but recriminations, encroachments, and re- prisals which culminated three years later in rupture. During the irritation caused by Hegesippus' subse- quent report at Athens, the famous charge of treason 106 PHILIP. in the First Embassy, in 346, was preferred at last by Demosthenes against iEschines in terms very trucu- lent and hostile to Philip ; but partly because all men knew that Demosthenes as ambassador had acted largely in sympathy with the man he was now accusing after three years ; partly because it was never approved that a man should turn upon his colleague, however greatly they had differed; partly perhaps also because the Ministerial Centre were not prepared to associate themselves altogether with utterances so provocative to Philip, the case resulted in acquittal and the enriching of literature with two incomparable forensic harangues. For the moment the restless Macedonian was not concerned with Greece. He had reverted to his great project, postponed five years before, of con- quering the western shores of the Black Sea, and the northern coasts of the Sea of Marmora, and all inland up to the Danube. To effect this purpose he must break the back of the Odrysian Thracians in Roumelia, of the Triballi in Bulgaria, and the " Scythians " in the Dobrudscha, and be acknow- ledged suzerain by the great Propontic Greek colonies, Byzantium, Perinthus, and Selymbria. That done, and the Hellespont watched from Cardia, he would have all the corn trade in his own hands,^ the food of Greece at his mercy, and the way to Asia open. His army was mobilized in the spring of 342, and he went off to the north. The disappearance of ^ Dem., Uor. 87. WAR IN THE BALKANS. 107 contemporary clironicles has reduced our knowledge of this great military venture to almost nothing, and historians have been led to ignore ^ almost entirely an expedition comparable to nothing in antiquity since Darius' famous march to Scythia, and a worthy pre- lude to the conquest of Asia. We know that Philip and his army were out for ten months at least, and, spending the winter in the field,^ endured, leader and follower alike, grievous hardships by storm, sick- ness, and war.^ But we hear nothing more precise until the spring of 341, when they had returned across the Balkans to the upper waters of the Hebrus,. and were warring with the Odrysian tribes.* In Eoumelia it was reported that the Athenian Diopithes^ sent out to reinforce the colonists of the Chersonese, had assaulted Cardia and raided inland Thrace. Whereupon Philip detached a force for the relief of Cardia and the chastising of the Athenian. Never- theless, it was not to be war yet with the Eepublic, for, when taxed, she disowned her admiral,^ who indeed was little better than a blackmailing buccaneer with unpaid pirates at his orders. But all this year a belief gathered strength that Philip was about to rob Athens of the Chersonese, and then speedily of her own liberty. Demosthenes gives that opinion utterance in a speech boldly justi- fying Diopithes, and in the third and greatest of his ^ Possible allusions to this expedition are to be found in, Frontinus, ii. 8, 14, and Strabo, p. 320. '- C'iiers. 11. ^ Chers. 35. ^ Chers. Arg. 8. '" See Chers. 28. 108 PHILIP. Philippics, wherein he demands that all this latent bickering and underground trifling be exchanged for brute war, open and declared, cost what it may ; and in a last Philippic, often ascribed to another orator, but " Demosthenic" from end to end, wherein the Athenians are warned that Philip in Thrace and the Chersonese is only preliminary to Philip in Athens, and that every drachma and every spear the city can muster must be used in war against him, who makes pretension, forsooth, to enlist the Greeks against another barbarian king who is far less their enemy. Two overt acts, moreover, were perpetrated by the Athenian Ministry, under Demosthenes' guid- ance, which Philip could not view with equanimity. Firstly, they formed a kind of anti-Macedonian League among some of the smaller states of Greece,^ and chiefly won over to it Euboea, by sending ■ Phocion to help its cities to expel Philip's partisans and to range themselves under Callias of Chalcis, and by promising to recognize the entire autonomy of the island for the future. Secondly, they sent envoys up to the Great King in Susa, to warn him of Philip's panhellenic project, and induce him to assist Philip's enemies. To counteract the first of these hostile moves and the depredations of Callias and Athenian volunteers,^ Philip himself made a rapid journey, it seems, to Thessaly ^ in 341, leaving ' The rebuilding of the long walls of Megara by Phocion must have taken place at this period (Pint., Fhoc. 15) as a sequel to ]ong intrigues prosecuted there by agents of Philip v. agents of Athens. ■ Aesch., C'les. 8:5. ^ Fhil. iii. 12 ; iv. 9. BYZANTIUM. 109 his army in eastern Thrace ; and in order to reproach the Athenians for their intrigue with Persia, and for many covert acts of enmity, he despatched a long- epistle to be read in the Assembly. But still it was not war. The forbearance, however, of the Macedonian, his reference of disputed points to arbitration, and his- abstention from the Chersonese, served him with the Athenian Ministry as conciliation usually serves with an Oriental government. In short it emboldened the Republic to take matters into her own hands. She had encouraged the Thracian chieftains already in the summer of 341 ; ^ now she went further, and sent Demosthenes to Byzantium to urge the guardians of the Bosphorus to break off relations with Philip, close their gates on the land side, and hold out. Byzantium, like Olynthus, had been for many years no friend to Athens. She had shared with the eastern islands and the cities of Asia and Thrace that intense dislike of Athenian imperial pretensions,, which found violent vent both after Sparta's triumph in 404, and again in the " Social War." If entire autonomy was not to be attained, any barbarian supporter — the Great King, the Carian viceroy, the Thracian princes, even the Macedonian himself — was preferred to the aggressive Ionian Republic, which demanded so much and gave so little. But now Athens was too weak to pretend to be more than an ally, and Philip had become the more dangerous foe to freedom. So the Byzantines listened to the ' Ep. Phil. 8. ff. 110 PHILIP. voice of Demosthenes, and persuaded Perinthus and Selymbria to listen likewise ; and almost at the same moment the Macedonian army in its winter quarters learned that the Propontic cities had declared against them, and that the Athenians had solemnly removed their pillar graven with the terms of the peace and alliance of 346. • Demosthenes throughout the year 341 speaks of Philip so constantly as moving on Byzantium, that we must understand the Macedonian army to have spent all that summer, autumn, and perhaps winter in eastern Thrace, reducing the dominions of the chieftains Teres, Sitalces, and Kersobleptes, to com- plete submission. There seems to have been a sturdy resistance, and in consequence a settlement more drastic than it was Philip's wont to impose. Not only were the Thracian lands compelled henceforward to pay him tithe, but he founded military colonies here and there in all the region, continuing a policy inaugurated by himself at Philippi, and destined to be developed signally by his son and his successors in Asia, Egypt, and Greece. Of two among his new cities we know no more than the names. Bine and Philippopolis ; but a third is said to have been a punishment-colony, founded as a sink for two thousand bad characters, and named Poneropolis, " city of bad men." ^ In the early spring of 340 the settlement ' Theopomp., fr. 122. Plutarch, Pliny, and Suidas repeat the statement, no doubt, from this passage. Cf . Strabo calls it Calybe (p. .320). SIEGE OF PEEINTIIUS. Ill of Thrace was accomplished ; and gathering up a siege-train, the like of which had not been seen in Europe, Philip marched his great army^ down to the Sea of Marmora, and sat down before Perinthus. The siege which ensued must have been very famous in antiquity for Diodorus to have admitted so detailed an account into his Universal Chronicle. It marked, in fact, an epoch in military history, for in it was first applied on a large scale the scientific method of assault by simultaneous sap, bombard- ment, and storm, with which the operations of Alexander at Tyre and Gaza, of Demetrius at Khodes, and of the Eomans at Syracuse were soon to make the world familiar.^ Clumsy devices as the rams and catapults and movable storming-towers may seem to modern science, and hugely laborious as were the works needed to bring them into action — the isthmus, for instance, built through deejp water at Tyre, the mounds about the walls of Gaza, the valley filled with stones and trees below the Rock of Chorienes — such expedients were the only ones by which natural citadels could be reduced. In the Propontic cities, it seems, Philip could find no " Macedonizing " traitors or not enough ; at hand was the sea, on which no blockade was ever quite eflective in the day of small sailing craft. An Athenian admiral. Chares, was hanging oft' the Chersonese, and Philip, in order to get his own fleet through the Dardanelles ' .Justin, ix. 1, alludes to its great size. Diodorus says be had 30,000 mea before Perinthus alone. ■- Of. Frontin., iii. 'J. y, for Philip's methods. 112 PHILIP. at all, had to make a raid into the peninsula, and seize the ports from which privateers were issuing/ Even when the Macedonian admiral was safe in the Sea of Marmora, he was unable to prevent the Byzantines throwing supplies continually into Perinthus, or the Persian satrap of the southern shore from running large convoys of provisions, munitions of war, and men at arms.^ For the Great King at Susa had taken in earnest the Athenian warning, and despatched the most imperative orders to his governors in Anatolia to aid and abet the foes of the Macedonian. Perinthus was extraordinarily strong, being perched on a precipitous hill rising at the end of a narrow neck, a furlong out at sea ; and as in so many picturesque cities of the Levant at this day, its lofty houses huddled one on the other, round the rock " as in a theatre." ^ With sap and rams and huge wooden towers rising a hundred and twenty feet on their wheels, Philip was not long in breach- ing and clearing the lines of defence across the isthmus ; but meanwhile the besieged had built an inner curtain, and the assault was all to begin again. The Macedonian projectiles cleared this second wall, but the Perinthians returned to the defence, and, well supplied with missiles, wore down the first stress of Philip's assault. The king changed his tactics, and divided his great army into successive storming parties, keeping the besieged without rest night or day. Piece by piece the inner lines were reduced ^ Justin, xi. 1. = Diod., xvi. 75. ^ Diod., I.e. SIEGE OF BYZANTIUM. 113 to ruin, and their defenders to despair. At last they gave way, and the Macedonians rushed in, but only to be checked immediately at the lowest tier of houses, linked together by barricades. Of such ramparts there were as many as there were streets. The siege had lasted already far into the summer, and thanks to the Byzantines, the besieged were as well supplied as ever. Philip tried a diversion. Drawing off a picked force, he vanished to the eastward, fell suddenly on Selymbria,' and presently appeared before Byzantium itself ere the citizens could call in their forces from Perinthus. The chief magistrate, one Leon, a student of peripatetic philosophy, and destined to be the historian of this siege, came out to parley. The Macedonian king in a merry mood said that, being smitten with love for the fair city, he did but come to her gates to sue for favours. " But these are not lovers' lutes," cried the Byzantine, looking round at the pikeheads, and went in again forthwith.^ Philip himself led the assault with sap and storm.^ The place was neither naturally so strong as Perin- thus, nor so well fortified, and its citizens were but just equal to manning the great length of the wall. The Macedonian fleet hovered round the sea-front, ' Although this assault is mentioned only in the probably- spurious documents inserted in the Speech de Corona, I feel no doubt it occurred. The name would hardly appear in those idocuments without suggestion from some authority ; and, geo- graphically, such an assault was almost inevitable on a march from Perinthus to Byzantium. •^ Said., s.v. Aioiv ; and Philostr. jun., de Soph. i. ^ Hesych. Miles., Orif/. Const. 26. I 114 PHILIP. and raided up the Bosphorus, and into the Black Sea. But the Byzantine resistance was obstinate, and just strong enough ; the defenders attempted no sortie, but were content to hold the wall in the hope that time would come to their aid. The crisis came on a moonless night of wind and rain in the early- winter of 339. The storming party was already at the wall when, it is said, the dogs of the city gave an alarm, and the defenders, rushing to their posts, saw by the light of a falling meteor in the northern sky the nature of their peril. ^ The surprise had failed, the storming party fell back, and the citizens raised a statue to Hecate the Torch-bearer, and in her honour struck coins bearing her emblem, the crescent moon, which Byzantium has bequeathed tO' Constantinople, and Islam borrowed all over the world. Thenceforward the tide turned against the besieger. His efforts to seduce Leon were not suc- cessful. The wall was repaired and heightened with tombstones, like that of Athens of old. The Athenian Chares, having got through the Hellespont, fortified a headland over against the Princes' Islands, and helped the Byzantines to rout Philip's fleet ; ^ but his wife dying, he sailed away, to be replaced by a better man, the famous Phocion, with whom Athens sent the best fleet she had commissioned since the battle of Naxos. The Carian satrap brought up ^ This tale, told in most detail by Hesychius Milesius, 27, is alluded to by Steph. Byz., s.v. Bdo-Tropos ; and by EustathiuSj ad Bioni/s. Periefj. 143. - Hesych. Miles., 27, 28, THE SIEGE RAISED. 115 ships of the Chians and Rhodians, and it was reported that a fresh Persian force had been thrown into Thrace/ All Hellas seemed to be arming, and it was high time to go. The Macedonian fleet seems to have been blocked in the Black Sea by the Athenians who held the Bosphorus. Philip is said to have written a fictitious letter to Antipater in Macedonia, saying that Thrace had risen and his case was desperate. It was contrived that this should fall into the hands of Phocion, who withdrew to the Chersonese, leaving the strait open. The next problem was how to pass the Dardanelles, now closed by an allied squadron, but Philip, making preliminary proposals of peace, threw the enemy off" his guard, and once more saved the most of his fleet. ^ His land forces were drawn off", the Chersonese was evacuated, and the Macedonian retired to ruminate on the most signal reverse that he had experienced in twenty years. To Byzantium and the satraps he proposed peace ; with Athens he persisted in not accepting war ; and he proceeded to spend the rest of the year as far from Greece as might be, in prosecuting a raid up to the distant region where reigned Ateas the Scythian.^ Partly, perhaps, he wished to remove from his soldiers' minds the memory of failure ; partly he desired plunder ; partly too he had a personal score ^ Arr., ii. 14. Cf. Dem., ad Ep. Phil. 5. '' Frontin., i. 4. 10. Cf. Plut., Phoc. 14, for the loss of some Macedonian vessels. ^ Strabo, p. 307 ; Justin, ix. 2. _ 116 PHILIP. to pay, for this Ateas a year before had invited his help against the Istrians, making offer even to the succession of his kingdom. Philip in response had detached a force, but Ateas' danger was passed before the Macedonians arrived, and he dismissed them scornfully with neither pay nor rations, excusing himself on the score of the leanness of his land. Therefore Philip was moving northward now, amusing himself by sending on messages in his own grim vein of irony. He had pledged himself, he said, during the siege of Byzantium, to set up a statue to Heracles at the Danube mouth. " Then," replied the Scythian, " send the statue to me." " But it must be guaranteed inviolable," said the Macedonian, and marched on. " If thou settest it up against my will," retorted Ateas, " it shall be overthrown and melted down for arrow-heads." For which reply the Scy- thian paid with twenty thousand of his women and boys, flocks and herds, and twenty thousand mares, taken by the victor to multiply on the Emathian plains. But in the Balkans the Triballian tribesmen fell on the retiring column, and having chanced to wound Philip sorely in the thigh, succeeded in driving off amid the confusion much of the spoil. And the king returned to Pella as winter drew on, with mortification threatening his leg to add to the many afflictions — the broken collar bone, the blinded eye, the gangrened arm — that he had endured already in the chase of glory. This year, 339, claims a peculiar place in universal ALEXANDER. 117 history, as that in which the figure of the great Alexander appears first upon its stage. He had received his baptism of blood, if we may believe Justin,^ before the walls of Perinthus, and now being turned sixteen, he was sent back to take the seals of Kegency from Antipater. And in such capacity it fell to him to do three things of which tradition ^ took note — to lead his first army against an lUyrian rising, to found his first city,^ and to receive a party of envoys sent by the great King of Persia,* doubtless in response to Philip's proposal of peace. The retailers of anecdote loved to record that the invader- to-be gravely and narrowly questioned the Asiatics on roads and marches, and the strength of the Great King's armies, to their no small wonder. Nor is it altogether incredible that even at sixteen Alexander had a definite ambition of Asiatic conquest, which issued in a little envy of his father, as Plutarch states. His later career, at least, shows him a miracle of pre- cocious development, destroyer of Thebes at twenty- one, master of Babylon at twenty-five, dying worn and aged at thirty-three with the world at his feet. The blood of Philip flowed in his veins, mixed with the strain of that savage witch, whom alone he feared ' ix. 1. But Justin states liis age wrongly. He "was barely sixteen. - Of. Ps. Callisth., i. 23. * Curt., viii. 1 ; Plut., Ale.r. 9 ; cf. Steph. Byz., whose third Alexandria (OpaK-ijs) this is. It was among the tribe of Mardi, i.e. in the upper Strymon valley. Nothing certain is known as to its precise representative in modern times. ' Plut., Alex. 5. 118 PHILIP. in later days and his successors feared after him ; he was bred in the boisterous court of Pella, his father being always at the wars, and himself with his singular beauty the centre of feudal idolatry : was he not bound to become very early headstrong, self- assured, self-centred ? The famous story of his boyhood, how he mastered and rode the wild horse Bucephalus, is worth repeat- ing from Plutarch, for the picture it affords of father and son at this time. A Thessalian appeared at the court of Pella offering to sell for thirteen talents a magnificent horse. Philip coveted the beast, and, with his son, his courtiers, and his grooms, went down in the evening into the plain below the city to try him : but he could not be mounted, hardly handled even, and at last the king, disgusted with his fractiousness, ordered the vendor to lead him away. Upon this the young prince, who had been watching the trials with a fine scorn, interposed with broad hints, which Philip for some time ignored, annoyed with his forwardness, but was forced at last to reprove, telling the speaker sharply not to set himself up against his elders. The boy, however, was not abashed, but offered to stake the price of the horse on the trial. Without more ado he wheeled the wild beast's head to the sun, having noted that he was shying at his own shadow. Then, having led him a little about the meadow, soothing and stroking him, he slipped stealthily his upper garment and vaulted gently on Bucephalus' back. The horse started, but Alexander sat quiet, feeling his mouth. THE HERALD FROM DELPHI. 119 and presently put him into a gentle canter, increasing tlie pace gradually with voice and heel until he was heading into the open country at full speed. The gallop was soon over. No southern horse ever lasts fully extended, and it was a very tame Bucephalus that the prince rode back at last triumphant into the meadow. The crowd cheered ; the king, overwrought by his excitement and fears, fell weeping, and kissed Alexander on the forehead, crying, " Boy, find thee a kingdom for thyself, for Macedonia is too strait for thee and me ! " Plutarch says, no doubt, truly that it was on account of this early development of a temper to be governed only by a precocious reason, that Philip sent now for the great Aristotle from Atarneus to take in hand the boy of fifteen, making thereby a conjunction of immortal names which has set rhetoricians vapour- ing, fabulists romancing, and poets singing ever since. Through the winter Philip nursed his wound until, big with fate, the spring of 338 came in. Early in March a herald came to Pella bearing a request from the Holy Synod of the Amphictyons, that the king- would be pleased to use his army to coerce on their behalf a contumacious town near Delphi. Philip needed little pressing ; it was always to his mind to head a Hellenic league ; he had work of his own to do in Greece, and the memory of Perinthus and Byzantium to efi"ace. The word went through his camp for active service, and that with all speed. The appearance of this herald was so opportune, and 120 PHILIP. the sequel of his message so momentous, that many historians have credited Philip with having invited his invitation. Admitted that habitually the Mace- donian left little to chance ; admitted that the artifice was quite in his vein ; admitted that two-thirds of the Holy Synod were his dependents ; admitted that, having done much violence to Hellenic feeling on the Propontis, and proposed lately a general peace, he may have thought it expedient not to move south without the sanction of a formal invitation, master of the Gates and lord of many battalions though he was — all these things being admitted, nevertheless, neither does any ancient authority state that he had foreknowledge of the herald's coming, nor do the antecedent facts point that way. The Amphictyonic quarrel, which resulted in Philip being invited, and need be noticed only in so far as it bears on him, had been on foot for at least a year ; and it is not to be disputed that great efforts had been made by the Holy Synod to settle it without calline in the Macedonian. He was invited only in the last resort, the Thebans being friends of the guilty Amphissa, the Athenians having decreed the withdrawal of their forces from the venture, and the Amphictyonic condottiere having been handled severely when the greater states ceased to support him. It is quite possible that Philip long had contemplated an expedition to the south ; but as he kept his own conscience, no one in Greece probably knew the fact then, and no one can prove it now. In any case, it seems distinctly not proven that either himself or his paid agents cooked PHILIP ACCEPTS THE CALL. 121 up the Ampliissian quarrel, or led it to an issue favourable to his own ambition. It is generally more true that a great man uses than that he makes his opportunities. Thessaly was Philip's own, and Thermopylae was held by his garrison. Without let or hindi"ance, therefore, his army marched south to Nicaea in May. Here was the situation. The object of his march was Amphissa, a town of sturdy mountaineers, north- west of Delphi. The Amphissians had been called to account in one of those superstitious panics, which, like the excitement after the affair of the Hermae at Athens, proceed from the most primitive motives, and require no subtle explanation ; in brief, it was demanded of these mountaineers that they should desist from an old standing occupation of certain sacred domain land of Apollo. But they had declined to obey the Holy Synod, and for a year had resisted its resort to force. To arrive within striking distance of them, Philip must lead his army round the end of Oeta into Phocis and the basin of the Cephissus, and, when he should turn up into the defiles of Parnassus, he would leave on his left flank Thebes, which had supported Amphissa all through its revolt, and was strong enough to cut his communications with Thermopylae. The hostility to himself in Greece was now, as he well knew, greater than in 346, and since his failure on the Bosphorus, the fear was less. His first measures, therefore, were directed to the safeeuardina; of his flank and communications. The •& 122 PHILIP. Theban "arrison, to which he had handed Nicaea eight years before/ was bidden retire, and Philip established Thessalians to guard in their place the southern mouth of the Pass.- Then, pursuing his way into Phocis, he reached the ruins of Elatea, where his path towards Amphissa forked west from the great south road which traversed the Copaic plain to Thebes. Since 346 the site had been untenanted, for Elatea was one of the towns whose inhabitants had been punished in that year by being distributed into villages. Here Philip called a halt, and prepared to establish a fortified camp. At the same time he seems to have sent an embassy southwards to Thebes to persuade the city to detach itself from Amphissa and act with himself. Here is an event which has been misrepresented both in ancient and modern times, perhaps more than anything in history. The fortification of Elatea by Philip was manifestly the reasonable precaution of a prudent general. If it menaced any city, that city was Thebes. The site of Elatea lies more than sixty miles by any practicable road from the nearest point of the Attic frontier, and at least ninety from Athens. The whole Copaic plain, the Theban territory, and the range of Cithaeron intervene. There was absolutely no ground, in 338, except Demosthenes' unsupported word, for the belief that Philip was entrenching Elatea as a menace to Athens. There is absolutely no other ground for the same belief being held now. But in spite of the geographical absurdity, in spite ' Dcm., ad Phil. e-i). 4. " yEsch., Gtes. 140. FORTIFICATION OF ELATEA. 123 of the positive denial given by Philip's subsequent action, the suggestion, for which a great orator in the interests of a policy succeeded in obtaining credence two thousand years ago, has been accepted absolutely ever since ! Word came to Athens one day towards sundown, that Philip was fortifying Elatea. The news caused great excitement, for the city considered herself at this particular moment to be still at war with the Macedonian, and always was agitated by the passing of Thermopylae. Furthermore, with the self-con- scious vanity of a great people, the Athenian, like the Briton, habitually relates to himself every event that happens in his world. Doubtless on that spring evening, season of chatter and intercourse in all the East, there was much discussion of the news, and an Assembly was summoned for next morning at sunrise, no abnormal hour at shadeless Athens in April. Here, however, was an obvious opportunity for the War Party. Thebes, hostile to Philip's errand in any case, having taken already the same side in the matter of Amphissa as Athens, might reasonably be expected to regard a fortified Elatea as a menace, and to ally herself with Athens ; and with her help Ministers could hope reasonably for a vigorous prose- cution of their policy, and a prosperous issue, the great success of the previous year at Byzantium being con- sidered. Philip once beaten decisively, the restoration of the Athenian Empire would follow in due course. There was no vote needed for war, for war had been the city's nominal relation to Philip these two 124 PHILIP. years past ; but in tlie interests of vigorous action by land, and of alliance with the unpopular Thebans, it was necessary to arouse the citizens to a sense of private peril. Demosthenes undertook this task, and with all his eloquence coloured Philip's design, declared Elatea to be but a stage on the road to Attica, and pointed out the nakedness of the frontier should the Thebans take sides with the Macedonian. The case seemed clear as daylight ; the citizens shouted for action ; and while the levies were being called out, Demos- thenes himself undertook to conduct an embassy to Thebes and sue for the Theban alliance. In the Cadmeian city he found Philip's envoys,^ newly come from Elatea. For what passed then and there we have the worst authority in the world, the statements of two contradictory pamphleteers, who published years afterwards, in the guise of orations, apologies for their own conduct in this matter. Demosthenes ^ is the less precise ; he relates that the Thebans first heard Philip's legates and their urgent request that Thebes would join their master in war on Athens, or at least give him passage to Attica ; but the effect so produced was swept away from the Boeotarchs' mind as soon as himself, Demosthenes, appeared. ^Eschines ^ says that at the first audience Demosthenes was received coldly, and the Boeotarchs ' Marsyas, fr. ap. Phtt., Dem. 18. ^ De Cor. 211 ff. ^ C'fes. 149 ff. There is a doubt whether his description really refers to this first embassy of Demosthenes to Thebes, or to another just before Chaeronea. On the whole, I adhere to the view in the text. THEBES AND ATHEKS ALLIED. 125 sent notice to the Athenian force, already on the move, not to enter Theban territory. Demosthenes, however, at a second audience demanded if not alliance, at least free passage for the Athenian army ; and, at last, by persistent working on the fears of the Thebans, and promising that his own city should take only second place in the field and pay two- thirds of the cost of the war, the orator persuaded the Boeotarchs to swear alliance. The end at least is certain. Thebes concluded a league for offence and defence with Athens, and received the forces of the latter within her walls ; and the two took the field against Philip with a larger and a finer army than had ibeen drawn from Greek cities for many a year. The larger Peloponnesian states, threatened or cajoled by Philip,^ stood aloof, waiting the event, Arcadia perhaps, as ^schines said afterwards, only for want of funds ; ^ but certain of the smaller, Achaea, Corinth, and Megara, with the islands of Corcyra, Leucas, and Euboea, joined the allies ; and Byzantium promised to see to the safety of the corn ships. One point only in these preliminary matters calls for more remark. Demosthenes states, and he alone, that Philip declared through his envoys from Elatea that his march was directed against Athens. When his entire abstention from any forward movement towards Attica, and his refusal to violate a foot of Athenian territory after Chaeronea, are recalled, it seems most improbable that his private purpose ^ Cor. 218. ' Cles. 240. Cf. Pans., viii. 27. 10. 126 PHILIP. was ever anything of tlie kind ; but that he should have said so to the Thebans is far from dissonant with his character, or with the usual methods of diplomacy ; and that his envoys, confronted with Demosthenes, bid against the latter on the spur of the moment with such a statement is most credible. The fact itself, indeed, is more worthy of credit than the authority for it. Word of the new alliance was brought to Elatea by the returning envoys. Philip indited a letter of bitter reproach to the Athenians, and anxious missives of encouragement to the Peloponnese, but proceeded none the less on his road to Amphissa.^ The allies, if we are to believe Polyaenus,^ threw a force into the passes of Parnassus, but by his old device of leaving a sham despatch in the enemy's path, the Macedonian got through. Amphissa had been reinforced strongly by Athenian hired troops,^ and a desultory campaign seems to have been waged for some weeks on the slopes above the Corinthian Gulf* and the hills bordering Boeotia. The allies gained two small successes,'^ of which they made the most, but by ' Plntarcli {^Dem. IS) inverts the order of these events ; but I agree with Holm and Hoffman (schol. Dem., ii. 5, 44) in dis- regarding his sequence. ' iv. 2, 8. ■' jEesch., Ctes. 140. " The sui-prise of Naupactus (Theopomp., fr. 46) seems to belong to this war. " One of these skirmishes is alluded to by Demosthenes (who alone has recorded them) as 17 xufitpivri {Cor. 216). This term must mean the " Battle of the Storm ; " but the translation of it as " Battle of the Winter " has led to the absurd supposition thati BATTLE OF CHAERONEA. 127" August they had fallen back on the great south road, and concentrated all their forces at the crossing of the- Cephissus in the plain before Chaeronea. On the 7 th of the Athenian month Metageitnion — ■ in early August or early September (how Meta- geitnion fell in 338 is doubtful) — one of the decisive issues of the world's history was fought out. On the one side stood the miscellaneous array, half mercenary,, half civic, of the last imperial Greek city-states ; on the other was ranged the first great army of a national power. Tried by any standard, Chaeronea ranks as a great battle. The Macedonian came down from Elatea with thirty thousand of the best infantry, and two thousand of the best cavalry in the world. The allied army is stated variously to have been more and less than his,^ and probably was about equal in numbers." The Theban horse and light troops, if we may judge from their condition three years later,^ ranked hardly inferior to the Mace- donian ; but the Greek army was hampered by a dual command, Theban and Athenian, and we gather that it was not too harmonious in face of the foe ; for Philip spent a ivhole winter, spring, and most of a snmmer, ranging about Amphissa, and to a general distortion of tlie chronology, 340-338. Grote, for instance, tries to include the end of the siege of Byzantium, a last campaign in the Chersonese, the march up to Scythia, the return through the Triballian country, the march through the Gates, the fortification of Elatea, and the marshalling of the allies, all in the one year 339 ! ' Of. Diod., xvi. 85, with Justin, ix. 3. ^ We gather from yEsch., Gtes. 14G, that the larger part of the Athenian mercenary force was shut up still in Amphissa. ^ Arr., i. 7. 128 PHILIP. there were some who would have fallen in with Philip's proffered terms rather than fight. The gods were not for the Greeks ; portents and in- auspicious omens ushered in the fatal morning. We know too little, alas ! of what happened on that memorable summer day, to fight the battle o'er again. No surviving author of antiquity has described it. By inference only can we set out even the skeleton of the battle array : on the Macedonian side, the Thessalian and allied cavalry to the right ; in the centre the phalanx, mercenaries to right, Macedonians to left, behind a bristling hedge of spear points ; on the left probably the Guards and Philip himself; and, flanking these and the whole array, the matchless feudal " Companion " cavalry, led to-day by no less a captain than Alexander, In the adverse array, facing the Companions and the Mace- donian left centre, was the Theban phalanx, with the Sacred Band in its centre front ; on the left ranked the Athenian brigades and mercenaries, and the Achaean ^ and other allies, probably out-flanking Philip's right. On either wing, and ranging before the battle-line in the faulty Greek manner, were targeteers and cavalry, the last used only to skirmish and pursue. Allusions and anecdotes which survive imply that the fight was stubborn and long drawn out, Philip keeping back his decisive charge until the unseasoned levies opposed to him should begin to tire.^ The ^ Paus., vii. 6. 5. - Polyaen., iv. 2. 7 ; Frontin., ii. 19. DEFEAT OF THE ALLIES. 129 heavy Theban phalanx wore itself out slowly against the mobile veteran formation of Macedonian spear- men ; the Athenians with better fortune broke the allies and mercenaries on Philip's left, and rushed on, shouting " To Macedonia ! " " These men know little of winning ! " grimly remarked the king, and threw his phalanx into the fatal gap which now had opened^ between Athenians and Thebans. It seems that the latter proved the harder to break, and gave way only to Philip's heaviest blow — a flank charge by the Companions, led by Alexander ; ^ but not before there had been one perilous moment when Philip, owing, it is said, to a sudden quarrel in his own phalanx between the Macedonian and the mercenary spearmen, the former perhaps jeering at the latter for having been broken by the Athenian onset, was struck down and hardly saved by his son. For which service,^ and for such credit as he claimed for the charge which decided that day, Alexander was never forgiven wholly by his father. It was the end. The Greek line gave way along its whole length, the Theban leader fell, the Sacred Band died in its ranks, lovers and loved, the Athenians ran, Demosthenes with the rest, and the supreme effort of Greece was spent. The Athenians lost three thousand men, killed or taken ; the Thebans mourned their general, and pro- bably not less of the rank and file than their allies. Pursuit seems not to have been pressed far, for it ■ Polyaen., iv. 2. 2. ^ Plut., Alex. 9. ' Curt., viii. 1, 23, 24. 130 PHILIP. ^ ■ was from Lebadea ^ that heralds came the same evening to supplicate the victor to give up the dead. There is a tale, strangely characteristic of Philip, told by more than one authority ^ about this night at Chaeronea. The suppliant heralds were bidden to wait — one authority says their request was refused — and Philip himself made meanwhile a great feast with his captains. It was such an orgy as his soul delighted in, with many a light o' love, and music and dancing ; and in the grey dawn he reeled out mad drunk through his camp and on to the corpse-strewn field, shouting songs of tipsy triumph, and jeering at the Athenians and their runaway Demosthenes. But among his huddling prisoners stood forth an Athenian orator, one Demades, a man of incisive speech, as many anec- dotes attest, and he faced Philip unabashed, "King, when Fate has cast thee for Agamemnon, art not ashamed to play Thersites ? " And something in the gibe, perhaps because it reminded him of that world of culture to which he had bid so long and so doubtfully for acceptance, some dim conviction of a shameful inferiority, penetrated to the fuddled sense of Philip. The impetuous captain tore off his garlands and trod them under- foot with the winecups and flutes and licentious emblems of his crew, and ordering Demades to be loosed, went away humbled and ashamed. »•' '■ ^ Plut., Vit. X. Orat., p. 849. - Cf. Theopomp., fr. 262, with Diod., xvi. 87, Plufc., Dem. 20, and Sext. Empir., Adv. Gram. p. 281. TREATMENT OF THEBES. 131 Certainly afterwards he comported himself towards one part of his beaten foes with a forbearing and, as it were, an apologetic temper ^ that is all the more conspicuous by contrast with the measure that he meted out to Thebes. That city, into which the Macedonians presently marched, was made to feel all the bitterness of defeat. Her headship of the Boeotian towns was stripped from her for ever, and Orchomenus and Plataea were encouraged to rise again on the north and the south.^ And not only this, but her own civic autonomy was destroyed, her leaders being proscribed or banished, and their lands seized for the king ; and, while a Macedonian garrison was installed in the Cadmeia,^ a body of three hundred men, formerly exiled for adherence to Macedonian interests, was put in office in the lower city to work their will on the lives and goods of the citizens.* Thus did Philip remove the last obstacle to his sway in northern Hellas, paying the city which had taught him war and cost him most the rude compliment of a treatment more brutal than any great state of Greece had experienced since the Persian War. But to Athens, his consistent foe, who now was cowering desperately behind her walls newly repaired with gravestones and the trunks of trees — to Athens, who had proposed even to enfranchise her aliens and free her slaves, and had sent round to the remnant of ^ Cf. Justin, is. 4 ; Diod., xvi. 87 ; Polyb., v. 10, xvii. 14. - Paus., ix. 1. 8, 37, 8. ^ Paus., ix. 1. 8 ; and Arr., i. 7. ^ Cf. Justin, ix. 4. 132 PHILIP. her allies to beg men and money for a last stand, lie " behaved so in victory that none might feel him victor." ^ Not only did he restore freely the Athenian dead — he had made the Thebans pay a ransom — but all his two thousand Athenian prisoners. Furthermore, he sent back ^schines^ and other envoys who had come to him, and with them Demades, to assure the terrified citizens not only of peace but his alliance, and he gave withal a signal pledge of good faith by allotting to the Republic of the spoil of Thebes the oft-disputed border town, Oropus. No Macedonian soldier was permitted to violate Attic soil, ^but in order to ratify the peace, Philip sent to Athens personages no less than Anti- pater, his Regent, and his own famous son, who saw then, for the first time so far as we know, those most glorious works of a civilization which it was to be given to him, more than to any Athenian, to spread to the ends of the earth. It was an extraordinary attitude for the master of irresistible legions to assume in the moment of decisive victory. From a military point of view Philip had nothing to fear, and next to nothing to gain, from Athens. The Republic had now no allies worth mentioning that had not been crushed equally with herself at Chaeronea, except the Pro- pontic cities, with whom her tie of friendship was very loose. She had ships, but never could com- mission two large fleets at a time ; and her army had almost ceased to exist. A few triremes and a small ^ Justin, I.e. , "^ Dem., do Cor. 282. TREATMENT OF ATHENS. 133 force of cavalry were all Philip could expect her to contribute to the alliance with himself/ Demos- thenes, after abandoning the idea of a last desperate struggle behind the walls, to furthering which he had given his voice, his money, and his official ser- vice, never credited his city with any further power of resistance. In his funeral oration over the dead of Chaeronea,^ and in his continued capacity as Minister,^ he contented himself with mourning over lost greatness, and with devoting his energies to lightening the public poverty.* Philip's attitude, however, was no other than the logical consequence of all his previous conduct towards the Athenian city. While he could not brook her rival empire,^ he hankered after her approval of his own, and confessed an inferiority which no arms could adjust. And now that she was at his feet, he could confer so great a favour that — man of no delicate susceptibilities as he was — he thought she might be won. Needless to say, he only seemed to succeed. Her adhesion to his panhellenic League against the Persian was only compelled, as not he, but his son lived to know. But nevertheless, in spite of his failure, there must be conceded to him a certain enlightenment in the conception of this policy, and a certain rude nobility in the execution ; and, at the least, Philip may claim to rank with 1 Plut., Phoc. 17. See Cor. 285-288 ; ^scli., Ctes. 152 ; Plut., Dem. 21. 2 Plut., Dem. I.e. " ^sch,, Ctes. 159. "* Cf.'Paus., i. 25. 8. 134 PHILIP. Sulla, who like him warred on Athens, and like him spared her when at his mercy in hope tO' find grace in her eyes, regarding not her weakness, but " the weight and repute " ^ that once had been hers. The twelvemonth after Chaeronea was spent by the Macedonian king in smoothing the last obstacles in his way to what had been growing during the past decade to be the crowning ambition of his life. He was become at last lord of the Hellenes de facto ; he would be acknowledged Captain-General of Hellenism de jure. Now that Thebes was crushed and Athens bound by treaty, there was no doubt of his being acknowledged Captain, except by the Peloponnesian states, which had been neither for him nor against him at Chaeronea. So, having secured Corinth, he displayed his spearmen in the spring and summer of 337 within the Isthmus. The most part of the states bowed low : Elis, a friend of old, added a new monu- ment to the Altis, the round Pliilippeion, and set up therein chryselephantine statues of the conqueror, his progenitors, and his kin — the first of many Mace- donian effigies destined soon to stand in Athens and Olympia ; ^ but Sparta, a little exalted perhaps in the day of her hereditary foe's humiliation, would have none of the new Crusade. Philip had to make a demonstration in the Eurotas valley, in the course of which a party of his men were handled roughly near ^ DiocL, xvi. 8. ^ f-'ee Pans., v. 20. 10 ; i. 9. 4 ; vi. 11. I. CAPTAIN-GENERAL OF HELLAS. 135 Gyttiium ; ' but raid her fields and sack her towns as he might, Sparta would not acknowledge him. To his demand for Laconian citizenship, she retorted quite in her old manner, that at least he could not prevent the Spartans dying for their country ; ^ and Philip was fain at last to content himself with cutting her territory down to the point at which she would become innocuous, but beyond which he might have outraged Hellenic sentiment, and with obtaining his recognition by the states of Hellas with one dis- sentient voice. His ambition was satisfied formally about a twelve- month after Chaeronea. Delegates from all the states, except Sparta, came to meet him at the Isthmus. We do not know what arguments he may have proffered at the Congress ; we hear that he spoke at length about the Crusade against the Persian, and aroused some expression of enthusiasm, to which doubtless the presence of his army without the walls lent a certain warmth. No one in those latter days felt strongly on the Panhellenic Question, or was bitter against the Great King of Susa, whose claries alone, not his men at arms, were to be ex- pected in Europe ; but many of the Greeks, doubtless, were not averse to the restless Macedonian departing for Asia. From one motive or another the delegates were content to acclaim Philip Captain-General, and to promise the spearmen, cavalry, and ships which he asked each state to provide, that his venture might ' Frontin., iv. 5. 12. 2 Pans., iii. 24. G ; v. 4. 9. 136 PHILIP. assume a panliellenic character. If their fellow- citizens grumbled privately, the returned delegates reminded them that they could hardly have done less for the master of so many legions. To Philip it mattered little if the panhellenic movement was factitious now ; a successful campaign in Asia would go far to give it reality, and common danger and common triumph would unite his Macedonians and their Greek allies. In 337 he had probably no such Asiatic Empire in view, as that which later his son conceived ; he was possessed rather with an idea of nation-making at home, to which end the mere warring with a common enemy would conduce more than the sack of the latter's towns, or the loot of his camps. The word given for a twelvemonth from that time, Philip left Greece, well pleased to gather up his forces for the great adventure which should crown all previous successes, and set the seal on his nation and his fame. He had a great army to equip and supply, and all that winter the arsenal of Pella ^ must have rung to the sound of his arming. By the spring of 336 his host was ready, and making two divisions, he despatched the lesser in advance under Parmenio, with Amyntas and Attains for lieutenant-generals, to hold the passage of the Dardanelles, and secure the Greek cities on the farther shore against his own coming with the second division and the allied army of Greeks. The total of the Grand Army we do not know. Justin ' Cf. Strabo, p. 752 ; Livy, xlii. 51. PHILIP AND HIS HOUSE. 137 gives an absurd aggregate of two hundred thousand foot and fifteen thousand horse for the Greek con- tingent alone. Alexander, however, began his venture two years later with not more than forty thousand men ; and at no higher figure is it probable that Philip's national Macedonian force should be estimated. But there remains to be added the auxiliary host of Greeks, who would have been used rather to garrison towns and keep open communications than to accom- pany the seasoned troops into the heart of the Persian Empire. Philip put off his own march to the autumn, for he had his house to set in order. His family affairs had been going ill these two years past. Himself being always in the field,^ and consorting now with this woman, now with that,^ it is small wonder if his Jezebel of a queen did not keep in the paths of strict virtue. A votary of the Cabiric mysteries before marriage was open to more than suspicion, and Philip was rumoured always to have doubted his own paternity of Alexander. The legends of the serpent seen with Olympias, and the seal set thereafter on her womb ; her affectation of divine relations,^ and that world-wide story of her seduction by an Egyptian astrologer, are so many popular improvements on the contemporary scandal which the Macedonian, Attains, blurted when he prayed ' Cf. Ps. Callisth., i. 4. - Aiti Kara Tro'Xe/ioi/ eya/iici, says the contemporary Satyrus (fragm. cqi. Atheiiae., xiii. p. 557b.). " See Plut., Alex. 2, 3, etc. 138 PHILIP. tipsily for a legitimate heir to the throne pf Philip, and received Alexander's drinking-cup in his face.^ The relations between father and son had lono- left much to be desired. Seeing, however, that Alexander was made Regent in 339, and led the Companions at Chaeronea in 338, we may infer that mutual jealousy had not led to an out- break before that battle. The open rupture came, it seems, in 337, after Philip's return from the Congress of Corinth. He had fallen in love with a Macedonian lady,^ niece of his general Attalus ; and she, more ambitious than the dancing-girls * and the like who had yielded to the king's embraces, worked upon his growing distaste for his wife, until she induced him to prefer a definite charge of in- fidelity against Olympias and to wed herself. The Epirote, bidden, like a woman of the harem, to cover her face, departed raging to her brother, and presently her son came to an issue with his father. During: the feast at the new nuptials, as a sequel to a brawl with Attalus, alluded to already, Philip drew his sword, and made for Alexander in drunken fury ; but stumbling over the fallen cups, he suff"ered him- self to be pacified by his oflicers, while Alexander, gibing at the man who would cross to Asia, but could not pass from couch to couch, betook himself ' Plut., Alex. 9. " Cleopatra, according to Plut., Alex. 9 ; Justin, ix. 7 ; Paus., viii. 77 ; iElian, V. H. xiii. 36 ; Died., xvi. 91. But Eimj- dice, Arr., iii. G. " E.g. the Larrissean who bore him Philip Arrhidaeus. ALEXANDER AND HIS FATHER. 13& to Epirus, and having seen his mother safe, went up into Lyncestis/ Philip, however, coming to himself, invited his son to return ; but presently he fell out with the youth again, not this time for a fault, but through a mis- understanding. For it seems that Pixodarus, satrap of Caria, wishing to stand well with the coming- invader, sent to negotiate a marriage between his eldest daughter and a natural son of Philip, Arrhi- daeus, begotten on a Thessalian dancing-girl. Upon this Olympias, convinced that by hook or by crook her own boy was to be robbed of his succession to the throne, had Alexander persuaded that this was too brilliant a match for his bastard half-brother ; for the Carian satrap was at that time the wealthiest of princes, and almost a king in his own right. Accord- ingly Alexander despatched a Corinthian friend to Caria, to tell the satrap that he, the legitimate heir^ was willing ; whereat the Carian, who had not dared to look so high, was mightily gratified. But Philip, hearing of the plot, took one of Alexander's intimates aside, when the boy himself was out of the way, and expressed his high displeasure that his heir should have deigned to propose alliance with a Carian subject of the Persian king, and a barbarian to boot. And he followed up his reproof with strin- gent punishment of the Corinthian go-between, and decrees of exile against four intimates of his son, who, he believed, were suborned by Olympias to 1 Plut., Alex. 9. The Eomance (Ps. Callisth., i. 21) has a picturesque exaggeration of this historical scene. 140 PHILIP. ■ poison the mind of the boy/ Among these last were some marked for fame in different ways : Harpalus, who would rebel against and rob Alexander at Baby- lon ; and Ptolemy, destined to be the historian of the Conquest of Asia, and himself a king. Such was not a state of affairs that Philip cared to leave in and about Macedonia on the eve of a long absence, and he proposed therefore to render harmless his divorced queen by detaching her powerful brother. Accordingly he offered to the latter a formal recon- ciliation and the hand of Alexander's sister. The overture was accepted, and Philip determined to make of the wedding a maernifieent demonstration of the unity of his panhellenic Empire. In pressing terms he invited representatives of the states of Hellas and all notable Greeks to repair in the autumn "to Aegae, the old capital of his kingdom. The great actors of Greece were invited to attend and perform the classic dramas ; games were proj ected on an Olympian scale, and shows and banquets ordered, even to the entire depletion of the royal exchequer. No matter ! Was not all the gold of Asia about to flow into the coffers of Macedon ? A few days ^ before the opening of the festival, the new queen was delivered of a boy. Here at last was an heir of undoubted legitimacy. We are not told that Philip ever proposed actually to dispossess Alexander in favour of the little Caranus, as the baby was named ; but Olympias, watching from among the Lyncestians, jumped to a conclusion, ' AiT., iii. G, and Plut., Alex. 10. I Diod., xvii. 2. THE MARRIAGE FESTIVAL. 141 and warning lier adherents of Alexander's peril, coun- selled speedy action of the most desperate kind. Whether she admitted her son to the plot or no the world has never agreed, and probably never will agree. The measures that Alexander took afterwards, and the terms in which he spoke of his father, tell neither for nor against his guilt. That subsequently he should have put out of the way not only the accomplices of his father's assassin, but also his own rivals, the baby Caranus, and the queen's uncle and brother, is only what an Oriental monarch does as matter of course. But we are bound to remember how little love was lost between father and son, and how much Alexander desired that Asia should be left for himself to conquer.' The great day of the marriage feast arrived. A vast crowd of sight-seers had thronged into the theatre before daybreak,^ and at sunrise a procession entered with superb effigies of the twelve Olympian gods, and of Philip himself, thirteenth. Men recalled afterwards that this public apotheosis was itself the most signal of omens, and interpreted too late a cloud of portents, how the prophetess of Delphi had replied to Philip's demand for an auspicious oracle ere he should attack Persia, with a vague hexameter, which signifies, being interpreted, — " The bull is garlanded ; his end draws on ; the sacrificer stands ready." ^ Again, had not the Athenian herald, ofi"ering a crown of honour the day before, stated solemnly that his city would give up to justice any 1 Pint., Alex. 5. ^ Diod., xvi. 92. = Paus., viii. 7. 6. 142 PHILIP. man who attacked the king? and did not Neopto- lemus, the great Athenian player, recite at the royal banquet overnight an apostrophe to Death ' ? But no one that morning thought of oracles or omens, only of the king's entry, now at every moment expected. The royal procession approached at last, and halting a moment, Philip bade his nobles and high guests precede him, and his guards stand back, that he himself might be the more conspicuous entering the theatre in his white robe, hero acclaimed equally by Macedonians and by Greeks. The leaders entered the building ; the rearguard hung back obediently, and Philip stepped forward alone under the gateway. In that instant a man sprang from the lateral corri- dor, thrust a short Celtic blade between the ribs of the king, and rushed off as his victim fell. In the Avild confusion that arose, the assassin came near getting clear away, for he had friends and swift horses ready ; but his sandal caught in a vine-stock, and pursuers were on him before he could rise. They pulled him to his feet, and pierced him through and through with their spears.^ ■ , • -• Philip was found to be dead. Who was first cause of his murder, there is no doubt. Seek the woman, slighted, and cast off ! The assassin was a mere tool, one Pausanias, an Orestian favourite, ill-treated, it seems, by Philip, and unable to obtain redress for a degrading insult put upon him by the new queen's uncle, but not a man of such calibre as would ,- .) ^ Diod., xvi. 94. • ' THE MURDER. 143 avenge liimself unsupported. His hysterical, half- feminine rancour was remarked by the disaffected party, itself reinforced, for aught we know, by Greek sympathy or Persian gold,^ and the Celtic sword was put by others into his hands. So perished the maker of Macedou, at a moment and in a manner which make his death the most dramatic in history. In the prime of his life — he was only forty-six — at the supreme crisis of his fame, on the eve of the greatest enterprise of arms the world had seen, he having steered the ship of his ambition through breakers and rocks to the open sea, — to fall at the whisper of a woman and by the hand of an androgyne ! For all that, it may be said of Philip that perhaps he died none too soon. The great work of his life was accomplished. Macedonia was already a nation, and, as Phocion warned the exulting Athenians,^ by the death of its creator, the army of Chaeronea lost no more than one man. Further- more, the work which was to follow was not for Philip to do. The expansion of the Greeks into a new nationality, blending with and absorbing the barbarians around them, could be effected only by a leader of a personality more magnetic and a genius more universal than his ; and the conquest of Asia from the Hellespont to the Punjab would demand a ^ Arr., ii. 14. - Cf., for their attitude, Ait., i. 10 ; .S^sch., Ctes. 11 • Plut., Dem. 22. , ■ 144 PHILIP. master in civil organization as well as a master in war. For while tlie creative military genius of Philip ranks with the very first in the history of arms, and he added to his magnificent excellences of person a certain statesmanlike breadth and insight and fore- sight, which have been equalled seldom, he was in some respects not a great man of civil aftairs. To th e bitter end he understood but very imperfectly the arts of peace. He could concjuer, but usually he was embarrassed by his conquest. Often in the record of his life we have to note that his work must be done twice, even thrice over. Thessaly, for example, was organized into due subjection only after years of desultory fighting and intriguing ; in Euboea Philip never wholly succeeded at all. There is a certain crude and tentative character about his dealings with the Greeks, and with Athens especially, which his son never would have displayed, never indeed did dis- play. Those all-powerful bonds of trade, that astute balancing of nationalities, that subtle use of religious influences, which made every province that Alexander left behind him as much his as if he had spent all his life in organizing it alone, — these things were hardly dreamed of by his father. Philip could have marched, no doubt, to the confines of India equally with his son, but all behind him would have been swelling up like the belly of that wineskin, on whose corner a Brahman trod to demonstrate to Alexander the futility of conquest. It was well for Philip, and it is very well for the world, that it was PHILIP AND HELLENISM. 145 not by him that the West was to be led against the East. " Europe had borne," indeed, " no such man, take him for all in all, as the son of Amyntas ; " ' — until she bore Amyntas' grandson ! Of Philip's conscious constructive work in Macedon we have spoken already. History will never deny him the credit of having^ made there a Nation and a Power. But it were idle to ignore that posterity has always overbalanced its praise by bitter censure for what he did in Hellas. The interest of the modern world in Philip, and his place in universal history, depend after all most on his relation to Greek civilization. Therefore we must examine, in conclusion, the indictment so often repeated, that the Macedonian destroyed Hellenic liberty, and the measure of the wrong he did to civilization, if that indictment be true. And since Athens contained always the quintessence of Hel- lenism, and in this century had come to gather more and more to herself all great Hellenes, wheresoever born, let the inquiry be narrowed to her polity ; and the charge, on which Philip shall stand arraigned, will be this — that, Athens still possessing all the elements and conditions of vigorous life, with promises yet unredeemed, and much still to be developed in her for whose full flower mankind would have been the better, he, Philip, did so restrict her imperial scope, and oppress her liberal aspirations, as to cause grave hurt to civilization. The charge implies, it will be ' Theopomp., fr. 27 ; Said., s.v. -n-apaTrav, L 146 PHILIP.- ■ : noted, two assertions of fact : first (which is matter of knowledge), that Athens was vigorous up to Philip's day ; second (which is matter rather of opinion), that the continued vigour of her civic life was still the most precious condition of human progress. The comparison of the life of states to the life of the individual is something more than a mere analogy. Organized in a polity, individuals have a corporate intellect and corporate emotions, corporate morality and corporate vices ; and, associated, they display a corporate development from youth to man- hood and manhood to age. The youth of the Athenian polity lies in the centuries before the Persian War. From that fiery trial the city emerged into manhood. Can it be that a century later she was falling already into sere senility ? The most ardent advocate of Athenian liberty has not denied that early in the fourth century the Athenian polity was showing signs of exhaustion. The slackness of its political life during that period is attested too well, and confessed too universally, to need demonstration. The orators have depicted for us even to satiety the figure of the too intellectual over- politicized Athenian, who is the later type of Demos. We know so familiarly that loafer in the market-place and on the hill of Assembly, averse equally to personal service and to direct taxation for the weal of his city ; who was little better than an out-pauper with his constant cry, panem et circenses, having replaced the unreasoned belief of his forefathers that THE ATHENIAN DEMOS. 147 the individual exists for tlie state, by a reasoned conviction that the state exists to support and amuse the individual. That his city should have a circle of tributary dependencies whose contributions would pay for mercenaries to fight and row in his stead, for ships to secure his corn supply,^ and for free shows in his theatre and his stadium, was a consum- mation which he contented himself with desiring devoutly. He would neither fight nor pay for its accomplishment, and with his idle criticism, his spoiled temper, his love of litigation, and his cease- less talk he so hampered his own executive ^ that it could carry out no imperial policy, and the few men of action left in the city hastened to reside beyond his reach.' As a matter of fact (and this consideration is very germane to the issue), during this period Athens had no truly imperial position at all, not even a hege- monic one, for which it might be claimed that it ennobled leader or led. Her First Empire, so soon as, having ceased to be a militant League against Persia, it lost its first justification, had assumed another under the reasoned direction of Pericles. The imperial Republic, keeping her tributaries entirely under her control, was to elevate them with herself into a splendid organism, representative of the best in Hellenism as against all the world. Obligations ' For the importance of this supply, cf. HcU. \. 1, 28 ; -1, CI ; and Dem., Cor. 87. - Cf. Phil i. 46, 47. ' Theopomp., fr. 117 ; Nep., Cliahr. 3. 148 pniLiP. whicli could not be enforced upon her were to be acquitted of her own free will more fully than her subjects could have dreamed. Hence that largeness of ideal, and especially that exalted sense of obligation, which characterize the policy of Athens in the fifth century and are reflected in her literature and her art. The citizen has an ambition transcending mere civic life ; the calls upon him keep him alert and active ; his ruder energies find worthy vent, and his sense of demi godlike superiority to his kind renders him incapable of what is sordid and small. In this way the First Empire justified itself awhile to the leader herself, and may perhaps find justification also at the bar of history, notwithstanding that the led for their part in no way identified themselves with, nor even acquiesced in, this ideal of their leader. But the Second Empire, falsely so called, that is, the revived League of 378, must be judged less favourably by history. The incompatibility of the Periclean ideal with weak human nature had come to be proved before Pericles' own death by protest after protest from the " allies," followed by actual revolt. The very loftiness of the leader caused her to be hated with such a hatred as has been meted out to few imperial cities ; and the constantly increasing coercion which she had to practise towards her dependencies throughout the closing decades of the century went far to neutralize any ennobling effect of her imperial position. Athens stood, at the opening of the fourth century, amid the ruins of her First Empire, disillusioned, her demi godlike state past for ATHENIAN EMPIRE. 149 ever, herself tumbled rudely to a lower level of obligation and ideal. Therefore, when, after the conclusion of a series of free commercial alliances and the reconstitution of her own means of offence and defence, Athens suc- ceeded, a generation later, in imposing her headship once more on above seventy cities, she did so under conditions which precluded this restored " Empire " from having any ennobling or elevating effect even on herself. The Second League was formed by the coercion of a single victorious fleet, and had a host of foes both within and without. In the original articles of association, which have been preserved to us on the official marble,^ Athens abandons by implication all the imperial rights which in her first Empire she had assumed in virtue of her own demi god- head. This League the Eepublic forms, not for her own aggrandisement, but in the interest of the continued existence of herself, equally with that of the smallest signatory. She admits that she has no right to use the lands of the allies for her own benefit, or to try their citizens by her laws. They, for their part, agree to send deputies and contributions to her for convenience' sake, being obviously jealous of her head- ship, and prepared to dissociate on the slightest sign of her assertion. With hardly anything in common but jealousy, such a League did not need a Philip to break it up, and as a matter of fact it had dissolved by no act or devising of his, before ever he laid a finger on Athenian possessions. ^ C. I. A. ii. 17. 150 PHILIP. Thereafter Athens in the fourth century had a number of uncertain, free allies, but no subject empire really under her own control, except those tracts in Samos, and on the northern shore of the Dardanelles, which were held, in contravention of her sworn assur- ance, by bodies of armed colonists, together with the unimportant islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros, and, for a brief period and very doubtfully, Euboea — and these few she effectually could neither protect nor coerce. Small wonder that Imperialism, when not recalled as a glorious memory of an earlier age, connoted little to the orators and historians of the fourth century but piratical raiding and the levying of blackmail, truckling to the Barbarian,^ complaints and protests from islands and cities, mercenary expeditions, and shifty evasions of sworn treaties. So far from ennobling, it reminded of decadence of prestige abroad, and was associated with failure of political morality at home. It is contended, however, that in this first half of the fourth century there was merely an eddy in the stream of Athenian progress ; that the polity of Athens was not really old, only exhausted for the moment by mighty effort, and about to have risen again, a giantess refreshed. Now a state no more than an individual can put on its youth again, but not less than an individual it may hasten its age. While the pulse beats at fever heat, both an individual and a state live many years in one. The ' Cf. ^Esch., C'/es. 238 ; Dem. Phil iv. 31. A CHOSEN PEOPLE. 151 Athenians, who had started manhood under the tre- mendous stimulus of a general belief that they were a chosen people, continued to live at the highest pressure under the guidance of Pericles and Periclean ideas for more than two generations. It was the existence of a huge slave population, of course, that made it possible for the privileged citizen body to cultivate exclusively its intellectual and physical perfection. It was the quick Ionian wit of its members that inclined them to the life political. The ephebic training gave every young citizen the same ambitions and the same tastes, and Periclean state-socialism took from them all concern for old age. Thus not merely a leisured minority, but the whole body of citizens, was able to lead for two- thirds of a century a life more intense than has fallen to the lot of any class in history ; and the Athenian state passed through the experience of three centuries at least in that one, working out a more complete evolution in politics, in art, and in letters, than many another people has developed in a millennium. Beginning the century as an aristocratic state, Athens ended it as a democracy developed to the last degree that that form of polity, as understood by Greek publicists, would admit. There was no reserve, nothing still to come in the next age, no large proletariate, for example, whose gradual eman- cipation might initiate fresh phases of vigour. The proletariate of Athens was all servile, and reckoned outside the polity. Henceforward there is no further 152 PHILIP. constitutional development to be remarked in Athens, but merely abuse of what has been developed already, as obligation ceased to be felt and self-indulgence increased. The orator system, for instance, is no new feature, merely an inevitable exaggeration of an old one. When Athens was aristocratic, but not imperial, we hear most of her Archons ; with the rise of her empire the Generals come to the front ; with its fall, and the disappearance of the aristocracy, the Talkers preside over the State. Alexander demanded the surrender not of generals, but orators. Demos- thenes himself was a symptom of democracy in decay. If we turn from politics to art and literature, we note the same complete evolution. Sculpture has passed in a century from archaism to the birth of mannerism with Praxiteles. All writers on the subject recognize a pause in the fourth century. The artist in marble or bronze has no more to learn, no new world to conquer ; his art has come down to earth, and is henceforward to be imitative or reforming only. The case is not otherwise with literature. The Epos is fixed finally ; prose style culminates in Isocrates ; Euripides has developed the Drama to the last point of humanism which the peculiar conditions of the Greek stage would admit, and presently with Menander it is to cease to be scenic and to become literary. Furthermore, let two things be remarked in Athenian literature which, more than anything else, argue that the Athenian polity was ageing, and not enduring a mere passing reaction. It has been remarked often GEXERAL DECAY. 153 that towards the end of the fifth century the tone of Athenian writers becomes distinctly anti-imperial. Thucydides, Aristophanes, Euripides, Plato, are none of them for the Empire. All condemn in their several ways the imperial idea, although, as certainly as our own giants in letters of the Elizabethan and Victorian ages, those great Athenians owed their own intellectual eminence to the imperial position of the society in which they moved. The explana- tion is not far to seek. The intellectual activity, which the empire stimulated, had led, on the one hand, to a dawning sense of a circle of oljligation, with which Empire was not consistent ; on the other, to ideals of human happiness not necessarily political. The Athenian had become conscious, and a race, once it has reasoned about its own existence, has left its demi god state behind for ever, and is no longer " chosen." The heyday of life vanishes with the birth of reflection. Secondly, it is surely significant that poets, both of the first and second order, should cease from Athens as the fourth century advanced. For a nation to confine its artistic effort in literature to the study of assonance and hiatus in prose, and that mainly ad captandum in the shallow style of the orator, implies surely that the evening of creative power has set in. That there should have come to be a demand for elaborate harangues, smelling of the lamp, was a sign of political decadence ; thai the literary class should have supplied almost nothing else, is proof that the decadence extended to art. Philip obtrudes himself on this Athenian stage 154 PHILIP. when decadence is no longer a tendency but an estab- lished fact ; when democracy has passed into mob- rule, and opportunists, like Eubulus,^ are at the helm of state. The Macedonian was responsible not for the predominance of such opportunists, but merely, like Sparta of old, for the line they elected to take. He appears also when there exists no longer at Athens generals even of the type of Chabrias or Timotheus,^ but in their stead condottieri and respectable corporals like Phocion ; when no poet has been seen since Euripides, prose has reached its last expression in the orator, and artists are passing into imitative artisans. So far as we can see, there loomed before the Athenian, in the middle of the fourth century, no future except to develop exag- geration, refinement, mannerism, and imitation in the small round of in-bred city life, and to pass away at last, monstrous or decayed. The sum of this whole matter may be set down thus. Had Macedon never arisen, the city of Athens probably would not have been very different at the end of the fourth century from what actually she came to be ; and Philip may be acquitted at once of having done, even indirectly, any grave hurt to civilization by his action towards her. Nay more — and now we face the assertion that the continued vigour of the civic existence of Athens, had it been possible for it to be sustained, would have been the ^ Theopomp., fr. 90. Cf. M^oh., Gtes. 25 ; Dem. in Bern. p. 102, 90. ■" Nep., Chair. ?>. . .... THE EXPANSION OP HELLAS. 155 most precious condition of human progress — Pliilip, l)y hastening the decadence of the Greek city-state, did the Greek race in particuLar, and all mankind in general, no small service. Needless to say, no such service was in his thoughts. Needless to say, it was not he that first set going, or he that conducted to its height, the overflow of Hellas. The banks had been leaking obscurely for a half century past. Mercen- aries, trading colonists, favourites of kings, and bar- barian chieftains, had been learning to forget their civic allegiance in wider spheres of energy ; and Cyrus the Younger, Agesilaus, Jason of Pherae, had all done their part to awake dim consciousness in the Hellene that it lay Ijut with himself to possess the world. But it needed a miohtier arm than theirs to break down altogether the barriers which confined the citizen to his city. Philip may be said to have cut decisively the dykes, Alexander to have o'uided and controlled the Hood. This is not the place — another may be found more suitable — to portray the Greek of the coming age, called so justly the Hellenistic; for the expan- sion of Hellas reached, of course, its full limits only under the successors of Philip's son. But as it was Philip who at least made that expansion possil:)le, it is but just to link his name loosely with those great benefits which were to accrue to Hellenism and the world in the new era. Briefly, the Hellene, being cut as by a pruner from the aged stem of his polity, began an independent development in a new soil, with new juices to feed upon and a new sky opened 15 6 PHILIP. overhead. No longer bound by the tyranny of cor- porate evolution to refine on the already too refined, and to follow the grooves which decline to corporate death, his individual genius could enter on a new progress. Born and trained to a higher grade of political capacity than members of any other con- temporary race, he applied to all communities into which he came higher and more universal principles of government than they had known hitherto ; and in the new field those principles took a new and larger scope than in his own little polity of old. His mind having been exercised through thought and the application of thought, he could apply it to any science or condition of life, and accordingly everywhere he instituted an advance on what had preceded him. But removed from the hothouse atmosphere of his parent polity, his genius takes now a more practical aspect. It turns to applied science rather than the pure theoretic, to decorative and domestic art, to application of literary form and finish to the presentation of useful knowledge, to treating, in short, art as made for man rather than man as made for art. Aristotle, Euclid, Era- tosthenes, and Ptolemy the geographer are more genuine products of this new era than ApoUonius, Callimachus, or Theocritus ; the artistic .culinary implements of Pompeii express it more aptly than the Sidon sarcophagi, the Pergamum frieze, or the Laocoon. The Greek went out to be the leaven of a world, which had not forgotten art and theory, but was no longer to live by art and theory alone. PHILIP'S PAUT. 157 It was remarked long ago tliat the modern world lias taken no political institution consciously or directly from Athens, that is to say, in letters and in art the Athenian is not our immediate fore- father. For if it is true that all the roads of civilization lead back to Greece, equally it is true that they run for vastly the greater part of their course not through Greece. But none the less all along those roads, down to the gate of modern times, the Greek is conducting us always, himself the spirit of progression. Had no Philip nor such rude giant driven him forth from the frontiers of his little state, our present debt to Hellas had been little greater than can be contracted by conscious archaists in political science, in letters, and in art. But Philip it was that forced the Hellene into the open sea, and therefore, if it l^e that " nothing moves in the world which is not Greek in origin," it is owed to no man more than the Macedonian. And surely if the great dead still may note the course of progress, in which once they played a part, a reconciliation must have been sealed long ago in the Elysian Fields between Demosthenes and his " barbarian of Pella." COP\' OF A PORTRAIT-BUST OF ALEXANDER. [TIVOLI HERM in the LOUVliE.] [To face p. 159. ALEXANDER. The bloody mantle of a murdered king has dropped seldom so uneasily as upon the shoulders of Alex- ander. His legitimacy had been impugned by his father. The party that looked to him was not dominant at court. A dispossessed uncle and a half- brother were at hand to claim his succession. His mother had contrived certainly, and he himself was suspected to have been privy to, the cruel catastrophe that had just befallen. It can have been with no too sanguine hopes that the boy allowed friends and flatterers to buckle his corselet and lead him to claim Philip's throne. A few minutes earlier the butchered king had been borne back to his palace. The streets on that October morning, all in gala trappings for the interrupted feast, were probably as empty now as the fatal Theatre ; for it was the doubtful hour after a great crime, when an oriental crowd runs instinctively to cover. Presently, however, what might not the assembled nobles and burghers attempt ? What would be the policy of that brilliant gathering of Envoys Extraordinary ? What last and most, was 160 ALEXANDER. likely to be the mood of the great Army of Asia, marshalled in the Vardar plain ? In the event this concurrent presence of ambas- sadors and soldiers in the first critical hours saved Alexander. Ere another's standard could be raised, he had had time to appeal in person to his father's allies, and to all sections of his father's army. The representatives of the former in the presence of the latter would have assured any heir of their loyalty perhaps with equal effusion ; and honestly and promptly the army declared for the hero of Chaeronea. Olympias had counted on memories of that great day, and Alexander appealing now with beauty and youth for his allies, did not appeal in vain. We can call up his image more distinctly than that of his father ; for Plutarch, who had seen por- traits by Lysippus and read contemporary memoirs now lost, has left a descriptive chapter, to be com- pared with such copies of the Lysippean type as sur- vive, and with countless idealized headi on medals and in marble. In all antiquity Alexander was famous for beauty of face, not quite of the then accepted type, but fuller featured and more ardent. Plutarch reports that his skin was singularly fair and clear, and though in stature not above the ordinary, he had the frame and aspect of an Olympic athlete. His father, indeed, once proposed that he should enter the lists for the great foot-race, but the haughty boy would not compete with less than his social peers. Further we are told that habitually his head was inclined a little COPlf OF A PORTRAIT-BUST OF ALEXANDER IN TJIE BRITISH MUSEUM. [To face p. 101. PORTRAIT. IGl towards the left slioulder, more proljably in an uncon- scious pose than through malformation or disease/ and that large and liquid but fiery eyes ^ arrested attention most in his face. In a copy of a portrait bust, brought from Alexandria to our national collection, the spectator does remark indeed the character of the eyes, deep sunk beneath brows extra- ordinarily prominent, and shaded by very full lids, which fold over on themselves, the whole giving a singular impression of amplitude and life. Not less remarkable, however, are the mouth and chin, both sensuous, and inspiring insistent suspicion whether the Macedonian conqueror can indeed have l^een so indifferent to the lusts of the tlesh as the ancients acrreed to believe. This bust in the opinion of some critics^ is a too emphatic copy, and less faithful than the Tivoli herm of the Louvre ; others ■* question if it represent a portrait at all. But in the matter of the mouth there is no need to take cover behind such doubts ; the tradition of antiquity and the sculptor are both ' Torticollis, or atrophy of the right side. Vide extracts from a paper by A. Dechambre, quoted in Rev. Arch. Ser. i., ix. p. 422. The learned doctor in his resume (p. 4;);!) says, '• L'antique connu sous le nom d'hermes d'Alexandre represeute ua personnage atteint d'uu torticolis par racconrcissement dn muscle sterno-mastoidien droit." ' Cf. Plut., Pomp. 2. " E.ff. Th. Reinach, in his discussion of the Alexander-heads on the Sidon sarcophagus {U/ie Kkropole roijale, etc., text, p. 29;!). Cf. frontispiece to this volume. "* E.g. F. Kffipp {Ueber das Eildnks Ale.mnders des Grosaeii, Berlin, 1892). M 1 62 ALEXANDER. to be justified. For two things about Alexander must be borne in mind. On tbe one hand, be had no characteristic more salient than an inordinate pride of self which stepped in whenever his emotion threatened to break from control. He owed that pride to many causes— equally to the very plenitude of his powers, and to the circumstances of an early life, spent in bitter quarrel with his natural guardian, and in the premature independence which such rela- tions in a feudal state induce. Exalted by the admonishment of a great tutor, the boy had been also early invested with command, and exposed to every intoxication of flattery. By one of these influences or another, Alexander had manifestly been brought, ere he reached manhood, to regard, as many men not professedly moral have regarded, sexual surrender as to be withstood always and every- where. Those impulses which threaten most absolute dominion over self, he dreaded most ; and in the sequel, largely through the strenuous part for which he was cast during all his life, he succeeded in keep- ing them under, as few ascetics have done. He who had refused angrily to marry and leave an heir before he set out for Asia, begot only two children of his body, the second, Roxana's boy, after four fruitless years of wedlock ; and since death inter- posed early between his will and its inevitable decay, he has remained a pattern of continence to the ages, the most signal example perhaps in history of the subjection of the flesh to inordinate pride ! On the other hand, his nature was neither cold CHARACTER. 163 nor passionless. The flame burned fiercely enough in Alexander, little issue though it found in the love of women. The .most beautiful of these he aS"ected to regard as " soulless dolls," ' but none the less he gloried in wine and song and feasting, like his father before him.^ And even if we did not know his record so intimately, we might assume that no nature coldly intellectual could display the half of Alex- ander's recklessness ; no man not essentially emotional would risk so much for ideas ; no one not frankly passionate had attached a great host to himself by a bond which held for seven years through sands and snows, and survived at the Sutlej and at Opis. But we do not depend alone on inference. Was there not in Alexander's life at least one emotional friendship, a friendship of that type which, based obscurely on passion, in certain natures passes the love of women ? Perhaps he consciously directed the imperious current of his emotion into that channel to avoid all risk of sexual slavery ; but even so, if we believe Plutarch'' and the consent of anti- quity, Alexander stands absolved of all suspicion of sin ; and we must count him not worse than the best of the race and school of Plato in the age before the idealization of woman. * , The prince, called thus suddenly to Philip's seat, had enjoyed no common education. The nature inborn in any son of Olympias (Aeacid though she was) would be rather that of an Albanian ^ Plut., Alex. 21. ^ Cf. Athen., x. 45. ' Alex. 22. 1G4 ALEXANDER. chieftain than a Greek citizen ; and if indeed Alex- ander sprang too from Philip's loins, he would be also on that side but a rude Hellene. On this proud mountain stock, however, had been grafted, by Philip's example and the precepts of his tutors, all the most exclusive sentiment of a Greek. Con- fident heir of a new-made order, cradled in the late- invented militarism, and imbued almost at his father's knee with the idea that whoso disposed of the forces of Macedon could dispose also of the earth, Alex- ander had been subjected to all exalting influences, and those untempered by parental control worthy the name. By inevitable consequence, in a latitude of early maturity, he was become full man ere he ascended his father's throne — a man who for years had been forming most definite ambitions, and, in measuring his personal powers against those of all the leading spirits of his sphere, had rated himself their equal or their better. He would know and do what no man else had known or done. " Not rightly," he wrote to Aristotle, " hast thou published the doctrines that thou taughtest to me by word of mouth, for why should the rest of the world be even as I ? " To himself he seemed to be the " god in mankind," with no straiter limitations, no gentler code of right, than a demigod of Homer's world. There are many stories of the boy's precocious self- assertion. Like a potentate of our own day, educated under influences not dissimilar, who maybe has modelled himself a little on the Macedonian, Alex- ander believed in royal roads to knowledge. He ASSERTION OF SELF. 165 would grasp the innermost mysteries of philosophy before he had learned well its rudiments ; he thought to have penetrated the arcana of medicine, and gravely lectured his most venerable physicians. But the ready smile fades in wonder, that, seeing who this prince was, and how brought up — seeing that his interests ranged from the conquest of the world to the collection of specimens — seeing withal that his follies were committed before all men — never- theless such tales should be so few ! So we are confronted, from the very outset, by a most masterful and conscious character, self-reliant to a fault, little hampered by restraints of constitution or family, but disciplined somewhat in Philip's hard school of arms. Add a most brilliant, precocious intellect, given the Avidest scope by contact for three years with the mind of Aristotle and deeply tinged with the romantic side of Hellenic culture ; add the frame and constitution of an Olympic victor, and, again, the beauty of a Praxitelean god. Alexander's physical excellences attracted those whom his intel- lectual force might have daunted or repelled ; and the two together endowed him with a personal magnetism which seems to have been felt equally by the subtlest Greek and the rudest barbarian in his service. On a far greater scale than Alcibiades, Alexander was born to do the most good or the most harm to all his world. What nature of inheritance devolved on this leader of men ? A professional army of probably 166 ALEXANDER. , not less than 60,000 men of all arms was absolutely ready to his hand, mobilized at the moment of his accession. That force was in a state of perfect discipline and efficiency, having received the last touches of its maker ; and no soldiery in the world could compare with it for purposes of offence. The Macedonian navy, however, was but a small, neglected force, hardly adequate for coast defence, and inferior to fleets which several Greek and Asiatic cities could put on the sea at short notice. In territorial possession the boy received absolutely what still we call Macedonia, with the most part of Rumelia, bounded west by the Albanian watershed and north by the Balkan chains ; but the Black Sea slope was part savage and half-subdued,^ part friendly but independent, under Byzantium.^ Absolutely also he was lord of Thessaly. The completeness of sub- jection to Macedonian rule is shown best in all this region by the fact that it has left no coinage of this period but that issued by the royal mints of Macedon. The remainder of the Balkan peninsula lay also in dependence more or less complete. Greece south of Thermopylae was kept in check by military occupa- tion, the Gates themselves, the Theban citadel, Chalcis the key of Euboea and Attica, and the Corinthian approach to the Peloponnese, being held strongly ' These Thracians are still called avTovojxoi in Alexander's reign (Arr.,i._l). _ - Which city sent ships to help Alexander in his Thracian campaign (Arr., i. S). INHERITANCE. 167 witli royal troops. But the cities continued to coin their own money/ and to be regarded nominally as sub- ject allies of the Macedonian king, a condition which they detested and would repudiate as soon as might be. Epirus remained an ally without being subject ; and all round the outer circle of the west and north the highland tribes of Albania, Montenegro, Servia, and Bulgaria were in an ill-defined tributary position towards Macedon, which called for rude correction from time to time ; for Philip's latest operations in those Balkan reoions had not contributed much to a definite settlement. Finally, Macedonian troops w^ere at this moment in possession of the farther shore of the Dardanelles, and a little of the inner land of Asia. It was a somewhat thorny heritage of Empire. No part of it was quite sound, not even the core, which it had been Philip's life-work to expand and assure. Through him indeed it was become loyal enough to the Macedonian crown, but not by any means was it so certainly attached to the person of the new king. The old trouble with the Feudatories was not quite past and done with : Alexander had to proceed at first with extreme caution in dealing, for ex- ample, with Lyncestians ; ^ and the arch Lyncestian ^ The value of the numismatic test may be ilhistratcd by the change which super\'enes in Athens and the Peloponnese after the disastrous end of the Lamian War in 322. Their independent coinage becomes thenceforward as non-existent as that of Thessaly. " Certain of whose chiefs fought on the Persian side in Asia, t.ij. Xeoptolemus at Halicarnassus, and Amyntas at Issus ; and Polemon fied to the foe at a later period, but returned to allegiance. 168 ALEXANDER. conspirator could not be put to death until years after his guilt was established/ Still more dangerous seemed certain of those who, having been foremost in Philip's councils, knew that his elder son perhaps would not, had the father lived longer, have been his designated successor. Eager to realize the legacy of his father's hopes, the son had first to secure the inheritance of his father's deeds. Alexander's seat in Europe was none too sure. Greece, agitated by Demosthenes, showed a most uncertain mood ; ^ the Balkan tribesmen were openly defiant. To neutralizing these foes within and without the first year and a half of the new reign had to be devoted, and in that brief but strenuous schooling in peril and patience the exuberant boy sensibly matured. Most notable is it, how these two preliminary campaigns in Europe display already the assertive personality of the future conqueror. Alex- ander has a perfect machine left ready to his hand, but its mechanical perfection induces in him no me- chanical habit ; even thus early he quickens it with all the fire of his own spirit. When at the outset the Thessalians bid him wait without their closed door of Tempe, convention would have enjoined ' Cf. Arr., i. 25, with Curt., vii. 15, and Justin, xi. 2. - The state of Greece at this crisis is well set forth by B. Niese, Geschkhte der jiriech. viicl makedon. Sfaateii, etc. (i. pp. 53 ff.). In fact, this passage and another on the condition of Greece and the AVest generally during Alexander's last years (p. IGl ff.) are the best in Niese's too summary and too little critical work .(is;);]). FIRST CAMPAIGNS. 169 the assault or the purchase of what had long beeu held to be the one practicable pass. But the new Captain, without a moment's hesitation, turns to the impracticable route, and succeeds. His spear- men are bidden cut steps along the sea-face of Ossa,' and get through where goats hardly had passed before. For result, the rising insolence of the penin- sula abjectly collapsed, and not a murmur was heard except from Sparta, when the boy came down to Corinth to claim the proud prerogatives of his father. And for further result, a year later, only the reported death of this stripling of twenty, at whom Demos- thenes had been jeering so lately, emboldened tortured Thebes to raise the standard of revolt. Warning of the dreadful phalanx did not dash the spirit of the rebels, for they were told it was led by Antipater, or by some namesake of Alexander. Then lo ! the boy himself was without the walls. Just as he found himself with his army at the moment that the ill news came to Lake Ochrida, unreinforced, careless of his communications and his supplies, he had made straight for the nearest gap in the frontier range, and in fourteen days was seated over against the Cadmeia. There was one sortie, and a tough tussle in the streets with the stifi-backed Theban burghers, and not another sword was unsheathed in Greece for five years. In the previous Balkan campaign, too, the dpio-Teia had been not less Alexander's, half reckless barbarian that he was, half heir of the highest civilization in ^ Polyaenus, iv. 8. 28. 170 ALEXANDEE. ■ liis age, and always source and spring of action. He demanded and obtained from his soldiers tlie prowess of single champions. In the very first engagement they must break up their close, confident formation, and, crouching under their shields, let Triballian waggons hurtle over their bodies down the Balkan slopes.^ They were ferried in a single night across the greatest river in their world, to demonstrate in a land absolutely unreconnoitred. The most complicated movements of the parade-ground had to be executed calmly in an open valley, for the psychologic value of the spectacle upon the watch- ins; ambuscades which beset flank and rear And already we find Alexander obeyed implicitly by professional soldiery, doubtless not a little because he was the bombastic young athlete, darling of rude men, who dropped the generalissimo whenever there was a wild charge to be headed, who risked him- self and the flower of his force across the Danube, simply that he might say he had crossed it, and prodigally spent health and strength in being first in every forced march, first through every doubtful ford, and first into every fenced city. A measure of self-conscious display was added to impulse, for Alexander was but twenty-one ; and there are well- known tales of his frank disappointment if his audience remained immoved. But whether when Diogenes grimly tells him, would-be Lord Bountiful, to stand away from his sunlight, or when certain hairy Kelts, to whose thews the boy's soul had ' Polyaenus, iv. 3. 11. ALEXANDER PANHELLENE. 171 ■vvarmed, refuse in the true Scots spirit the shadow of a compliment to all his fishing, Alexander has always enough conviction or enough nobility to keep his temper and his dignity. And, indeed, the very frankness of the boy's self-assertion, inspiring still a kindly sentiment for him in this fair spring of his year, reveals the secret of his extraordinary personal magnetism. However conscious the pose, however deliberate the action, there remained in Alexander to the end so much of an exuberant child of nature, who used all his powers recklessly for all they were worth, that custom never staled the enthusiasm he so openly sought. A year and a half passed by, and by the time that the young Captain was ready for the great venture in whose inception his father had died, and whereof himself had dreamed long, the noise of him and the fear had spread from the Danube to the southernmost isles of the Greek sea. He was become to the mass of his Macedonians a Hero who could do no wrong ; but this idolatry was not enough for his ambi- tion, and he was bent on winning a like throne in the hearts of the Greeks. Even as Philip, so Alexander, piqued by the precious exclusiveness of Athens, paid involuntary homage to her pre-eminence in a world more universal than his own ; but more than his father, for he had had the better Hellenic training, he would make appeal to her literary and artistic sense, sparing the house of Pindar, sleeping head on Homer, and proclaiming in an open letter to 172 ALEXANDER. Aristotle, that he set the great achievements of pure intellect above all feats of arms. A romantic vein having led him in this first bloom of his youth to set up the Homeric Hero as his life's ideal, the title of Captain-General of Hellas, which seemed to lift its holder to an Agamemnonic pinnacle, was taken probably by Alexander at the first much more seriously than by Philip. The boy could not, however, have been possessed of the intelligence which was his, had he supposed the Greeks, least of all the Athenians, to be with him heart and soul. The reception which the news of his father's death had met with south of Olympus, the obstruction off'ered to his own first entry into Thessaly, the revolt of Thebes, and the sympathy shown to her beyond Cithaeron, had supplied warnings patent to a duller man than Alexander. And, indeed, it was clearly to conciliate a hostile spirit, of which he was uneasily conscious, that he began by making not only appeal to Athenian culture, but the same sort of gracious concession to Athenian political pride that his father had fancied would be grateful. Like Philip, Alexander never violated Attic soil ; like Philip, when he had to arraign certain statesmen for words or deeds hostile to himself, he ostentatiously left the convicted in the hands of the sovereign Athenian people. Unlike Philip, however, he seems not to have believed that such favours could avail alone, but to have relied for ultimate success rather on his own personality, on his physical beauty, on his intellectual culture, and on the THE PERSIAN CRUSADE. 173 Homeric spectacle he was about to display of a new Achilles gone to Asia. Euined Thebes he hoped thus would be forgotten/ thus the enthusiastic applause of the Academy be won, thus that he might make of his present Empire and his future conquest one Hellenic unity, himself acclaimed by free conviction the one worthy prince of the whole. Behold, then, a very sanguine and large-hearted youth, somewhat conscious and greedy of recognition and applause, bid adieu to his mother on the Mace- donian border in early spring of 334, and march off with forty thousand men at arms and his hopes for the Dardanelles. Those "hopes" which, after giving away almost all his substance with a Quixotic indif- ference to money and luxuries which remained cha- racteristic to the end, Alexander had said, laughing, would pass the straits alone of all his treasures, were already full-fledged. He proposed nothing short of complete dispossession of the great Darius in favour of himself, Captain-General of Hellas — in short, the establishment of his own panhellenic Empire in the room of the Persian. It might be superfluous to emphasize this so obvious ambition of the young Alexander, were it not that there is hardly a commentator or a critic but has forgotten it by the time the Conqueror is come to Issus. Thenceforward special reasons are sought and supplied with a wealth of perverse ingenuity for almost every forward movement. From Egypt to 1 Plut., AJex. 13. 174 ALEXANDER. the Euphrates, from Persepolis to the Caspian, from the Caspian to the Sir Daria, from Balkh to India, Alexander is said to be forced by this particular consideration of policy, or that fresh goad of masterful fate. In truth, however, the motive influence was always one and simple. From the first Alexander looked to reach no goal, and indeed reached none, either at Memphis, or at Arbela, or at Babylon, or at Persepolis, or in the little gorge where Darius lay dead, so long as any tiara but his own was erect in the Persian Empire, or a single satrapy had failed to acknowledge his sway. And such a plan of cam- paign was, beyond a doubt, what contemporary Greeks, understood by the due wreaking of the revenge of Hellas. That the campaign of Vengeance should be merely demonstrative, to be relinquished when the Palace of Xerxes was burned, or his successor had been done to death — that one should vanquish but not possess the lands of the vanquished — -this was neither contemporary theory, nor likely to be contemporary practice. At least no such conception was present to the minds of those who saw, some with grief, some with joy, but all with surprise,. Alexander burn at Persepolis what they recognized was now become his own. We are not called upon to find a fresh motive for progress west of the Indus. The simple scheme of dispossessing the one rival Emperor in his world and possessing in his room, had been Philip's last absorb- ing idea ; it had become that of the boy Alexander- even before his father's death ; it continued to be his. SPIMT OF THE CRUSADE. 175' when king. From the very first in Asia Alexander assumed the position of the Persian, replacing the latter's satraps with his own, continuing the old system of administration, with, at first, special indulgence for Greek cities,^ accepting even Persian! officials if proved loyal to their new Great King ; and every province, witness Egypt in chief, was organized as a possession for ever. The Macedonian put his own purpose nakedly enough in replying to Darius' overtures before Arbela,'^ that he required all the king's lands, not any part : " I, Alexander, consider the whole of thy treasure, and the whole of thy land, to be mine." How can this be misconceived ? The Conc[ueror did not march on a bee-line tO' Susa, but he was making thither not less but more surely, because from Side, from Issus, from. Arbela he turned ofi" the main track to fix his foot- ing so surely that no one after him ruled in the western empire of Persia but on western lines before- the Hegira. Ultimately, as will be seen in the sequel, the Conqueror's ideal came to transcend these primary limits, and the conquest of Persia was forgotten in the conquest of the Earth. Equally, but much earlier, the outward sanction which the conqueror ^ Cf. bis letter to the people of Smyrna, tlie record of wbicli is preserved in an inscription (6'. /. G. SliiT, 11. 100 ff.) ; also similar privileges granted to Priene {B. M. iiiscr., iii.. No. 400). ^ On the authenticity of these letters to Darius, see Pridik, De Al. Marjni ejnsiularum commercio, pp. ;iOff. That learned scholar- accepts them as at least embodying genuine matter. Nieso: accepts them also, but -without criticism. 176 ALEXANDER. had sought at first for liis conquest was forgotten also. Partly it had become meaningless in the face of facts ; partly it was needed no longer. What survived through all change was the single human desire, which was actuating Alexander on the hither shore of the Dardanelles, and would be prepon- derating on his death-lDcd, the desire, namely, of acquisition. Trite as it may seem, this needs saying again. Alexander, like Philip, was but a man of his age and race — an age and race whose greatest thinker laid it clown for law that Hellene was justified abso- lutely in enslaving barbarian. No more subtle moral rule claimed the attention of a Hellenic conqueror in Asia at that day, than the right of the stronger. The world was that Hellene's oyster whose sword could lift the shell. Why Philip wished to be first and foremost a Hellene has been discussed in the former essay. All the motives which actuated him were but stronger in Alexander. Both wished to rest on a unified base wider than Macedonia, both to conquer and hold a vast Empire beside. Both — for they were Hellenes by birth and training — believed that the second element to be incorporated with the Macedonian, both in the base and in the conquest, was the Hel- lenic ; but Alexander understood the better how to deal with it. One cannot be too fearful of credit- ing a youth who makes history with a consciousness in advance of his epoch, or beyond his years. To claim for Alexander that he conceived the regeneration of the world by the Hellene is sheerly absurd ; to CROSSING TO ASIA. 177 suppose that thus early he foresaw altogether even what Hellenes would effect for his own selfish end of Empire, is to rank him with the Prophets. But to say that he had learned from his father's and his own experience that a base on which Hellene and Mace- donian would fuse firmly together must be outside the traditional home of either ; that the Hellene would prove of even greater service in the holding of Empire than in the conquering thereof ; and that with a view to both these considerations the Hellene's commercial interest must be appealed to, and his commercial apti- tudes utilized — this is only to place Aristotle's pupil early in his precocious life among the more enlightened minds of his own day. Alexander came, then, in this April of 334, to the shore of the Dardanelles, with an ambition to possess all Persia as already he possessed all Greece. He was captain of the Hellenes, full of faith in the Hellenic nationality, and most desirous, in the interests of security as well as of sentiment, that enforced obedi- ence might give place through the gods and him- self to some such willing recognition of his own pre-eminence as Pericles had enjoyed awhile at Athens. His mood was of the most exalted and romantic ; he crossed and landed with the strictest Heroic usage, solemnly visited Ilium, and went through a whole archaistic masque as another Achilles.^ And when ' He even returned after Granicus, and promoted the squalid village to be a free city by way of thanksgiving (Strabo, p. 593) ; and it is probably the ruin of this New Ilium that Schliemann 178 ALEXANDER. a few clays later he found himself for the first time face to face with his foe, scorning, as a Hero might, all counsels of caution, he charged forthwith with a rush of horsemen through the stream of Granicus, himself seeking and fighting single combats as before windy Troy. The spoil was dedicated as a solemn firstfruits to the gods of the Greeks, and in formal terms Alexander decreed annihilation to those dastard Hellenes who were found opposing in arms the Captain- General of their race. Scarce two months later at Miletus Alexander again had at his mercy a body of Greeks, equally guilty ; he allowed them to surrender on terms, and took them into his service. It is a small matter, but a straw on the stream of events. What had hap- pened since the " Cavalry Battle," to ease the con- science of the Captain-General ? In effect enough to make Miletus a point clearly marked in the passing of the enthusiastic boy into the calculating man of affairs. For those two months had proved to demonstration nothing less than that the maritime states of Hellas, those that alone greatly mattered, were in their hearts not for Alexander, but for his enemies. The larger islands, Rhodes, Chios, and Lesbos, and nearly all the lesser, kept open ports found in the uppermost layer at Hissarlik (cf. SchucKhardt, Schlimiami's Excavations, pp. 79 ff. ; and C. I. 6. 3595 for its increase under the Diadochi). It was not a foundation to serve any purposes of commerce or strategy ; for Antigonus was under the necessity of creating hard by a new city for those ends, namely, that Alexandria of the Troad, which became well known in subsequent centuries. PEELING OF THE GREEKS. 179 to the Persian admirals, and the city of Athens had been at no pains to disguise her sympathies. Her continental position and twenty of her ships, held as hostages by the Macedonian, made her warn Pharnabazus off the Piraeus ; but openly she sat within her walls watching for the first Macedonian reverse, and indeed had sent already, or was about to send soon, an envoy direct to Darius. In brief, Alexander had failed entirely to carry Athens with him on the wind of his enthusiasm. He had failed, partly because some of her best spirit survived still, refusino; to be comforted for the loss of Empire ; partly because she had outlived her heroic period. At that stage of her conscious intellectualism, when oratory and philosophy had become popular diversions, an exuberant Homeric champion struck no true note of admiration. There was felt in Athens no longer any enthusiasm for crusades, and at best but a languid interest in the physical excellences of a youth who assumed the Hero and dared kings to battle. She was perhaps, to tell truth, a little wearied with him, and needed only encouragement by an active agitator to express her feelings in open hostility. Therefore, at Miletus, the first sanguine hour of Alexander's life has closed, and on the wreck of his ■exuberant illusions begins to rise a sterner purpose. Greece must be coerced if she will not be courted. Her command of the seas shall be broken by the capture of the coasts of the Levant, and her people be bent willy nilly to do panhellenic work. For 180 ALEXANDER. Alexander knew that, even in spite of themselves, they would do it for him. And therefore, not having resigned all hope that they might be brought some day to see with him eye to eye, he retained, and put forward still the style and title of Captain- General. In face of present hostility, however, it was no longer worth while to maintain an offensive lleet ; and, accordingly, he issued now his much canvassed decision to "burn his boats" and leave himself stranded in Asia. It has not always been understood how inevitably that decision followed on the revelation that had been made. The sea was the element of the Greek. No fleet that, as yet, Alexander could requisition would make head for a moment against the squadrons of Persia and the Hellenic powers, should these combine. Furthermore, like most self-reliant men, Alexander was never easy about operations not conducted under his immediate eye. He could not be on the sea and the land at once ; furthermore, he had never contemplated, when he equipped his own small squadron, that it would remain always small ; and therefore, now that the expected reinforce- ments were accruing rather to the fleets of the foe than to himself, the Macedonian had no choice but to disband his few ships, become too precarious hostages to fortune. This early disillusionment, though it cooled the boy's spirit all too soon, and when pressed home by much future trouble with Greeks, embittered him not a little, and forced him in the end to adopt a policy COKQUEST OF THE COASTS. 181 alien to modern sympathy, was in certain ways salutary. The remembrance of it, and futile regrets that recurred from time to time all through his life, served for his memento mori, a constant check on the confident animalism of his physical nature. Had Alexander never experienced anything less stimu- lating than the favour and applause amid which he started for Asia, his splendid mental powers might have been exercised but little. Nature had framed him for a great warrior ; necessity made of him a great organizer of peace ; and it may be said that Greek hostility did at least as much as Greek precept to give him the claim that is his to have been more than conqueror. The check that he had experienced on the sea turned Alexander's eyes wholly to that element for two years. The campaigns of the last half of 334, of 333, and of 332 had all for their objective the littoral of the Levant. Alexander took little trouble except with the coast districts, and little account of the Persian armies but as incidental checks. After traversing Lycia and Pamphylia with much thorough- ness, and marching and counter-marching for some weeks along the coasts of the latter, when at last he turned inland the conqueror stayed not to organize, hardly even to conquer, but was content to sweep clear a road up to some point which would be convenient for his reinforcements and command a practicable route to the south-eastern coasts,- Gordium, where in the valley of the 182 ALEXANDER. Sakkaria a natural route from tlie Sea of Marmora • — in part now tlie line of a railway — meets the track of the royal Anatolian highway of antiquity, was such a point ; and accordingly Alexander came thither in the spring of 333. Thence he set forth again in early summer, without visiting any part of the Black Sea littoral, content with a formal sub- mission made by the Paphlagonians ere he left Ancyra. All the rest of the work to be done in Asia Minor was left to satraps, and after two years the Cappadocians were able still to join Darius at Arbela. ■• • ' ■ The Macedonian had reason enou2:h to hold in slight esteem the peoples of the Anatolian plateau, and to despise the foreigner who so long had claimed sovereignty over them, but, holding their lands by neither a military^ nor a civil organization worth the name, has left hardly a memorial of his two centuries of empire ! Alexander's attitude, however, implied] not so much contempt for the inner land, as anxiety for the coast ; and for the coast he went again hot and hard, covering in a day and a night, we are told, not less than sixty- two miles, and thereby succeeded in swooping on the Cilician Gates before the Viceroy of Cilicia had begun to think seriously of reinforcing hisj pickets in the pass. How much time and trouble the unsparing Captain must have saved by that forced march may, perhaps, be estimated, if we recall that until Ibrahim Pasha, little more than a half-century ago, blasted the rocks in the famous ' Sec Niese, op. cit., p. C6. CILICIA. 183 defile, every camel had to be unloaded before it could pass. Spent by long noons and sleepless nights, Alexander brought his army, in the fearful heat of a Cilician August, to the sea-level, having descended three thousand feet in about three days. Small wonder that then and there he caught the Cilician fever ! ' — the which mischance gave him, indeed, a notable opportunity of knitting more tightly the bonds of affection between himself and his immediate circle at a moment when murmurs, provoked by recent labours and his own exuberance, were beginning to be heard, but it lost a precious month. Let it not be supposed, however, that it was Issus that immediately was delayed. The settlement of an important maritime province came first in Alexander's mind. Darius was camped all the while no farther away than the plain of Sinjerli beyond Amanus ; but his rival found time to visit Soli twice, and to raid the hillmen of the Tracheia district, ere going leisurely enough to meet the Persian by the indirect way of Mallus. It is only the dazzling appeal that pitched battles make to the imagination which a;ives Granicus and Issus their bulk in Alexander's history. The first of those battles had been really a small afiair, always regarded by contemporaries as a cavalry skirmish. It was not more comparal^le in respect of difiiculties overcome or important result with the ' The famous bath in the Cydiius is more likely to have been aggravation than cause of that malady — a foolish attempt to alleviate the first flush of heat. 184 ALEXANDER, subsequent sieges of such, cities as Halicarnassus, than was the fight at Issus with the siege of Tyre. Alexander himself wasted not a day's pursuit on either of the Persian Grand Armies which he met west of Euphrates. He found them in his path, dealt a smashing blow, and left them to break up as they might, himself in each case continuing on his way irrespective of theirs. There was hardly more respect shown to the defeated army of Issus than to the Pisidian hillmen. That Issus, however, proved so light a matter to Alexander, was due, it is well known, to a particular mistake of the enemy. Had Darius stayed where he was encamped at first, Alexander must, in the interests of his own base and communications, have gone to find him, and been faced by a problem hardly less serious than ultimately he was to meet east of Tigris — how, in fact, with a very small force effec- tually to cut up an immense host, deployed where it could bring; its overwhelming; weight of flesh to bear. Partly, no doubt, because he expected such a task, Alex- ander took so much time to make Cilicia his, having little expectation that Darius would do anything so suicidal as move his unwieldy army through the moun- tains. The news that after all this clumsy host had deserted its chosen ground, and was to be met not even in the open Aleian plain, but in the cramped defiles of Issus, seemed to Alexander too good to be true ; and on its confirmation, he turned back — and no wonder! — hot-foot and exulting, careless that his communications had been cut, careless that he was trapped, knowing ISSL'S AKD ITS CONSEQUENTS. 185 that the very stars in their courses would fight his battle. We must admire the skill and force with which he proceeded to follow up his advantage on the field, himself always in the front, inspiring the vital move- ment and securing the event against any possible mischance; but let it be remembered at the same time that, from the very first, he was playing the winning game, and we shall confine our admiration to the degree and the manner in which he knew how to win. Certain consequents of Issus, however, are of more importance to Alexander's individual history than the battle itself; for through it, in two ways, illu- mination came to him, and a distinct change in his personal attitude ensues. In the first place, not only had he been placed by the capture of Darius' baggage in possession of much correspondence between the Great King and Hellenic states, but also, for the first time, he had seized in flagrant fault the persons of Hellenic envoys sent up to the Persian. These springs of irritation fell to be added to all that had been happening for a year past in Greece, to the crusade preached by Agis of Sparta, to the militant speeches of the anti-Macedonian orators at Athens,^ and to the unequal struggle of his friends in the islands with the ubiquitous Persian admirals. In the second place, the final proof thus furnished, that he could never hope to enjoy to the full the Periclean form of kingship, coincided with the first revelation ' Demosthenes and Hyperides, in the summer of 333. Vide Droysen, p. 242. 186 ALEXANDER. ' ' of the possibilities of another form. " This, it seems," said Alexander, as he gazed on the state and luxury of Darius' tent after the battle, "it is to be a King ! " And, although he would have no commerce with Darius' harem — a continence due as much to temperament as to chivalry — and remained con- temptuous of luxury,' it was not for nothing that, having become possessed of a large slice of wealth by Parmeuio's capture of Damascus, he learned now what wealth could buy. Alexander's simplicity before this epoch had been the unconscious habit of his race ; hereafter it will be conscious policy. He has eaten of the fruit of the Tree, and with growing conscious- ness begins inevitable hardening;. We detect the process presently in the tone and tenor of his letters to Darius, in his arbitrary attitude towards his prisoners and the vengeance meted out to Tyre and to Gaza ; ^ but best in more private matters, so far as we may know them. The famous scene in the tent of the captive queens at Issus is perhaps the last glimpse afforded in Alexander's life of that unre- flective chivalry which had induced him, a month or two before, to take his chance of death by poison rather than show suspicion of a friend. He was not, indeed, solely responsible for the change. Some of his followers had eaten also of the same fruit, and taken the greater harm ; for shortly i Cf., e.g., Plut., Alex. 57 ; Polyaen., iv. ?>. 10. - The story of the punishment of Batis, the brave defender of Gaza (found in Curt., iv. G, and Dion. Hal., de Com}). Verb.. pp. 123-125), is not to be set lightly aside for an utterly incredible cruelty, as Droysen pretends. ALEXANDER THE FOUNDER. 187 after Issus the first whispers of treason were breathed by Philotas to his mistress. Therefore, never again could Alexander afford so well to take chances as they came, never again to give without receiving directly the value of his gift. The illusions of boyhood had melted at Miletus, the hopes of youth have begun to fade at Issus. Alexander at Tyre is removed by two stages of growth from Alexander at Troy. He has become already older than his years, a man harder and more reflective, seeing farther and deeper than is congruous with his age of twenty-four : and after another year of most strenuous effort (for the capture of Tyre remains the greatest of his triumphs over natural difficulties and obstinate resistance), when the coasts of the Levant had become wholly his, and he was come down to the Mareotic shore, we find him founding his greatest Alexandria with the calculation and the providence of a mature man. It was once the fashion to endow Alexander the Founder with more than human foreknowledge of the future of his foundations ; now, by reaction, we are asked to deny him design. Alexandria in Egypt, it is said, was no better than a lucky accident. The new foundation was meant at most to be an improved Naucratis, at once emporium for Greek traders to Egypt, and garrisoned post of observation on the Nile valley. Circumstances, in no way foreseen by the Founder, made a cosmopolitan city of what had been at first a mere Greek harbour in Egypt. Needless to say, many circumstances of which 1»8 ALEXANDER. Alexander had not foreknowledge, still less had con- trol, did combine indeed to raise Alexandria in two generations after its birth to the rank of second, if not first, city in the Mediterranean, and undisputed first in the Levant. The Founder did not foresee the Indian and Arabian trade which would come in by way of Coptos and the Nile, much as half-consciously he did later to open a route for that trade. The Founder •did not foresee the influx into his city of an obscure race of Semitic traders, risen from the ashes of their Phoenician cousins, — the Jews, of whose cosmopolitan expansion the ruin of Tyre and the rise of Alexandria are jointly the first cause. The Founder did not foresee into what wise hands Egypt was to fall at his own death, and how she, and Alexandria within her, would grow at the expense of the rest of his distracted Empire. The Founder did not foresee that Hellenism would follow his own footsteps so far abroad, that its centre would shift to a great city of Egypt and a great city of Syria. Certain things, however, were not hidden in the womb of the Future. It must have been patent to a meaner intelligence than Alexander's, that the great trading area of the Levant was for the moment without focus. Tyre lay an utter wreck, and the other Phoenician cities, never in recent centuries of great account beside her, had been stripped lately of such fleets as they had. It might have been patent to less than Alexander, that, if Greeks were to seize this favourable occasion, it must be done by settling at a point not already occupied ; and that, if Greeks and ALEXANDRIA IN EGYPT. 189' Macedonians were to coalesce into a Hellenistic nation,, there was no land on the eastern Mediterranean left so open to mixed colonization as the Egyptian. Eacial fusions, be it observed, were quite within the scope of the political foresight of Alexander's day. Greek colonies for three centuries had supplied an object lesson in the feasibility of such fusions and the rapid gathering of strength which ensued upon them. To plant rival sections of' one race on a new soil, in the sure hope that their old dissensions, would be forgotten, was not much beyond what had been the notorious policy of many Greek lawgivers and of the Apolline priests. In the event, Alexandria in Egypt did become the scene of just such a fusion, and remained the capital of the resultant Hellenistic nationality. Did Alexander, however, consciously found it for nation-making ? He founded it, assuredly, for some special reason or other, as he had created his first Alexandria to guard the defiles north and south of the bay of Iskenderun. He selected for the second the one possible site on the Egyptian coast * for a great port, as all previous and later experience has gone to prove. For the new harbour must lie outside the reach of the Nilotic silt ; therefore not on the Delta coast-line. It must be sheltered from the west, ' A great authority on Ptolemaic Egypt lias recently called this fact in question. Surely a moment's consideration of the peculiar conditions of a Delta coast, and a glance at the Admiralty charts of this particular Delta littoral, leave no doubt, even to one who has not surveyed the district with his own eyes (see MahafFy,. Em2>ire of the Ptolemies, p. 11). 190 ALEXANDER. the prevailing wind in the Levant ; therefore no point on the exposed shore trending north-east from Pelusium would serve. It must be, lastly, within reach of sweet Nile water ; therefore it could hardly be placed farther west than Ehacotis. The site now chosen was eminently defensible, having Lake Mareotis in the rear ; and the tradition of history has ascribed unanimously to Alexander a personal share in, and solicitude for, the inaugurating of this Egyptian city, of which no mention is made in connection with any other of his foundations. And reasonably ; for Egypt beyond a doubt held a peculiar place in Alexander's aifections, as the land of the particular God by whom he secretly fancied himself to have been begotten. Alexander, then, may be assumed to have in- tended his Alexandria in Egypt to be an important harbour ; but important to what end ? As the key of Egypt ? Yet he kept his main garrison always at Memphis. As a gate whereby Greek trade of the old type might enter the Nile valley ? For that alone a new foundation was scarcely needed ; Nau- cratis had existed long, and long continued to exist. But to gather in a wider commerce ? If that end be allowed, then it must follow that Alexandria was created as a direct consequence of the ruin of Tyre, and was intended to be a new focus for the Levant : and even if Alexander did not consciously create a new capital to concentrate a new mixed nationality — though such a purpose was neither beyond the scope of his intelligence, nor anything but consonant with ALEXANDER AND COMMERCE. 191 liis general policy — the fact will stand that consciously he created a new local capital for commerce.^ And, surely, to do that is to open the door to so many possibilities of expansion, that the Founder of such a city, if it prosper, may claim credit for the great- ness and wealth which have followed on his action. The conception thus ascribed to Alexander is no way incredible on circumstantial evidence. For, first, such commercial aims in colonization had been in the Greek air for centuries, and Alexander would have been perfectly familiar with them, even had he not sat at the feet of the greatest of Greek economists : and, second, in his subsequent career the Founder of Alexandria will give ample proof that he was indeed familiar with 'economic questions, and had a vivid interest and belief in the influence of commerce. His instructions to Nearchus before he left the Indus ; his removal of the obstructions in the Tigris water-way ; ^ his proposal to create a second Phoenicia on the shore of the Persian Gulf^ — these are instances of a single-minded commercial purpose, which conditioned also, but less directly, many other enterprises, the explorations, for example, of the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, and the Indus, and pro- bably the foundation of all the Eastern colonies, ' Cf. Econ. ii. 38, for tlie reflection of a contemporary view of the Founder's purpose (whether by Aristotle or another). Even Niese admits that Alexandria was intended "den Verkehr mit Griechenland und Makedonien zu vermitteln und eine sichen Verbindung Agyptens mit diesen Landen zugewilhren" (p. 85). ^ Strabo, p. 740 ; Arrian, vii. 7. ^ Arr., vii. 19. ' • „ 192 ALEXANDEH. whose representatives survive still as ganglia in Asia's nerve system of caravan roads. Hereby we are ascribing to Alexander no prophetic view of the regeneration of Asia or the mission of the Hel- lene, indeed no altruistic motive at all. His was simply a highly enlightened selfishness, which, having conquered by the sword, knew it could possess in permanence only by fostering the influences of peace. To Alexander commerce and Hellenism were means, not ends, means indeed far from clearly grasped or understood ; but in so far as he did grasp and under- stand them, his is the glory to all time of having applied on a great scale for whatever end the greatest influences for peace in the world of his day. If any further proof were needed that we have to reckon already with an advanced student of state- craft in the Founder of Alexandria, it can be supplied by the organization which he imposed in this same winter on the whole province of Egypt. We are allowed to see only its skeleton, and to detect little more than its singularity — a singularity which proves that, however he may have learned them, Alexander certainly knew those unique difiiculties which Egypt presents to foreign occupation. With marsh at one end and tropics at the other, eight hundred miles of deserts on its either flank, and itself nowhere more than thirty miles in breadth, the Nile valley has called always for a peculiar scheme of government. Arrian is probably right in saying that the Macedonian system, with its lack of an all- powerful supreme official, its three nationalities set THE EXPEDITION TO AMMON. 193 one against the otlier, and its counteracting civil and military powers, anticipated in some ways the Roman. For if Augustus, who indeed was a professed disciple of Alexander, had needed a model for the imperial settlement of the Nile valley, he would have looked, not to any Ptolemaic king who had ruled Egypt from within, but to the first western emperor who had held it as a foreign possession. But this precocious Founder and craftsman in politics has not forsworn yet all the dreams of his youth. Between creating a city and organizing a province, he is capable of the romantic folly of the expedition to the oracle of Ammon. What can be said certainly of this folly ? Hardly more than that indeed Alexander went to the Ammon Temple. He can have made no general announcement either of what he asked its priests or of what they replied.' For the rest, the record of this expedition is shrouded in inconsistency and myth. As Arrian's two best authorities ^ insisted on distinct routes for Alexander's return from the Oasis, we may ' Cf. Arrian, iii. i ad fin., and Plutarch's quotation (Alex. 27) from Alexander's letter to his mother, speaking of the "secret answers which he will tell on his return to her alone.'''' - On Arrian's authorities for the Anabasis, and indeed on the whole subject of the Quellen, see Frankel's monumental work (Breslau, 1883), and lesser and more recent inquiries by E. Peters- dorff, Fine neue Haupfquelle des Q. Ouriius, etc. (Hanover, 1884) ; E. Pridik, Be A. M. epistidarum commercio (1893) ; and A. Zumetikos, De A. Oli/mpiadisque epist . fontihus et reliquiis (1894). Niese devotes a section to the subject, but hardly attempts criticism. 194 ALEXANDER. infer with some confidence that neither chronicler accompanied him. And with almost equal confidence it can be maintained that the expedition was a small affair that assumed little importance at the time^ but came to be subject of general gossip at some later period, when recollection of the facts was confused and vague. Whether Alexander, when he started along the coast from Mareotis, was making indeed for Ammon, or not rather for Gyrene — even this must remain uncertain ; for his historians dismiss with a mere mention the submission of the greatest Greek colony in Africa, which was made to him on his way.^ How did those Cyrenian envoys come so aptly to Paraetonium ? Their city must have been sunmioned to surrender, or have been fearful of an attack. Paraetonium, be it remarked, lies a good deal further west than the usual point at which a caravan leaves the coast and strikes across the desert to the Oasis of Siwah ; and indeed had Alexander had merely Siwah for objective, his natural road had lain not by the north at all, but through the Fayum. Let the conjecture, then, be hazarded for what it is worth, that if indeed a large force went with the king to Paraetonium, on receipt of the Cyrenian submission the most part of it was sent back ; and Alexander seized the occasion to fulfil an old ambition by going to Siwah. He struck inland with a small party, such as alone can traverse so much waterless desert ; and since no chronicler of 1 Diod., xvii. id. Arrian omits, but Cui'tius (iv. 7. 9) confirms Diodorus. ALEXANDER'S PURPOSE. 195 his acts was included in liis following, tlie Alexander of history melts into the Iskender of romance until such time as he reaches Memphis again. The obvious purpose of Alexander, as Pharaoh, was to pay a visit of ceremony to his official Father, Amen. His added secret object was to ask a par- ticular question as to his own carnal origin. All tradition agrees on this last point. Likely enough, Olympias had worked on a mind already full of romantic Homeric ideas. His father had publicly called him bastard. Was he, then, after all, like one of the Heroes, god-begotten on a mortal woman ? It is not impossible that, in this matter, Alexander was doing no more than the behest of his mother ; for he himself mostly made scant account of oracles and divinations, unless they chanced to agree with a policy preconceived. As a boy, he had treated cavalierly even the Pythia. As a man, he re&sed to listen when a soothsayer forbade his venture across the Sir Daria ; he committed palpable fraud with the auspices to save his dignity at the Sutlej ; and replied with scornful sarcasm to the last warn- ings of the prophets of Bel. Why, however, Alex- ander chose to ask his question of Amen of the Oases rather than of Amen of the mother-shrine at Karnak must remain doubtful until we learn more of the religious connections between Egypt ■and Europe at this period.^ ^ Prof. G. Maspero, in a recent article {Comment A, le G. dsvint 'dieu en Egypte, in the Annuaire de VEcole pratique des Hautes Mudes, 1897), explains Alexander^ s choice of Siwah simply by the 196 ALEXANDER. None of the authorities, however, on whom Arrian relied, knew what passed in the Holy of Holies. Later gossip was better informed — not impossibly by report of Alexander's own loose talk with inti- mate friends. It is certain, at least, that publicly and officially Alexander remained son of Philip ^ till his death, and found no greater inconsistency in asserting his private belief that Ammon had indeed begotten him, than Queen Hatasu or Amen- hotep HI., being children respectively of Thothmes I. and Thothmes IV., found in depicting on their temple walls at Der el Bahari and Luxor a legend of their miraculous begetting by Amen. Certain historians, however, have laboured to elevate Alexander's expedition to Siwah into the familiarity of the Greeks with the god of the Oases, as compared with their ignorance of Thebes. This does not, however, go far enough. Why in the first instance was Ammon of Siwah so familiar to Greek legend ? For the rest, Prof. Maspero's learned and ingenious article is a most welcome contribution to this question. The author, as an Egyptologist, examines the ritual observed on these ceremonial visits of Pharaohs to their Father, Amen ; and from his point of view he reaches much the same conclusion as to the significance of Alexander's visit as is expressed above, namely, that no exceptional public policy was involved. At most the new Pharaoh was legitimized for Egypt by a dogma of miraculous conception, like Queen Hatasu, Amenhotep III., and later, Caesarion. Prof. Maspero's expla- nation of the euhemeristic genesis of the Nectanebo myth agrees with my own, published in January, 1896, in the Eiig. Hist. Review. ' Cf. his letters to Darius and to the Athenians (Plut., Alex. 28), and also Arr., ii. 5 ; iii. 3 ; iv. 8 ; vi. 3, in all of which passages reference is made to his Heraclid descent, of course through Philip. DEIFICATION. 197 inception of a great policy. The king, say tliey, about to proceed to tlie East, and already desirous of exalta- tion above his Macedonians and Greeks, deliberately assumed divine character as son of Amen. Mis- placed ingenuity ! Every king of Egypt had been son of Amen since the growth of Thebes. The last Nectanebo, as well as the first Ptolemy, bear the title on their inscriptions equally with Alexander. In Egypt sonship to Amen was so far from being an exception, that it could not be escaped by a Pharaoh. ■ Outside Egypt it was useless. Who, beyond Pelusium, worshipped Amen, or, beyond Euphrates, even knew his name ? Furthermore, evidence lacks wholly for the divine style, least of all with any express statement of son- ship to Amnion, being used officially by Alexander ; or for such " divine honours " as Persians paid or Greeks decreed being rendered as to the son of the Egyptian god. The men of the East prostrated themselves to Alexander as to all their princes ; and when the Macedonian demanded the same adoration from men of the West, it was not as son of Amnion, but as Emperor, that there might be no invidious distinction among his subjects. Moreover with respect to this matter two things must be distinguished sharply, which usually are confused : ^ a claim, however publicly made, by ^ I did not keep them distinct myself in an article written in part as an nndergraduate, and published in the Eng. Hid. Review, April, 1887. J. P. Mahaffy confuses them also in his criticism of that article in Prollems of Greek Htdorij, p. 1G5 ff. 198 ALEXANDER. Alexander to be of divine parentage is one thing ; the institution by Mm of any cult of himself is wholly another. In Greek mythology, it should be borne in mindj the first of these things did not involve the second. Neither was Achilles worshipped in the Greek camp, nor Aeneas in the Trojan, because they had goddesses to their mothers. Alexander himself, although his Macedonian royalty and the manner of his life led him to assert personality in a manner foreign to Greek civic usage, and even to give his name to cities, appears to have introduced no effigy of himself on to his coinage. In his lifetime we never hear of his temples, altars, groves or games, such as not a generation later were dedicated to the living Demetrius. Greek adulation suggested the paying of divine honours to Alexander more than once, but the supposed prompting of these by an Imperial Decree rests on an inference so indirect from a statement historically so worthless that one can only wonder how it has found a place in the creed of a responsible historian.^ There is, in short, hardly any question of public policy involved. Alexander went to Siwah purposing little more than to test a romantic belief which he owed to Homer, and in diverse ways to both his parents ; and ever afterwards he hugged to himself the belief that the Egyptian Zeus was not only his ^ Practically it rests only on a passage in Aelian, V. H. ii. 19. See my article quoted sujjra, in which I have given every shred of evidence. Grote, at any rate, little as he loves Alexander, omits, the whole question of the Decree as not worth serious discussion. THE TRUTH OP THE MATTER. 199 official but his fleshly father. In moments of con- fidence and moments of exaltation, such as became more frequent as his imperial position developed, there can be no doubt that he made a boast of this divine origin, and thereby gave a handle to malcontents, and maybe some difficulty to himself in junctures when it was expedient to make appeal to his dynastic feudal position. It was a foolish fancy, no doubt, incompatible with the more advanced thought of his time, but quite consistent with the belief of older fashion that gods were really existent in human form with human passions. Thus much may be granted ; but it cannot be conceded by historical truth that Alexander seated himself even in imagination on Olympus, as praesens deus. He never pretended that his veins distilled ichor, claimed supernatural powers,^ or affected to be fed by the smoke of altar fires. Had he cherished such delusions or made such pretensions, his earthly success had never been attained. His wildest imagi- nation did no more than set him among the half-divine Heroes : his sober reason claimed that he was godlike man, one of those noblest mortals who in a peculiar sense are sons of the common Father.^ And with this let us leave an incident possessed of no great import nor grave result, and unworthy of much attention, were it not that in such affairs as this — by his sick-bed at Tarsus, or in the Queen's tent at Issus — we get a passing glimpse of Alexander in an atmosphere less artificial than that of the ' Of. Plut., Alex. 17. ' Pint., Alex. 27. 200 ALEXANDEE. Council chamber, and for once not obscured by the dust and blood of the battle-field. In Egypt Alexander had received tidings that his admirals had triumphed on the Aegean, where, since the fall of Phoenicia, they had been able to take the offensive. The submission of Cyrene had completed their conquest, and the rising walls of Alexandria were to assure the enjoyment of its fruit. With the sea went one half of the Persian realm : it remained to win the other half. To accomplish this second part of his primary scheme, Alexander marched out of Egypt in the spring of 331. He assured himself, in passing, of the com- plete humility of Tyre — caution significant in the Founder of Alexandria ! — and reached the Euphrates late in July. Neither there, nor in rounding the head of the Mesopotamian Desert, nor during the five days that his army was ferrying itself painfully over Tigris, was he opposed seriously. The Persian outposts fell back so weakly from every point of vantage, that it seems as if their commander, Mazaeus, had begun already to serve the new master, for whom afterwards long and faithfully he governed Babylon. The Great King was waiting beyond Tigris, on the threshold of the inner half of his realm. He lay at a point where great roads come together, those from farther Asia through Hamadan and Tabriz, that from Babylon and the Gulf, those from the Armenian gorges of the Tigris and from THE ADVANCE RESUMED. 201 the West by the way Alexander himself had marched. It is this concurrence that gives importance still to Mosul, and determined in the dawn of history the site of Nineveh. But already, in this year 331, Nineveh was a forgotten ruin, and the great battle which decided the fate of the East, though fought almost within sight of the famous Assyrian mounds, has taken its popular name, not from the once imperial city nor from the nearest village, but from Arbela, an obscure local capital situate sixty miles away : and " of Arbela," in defiance of geographical purists, this battle will be to the end of time. A glance at Arrian's list of the Persian array will show how much more formidable that host must have been on its own chosen ground, than any that Alexander hitherto had encountered. Grouped round a nucleus of Greek veteran swashbucklers more numerous than all the Macedonian force, were the picked guerilla fighters of the warlike East, all in enormous strength : — masses of those nomads of Turkestan, accustomed to fight in hordes, who were hereafter to give Alexander much trouble ; Pathans and hillmen from Chitral and Khond and all the range of Hindu Kush, against whom four years later the Macedonians would have to fight every mile of their way ; wild mountaineers of southern Persis, Lars and Lurs, and Kurds and Bedawin from the Mesopotamian and Arabian wastes. Decisive defeat alone would find out their want of a reaf principle of cohesion : undefeated they were most formidable. For even had the host contained elements less warlike, 202 ALEXANDER. its mere weight brought to bear in an open plain, the sheer butcher's work that must be done to break it up, caused it to present a terribly difficult problem in the days of direct charging and hand-to-hand battle. The gravity of his danger did not escape Alexander. The dare-devil youth, who had rushed across Granicus and turned hot-foot and jubilant to meet his pursuers in the defile of Issus, is seen now displaying the caution of a veteran. With Tigris and Euphrates behind him, mountain and desert hemming him in, he must win outright, or be trampled in retreat under the hoofs of a cloud of horsemen. The preliminaries of this most famous fight of antiquity display the Captain at his best. Most cautiously he moved four marches along the Babylon road, and having met and driven in the first scouting parties of the foe, called a halt, to collect information, rest his army, purge away all non-combatants, and fortify a camp. He could afi"ord to take his time. A host, such as that opposed to him, neither would nor could be moved at short notice. At the second watch of the fourth night his columns, selected and stifiened, set out again, having some eight miles to cover, and hoping to be within touch of an unready foe at dawn. But from the top ©f the last range of hills the Persian army was perceived in the plain of Gaugamela, ordered already in line of battle. Alexander once more gave the order to bivouac : for he was in a very strong position, and might well wait yet another day to study the ground and the dispositions of the mighty host below. Thus the last EVE OF AEBELA. 20 S daylight of September passed away, the Macedonians resting for the most part, the Persians nervously standing to their arms ; and as the night falls Plutarch, with a rare graphic touch, sketches on his canvas the great plain kindling to the horizon with myriad bar- barian fires, and the flare of the torches carried before the Great King as he passed restlessly up and down his lines. The hum of the immense multitude rose to the Macedonian posts on the hill-tops, and old Parmenio, mindful of many fights, gazed over the limitless vista of fires, and listened to the confused roar that came down the night wind. How could the little army behind him overcome in equal fight by day that swarming host ? It seemed madness to await the morning light, and he turned to the royal tent to urge a night attack, the counsel of despair. The king cut short his argument with a curt reply, that must have astonished the veteran student of strategy, "Alexander will steal no victories ! " Not a moment for theatrical phrases, it might be said ! but indeed no moment is adapted better for them than the eve of a battle, and no audience will be so responsive as an army waiting the signal to attack. Moreover, sound policy was expressed in this phrase, as Arrian, commander of Ptoman frontier legions, perceived. For the iron Macedonian discipline would have counted but little in a night attack, and the practised soldier have been almost on a par with the brigand. A victory half won in the dark might well have been followed by a rally at dawn, and the weary Macedonian army would have found itself still 204 ALEXANDER. ■■ opposed by scarcely diminished myriads. And even were final and complete victory granted, its moral effect under such circumstances would be so little as by no means to ensure the breaking up of Darius' host. In sober reason, it was better that the attack on such odds should be delivered with every resource of the parade ground, the General being able to discern the critical moments over all the field ; and that victory, wherever declaring itself, should be victory patent to all. The argument with his Marshal and the decision forced upon him seem to have cleared Alexander's mind. Dawn found him sleeping. Uneasy generals gathered about his tent ; surely the fight was to be that day, and yet even the signal for the army to breakfast had not been given ! The Marshal bade the bugle sound the call ; but the king still slept on, and Parmenio, having called him repeatedly by name without success, ventured at last to awake him with his hand. " How is it," protested the Marshal, " that thou, who so often surprisest the watch, canst sleep ■on such a morning as this?" "I have followed Darius up and down through all Asia," said Alexander, " and shall I not sleep now when he is given into my hand ? " Of the great battle, which has made the first day of October an anniversary famous for all time, a civilian had best say little more than that its course justified all Alexander's previous caution, and that never did the Grand Army owe more to the man who had given them their military training, and to his BATTLE OP AEBELA. 205 son who led them now. Far out-flanked, at one time almost surrounded, cut oS for three parts of the day from their only support, the entrenched camp, they remained steady as on the parade ground by the Vardar. No battle in antiquity is described so fully as this of Ai-bela, and historians have not knownr which most to admire, the confidence of the western army, or the skill with which it was directed ; the discipline which opened the ranks to let scythed chariots thunder harmlessly through, or the temper with which the left wing, cut off and ridden over, recovered itself before help came. There is a story told by Curtius of the awful night that followed, when a rout of half a millioo men went roaring through the dust to the Zab, which, if true, shows how the spirit of dare-devilry was latent a;lways in the cool calculator of chances. It is said that, the fever of that chase seizing him, Alexander himself rode fast and far into the night, and turn- ing back at last with only a remnant of his staff was confronted by a large body of the flying foe.- The barbarians saw their chance, and bore down upon the conqueror. But Alexander, taking up the Homeric part, spurred at the leader, and having struck him down engaged with fury the next man and the next. The barbarians rode ten to one, but Victory herself seemed to sit on the Macedonian's helm. The fugitives wavered, Alexander and his band pressed their advantage, and their foes turned and fled once more into the dark. Darius got clear away to the eastward through "206 ALEXANDER. Zagros, and so to Hamadan ; his vast army dispersed to its deserts and' liills at the four winds of heaven. Both king and army were ignored by the Conqueror as absolutely as after Issus : for Alexander for his part kept on straight to the south, pursuing his pre- dominant pm-pose to assume methodically and in permanence the Persian lands. Babylon, which had nearly proved a Capua, but for his prompt action — action not to be forgotten when, mindful of Hannibal, we estimate the issue of the struggle between Rome and the Macedonian that was never fought — Susa, Persepolis, the southern capitals with their stores of bullion, were swept into the net, and almost a year elapsed ere Alexander troubled himself again about the Great King. Indeed, as a single expression, the Persian Empire had ceased to exist. Alexander never met again an imperial army. For the future his affair was to be with the levies of irresponsible satraps or frontier kings, and the half-independent hillmen and nomads. The campaigns of the rest of his life are, in fact, precisely such as the Persian kings had always had to wage from time to time for the holding of their outlying provinces or the securing of their communi- cations. And he himself seems to have understood that this was to be ; for in the camp outside Babylon h.e made changes, for the first time, in the organization of the military machine he had inherited ; in fact, he took there first steps towards multiplying units in the interest of detachment and mobility, and towards that ALEXANDER'S CHANGED POSITION. 207 ■denationalization whicli gradually he would promote in his eastern campaigns. Later events gave to his aims an extension and scope not as yet conceived ; but in the obscure allusions of Arrian and Curtius we may espy at Babylon in 331 the birth of ideas which were in fair way to be realized in 323 at Babylon again. There was, however, more involved than a military idea. The little cloud was rising no bigger than a man's hand. Alexander's position towards the different elements in his army and realm had been from the first ambiguous. He was officially both King of Macedon and Federal Captain-General of the Hellenes ; but neither ^the habitual attitude of his Macedonians towards his Greeks, nor of his Greeks towards his Macedonians, was consistent with the relation in which each stood to the General. Alex- ander had started for Asia with good hope that the ambiguity would "disappear as by common service and common interest a single Hellenistic nation was evolved, over which he himself would reign as freely accepted sovereign. The attitude of the Hellenes in Greece had raised, as we have seen, a first difficulty ; the attitude of the elder Macedonians was now raising a second. The party which Parmenio led had no panhellenic ideals. They would have had Alexander even as Philip and his forefathers had been — feudal king of the Macedonians, conqueror of the Greeks if he would, and of the Persians if he could. Their chief had urged acceptance of Darius' terms after Issus, seeing no larger question involved than acquisition of territory, and fearful that further 208 ALEXANDER. conquest might shift the centre from ;Macedon. " I would accept, were I Alexander," said the old Marshal. " And I, if I were Parmenio," replied the king, well knowing how radically their points of view diverged, and why.^ For there had been many mutterings among the Macedonians, as we are to learn hereafter ; and an actual outbreak with the Greeks took place, it is said, on the field of Issus. Alexander, indeed, had no idea of remaining Macedonian King. His ambition demanded a much more catholic position ; and his sympathy, unlike Philip's, was not really with his ruder subjects.^ For these reasons he had begun the advance as Captain of all the Hellenes ; but the adhesion of the wider nationality was so little spontaneous, wherever mili- tary duty and the magnetism of his own presence did not have effect, that the title soon proved to be^ little worth. Now at Babylon a dignity, still more catholic, in which Macedonian kingship and Hellenic hegemony would alike be absorbed, was beginning to loom in his mental vision.^ Always as he advanced,* ^ Diodorus (xvii. 39) tells us that Alexander suppressed the actual letter of Darius when it came up for consideration in the council of the generals, and read a letter much less equitable. If true, this action shows conclusively that Alexander well knew his own aims and those of the Macedonians to differ, and that" he feared the too sudden enlightenment of his vassals. - Cf. Plut., Alex. 28 ; and the story of the Clitus tragedy, narrated below, p. 231. ^ Cf. Pint., Alex. 47, for the sympathy which young Mace- donia showed to this idea. ■* For, as Talboys Wheeler excellently says (Hist, of India, id.. p. 153), Alexander was, like ourselves, of " the true Aryan or political type of conqueror, which identifies itself with the- empire it conquers." KING TO EMPEROR. 209 he widened his pantheon to receive successively Melkarth and Amen, Jehovah ^ and Bel ; and more and more readily he accepted natives of the East to rule in his newly won cities and provinces. In a word, Alexander was passing already, scarce knowing- it, from King to Emperor.^ The same opposition which had forced Alexander to the inception of this change, when redoubled and unified by the change itself, forced him, as we shall see, to develop his new position far more completely than at first he had contemplated. For since it com- pelled him to rely on all sorts and conditions of his subjects, it led to the breaking down of national privilege, and the inevitable widening of his own ideal. Indeed, quite as much as, if not more than, congenital lust of acquisition, opposition may be said to have led him in the end to that oecumenic scheme which began to take visible shape a year from this, and had absorbed his whole ambition ere his death. ^ For the moment, however, the change worked ' On the often - debated question of Alexander's visit to Jerusalem, see Niese, op. cit. p. 83. '' Not merely to Great King, in the Persian sense. This cannot be too much insisted upon. Alexander never proposed to put Persians in a position of superior privilege, but of equality only ; and he obviously intended, in pursuance of a distinct policy, that a non-Persian capital, Babylon, should be his own centre of empire. (See Strabo, p. 731.) ^ The last despatches which Alexander gave Craterus to convey to Antipater, and which were opened in Cilicia on the news of the Emperor's death, are said to have contained a plan for transporting European peoples into Asia, and Asiatic into Europe (Diod., xviii. i). P 210 ALEXANDER. inwardly more tlian outwardly. If the Macedonian King Las almost ceased to be, the Captain- General of Hellas is, by consequence, all the more conspicuous in this year. It is the year of the famous burning of Persepolis, with all its formal parade of restoring the spoil of Xerxes, and its orgy of the vengeance of Hellas, who spoke not inappropriately in these deca- dent days by the beautiful courtesan who led the rout. It is the year also of the surrender of Darius' Greeks at the Caspian, and of the Greek envoys who^ had fled with the Great King, to whom, for the last recorded time, Alexander solemnly proclaimed his Hellenic mission. But that mission was coming to be believed in neither by leader nor by led ; and in the valleys of Afghanistan it dropped, scarce re- marked, out of mind, the quicker, perhaps, for the news of the revolt of Aa;is and the treason trials of Prophthasia, but long doomed to disappear. The southern provinces and the treasure cities of the Eastern Empire had all fallen to Alexander in six months after Arbela, at no greater cost than a little hill-fighting. The north, however, as he knew well, was no way disposed to follow tamely the fortunes of the south. The Great King himself was still in his northern capital of Ecbatana with tiara erect ; the great Viceroys of the East had not deserted his cause ; and about him stayed still the nucleus of a formidable army. So long as these things were so, the conqueror had realized his original scheme no more than his later dreams. PURSUIT EESUMED. 211 Alexander took up the offensive again from Persepolis in April, when the snows had vanished from the passes. At starting he seems to have thought that Darius would stand and fight near Hamadan/ That illusion was soon to be dispelled. There was treachery in the Persian Court, and the northern nomads had not responded a second time to the war- summons of their King. At a point three days south of Hamadan news reached the Macedonian army that Darius had gathered up his few thousands of men, evacuated his last capital, and gone north-east for the passes which lead to Meshed. The vast treasure left in Ecbatana compelled Alexander to proceed thither instead of cutting across to the Teheran road ; but he was determined, none the less, to pursue and to capture at all costs the person of Darius. For as previously he seems to have thought that another victory would secure the submission of the north-east, so now he took on the hope that the capture of the King's person would spare him the march into Bactria. News, however, came presently to Ecbatana that modified all his plans. Darius had been degraded to a mere puppet by the great Viceroys of the north- east, who were his keepers and proposed to be independent of his fate. In the interests of his own legitimate establishment on the Persian throne, it was still desirable for Alexander to possess him- self of the person of its last Achaemenid occupant, ' According to Curtius' authority (v. 8. 2), such indeed had been Darius' original intention. 212 ALEXANDER. and it was more than possible that, should the stiff- backed Viceroys be captured with the King, after all their provinces would make peaceful submission. Such speedy success, however, could not be reckoned upon, and Alexander felt that now he must lay plans openly for a long eastern march. First and foremost came reorganization. In view of the probable duration of the coming campaign, its certain hardships, and the necessity, if the eastern provinces were to be more than overrun, of planting and peopling colonies far out of sight of the West, the feudal and political character of a large part of the Grand Army must be swamped as far as possible in the professional element. The character best adapted to the work that lay before the expedi- tionary force, was that of a Grand Company, own- ing no obligation but a common tie of devotion to its general, his venture, and his star. The Mace- donians would be retained, for to follow the king was their simple feudal duty. The professional part of the Philippian army, even if not Macedonian by birth, could be relied on to stay by the standards, for it knew no other trade half so lucrative. But to all the allied political contingents, especially the Greek, which had been sent by their cities to assist a Crusade for which neither they themselves nor their Captain-General felt unmixed enthusiasm, there must now be ofiered a choice between retiring from further service or re-enlisting simply as soldiers of fortune. The most part at once took their dis- missal, their pay, and a regal gratuity, and set out for t REORGANIZATION OP THE ARMY. 213 the sea. But "not a few," we are told, volun- teered to become Alexander's men absolutely, whether from love of adventure, or of prize-money, or of the person of the conqueror himself; and of their mind will be henceforward nearly all Alexander's Grand Army. Its complexion is so professional that many of its veterans seem to have retained little or no desire to return to the West. The old Body Guard, for example, were still selling their services as the " Silver Shields " to this king and that in Asia long after Alexander had been laid in Memphis. Thus openly did Alexander prepare in Ecbatana for long campaigns of conquest. But still he had hope of saving much time and toil by overtaking Darius and his party before they reached the desert of Khorasan : and as soon as might be he started in pursuit with the pick of the expeditionary force. It is a strange chapter in history, this grim, stern chase of king by king in the heart of Asia — from Hama- dan to Rhagae on the confines of Teheran,^ and from Ehao-ae to the defiles on the borders of the desert. At the entrance to those defiles, in the midst of a halt to collect supplies, news arrived that the miserable ' Plutarcli (Alex. 4:2, pace Niese, op. cit. p. 100) cannot include only the march to Ehagae in his eleven days, for the distance between Hamadan and Teheran is not above the half of what he states ; and we have no reason to suppose that either Alexander's rate of marching between those points, or the nature of the country traversed, entailed any special hardship. Plutarch evidently speaks of the whole march, up to the capture of Darius, and has got his distance right, his time wrong. 214 ALEXANDER, treactery ahead had reached its crisis. Darius was become actually a loound prisoner in the hands of his Viceroys, and the faithful Greek mercenaries, who had remained by him to the last, were gone north through the Elburz chain. Forthwith Alexander, without waiting for the return of his foraging parties, took all his cavalry and the most athletic of his footmen, and pressed forward all a night and half a day. A few hours' rest were followed by a second night of marching, and at dawn the column reached a deserted camp of the fugitives. Here further news was obtained that the Viceroys meant to give up their King, if pressed by the pursuit. It was no time for rest, and at nightfall Alexander was again in his saddle, and careless that men fell out and horses foundered, " still he drove on," until at high noon he found himself in a village not twenty-four hours behind his quarry. The Viceroys, however, were reported here to intend a forced march in the coming night ; and Alexander's column had almost spent its effort. Was there no short way ? The villagers knew of a path more direct than the main road, but it was without water. The king, without hesitation, unhorsed his weaker troopers, mounted the sturdiest of his footmen, and at dusk led up the short cut at a trot.^ Fifty miles were covered in that night, and as dawn broke, lo ! the fugitives were close ahead, straggling over the road, weary ^ See Curzon, Persia, i. pp. 293 ff., on the Sirdara Pass ; and for a lengthy discussion of all the ancient authorities, Th. ZoUing, A. des G. Feldztig in Central Asien, pp. 93 ff. DEATH OF DARIUS. 215 and some unarmed.^ There was a wild panic and stampede : a few rallied for a stand, but it was very brief. The captive King was bidden by his jailors to leave his waggon and mount a horse ; but he refused obstinately, and the sorry tragedy reached its catastrophe with a vengeful sword-thrust, and the clatter of flying hoofs. The last scene is singularly pathetic as Curtius finds it in authorities now lost.^ The driver of the king's waggon had fled with the viceroys, and the mules, feeling the reins on their backs, wandered off' the road, in quest of water, and dragged the dying man to a pool in a little lateral gorge. There a Macedonian rider found him, and mercifully gave him to drink; and with words of gratitude on his lips, the gentle prince, of whom as man no one has said an ill word, but few will venture a good one as king, breathed his last. The rhetorical historians and the poets of the East have loved to imagine that Alexander found "Dara" still breathing, and received from his lips a legacy of empire and edifying moralities on the vanity of gxeatness ; but more sober chroniclers record that the Conqueror came up only after the end, and with some natural impulse of emotion covered the poor body with his cloak. Fortune, it has been remarked by many critics, ^ An added motive for Alexander's haste was the fear of giving the Persians time to destroy supplies. CL Polyaenus, iv, 3.. 18, for the similar motive for rapid pursuit after Arbela. ' I agree with Niese, that the earlier part of Cm-tius' dramatic narrative of the Fhght is not to be taken aicjned de la lettre ; but rather because he has antedated things than because he has related incidents that never occurred. 216 ALEXANDER. never served Alexander better than when it delivered into his hand Darius already dead. The Macedonian, say they, obtained the inheritance of the Persian ■without either the odious obligation of putting him to death, or the equally odious and more dangerous necessity of dragging an ex-king captive at his chariot wheels. Alexander himself, however, seems to have felt more chagrin than relief. So far as there was odium abroad, it fell as justly on him who had hounded the Great King to a miserable end, as on those who, pleading dire necessity, actually killed him. As a rule, on the occasion of a dynastic change in the East, the execution of a king dethroned does not follow immediately on his fall. For a time he may serve many ends of his conqueror ; and in such a captive position a man of so weak a character as Darius might have been of no small advantage to his jailor. Furthermore it must be borne in mind that Alexander already had in his hands a wife and daughter, held very dear by the fallen prince, and far from ill-disposed to their captor, through whose influence and agency the Macedonian might easily have been legitimized with something like the open consent of the fallen king, and might have used this consent to compel obedience from the eastern Viceroys. The grief, which all authorities report that Alexander displayed on seeing the dead Persian, sprang in the main, we are glad to believe, from a generous impulse of remorse ; but it may well have been embittered by the reflection that a fearful chase through three midsummer days and four nights had TURN OF THE YEAR. 217 resulted in uo greater gain tlian this poor corpse. The real holders of all that Alexander had not won already for himself before he began the pursuit, had made good their escape. Having made this point for the occasion his winning-post, the Macedonian had spent his last effort to reach it. His track was strewn with his horses and his men ; his heavy columns were lagging far in the rear ; and, after all, what could he do but lap the royal mummy in boughs, as still is a practice in Asia, and having sent it forward to the tombs of its House in Persis, go back slowly by the road he had come ? Nevertheless, although the death of Darius did not constitute in itself a decisive moment, historians have been right in regarding the summer in which it took place as cardinal in Alexander's career ; for it was then that first it became clear to all men that there was presently to be neither King of Macedon nor Captain-General of Hellas, nor Great King of Persia, but an Emperor of Europe and Asia. The little cloud of Babylon was swelling over all the sky. It is the turn of Alexander's year. He had transformed his army at Ecbatana, and by the time he reached the Caspian the new character of his following was beginning to react inevitably on himself. All the remainder of this year, 330, in which Alexander begins in patient earnest the advance into the Far East, overrunning Mazenderan, and thence following the great Indian road until winter overtakes him in Seistan, a shadow is spreading over 218 ALEXANDER. the glory of his early days. There is no decay of his own powers, for much that he will do hereafter is not more inferior to the exploits of his former years than the days of July to those of June. Nay rather, his genius will rise to the greater occasions that present themselves. But as his soldiery become less responsible and more servile, so the Captain exalts himself, obtruding always more and more the garish aspect of his personality ; until we begin to lose sight of anything but his single figure loom- ing large and sombre against the lurid sky of his evening. The disorder within may be known by the sore that breaks outwardly. An ulcer was spreading among the Macedonian members of the Grand Army. Till now, as every point in advance had brought gain of a rich land, or a fair city, or a mighty treasure, all ranks of the vassals had been buoyed up in toil and peril by hope presently to possess their souls in wealth. But hope of return had become hope indefinitely deferred : their king's ideal was growing manifestly above and beyond their own ; and they felt that daily their privilege became less, as the privilege of others became more. In particular, certain of the prouder Macedonian vassals of the elder school had begun to foresee with bitterness their effacement in the colossal shadow of Alexander, many cherishing in secret the memory of Philip, first and last a Macedonian, who had made so much of his native nobility, and now was spoken of lightly by the son he had not loved. Parmenio, DISAFFECTION AND CONSPIRACY. 219 once Philip's right-hand man in war, represented to this party the heroic age, and, whether he wished it or no, was looked to as chief. But he was old and not assertive of himself, and the habit of feudalism lay heavy upon him ; ^ and therefore it was upon his son Philotas that there fell the active lead in this discontent. Philotas seems to have been a man of little restraint and a rude manner, who, holding high office, ran riot in private speech against the royal boy who, he said, owed everything to him and to his father. Certain of his words had been brought by a Greek girl to Alexander's ears in Egypt before the close of the year 332 ; ^ but partly from trust in Parmenio, partly, no doubt, for fear of exasperating a strong section of his Macedonians, the King con- tented himself with observing in secret, in the hope that common service in the Advance about to be resumed would gradually eliminate the malcontent spirit. Before long, however, having fancied himself to have been supported but indifferently by Parmenio's command at Arbela, he was moved to adopt a more decided policy, and to keep the old Marshal behind the main advance in positions where he could be checked by commanders of a fidelity more assured. The murmurs grew loud on the Caspian shore ; for, having purged his Grand Army of all but volunteers, friends, and vassals, Alexander was ^ Plutarch quotes from Callisthenes that Parmenio inwardly regarded anything but kindly Alexander's growing power, ambition, and surroundings of ceremony {Alex. 33). ^ We have this on the best authority. Vide Arr., iii. 2G. 220 ALEXANDER. venturing to assume something of the dress and style of an Asiatic, and the aloofness of an Emperor.' The hint was not lost on either Macedonians or Greeks ; did it not imply that the Grand Army was no longer of the West, but become definitively of the East? Throughout a long halt at Zadracarta, and the subsequent march towards Seistan, disafiection gathered strength, and a certain party, which covertly imputed all its personal woes to the king, spoke in secret of poison and daggers. But there can have been little combination in conspiracy, for the story goes that matters came quite fortuitously to a head at Prophthasia during the winter of 330,^ through none other than Philotas being made privy, all unexpecting and involuntary, to the vapour- ings of a nobody. The same idle words presently reached Alexander's ears also, but not, as they should have done, from the lips of Parmenio's son. Philotas may or may not have been guilty of sympathy with the vapourer ; at any rate, he had let the matter drift, and the king, waiting for some pretext to strike a decisive blow at the malcontent party, chose to assume his guilt. Alexander was in a stronger position in this far land than in Egypt, for the mass of his army had fallen into an absolute dependence on his ^ Of. Plut., Phoc. 17, for his omission henceforth of the usual courteous greeting to his correspondents. The fact of the Median roj-al dress, etc., is beyond cjuestion, though it seems to have been assumed only on certain festal or religious occasions ; e.g. at Maracanda, Bactra, Susa, and Opis. Turgid lies are told about it by such as Ephippus of Olynthus {ap. Athen. p. 537 E). ^ See Appendix for the chi-onology of the next three years. TREASON TEIALS. ' 221 life. Pliilotas was arrested at once, and haled before the general feudal assembly ; but such evidence, as was adduced there and then, established criminal negligence, hardly more. An adjournment was pro- claimed, and in the night Hephaestion wrested in the torture-chamber a confession from the son, which included the father's name. That evidence was more than enough for such a Court ; the faithful vassals, transported with rage, acted both as judges and executioners, Macedonum more, and in twelve days three swift dromedaries bore back, across the plains of Khorasan, the death-warrant of Parmenio.^ The Lyncestian Alexander, who, at first a suspected friend, had for four years been a prisoner of state, was dragged forth also and put to death — a warning to all his tribesmen ; ^ and subsequently four or five intimates of Philotas were put on their trial ; but Alexander had been warned to accept easy satis- faction,^ and the most part were dismissed scot-free. It was a grievous necessity, which has been regarded often enough as judicial murder. But if the ulcer of discontent was in the Army — and there seems no doubt that it had been spreading there these two years — Alexander had little choice, in view of the tremendous needs and risks of warfare, but to cut — ^ Strabo, p. 724. The ordinary rate of travelling was thirty to forty days to Ecbatana. ^ Diod., xvii. 80 ; and Curtius, vii. 1. G. ^ According to Curtius' authorities, there was much grumbling after Philotas' death (vii. 2. 10), and Alexander had to make a punishment battalion (of. Diod., xvii. 80). Also the garrison of Ecbatana came very near open mutiny in sympathy for Parmenio. 222 ALEXANDER. and he cut strongly, Eegicide was not spoken of again in the camp, except by one little group nursing- a private grievance of the moment ; and to secure this immunity Alexander, after all, had taken means, the moral responsibility for which is not more than rests on any general who decimates a mutinous company. Let whoso sits in the seat of judgment on this matter remember that he has not one-tenth of the evidence that was before the Emperor ; and that he is revising the acts not of a civil, but a martial court. At the same time, while we recognize dire necessity in this matter, we would not maintain that the dis- content of the great vassals was causeless, or indeed anything but reasonable. The loss of privilege is a very bitter fruit, whose taste long remains in the mouth. They would have been more or less than men had they swallowed and smiled ! And, more- over, the sun of their feudal system no longer shone as graciously as of old. The enthusiastic boy who had led them out of Macedon was dragging them inexorably into far deserts and sky-kissing hills, as an irritable and uncertain despot, flaming into dangerous passion and collapsing into as dangerous remorse. His many hurts had not been suffered for nothing — the stroke on the neck and head in the Balkans, the fever at Tarsus, the stab in the thigh at Issus, the almost fatal bolt-wound at Gaza. Every change in a character such as Alexander's makes for intensification ; insensibility to pain becomes positive cruelty, impetuosity grows to foolhardiness, and ALBXANDEE AND HIS AEMY. 223 diplomacy to deceit. The man who had wept over the corpse of Darius made presently so brutalizing an exhibition of a regicide at Balkh as to shock his greatest eulogists ; the cool deliberator of Arbela is become the almost suicide of Mooltan ; he who never refused quarter to surrendered foes, stains his record on the Swat with a massacre of men on parole/ Fortunately, whatever the decay of his character,, neither was Alexander's mental force nor was the abso- lute devotion of the rank and file to his person abated. He had studied to ripen that goodwill of the soldiery, which had been won ere he came to the throne, into something little less than worship, by arts which sympathy with fighting men enabled Philip's son to apply with rare success. By magnificent funerals and posthumous honours to those who fell in battle, by huge gratuities when money was flush,^ by personal recognition and fellowship in all things,^ by voluntary concessions such as the despatch of the married men from Halicarnassus to spend winter with their wives, ' Diod., xvii. 84. Alexander's act is condemned especially by Plutarch. ^ E.g. one talent to each horseman, and ten minae to each foot- soldier, discharged at Ecbatana in 330 ; six minae to each Mace- donian horseman, five to each allied horseman, two to foot-soldiers, at Babylon in 331 (Diod., xvii. 63). ^ A story is told by two authorities (Curt., viii. 4. 15, and Frontinus, iv. 6. 3) of Alexander restoring a frost-bitten soldier by seating him on his own seat by the fire. Cf. the well-known story of the draught of water in the desert {infra, p. 258) ; the debt-paying at Susa ; and Alexander's sacrifice of his own super- fluities in order to obtain destruction of those of his men (Plut., Alex. 57 ; cf. also 41). 224 ALEXANDER. by tlie confidence with which, he drank the perilous cup at Tarsus, — by these and many other means Alexander bound his men's interests to his. Add such enthusiasm as beauty, daring, and pre-eminent powers will breed, and the dependence of men lost in a strange land, and perhaps we shall cease to wonder at that marvellous temper which Alexander's army shows, even in its most mutinous moods, when it is accepting in sorrowful silence his taunts at the Hyphasis, or uttering heart-broken protests at Opis. Many armies have made a massacre to avenge a general's wound, as the Macedonians did in Chitral ; and many, in similar plight, might equal the wild joy of the phalanx at Mooltan, when its single hope came back from the gates of death. But how many veterans, who had mutinied against a particular decree, have accepted the same a few days later, unmodified in a single point, as the time-expired men accepted their dismissal at Opis ? Nothing short of such devotion will account for the readiness with which the Army followed whither their Captain, leaving Seistan in the spring of 329, was about to go — into the snow-blocked ranges between Candahar and Cabul in midwinter ; through Hindu Kush and over the deserts of Turkestan in mid- summer ; up and down huge foothills of the Hima- laya, which European armies hardly can penetrate even now ; across the Punjab in the Eains ; and finally into that land of Gedrosia, which later Moslem conquerors regarded as a fit resort for the souls of the damned. Nothing short of such devotion will EASTERN COLONIZATION. 225 explain the acquiescence of so many in the sentences of exile whicli were pronounced whenever there was planted one of those military trading colonies, of which we know so little but the fact of their foun- dation. How large they were ; built upon what plan, Greek or Oriental ; endowed with what com- munal government — who can say ? ^ We are told only that at this point or that the " geographical eye " of the Emperor sees that a city " would become great and prosperous among men," and inexorably he details men at arms to build its walls, and a draft of his Macedonians or Greeks, the least fit for further marching, to form an official class and a garrison among a proletariate of camp followers and natives. The Europeans were not too willing. When Alex- ander came back through Hindu Kush in 327 by way of his yearling city of Alexandria ad Paropa- onisum, he found it in a very unsatisfactory state. Two or three years later some three thousand colonists of the north country shook the dust of their exile off their feet, while over twenty thousand, after the Emperor's death, set out from the same region for the west.^ ' Diodorus (xvii. 83) does indeed tell lis that a town at the foot of Hindu Kush was peopled at the first with seven thousand natives, and three thousand camp followers and volunteers ; but with that our knowledge begins and ends. " See Curt., ix. 7. 1, and Diod., xvii. 99, xviii. 7, for the circiun- stances of these movements, which seem to have led to the break- ing off of Bactria from the rest of the empire even while Alexander was alive. The number of Greeks— stated even as high as forty thousand— is to be accounted for by the very numerous colonies and garrisons in Bactria, and a large infusion of camp followers. Q 226 . ALEXANDEE. This development of Alexander's colonial policy is the most interesting; feature of the eastern cam- paigns. Out of the sixteen Alexandrias enumerated by Stephen of Byzantium which can be referred with probability to the son of Philip, not less than eleven are to be placed east of Persis, whilst in the north-east alone we are told by other authorities that Alexander founded at least eight cities.^ Such ^ Justin states that there were twelve colonies in the north-east (xii. 5) ; Sfcrabo eight (p. 517), while Curtius mentions six in and about Margiana alone (vii. 10. 15). We know of only two individually — Alexandria la-xary}, on the Sir Daria, near Khojend (Arr., iv. 4. 1 ; and Pliny, N. H. vi. IG), and Alexandria Kara BttKTpa (Steph. Byz.), which seems to have been a foundation on the northern slopes of Hindu Kush, designed to watch the direct passes from Cabnl (cf. the old reading of Pliny, N. H. vi. 23). But Hephaestion's commission, ras Iv -rrj SoyStaviJ •n-oXcis