nized Philip as the leader of the Hellenic world, a disgrace little short of political extinction. Her fall was not unfitly symbolized by the death of the eldest, and one of the most famous of her citizens. Isocrates, who had been born when the city was at the acmé of her glory under Pericles, and who, only two years before, had celebrated that glory in his great Panathenaic oration, died at the age of ninety-eight, of grief, at hearing of the battle of Chæronea. But Athens had still the spirit left to honour the orator who bore his grief and assuaged hers. To understand her feelings at this epoch, we must look forward a few years to the contest which has given the world its two great master-pieces of forensic oratory. Rising superior to the prejudice which makes success the only test of merit, the Athenians, after the battle of Charonea, voted to Demosthenes a golden crown (B.c. 337-336). Several attempts to impeach him had already failed; and Eschines renewed the attack in the form of an indictment against Ctesiphon, the mover of the vote, for proposing an illegal decree; but the trial did not come on till B.C. 330. We need not recount the well-known result; the disgraceful defeat of Eschines; his retirement from Athens; and the memorable tribute which he paid to his rival's surpassing eloquence when he read his speech "On the Crown” to his class of rhetoric at Rhodes. But in that masterpiece of oratory there is one passage which sums up the whole question of the policy of Demosthenes in an apostrophe as true as it is daring: "It cannot be that you were wrong, Athenians, when you took upon you the peril of the universal freedom and salvation! No! by our forefathers who confronted the danger at Marathon, who stood in their ranks at Platea, who fought at Salamis ! " To such an appeal ill success is no reply. The lenity of Philip towards Athens was doubtless prompted in part by his ambition to lead the united forces of Greece to the conquest of Persia. At a congress held at Corinth, from which Sparta alone was absent, war was declared against the Great King, and Philip was appointed to conduct it as general of the Greeks. After a triumphant progress through Peloponnesus to enforce the submission of Sparta, and after receiving the adhesion of the western states, Philip returned to Macedonia to complete his preparations. The expedition was delayed during the whole of the next year (B.c. 337) by his domestic dissensions with Olympias and Alexander, consequent upon his marriage with Cleopatra, to which we shall have to recur in the next chapter. In the following B.C. 336.] DEATH OF PHILIP. 31 spring his preparations were complete. Some troops had already been sent forward under Parmenio to rouse the Asiatic Greeks; and he only stayed to provide a fresh security for the safety of his kingdom, by the marriage of his daughter to Alexander of Epirus; when, at the wedding festival at gæ, he fell by the sword of Pausanias, a young Macedonian noble. The assassin is supposed to have been instigated by Olympias, and some have charged Alexander with a share in the crime, but upon no adequate evidence. Philip had only reached the forty-seventh year of his age, and the twenty-seventh of his reign, when he left to his son Alexander the inheritance of his great conquests and his far greater schemes. CHAPTER XVI. THE CONQUESTS OF ALEXANDER. B.C. 336 TO B.C. 323. "And, as I was considering, behold an he goat came from the west on the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground: and the goat had a notable horn between his eyes. And he came to the ram that had two horns, which I had seen standing before the river, and ran unto him in the fury of his power. And I saw him come close unto the ram, and he was moved with choler against him, and smote the ram, and brake his two horns and there was no power in the ram to stand before him, but he cast him down to the ground, and stamped upon him: and there was none that could deliver the ram out of his hand. Therefore the he goat waxed very great. The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia. And the rough goat is the king of Grecia: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king." Daniel, chap. viii. 5–8, 20, 21. : "High on a throne with trophies charged, I viewed The youth, that all things but himself subdued; His feet on sceptres and tiaras trod, And his horn'd head belied the Lybian god."-POPE. ACCESSION OF ALEXANDER - HIS CHARACTER AND EDUCATION HIS EARLY PUBLIC LIFE AT PERSEPOLIS ALEXANDER III., of Macedonia, was the first of those conquerors whom men have rewarded for the sufferings they have inflicted, in the pursuit of power and fame, with the title of the GREAT. Born in B.C. 356, he was only in his twentieth year when the murder of his father called him to the throne (B.c. 336); and his dazzling career lasted less than thirteen years. Nature had endowed the young prince with that enthusiastic temper which B.C. 336.] CHARACTER OF ALEXANDER. 33 deems no end too high to aim at, no difficulty too great to be surmounted. This spirit was inflamed, from his earliest youth, by the influence of Lysimachus, one of his tutors, who imbued his mind with the knowledge of Homer, and with admiration for the heroes of the Iliad. Claiming descent, on his father's side from Hercules, on his mother's from Achilles, he took the latter for his own exemplar. And, while he resembled him in that thirst for fame, which Homer has so beautifully depicted as reckless of early death, he inherited from his Epirot mother a fierce, impatient, and ungovernable temper, as disastrous as "the wrath of Achilles" to himself and others. Of Alexander, as well as Philip, it should be borne in mind, that the basis of character was thoroughly barbarian, and this element never ceased to break out through the superficial culture of an elaborate Greek education. To provide such an education for his son had been one of Philip's chiefest cares. The young prince was trained in a discipline of almost Spartan hardihood by his mother's kinsman, Leonidas. All know the proof he gave of his courage and skill in manly exercises by taming the horse Bucephalus, which Philip had bought for thirteen talents, and which no one else at the court dared to mount. This renowned charger carried Alexander through his campaigns in Asia; till, dying in India, he was buried at the town of Bucephala, on the Hydaspes (B.c. 327). But the chief advantage of Alexander's education was the tuition he received from Aristotle during the three best years of his youth, from the age of thirteen to that of sixteen. We know nothing certain of the course which the philosopher pursued; but we are told that Alexander threw himself into it with all the energy of his nature, and that he retained the warmest affection for his preceptor. Still we may feel sure that the lessons he most valued were those which developed the heroic spirit of the old Greek poetry. He carried with him, through all his campaigns, a copy of the Iliad, corrected by Aristotle; but no similar example is recorded of his fondness for the more peaceful beauties and civil lessons of the Odyssey. He is said to have entertained the Athenian ambassadors, when they were feasted by Philip at Pella, with recitations from the Greek poets; and his whole career was marked by a taste for literature, and a splendid patronage of art. But even here the bent of his character was shown in his preference for what was most striking, especially when it flattered himself, like his portrait by Apelles, wielding the thunderbolts of Jove. The lessons of Aristotle probably VOL. II.-2 contributed to that early maturity of judgment and political knowledge, by which he is said to have astonished certain Persian ambassadors, who arrived at the court during his father's absence, and which he displayed in adjusting the affairs of Greece after Philip's death. As a speaker, he could always express himself in a manner equal to the occasion; and, if he wanted his father's finished eloquence, he was free from the deep dissimulation of which it was so powerful an instrument. In fine, the epithet "superficial," applied just now to his Hellenic culture, was not intended to deny a considerable effect produced upon his mental character, but to signify that it could not reach deep enough to alter that basis of nature, common to his father and himself, which is so well described by Mr. Grote as "the self-will of a barbarian prince, not the ingenium civile, or sense of reciprocal obligation and right in society with others, which marked more or less even the most powerful members of a Grecian city, whether oligarchical or democratical."* This quality distinguishes him from Pisistratus and Cæsar, and marks the oriental character of his despotism, even before he became an Asiatic sovereign. Alexander began his public life as early as his sixteenth year, in the capacity of regent during Philip's campaign on the Bosporus (B.c. 340); and we have seen how he distinguished himself at Chæronea two years later. The brief interval before Philip's death was marked by a violent quarrel in the royal family, which seemed to endanger Alexander's succession. His mother, Olympias, had so disgusted Philip by her intolerable temper, that he divorced her and married Cleopatra, the niece of his general, Attalus. At the wedding banquet there occurred a scene, thoroughly characteristic of the essential barbarism of the Macedonian court: "Natis in usum laetitia scyphis Heated with wine, Attalus called for a toast to the prospect of a legitimate heir to the throne, thus placing Olympias and her offspring on the same footing as Philip's numerous illicit connections. Alexander flung his drinking-cup at Attalus, with the furious cry, "Am I then a bastard?" Philip rushed up to his son with his sword drawn; but, too intoxicated to keep his footing, he fell prostrate on the floor, while Alexander left the hall, exclaiming, "Behold the man who was about to pass from Europe to Asia, but has been overthrown in going from one couch to another." * Grote, History of Greece, vol. xii., p. 2. |