SECTION 7. ASIA UNDER PERSIA

On the whole evidence the Persians might justifiably claim that their imperial organization in its best days, destitute though it was of either the centralized strength or the theoretic justification of modern civilized rule, achieved a very considerable advance, and that it is not unworthy to be compared even to the Roman in respect of the freedom and peace which in effect it secured to its subjects.

[Plate 5: PERSIAN EMPIRE (WEST) AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. TEMP. DARIUS HYSTASPIS]

Not much more need—or can—be said about the other conquered peoples before we revert to the Greeks. Though Cyrus did not live to receive in person the submission of all the west Asian peoples, his son Cambyses had received it before his short reign of eight years came to an end. Included in the empire now were not only all the mainland territories once dominated by the Medes and the Babylonians, but also much wider lands east, west and south, and even Mediterranean islands which lay near the Asiatic shores. Among these last was Cyprus, now more closely linked to Phoenicia than of old, and combining with the latter to provide navies for the Great King's needs. On the East, the Iranian plateau, watched from two royal residences, Pasargadae in the south and Ecbatana in the north, swelled this realm to greater dimensions than any previous eastern empire had boasted. On the south, Cambyses added Cyrene and, less surely, Nabia to Egypt proper, which Assyria had possessed for a short time, as we have seen. On the west, Cyrus and his generals had already secured all Asia which lay outside the Median limit, including Cilicia, where (as also in other realms, e.g. Phoenicia, Cyprus, Caria) the native dynasty accepted a client position.

This, however, is not to be taken to mean that all the East settled down at once into contented subservience. Cambyses, by putting his brother to death, had cut off the direct line of succession. A pretender appeared in the far East; Cambyses died on the march to meet him, and at once all the oriental provinces, except the homeland of Persia, were up in revolt. But a young cognate of the royal house, Darius, son of Hystaspes, a strong man, slew the pretender, and once secure on the throne, brought Media, Armenia, Elam and at last Babylonia, back to obedience. The old imperial city on the Euphrates would make one more bid for freedom six years later and then relapse into the estate of a provincial town. Darius spent some twenty years in organizing his empire on the satrap system, well known to us from Greek sources, and in strengthening his frontiers. To promote the latter end he passed over into Europe, even crossing the Danube in 511 to check Scythian raids; and he secured the command of the two straits and the safety of his northwest Asiatic possessions by annexing the south-east of the Balkan peninsula with the flourishing Greek cities on its coasts.

SECTION 8. PERSIA AND THE GREEKS

The sixth century closed and the fifth century ran three years of its course in apparently unbroken peace between East and West. But trouble was near at hand. Persia had imposed herself on cities which possessed a civilization superior, not only potentially but actually, to her own; on cities where individual and communal passion for freedom constituted the one religion incompatible with her tolerant sway; on cities conscious of national identity with a powerful group outside the Persian Empire, and certain sooner or later to engage that group in warfare on their behalf.

Large causes, therefore, lay behind the friction and intrigue which, after a generation of subjection, caused the Ionian cities, led, as of old, by Miletus, to ring up the first act of a dramatic struggle destined to make history for a very long time to come. We cannot examine here in detail the particular events which induced the Ionian Revolt. Sufficient to say they all had their spring in the great city of Miletus, whose merchant princes and merchant people were determined to regain the power and primacy which they had enjoyed till lately. A preliminary failure to aggrandize themselves with the goodwill of Persia actually brought on their revolt, but it only precipitated a struggle inevitable ultimately on one side of the Aegean or the other.

After setting the whole Anatolian coast from the Bosporus to Pamphylia and even Cyprus in a blaze for two years, the Ionian Revolt failed, owing as much to the particularist jealousies of the Greek cities themselves as to vigorous measures taken against them by Darius on land and his obedient Phoenicians at sea. A naval defeat sealed the fate of Miletus, whose citizens found, to the horror of all Greece, that, on occasion, the Persian would treat rebels like a loyal successor of Shalmaneser and Nebuchadnezzar. But even though it failed, the Revolt brought on a second act in the drama. For, on the one hand, it had involved in Persian politics certain cities of the Greek motherlands, notably Athens, whose contingent, greatly daring, affronted the Great King by helping to burn the lower town of Sardes; and on the other, it had prompted a despot on the European shore of the Dardanelles, one Miltiades, an Athenian destined to immortal fame, to incense Darius yet more by seizing his islands of Lemnos and Imbros.

Evidently neither could Asiatic Greeks be trusted, even though their claws were cut by disarmament and their motives for rebellion had been lessened by the removal of their despots, nor could the Balkan province be held securely, while the western Greeks remained defiant and Athens, in particular, aiming at the control of Aegean trade, supported the Ionian colonies. Therefore Darius determined to strike at this city whose exiled despot, Hippias, promised a treacherous co-operation; and he summoned other Greek states to make formal submission and keep the peace. A first armada sent to coast round the northern shore in 492 added Macedonia to the Persian Empire; but it was crippled and stayed by storms. A second, sent two years later direct across the Aegean, reduced the Cyclad isles, revenged itself on Eretria, one of the minor culprits in the Sardian affair, and finally brought up by the Attic shore at Marathon. The world-famous defeat which its landing parties suffered there should be related by a historian rather of Greece than of the East; and so too should the issue of a third and last invasion which, ten years later, after old Darius' death, Xerxes led in person to defeat at Salamis, and left to meet final rout under his generalissimo at Plataea. For our purpose it will be enough to note the effects which this momentous series of events had on the East itself.

SECTION 9. RESULTS OF THE PERSIAN ATTACKS ON GREECE

Obviously the European failure of Persia affected the defeated less than the victorious party. Except upon the westernmost fringe of the Persian Empire we have no warrant for saying that it had any serious political result at all. A revolt of Egypt which broke out in the last year of Darius, and was easily suppressed by his successor, seems not to have been connected with the Persian disaster at Marathon; and even when two more signal defeats had been suffered in Greece, and a fourth off the shore of Asia itself—the battle of Mycale—upon which followed closely the loss of Sestus, the European key of the Hellespont, and more remotely the loss not only of all Persian holdings in the Balkans and the islands, but also of the Ionian Greek cities and most of the Aeolian, and at last (after the final naval defeat off the Eurymedon) of the whole littoral of Anatolia from Pamphylia right round to the Propontis—not even after all these defeats and losses did the Persian power suffer diminution in inner Asia or loss of prestige in inland Asia Minor. Some years, indeed, had still to elapse before the ever-restless Egyptian province used the opportunity of Xerxes' death to league itself with the new power and make a fresh attempt to shake off the Persian yoke; but once more it tried in vain.

When Persia abandoned direct sovereignty over the Anatolian littoral she suffered little commercial loss and became more secure. It is clear that her satraps continued to manage the western trade and equally clear that the wealth of her empire increased in greater ratio than that of the Greek cities. There is little evidence for Hellenic commercial expansion consequent on the Persian wars, but much for continued and even increasing Hellenic poverty. In the event Persia found herself in a position almost to regain by gold what she had lost by battle, and to exercise a financial influence on Greece greater and longer lasting than she ever established by arms. Moreover, her empire was less likely to be attacked when it was limited by the western edge of the Anatolian plateau, and no longer tried to hold any European territory. There is a geographical diversity between the Anatolian littoral and the plateau. In all ages the latter alone has been an integral part of inner Asia, and the society and politics of the one have remained distinct from those of the other. The strong frontier of Asia at its western peninsular extremity lies not on, but behind the coast.

At the same time, although their immediate results to the Persian Empire were not very hurtful, those abortive expeditions to Europe had sown the seeds of ultimate catastrophe. As a direct consequence of them the Greeks acquired consciousness of their own fighting value on both land and sea as compared with the peoples of inner Asia and the Phoenicians. Their former fear of numerical superiorities was allayed, and much of the mystery, which had hitherto magnified and shielded Oriental power, was dissipated. No less obviously those expeditions served to suggest to the Greeks for the first time that there existed both a common enemy of all their race and an external field for their own common encroachment and plundering. So far as an idea of nationality was destined ever to be operative on Greek minds it would draw its inspiration thenceforward from a sense of common superiority and common hostility to the Oriental. Persia, in a word, had laid the foundations and promoted the development of a Greek nationality in a common ambition directed against herself. It was her fate also, by forcing Athens into the front of the Greek states, to give the nascent nation the most inspiriting and enterprising of leaders—the one most fertile in imperial ideas and most apt to proceed to their realization: and in her retreat before that nation she drew her pursuer into a world which, had she herself never advanced into Europe, would probably not have seen him for centuries to come.

Moreover, by a subsequent change of attitude towards her victorious foe—though that change was not wholly to her discredit—Persia bred in the Greeks a still better conceit of themselves and a better understanding of her weakness. The Persians, with the intelligence and versatility for which their race has always been remarkable, passed very rapidly from overweening contempt to excessive admiration of the Greeks. They set to work almost at once to attract Hellenic statesmen and men of science to their own society, and to make use of Hellenic soldiers and sailors. We soon find western satraps cultivating cordial relations with the Ionian cities, hospitably entertaining Greeks of distinction and conciliating Greek political and religious prepossessions. They must have attained considerable success, while thus unwittingly preparing disaster. When, a little more than a century later, western Europe would come eastward in force, to make an end of Persian dominion, some of the greater Ionian and Carian cities would offer a prolonged resistance to it which is not to be accounted for only by the influence of Persian gold or of a Persian element in their administration. Miletus and Halicarnassus shut their gates and defended their walls desperately against Alexander because they conceived their own best interests to be involved in the continuance of the Persian Empire. Nor were the Persians less successful with Greeks actually taken into their service. The Greek mercenaries remained to a man loyal to the Great King when the Greek attack came, and gave Alexander his hardest fighting in the three great battles which decided the fate of the East. None the less, such an attitude towards Greeks was suicidal. It exalted the spirit of Europe while it depraved the courage and sapped the self-reliance of Asia.

SECTION 10. THE FIRST COUNTER-ATTACKS

This, however, is to anticipate the sequel. Let us finally fix our eyes on the Eastern world in 400 B.C. and review it as it must then have appeared to eyes from which the future was all concealed. The coasts of Asia Minor, generally speaking, were in Greek hands, the cities being autonomous trading communities, as Greeks understood autonomy; but most of them until four years previously had acknowledged the suzerainty or rather federal leadership of Athens and now were acknowledging less willingly a Spartan supremacy established at first with Persian co-operation. Many of these cities, which had long maintained very close relations with the Persian governors of the nearer hinterland, not only shaped their policy to please the latter, but even acknowledged Persian suzerainty; and since, as it happens, at this particular moment Sparta had fallen out with Persia, and a Spartan army, under Dercyllidas, was occupying the Aeolian district of the north, the "medizing" cities of Ionia and Caria were in some doubt of their future. On the whole they inclined still to the satraps. Persian influence and even control had, in fact, greatly increased on the western coast since the supersession of Athens by a power unaccustomed to imperial politics and notoriously inapt in naval matters; and the fleets of Phoenicia and Cyprus, whose Greek princes had fallen under Phoenician domination, had regained supremacy at sea.

Yet, only a year before, "Ten Thousand" heavy-armed Greeks (and near half as many again of all arms), mostly Spartan, had marched right through western Asia. They went as mercenary allies of a larger native force led by Cyrus, Persian prince-governor of west central Anatolia, who coveted the diadem of his newly enthroned brother. Having traversed the old Lydian and Phrygian kingdoms they moved down into Cilicia and up again over north Syria to the Euphrates, bound (though they only learned it at last by the waters of the Great River itself) for Babylon. But they never reached that city. Cyrus met death and his oriental soldiers accepted defeat at Cunaxa, some four days' march short of the goal. But the undefeated Greeks, refusing to surrender, and, few though they were, so greatly dreaded by the Persians that they were not directly molested, had to get back to their own land as best they might. How, robbed of their original leaders they yet reached the Black Sea and safety by way of the Tigris valley and the wild passes of Kurdish Armenia all readers of Xenophon, the Athenian who succeeded to the command, know well. Now in 400 B.C. they were reappearing in the cities of west Asia and Europe to tell how open was the inner continent to bold plunderers and how little ten Orientals availed in attack or defence against one Greek. Such stories then and there incited Sparta to a forward policy, and one day would encourage a stronger Western power than hers to march to the conquest of the East.

We are fortunate in having Xenophon's detailed narrative of the adventures of these Greeks, if only because it throws light by the way on inner Asia almost at the very moment of our survey. We see Sardes under Persia what it had been under Lydia, the capital city of Anatolia; we see the great valley plains of Lydia and Phrygia, north and south, well peopled, well supplied, and well in hand, while the rough foothills and rougher heights of Taurus are held by contumacious mountaineers who are kept out of the plains only by such periodic chastisement as Cyrus allowed his army to inflict in Pisidia and Lycaonia. Cilicia is being administered and defended by its own prince, who bears the same name or title as his predecessor in the days of Sennacherib, but is feudally accountable to the Great King. His land is so far his private property that Cyrus, though would-be lord of all the empire, encourages the pillage of the rich provincial capital. The fleet of Cyrus lands men and stores unmolested in north Syria, while the inner country up to the Euphrates and down its valley as far as Babylonia is at peace. The Great King is able to assemble above half a million men from the east and south to meet his foe, besides the levy of Media, a province which now seems to include most of the ancient Assyria. These hundreds of thousands constitute a host untrained, undisciplined, unstable, unused to service, little like the ordered battalions of an essentially military power such as the Assyrian had been.

From the story of the Retreat certain further inferences may be drawn. First, Babylonia was a part of the empire not very well affected to the Great King; or else the Greeks would have been neither allowed by the local militia to enter it so easily nor encouraged by the Persians to leave it. Second, the ancient Assyria was a peaceful province not coerced by a standing Persian force or garrisons of any strength. Third, southern Kurdistan was not held by or for the Great King and it paid tribute only to occasional pressure. Fourth, the rest of Kurdistan and Armenia as far north as the upper arm of the Euphrates was held, precariously, by the Persians; and lastly, north of the Euphrates valley up to the Black Sea all was practical independence. We do not know anything precise about the far eastern provinces or the south Syrian in this year, 400. Artaxerxes, the Great King, came from Susa to meet his rebellious brother, but to Babylon he returned to put to death the betrayed leaders of the Greeks. At this moment Ctesias, the Cnidian Greek, was his court physician and no friend either to Cyrus or to Spartans; he was even then in correspondence with the Athenian Conon who would presently be made a Persian admiral and smash the Spartan fleet. Of his history of Persia some few fragments and some epitomized extracts relating to this time have survived. These have a value, which the mass of his book seems not to have had; for they relate what a contemporary, singularly well placed to learn court news, heard and saw. One gathers that king and court had fallen away from the ideas and practice of the first Cyrus. Artaxerxes was unwarlike, lax in religion (though he had been duly consecrated at Pasargadae) and addicted to non-Zoroastrian practices. Many Persians great and small were disaffected towards him and numbers rallied to his brother; but he had some Western adventurers in his army. Royal ladies wielded almost more power at the court than the Great King, and quarrelled bitterly with one another.

Plutarch, who drew material for his life of Artaxerxes not only from Ctesias, but also from authorities now lost to us, leaves us with much the same impression of the lords of the East at the close of the fifth century B.C. Corrupt and treacherous central rule, largely directed by harem intrigue; an unenthusiastic body of subjects, abandoned to the schemes of satraps; inefficient and casually collected armies in which foreign mercenaries were almost the only genuine soldiers—such was Persia now. It was something very unlike the vigorous rule of Cyrus and the imperial system of the first Darius—something very like the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century A.D.—something which would collapse before the first Western leader of men who could command money of his own making and a professional army of his own people.



CHAPTER V

THE VICTORY OF THE WEST

The climax was reached in about seventy years more. When these had passed into history, so had also the Persian Empire, and the East, as the Greeks had conceived it thus far and we have understood it, was subject to the European race which a century and a half before it had tried to subdue in Europe itself. To this race (and to the historian also) "the East," as a geographical term, standing equally for a spatial area and for a social idea, has ceased to mean what it once meant: and the change would be lasting. It is true that the East did not cease to be distinguished as such; for it would gradually shake itself free again, not only from control by the West, but from the influence of the latter's social ideas. Nevertheless, since the Western men, when they went back to their own land, had brought the East into the world known to them—into a circle of lands accepted as the dwelling of civilized man—the date of Alexander's overthrow of the Persian Empire makes an epoch which divides universal history as hardly any other divides it.

Dramatic as the final catastrophe would be, it will not surprise us when it comes, nor did it, as a matter of fact, surprise the generation which witnessed it. The romantic conception of Alexander, as a little David who dared a huge Goliath, ignores the facts of previous history, and would have occurred to no contemporary who had read the signs of the times. The Eastern colossus had been dwindling so fast for nearly a century that a Macedonian king, who had already subdued the Balkan peninsula, loomed at least as large in the world's eye, when he crossed the Hellespont, as the titular Emperor of contumacious satraps and ever-rebelling provinces of western Asia. To accept this view we have only to look back over seventy years since that march of Ten Thousand Greeks, with which our last survey closed.

SECTION 1. PERSIA AND ITS PROVINCES

Before the expedition of Cyrus there may have been, and evidently were, enough seeds of corruption in the state of Persia; but they had not become known by their fruits. No satrap for a century past had tried to detach himself and his province from the Empire; hardly a subject people had attempted to re-assert its independence. There were, indeed, two exceptions, both of them peoples which had never identified themselves at any time with the fortunes of their alien masters. One of these was, of course, the Asiatic Greek, the other was the Egyptian people; but the contumacy of the first threatened a danger not yet realized by Asia; the rebellious spirit of the last concerned, as yet, itself alone.

It was Egypt, however, which really gave the first warning of Persian dissolution. The weakest spot in the Assyrian Empire proved weakest in the Persian. The natural barriers of desert, swamp and sea, set between Egypt and the neighbouring continent, are so strong that no Asiatic Power, which has been tempted to conquer the rich Nile valley, has ever been able to keep it long. Under its own leaders or some rebellious officer of its new masters it has reasserted independence sooner or later, and all history is witness that no one, whether in Asia or in Europe, holds Egypt as a foreign province unless he holds also the sea. During the century which had elapsed since Cambyses' conquest the Egyptians had rebelled more than once (most persistently about 460), calling in the sea-lords to their help on each occasion. Finally, just before the death of Darius Nothus, and some five years before Cyrus left Sardes, they rose again under an Egyptian, and thereafter, for about sixty years, not the kings of Susa, but three native dynasties in succession, were to rule Egypt. The harm done to the Persian Empire by this defection was not measured by the mere loss of the revenues of a province. The new kings of Egypt, who owed much to Greek support, repaid this by helping every enemy of the Great King and every rebel against his authority. It was they who gave asylum to the admiral and fleet of Cyrus after Cunaxa, and sent corn to Agesilaus when he invaded Asia Minor; they supplied money and ships to the Spartan fleet in 394, and helped Evagoras of Cyprus in a long resistance to his suzerain. When Tyre and the cities of the Cilician coast revolted in 380, Egypt was privy to their designs, and she made common cause with the satraps and governors of Western Asia, Syria and Phoenicia when, in combination, they planned rebellion in 373 to the grave peril of the Empire. Twelve years later we find an Egyptian king marching in person to raise Phoenicia.

The Persian made more than one effort to recover his province. After conspicuous failure with his own generals Artaxerxes adopted tardily the course which Clearchus, captain of the Ten Thousand, is said to have advised after the battle of Cunaxa, and tried his fortune once more with Greek condottieri, only to find Greek generals and Greek mercenaries arrayed against them. It had come to this, that the Persian king and his revolted province equally depended on mercenary swords, neither daring to meet Greek except with Greek. Well had the lesson of the march of the Ten Thousand been read, marked and digested in the East!

SECTION 2. PERSIA AND THE WEST

It had been marked in the West as well, and its fruits were patent within five years. The dominant Greek state of the hour, avowing an ambition which no Greek had betrayed before, sent its king, Agesilaus, across to Asia Minor to follow up the establishment of Spartan hegemony on the coasts by an invasion of inland Persia. He never penetrated farther than about half-way up the Maeander Valley, and did Persia no harm worth speaking of; for he was not the leader, nor had he the resources in men and in money, to carry through so distant and doubtful an adventure. But Agesilaus' campaigning in Asia Minor between 397 and 394 has this historical significance: it demonstrates that Greeks had come to regard a march on Susa as feasible and desirable.

It was not, however, in fact feasible even then. Apart from the lack of a military force in any one state of Greece large enough, sufficiently trained, and led by a leader of the necessary magnetism and genius for organization, to undertake, unaided by allies on the way, a successful march to a point many months distant from its base—apart from this deficiency, the Empire to be conquered had not yet been really shaken. The Ten Thousand Greeks would in all likelihood never have got under Clearchus to Cunaxa or anywhere within hundreds of miles of it, but for the fact that Cyrus was with them and the adherents of his rising star were supplying their wants and had cleared a road for them through Asia Minor and Syria. In their Retreat they were desperate men, of whom the Great King was glad to be quit. The successful accomplishment of that retreat must not blind us to the almost certain failure which would have befallen the advance had it been attempted under like conditions.

SECTION 3. THE SATRAPS

What, ultimately, was to reduce the Persian Empire to such weakness that a Western power would be able to strike at its heart with little more than forty thousand men, was the disease of disloyalty which spread among the great officers during the first half of the fourth century. Before Cyrus' expedition we have not heard of either satraps or client provinces raising the standard of revolt (except in Egypt), since the Empire had been well established; and if there was evident collusion with that expedition on the part of provincial officers in Asia Minor and Syria, the fact has little political significance, seeing that Cyrus was a scion of the royal House, and the favourite of the Queen-Mother. But the fourth century is hardly well begun before we find satraps and princes aiding the king's enemies and fighting for their own hand against him or a rival officer. Agesilaus was helped in Asia Minor both by the prince of Paphlagonia and by a Persian noble. Twenty years later Ariobarzanes of Pontus rises in revolt; and hard on his defection follows a great rebellion planned by the satraps of Caria, Ionia, Lydia, Phrygia and Cappadocia—nearly all Asia Minor in fact—in concert with coastal cities of Syria and Phoenicia. Another ten years pass and new governors of Mysia and Lydia rise against their king with the help of the Egyptians and Mausolus, client prince of Halicarnassus. Treachery or lack of resources and stability brought these rebels one after another to disaster; but an Empire whose great officers so often dare such adventures is drawing apace to its catastrophe.

The causes of this growing disaffection among the satraps are not far to seek. At the close of the last chapter we remarked the deterioration of the harem-ridden court in the early days of Artaxerxes; and as time passed, the spectacle of a Great King governing by treachery, buying his enemies, and impotent to recover Egypt even with their mercenary help had its effect. Belief gained ground that the ship of Empire was sinking, and even in Susa the fear grew that a wind from the West was to finish her. The Great King's court officers watched Greek politics during the first seventy years of the fourth century with ever closer attention. Not content with enrolling as many Greeks as possible in the royal service, they used the royal gold to such effect to buy or support Greek politicians whose influence could be directed to hindering a union of Greek states and checking the rising power of any unit, that a Greek orator said in a famous passage that the archers stamped on the Great King's coins were already a greater danger to Greece than his real archers had ever been.

By such lavish corruption, by buying the soldiers and the politicians of the enemy, a better face was put for a while on the fortunes of the dynasty and the Empire. Before the death of the aged Artaxerxes Mnemon in 358, the revolt of the Western satraps had collapsed. His successor, Ochus, who, to reach the throne, murdered his kin like any eighteenth-century sultan of Stambul, overcame Egyptian obstinacy about 346, after two abortive attempts, by means of hireling Greek troops, and by similar vicarious help he recovered Sidon and the Isle of Cyprus. But it was little more than the dying flicker of a flame fanned for the moment by that same Western wind which was already blowing up to the gale that would extinguish it. The heart of the Empire was not less rotten because its shell was patched, and in the event, when the storm broke a few years later, nothing in West Asia was able to make any stand except two or three maritime cities, which fought, not for Persia, but for their own commercial monopolies.

SECTION 4. MACEDONIA

The storm had been gathering on the Western horizon for some time past. Twenty years earlier there had come to the throne of Macedonia a man of singular constructive ability and most definite ambition. His heritage—or rather his prize, for he was not next of kin to his predecessor—was the central southern part of the Balkan peninsula, a region of broad fat plains fringed and crossed by rough hills. It was inhabited by sturdy gentry and peasantry and by agile highlanders, all composed of the same racial elements as the Greeks, with perhaps a preponderant infusion of northern blood which had come south long ago with emigrants from the Danubian lands. The social development of the Macedonians—to give various peoples one generic name—had, for certain reasons, not been nearly so rapid as that of their southern cousins. They had never come in contact with the higher Aegean civilization, nor had they mixed their blood with that of cultivated predecessors; their land was continental, poor in harbours, remote from the luxurious centres of life, and of comparatively rigorous climate; its configuration had offered them no inducement to form city-states and enter on intense political life. But, in compensation, they entered the fourth century unexhausted, without tribal or political impediments to unity, and with a broad territory of greater natural resources than any southern Greek state. Macedonia could supply itself with the best cereal foods and to spare, and had unexploited veins of gold ore. But the most important thing to remark is this—that, compared with Greece, Macedonia was a region of Central Europe. In the latter's progress to imperial power we shall watch for the first time in recorded history a continental European folk bearing down peninsular populations of the Mediterranean.

Philip of Macedon, who had been trained in the arts of both war and peace in a Greek city, saw the weakness of the divided Hellenes, and the possible strength of his own people, and he set to work from the first with abounding energy, dogged persistence and immense talent for organization to make a single armed nation, which should be more than a match for the many communities of Hellas. How he accomplished his purpose in about twenty years: how he began by opening mines of precious metal on his south-eastern coast, and with the proceeds hired mercenaries: how he had Macedonian peasants drilled to fight in a phalanx formation more mobile than the Theban and with a longer spear, while the gentry were trained as heavy cavalry: how he made experiments with his new soldiers on the inland tribes, and so enlarged his effective dominions that he was able to marshal henceforward far more than his own Emathian clansmen: how for six years he perfected this national army till it was as professional a fighting machine as any condottiere's band of that day, while at the same time larger and of much better temper: how, when it was ready in the spring of the year 353, he began a fifteen years' war of encroachment on the holdings of the Greek states and particularly of Athens, attacking some of her maritime colonies in Macedonia and Thrace: how, after a campaign in inland Thrace and on the Chersonese, he appeared in Greece, where he pushed at last through Thermopylae: how, again, he withdrew for several seasons into the Balkan Peninsula, raided it from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, and ended with an attack on the last and greatest of its free Greek coastal cities, Perinthus and Byzantium: how, finally, in 338, coming south in full force, he crushed in the single battle of Chaeronea the two considerable powers of Greece, Athens and Thebes, and secured at last from every Greek state except Sparta (which he could afford to neglect) recognition of his suzerainty—these stages in Philip's making of a European nation and a European empire must not be described more fully here. What concerns us is the end of it all; for the end was the arraying of that new nation and that new empire for a descent on Asia. A year after Chaeronea Philip was named by the Congress of Corinth Captain-General of all Greeks to wreak the secular vengeance of Hellas on Persia.

How long he had consciously destined his fighting machine to an ultimate invasion of Asia we do not know. The Athenians had explicitly stated to the Great King in 341 that such was the Macedonian's ambition, and four years earlier public suggestion of it had been made by the famous orator, Isocrates, in an open letter written to Philip himself. Since the last named was a man of long sight and sustained purpose, it is not impossible that he had conceived such an ambition in youth and had been cherishing it all along. While Philip was in Thebes as a young man, old Agesilaus, who first of Greeks had conceived the idea of invading the inland East, was still seeking a way to realize his oft-frustrated project; and in the end he went off to Egypt to make a last effort after Philip was already on the throne. The idea had certainly been long in the air that any military power which might dominate Hellas would be bound primarily by self-interest and secondarily by racial duty to turn its arms against Asia. The Great King himself knew this as well as any one. After the Athenian warning in 341, his satraps in the north-west of Asia Minor were bidden assist Philip's enemies in every possible way; and it was thanks in no small measure to their help, that the Byzantines repulsed the Macedonians from their walls in 339.

Philip had already made friends of the princely house of Caria, and was now at pains to secure a footing in north-west Asia Minor. He threw, therefore, an advance column across the Dardanelles under his chief lieutenant, Parmenio, and proposed to follow it in the autumn of the year 336 with a Grand Army which he had been recruiting, training and equipping for a twelvemonth. The day of festival which should inaugurate his great venture arrived; but the venture was not to be his. As he issued from his tent to attend the games he fell by the hand of a private enemy; and his young son, Alexander, had at first enough to do to re-establish a throne which proved to have more foes than friends.

SECTION 5. ALEXANDER'S CONQUEST OF THE EAST

A year and a half later Alexander's friends and foes knew that a greater soldier and empire-maker than Philip ruled in his stead, and that the father's plan of Asiatic conquest would suffer nothing at the hands of the son. The neighbours of Macedonia as far as the Danube and all the states of the Greek peninsula had been cowed to submission again in one swift and decisive campaign. The States-General of Greece, re-convoked at Corinth, confirmed Philip's son in the Captain-Generalship of Hellas, and Parmenio, once more despatched to Asia, secured the farther shore of the Hellespont. With about forty thousand seasoned horse and foot, and with auxiliary services unusually efficient for the age, Alexander crossed to Persian soil in the spring of 334.

There was no other army in Asia Minor to offer him battle in form than a force about equal in numbers to his own, which had been collected locally by the western satraps. Except for its contingent of Greek mercenaries, this was much inferior to the Macedonian force in fighting value. Fended by Parmenio from the Hellespontine shore, it did the best it could by waiting on the farther bank of the Granicus, the nearest considerable stream which enters the Marmora, in order either to draw Alexander's attack, or to cut his communications, should he move on into the continent. It did not wait long. The heavy Macedonian cavalry dashed through the stream late on an afternoon, made short work of the Asiatic constituents, and having cleared a way for the phalanx helped it to cut up the Greek contingent almost to a man before night fell. Alexander was left with nothing but city defences and hill tribes to deal with till a fuller levy could be collected from other provinces of the Persian Empire and brought down to the west, a process which would take many months, and in fact did take a full year. But some of the Western cities offered no small impediment to his progress. If Aeolia, Lydia and Ionia made no resistance worth mentioning, the two chief cities of Caria, Miletus and Halicarnassus, which had been enjoying in virtual freedom a lion's share of Aegean trade for the past century, were not disposed to become appanages of a military empire. The pretension of Alexander to lead a crusade against the ancient oppressor of the Hellenic race weighed neither with them, nor, for that matter, with any of the Greeks in Asia or Europe, except a few enthusiasts. During the past seventy years, ever since celebrations of the deliverance of Hellas from the Persian had been replaced by aspirations towards counter invasion, the desire to wreak holy vengeance had gone for little or nothing, but desire to plunder Persia had gone for a great deal. Therefore, any definite venture into Asia aroused envy, not enthusiasm, among those who would be forestalled by its success. Neither with ships nor men had any leading Greek state come forward to help Alexander, and by the time he had taken Miletus he realized that he must play his game alone, with his own people for his own ends. Thenceforward, neglecting the Greeks, he postponed his march into the heart of the Persian Empire till he had secured every avenue leading thither from the sea, whether through Asia Minor or Syria or Egypt.

After reducing Halicarnassus and Caria, Alexander did no more in Asia Minor than parade the western part of it, the better to secure the footing he had gained in the continent. Here and there he had a brush with hill-men, who had long been unused to effective control, while with one or two of their towns he had to make terms; but on the approach of winter, Anatolia was at his feet, and he seated himself at Gordion, in the Sakaria valley, where he could at once guard his communications with the Hellespont and prepare for advance into farther Asia by an easy road. Eastern Asia Minor, that is Cappadocia, Pontus and Armenia, he left alone, and its contingents would still be arrayed on the Persian side in both the great battles to come. Certain northern districts also, which had long been practically independent of Persia, e.g. Bithynia and Paphlagonia, had not been touched yet. It was not worth his while at that moment to spend time in fighting for lands which would fall in any case if the Empire fell, and could easily be held in check from western Asia Minor in the meantime. His goal was far inland, his danger he well knew, on the sea—danger of possible co-operation between Greek fleets and the greater coastal cities of the Aegean and the Levant. Therefore, with the first of the spring he moved down into Cilicia to make the ports of Syria and Egypt his, before striking at the heart of the Empire.

The Great King, last and weakest of the Darius name, had realized the greatness of his peril and come down with the levy of all the Empire to try to crush the invader in the gate of the south lands. Letting his foe pass round the angle of the Levant coast, Darius, who had been waiting behind the screen of Amanus, slipped through the hills and cut off the Macedonian's retreat in the defile of Issus between mountain and sea. Against another general and less seasoned troops a compact and disciplined Oriental force would probably have ended the invasion there and then; but that of Darius was neither compact nor disciplined. The narrowness of the field compressed it into a mob; and Alexander and his men, facing about, saw the Persians delivered into their hand. The fight lasted little longer than at Granicus and the result was as decisive a butchery. Camp, baggage-train, the royal harem, letters from Greek states, and the persons of Greek envoys sent to devise the destruction of the Captain-General—all fell to Alexander.

Assured against meeting another levy of the Empire for at least a twelvemonth, he moved on into Syria. In this narrow land his chief business, as we have seen, was with the coast towns. He must have all the ports in his hand before going up into Asia. The lesser dared not gainsay the victorious phalanx; but the queen of them all, Tyre, mistress of the eastern trade, shut the gates of her island citadel and set the western intruder the hardest military task of his life. But the capture of the chief base of the hostile fleets which still ranged the Aegean was all essential to Alexander, and he bridged the sea to effect it. One other city, Gaza, commanding the road to Egypt, showed the same spirit with less resources, and the year was far spent before the Macedonians appeared on the Nile to receive the ready submission of a people which had never willingly served the Persian. Here again, Alexander's chief solicitude was for the coasts. Independent Cyrene, lying farthest west, was one remaining danger and the openness of the Nile mouths another. The first danger dissolved with the submission, which Cyrene sent to meet him as he moved into Marmarica to the attack; the second was conjured by the creation of the port of Alexandria, perhaps the most signal act of Alexander's life, seeing to what stature the city would grow, what part play in the development of Greek and Jew, and what vigour retain to this day. For the moment, however, the new foundation served primarily to rivet its founder's hold on the shores of the Greek and Persian waters. Within a few months the hostile fleets disappeared from the Levant and Alexander obtained at last that command of the sea without which invasion of inner Asia would have been more than perilous, and permanent retention of Egypt impossible.

Thus secure of his base, he could strike inland. He went up slowly in the early part of 331 by the traditional North Road through Philistia and Palestine and round the head of the Syrian Hamad to Thapsacus on Euphrates, paying, on the way, a visit of precaution to Tyre, which had cost him so much toil and time a year before. None opposed his crossing of the Great River; none stayed him in Mesopotamia; none disputed his passage of the Tigris, though the ferrying of his force took five days. The Great King himself, however, was lying a few marches south of the mounds of Nineveh, in the plain of Gaugamela, to which roads converging from south, east and north had brought the levies of all the empire which remained to him. To hordes drawn from fighting tribes living as far distant as frontiers of India, banks of the Oxus, and foothills of the Caucasus, was added a phalanx of hireling Greeks more than three times as numerous as that which had been cut up on the Granicus. Thus awaited by ten soldiers to each one of his own on open ground chosen by his enemy, Alexander went still more slowly forward and halted four and twenty hours to breathe his army in sight of the Persian out posts. Refusing to risk an attack on that immense host in the dark, he slept soundly within his entrenchments till sunrise of the first day of October, and then in the full light led out his men to decide the fate of Persia. It was decided by sundown, and half a million broken men were flying south and east into the gathering night. But the Battle of Arbela, as it is commonly called—the greatest contest of armies before the rise of Rome—had not been lightly won. The active resistance of the Greek mercenaries, and the passive resistance of the enormous mass of the Asiatic hordes, which stayed attack by mere weight of flesh and closed again behind every penetrating column, made the issue doubtful, till Darius himself, terrified at the oncoming of the heavy Macedonian cavalry, turned his chariot and lost the day. Alexander's men had to thank the steadiness which Philip's system had given them, but also, in the last resort, the cowardice of the opposing chief.

The Persian King survived to be hunted a year later, and caught, a dying man, on the road to Central Asia; but long before that and without another pitched battle the Persian throne had passed to Alexander. Within six months he had marched to and entered in turn, without other let or hindrance than resistance of mountain tribesmen in the passes, the capitals of the Empire—Babylon, Susa, Persepolis, Ecbatana; and since these cities all held by him during his subsequent absence of six years in farther Asia, the victory of the West over the Ancient East may be regarded as achieved on the day of Arbela.



CHAPTER VI

EPILOGUE

Less than ten years later, Alexander lay dead in Babylon. He had gone forward to the east to acquire more territories than we have surveyed in any chapter of this book or his fathers had so much as known to exist. The broad lands which are now Afghanistan, Russian Turkestan, the Punjab, Scinde, and Beluchistan had been subdued by him in person and were being held by his governors and garrisons. This Macedonian Greek who had become an emperor of the East greater than the greatest theretofore, had already determined that his Seat of Empire should be fixed in inner Asia; and he proposed that under his single sway East and West be distinct no longer, but one indivisible world, inhabited by united peoples. Then, suddenly, he was called to his account, leaving no legitimate heir of his body except a babe in its mother's womb. What would happen? What, in fact, did happen?

It is often said that the empire which Alexander created died with him. This is true if we think of empire as the realm of a single emperor. As sole ruler of the vast area between the Danube and the Sutlej Alexander was to have no successor. But if we think of an empire as the realm of a race or nation, Greater Macedonia, though destined gradually to be diminished, would outlive its founder by nearly three hundred years; and moreover, in succession to it, another Western empire, made possible by his victory and carried on in some respects under his forms, was to persist in the East for several centuries more. As a political conquest, Alexander's had results as long lasting as can be credited to almost any conquest in history. As the victory of one civilization over another it was never to be brought quite to nothing, and it had certain permanent effects. These this chapter is designed to show: but first, since the development of the victorious civilization on alien soil depended primarily on the continued political supremacy of the men in whom it was congenital, it is necessary to see how long and to what extent political dominion was actually held in the East by men who were Greeks, either by birth or by training.

Out of the turmoil and stress of the thirty years which followed Alexander's death, two Macedonians emerged to divide the Eastern Empire between them. The rest—transient embarrassed phantoms of the Royal House, regents of the Empire hardly less transient, upstart satraps, and even one-eyed Antigonus, who for a brief moment claimed jurisdiction over all the East—never mattered long to the world at large and matter not at all here and now. The end of the fourth century sees Seleucus of Babylonia lording it over the most part of West Asia which was best worth having, except the southern half of Syria and the coasts of Asia Minor and certain isles in sight of them, which, if not subject to Ptolemy of Egypt, were free of both kings or dominated by a third, resident in Europe and soon to disappear. In the event those two, Seleucus and Ptolemy, alone of all the Macedonian successors, would found dynasties destined to endure long enough in kingdoms great enough to affect the general history of civilization in the Ancient East.

Seleucus has no surviving chronicler of the first or the second rank, and consequently remains one of the most shadowy of the greater men of action in antiquity. We can say little of him personally, except that he was quick and fearless in action, prepared to take chances, a born leader in war, and a man of long sight and persistent purpose. Alexander had esteemed and distinguished him highly, and, marrying him to Apama, a noble Iranian lady, convinced him of his own opinion that the point from which to rule an Asiatic empire was Babylonia. Seleucus let the first partition of the dead man's lands go by, and not till the first turmoil was over and his friend Ptolemy was securely seated in Egypt, did he ask for a province. The province was Babylonia. Ejected by the malevolence of Antigonus, he regained it by grace of Ptolemy in 312, established ascendency over all satraps to east of him during the next half-dozen years, letting only India go, and then came west in 305 to conquer and slay Antigonus at Ipsus in central Asia Minor. The third king, Lysimachus of Thrace, was disposed of in 281, and Seleucus, dying a few months later, left to his dynastic successors an Asiatic empire of seventy-two provinces, very nearly equal to Alexander's, with important exceptions in Asia Minor.

In Asia Minor neither Seleucus nor the Seleucids ever held anything effectively except the main lines of communication from East to West and the district in which these come down to the Aegean Sea. The south coast, as has been said, remained in Egyptian hands almost all through the Seleucid period. The southwest obeyed the island republic of Rhodes. Most of the Greek maritime cities of the northwest and north kept their freedom more or less inviolate; while inland a purely Greek monarchy, that of Pergamum, gradually extended its sway up to the central desert. In the north a formidable barrier to Seleucid expansion arose within five years of Seleucus' death, namely, a settlement of Gauls who had been invited across the straits by a king of Bithynia. After charging and raiding in all directions these intractable allies were penned by the repeated efforts of both the Seleucid and the Pergamene kings into the upper Sakaria basin (henceforth to be known as Galatia) and there they formed a screen behind which Bithynia and Paphlagonia maintained sturdy independence. The north-east also was the seat of independent monarchies. Cappadocia, Pontus and Armenia, ruled by princes of Iranian origin, were never integral parts of the Seleucid Empire, though consistently friendly to its rulers. Finally, in the hill-regions of the centre, as of the coasts, the Seleucid writ did not run.

Looked at as a whole, however, and not only from a Seleucid point of view, the Ancient East, during the century following Seleucus' death (forty-three years after Alexander's), was dominated politically by Hellenes over fully nine-tenths of its area. About those parts of it held by cities actually Greek, or by Pergamum, no more need be said. As for Seleucus and his successors, though the latter, from Antiochus Soter onward, had a strain of Iranian blood, they held and proved themselves essentially Hellenic. Their portraits from first to last show European features, often fine. Ptolemy Lagus and all the Lagidae remained Macedonian Greeks to a man and a woman and to the bitter end, with the greatest Hellenic city in the world for their seat. As for the remaining tenth part of the East, almost the whole of it was ruled by princes who claimed the title "philhellene," and justified it not only by political friendliness to the Seleucidae and the Western Greeks, but also by encouraging Greek settlers and Greek manners. So far as patronage and promotion by the highest powers could further it, Hellenism had a fair chance in West Asia from the conquest of Alexander down to the appearance of Rome in the East. What did it make of this chance? How far in the event did those Greek and Macedonian rulers, philhellenic Iranian princes and others, hellenize West Asia? If they did succeed in a measure, but not so completely that the East ceased to be distinct from the West, what measure was set to their several influences, and why?

[Plate 6: HELLENISM IN ASIA. ABOUT 150 B.C.]

Let us see, first, what precisely Hellenism implied as it was brought to Asia by Alexander and practised by his successors. Politically it implied recognition by the individual that the society of which he was a member had an indefeasible and virtually exclusive claim on his good will and his good offices. The society so recognized was not a family or a tribe, but a city and its proper district, distinguished from all other cities and their districts. The geographical configuration and the history of Greece, a country made up in part of small plains ringed in by hills and sea, in part of islands, had brought about this limitation of political communities, and had made patriotism mean to the Greek devotion to his city-state. To a wider circle he was not capable of feeling anything like the same sense of obligation or, indeed, any compelling obligation at all. If he recognized the claim of a group of city-states, which remotely claimed common origin with his own, it was an academic feeling: if he was conscious of his community with all Hellenes as a nation it was only at moments of particular danger at the hands of a common non-Hellenic foe. In short, while not insensible to the principle of nationality he was rarely capable of applying it practically except in regard to a small society with whose members he could be acquainted personally and among whom he could make his own individuality felt. He had no feudal tradition, and no instinctive belief that the individualities composing a community must be subordinate to any one individual in virtue of the latter's patriarchal or representative relation to them.

Let us deal with this political implication of Hellenism before we pass on to its other qualities. In its purity political Hellenism was obviously not compatible with the monarchical Macedonian state, which was based on feudal recognition of the paternal or representative relation of a single individual to many peoples composing a nation. The Macedonians themselves, therefore, could not carry to Asia, together with their own national patriotism (somewhat intensified, perhaps, by intercourse during past generations with Greek city-states) any more than an outside knowledge of the civic patriotism of the Greeks. Since, however, they brought in their train a great number of actual Greeks and had to look to settlement of these in Asia for indispensable support of their own rule, commerce and civilization, they were bound to create conditions under which civic patriotism, of which they knew the value as well as the danger, might continue to exist in some measure. Their obvious policy was to found cities wherever they wished to settle Greeks, and to found them along main lines of communication, where they might promote trade and serve as guardians of the roads; while at the same time, owing to their continual intercourse with each other, their exposure to native sojourners and immigrants and their necessary dependence on the centre of government, they could hardly repeat in Asia the self-centred exclusiveness characteristic of cities in either European Greece or the strait and sharply divided valleys of the west Anatolian coast. In fact, by design or not, most Seleucid foundations were planted in comparatively open country. Seleucus alone is said to have been responsible for seventy-five cities, of which the majority clustered in that great meeting-place of through routes, North Syria, and along the main highway through northern Asia Minor to Ephesus. In this city, Seleucus himself spent most of his last years. We know of few Greek colonies, or none, founded by him or his dynasty beyond the earlier limits of the Ancient East, where, in Afghanistan, Turkestan and India, Alexander had planted nearly all his new cities. Possibly his successor held these to be sufficient; probably he saw neither prospect of advantage nor hope of success in creating Greek cities in a region so vast and so alien; certainly neither he nor his dynasty was ever in such a position to support or maintain them, if founded east of Media, as Alexander was and proposed to be, had longer life been his. But in western Asia from Seleucia on Tigris, an immense city of over half a million souls, to Laodicea on Lycus and the confines of the old Ionian littoral, Seleucus and his successors created urban life, casting it in a Hellenic mould whose form, destined to persist for many centuries to come, would exercise momentous influence on the early history of the Christian religion.

By founding so many urban communities of Greek type the Macedonian kings of West Asia undeniably introduced Hellenism as an agent of political civilization into much of the Ancient East, which needed it badly and profited by it. But the influence of their Hellenism was potent and durable only in those newly founded, or newly organized, urban communities and their immediate neighbourhood. Where these clustered thickly, as along the Lower Orontes and on the Syrian coast-line, or where Greek farmers had settled in the interspaces, as in Cyrrhestica (i.e. roughly, central North Syria), Hellenism went far to make whole districts acquire a civic spirit, which, though implying much less sense of personal freedom and responsibility than in Attica or Laconia, would have been recognized by an Athenian or a Spartan as kin to his own patriotism. But where the cities were strung on single lines of communication at considerable intervals, as in central Asia Minor and in Mesopotamia, they exerted little political influence outside their own walls. For Hellenism was and remained essentially a property of communities small enough for each individual to exert his own personal influence on political and social practice. So soon as a community became, in numbers or distribution, such as to call for centralized, or even representative, administration, patriotism of the Hellenic type languished and died. It was quite incapable of permeating whole peoples or of making a nation, whether in the East or anywhere else. Yet in the East peoples have always mattered more than cities, by whomsoever founded and maintained.

Hellenism, however, had, by this time, not only a political implication but also moral and intellectual implications which were partly effects, partly causes, of its political energy. As has been well said by a modern historian of the Seleucid house, Hellenism meant, besides a politico-social creed, also a certain attitude of mind. The characteristic feature of this attitude was what has been called Humanism, this word being used in a special sense to signify intellectual interest confined to human affairs, but free within the range of these. All Greeks were not, of course, equally humanistic in this sense. Among them, as in all societies, there were found temperaments to which transcendental speculation appealed, and these increasing in number, as with the loss of their freedom the city-states ceased to stand for the realization of the highest possible good in this world, made Orphism and other mystic cults prevail ever more and more in Hellas. But when Alexander carried Hellenism to Asia it was still broadly true that the mass of civilized Hellenes regarded anything that could not be apprehended by the intellect through the senses as not only outside their range of interest but non-existent. Further, while nothing was held so sacred that it might not be probed or discussed with the full vigour of an inquirer's intelligence, no consideration except the logic of apprehended facts should determine his conclusion. An argument was to be followed wherever it might lead, and its consequences must be faced in full without withdrawal behind any non-intellectual screen. Perfect freedom of thought and perfect freedom of discussion over the whole range of human matters; perfect freedom of consequent action, so the community remained uninjured—this was the typical Hellene's ideal. An instinctive effort to realize it was his habitual attitude towards life. His motto anticipated the Roman poet's "I am human: nothing human do I hold no business of mine!"

By the time the Western conquest of Asia was complete, this attitude, which had grown more and more prevalent in the centres of Greek life throughout the fifth and fourth centuries, had come to exclude anything like religiosity from the typical Hellenic character. A religion the Greek had of course, but he held it lightly, neither possessed by it nor even looking to it for guidance in the affairs of his life. If he believed in a world beyond the grave, he thought little about it or not at all, framing his actions with a view solely to happiness in the flesh. A possible fate in the hereafter seemed to him to have no bearing on his conduct here. That disembodied he might spend eternity with the divine, or, absorbed into the divine essence, become himself divine—such ideas, though not unknown or without attraction to rarer spirits, were wholly impotent to combat the vivid interest in life and the lust of strenuous endeavour which were bred in the small worlds of the city-states.

The Greeks, then, who passed to Asia in Alexander's wake had no religious message for the East, and still less had the Macedonian captains who succeeded him. Born and bred to semibarbaric superstitions, they had long discarded these, some for the freethinking attitude of the Greek, and all for the cult of the sword. The only thing which, in their Emperor's lifetime, stood to them for religion was a feudal devotion to himself and his house. For a while this feeling survived in the ranks of the army, as Eumenes, wily Greek that he was, proved by the manner and success of his appeals to dynastic loyalty in the first years of the struggle for the succession; and perhaps, we may trace it longer still in the leaders, as an element, blended with something of homesickness and something of national tradition, in that fatality which impelled each Macedonian lord of Asia, first Antigonus, then Seleucus, finally Antiochus the Great, to hanker after the possession of Macedonia and be prepared to risk the East to win back the West. Indeed, it is a contributory cause of the comparative failure of the Seleucids to keep their hold on their Asiatic Empire that their hearts were never wholly in it.

For the rest, they and all the Macedonian captains alike were conspicuously irreligious men, whose gods were themselves. They were what the age had made them, and what all similar ages make men of action. Theirs was a time of wide conquests recently achieved by right of might alone, and left to whomsoever should be mightiest. It was a time when the individual had suddenly found that no accidental defects—lack of birth, or property, or allies—need prevent him from exploiting for himself a vast field of unmeasured possibilities, so he had a sound brain, a stout heart and a strong arm. As it would be again in the age of the Crusades, in that of the Grand Companies, and in that of the Napoleonic conquests, every soldier knew that it rested only with himself and with opportunity, whether or no he should die a prince. It was a time for reaping harvests which others had sown, for getting anything for nothing, for frank and unashamed lust of loot, for selling body and soul to the highest bidder, for being a law to oneself. In such ages the voice of the priest goes for as little as the voice of conscience, and the higher a man climbs, the less is his faith in a power above him.

Having won the East, however, these irreligious Macedonians found they had under their hand a medley of peoples, diverse in many characteristics, but almost all alike in one, and that was their religiosity. Deities gathered and swarmed in Asia. Men showed them fierce fanatic devotion or spent lives in contemplation of the idea of them, careless of everything which Macedonians held worth living for, and even of life itself. Alexander had been quick to perceive the religiosity of the new world into which he had come. If his power in the East was to rest on a popular basis he knew that basis must be religious. Beginning with Egypt he set an example (not lost on the man who would be his successor there) of not only conciliating priests but identifying himself with the chief god in the traditional manner of native kings since immemorial time; and there is no doubt that the cult of himself, which he appears to have enjoined increasingly on his followers, his subjects and his allies, as time went on, was consciously devised to meet and captivate the religiosity of the East. In Egypt he must be Ammon, in Syria he would be Baal, in Babylon Bel. He left the faith of his fathers behind him when he went up to the East, knowing as well as his French historian knew in the nineteenth century, that in Asia the "dreams of Olympus were less worth than the dreams of the Magi and the mysteries of India, pregnant with the divine." With these last, indeed, he showed himself deeply impressed, and his recorded attitude towards the Brahmans of the Punjab implies the earliest acknowledgment made publicly by a Greek, that in religion the West must learn from the East.

Alexander, who has never been forgotten by the traditions and myths of the East, might possibly, with longer life, have satisfied Asiatic religiosity with an apotheosis of himself. His successors failed either to keep his divinity alive or to secure any general acceptance of their own godhead. That they tried to meet the demand of the East with a new universal cult of imperial utility and that some, like Antiochus IV, the tyrant of early Maccabaean history, tried very hard, is clear. That they failed and that Rome failed after them is writ large in the history of the expansion of half-a-dozen Eastern cults before the Christian era, and of Christianity itself.

Only in the African province did Macedonian rule secure a religious basis. What an Alexander could hardly have achieved in Asia, a Ptolemy did easily in Egypt. There the de facto ruler, of whatever race, had been installed a god since time out of mind, and an omnipotent priesthood, dominating a docile people, stood about the throne. The Assyrian conquerors had stiffened their backs in Egypt to save affronting the gods of their fatherland; but the Ptolemies, like the Persians, made no such mistake, and had three centuries of secure rule for their reward. The knowledge that what the East demanded could be provided easily and safely even by Macedonians in the Nile valley alone was doubtless present to the sagacious mind of Ptolemy when, letting all wider lands pass to others, he selected Egypt in the first partition of the provinces.

The Greek, in a word, had only his philosophies to offer to the religiosity of the East. But a philosophy of religion is a complement to, a modifying influence on, religion, not a substitute sufficient to satisfy the instinctive and profound craving of mankind for God. While this craving always possessed the Asiatic mind, the Greek himself, never naturally insensible to it, became more and more conscious of his own void as he lived in Asia. What had long stood to him for religion, namely passionate devotion to the community, was finding less and less to feed on under the restricted political freedom which was now his lot everywhere. Superior though he felt his culture to be in most respects, it lacked one thing needful, which inferior cultures around him possessed in full. As time went on he became curious, then receptive, of the religious systems among whose adherents he found himself, being coerced insensibly by nature's abhorrence of a vacuum. Not that he swallowed any Eastern religion whole, or failed, while assimilating what he took, to transform it with his own essence. Nor again should it be thought that he gave nothing at all in return. He gave a philosophy which, acting almost as powerfully on the higher intelligences of the East as their religions acted on his intelligence, created the "Hellenistic" type, properly so called, that is the oriental who combined the religious instinct of Asia with the philosophic spirit of Greece—such an oriental as (to take two very great names), the Stoic apostle Zeno, a Phoenician of Cyprus, or the Christian apostle, Saul the Jew of Tarsus. By the creation of this type, East and West were brought at last very near together, divided only by the distinction of religious philosophy in Athens from philosophic religion in Syria.

The history of the Near East during the last three centuries before the Christian era is the history of the gradual passing of Asiatic religions westward to occupy the Hellenic vacuum, and of Hellenic philosophical ideas eastward to supplement and purify the religious systems of West Asia. How far the latter eventually penetrated into the great Eastern continent, whether even to India or China, this is no place to discuss: how far the former would push westward is written in the modern history of Europe and the New World. The expansion of Mithraism and of half-a-dozen other Asiatic and Egyptian cults, which were drawn from the East to Greece and beyond before the first century of the Hellenistic Age closed, testifies to the early existence of that spiritual void in the West which a greater and purer religion, about to be born in Galilee and nurtured in Antioch, was at last to fill. The instrumentality of Alexander and his successors in bringing about or intensifying that contact and intercourse between Semite and Greek, which begot the philosophic morality of Christianity and rendered its westward expansion inevitable, stands to their credit as a historic fact of such tremendous import that it may be allowed to atone for more than all their sins.

This, then, the Seleucids did—they so brought West and East together that each learned from the other. But more than that cannot be claimed for them. They did not abolish the individuality of either; they did not Hellenize even so much of West Asia as they succeeded in holding to the end. In this they failed not only for the reasons just considered—lack of vital religion in their Macedonians and their Greeks, and deterioration of the Hellenism of Hellenes when they ceased to be citizens of free city-states—but also through individual faults of their own, which appear again and again as the dynasty runs its course; and perhaps even more for some deeper reason, not understood by us yet, but lying behind the empirical law that East is East and West is West.

As for the Seleucid kings themselves they leave on us, ill-known as their characters and actions are, a clear impression of approximation to the traditional type of the Greek of the Roman age and since. As a dynasty they seem to have been quickly spoilt by power, to have been ambitious but easily contented with the show and surface of success, to have been incapable and contemptuous of thorough organization, and to have had little in the way of policy, and less perseverance in the pursuit of it. It is true that our piecemeal information comes largely from writers who somewhat despised them; but the known history of the Seleucid Empire, closed by an extraordinarily facile and ignominious collapse before Rome, supports the judgment that, taken one with another, its kings were shallow men and haphazard rulers who owed it more to chance than to prudence that their dynasty endured so long.

Their strongest hold was on Syria, and in the end their only hold. We associate them in our minds particularly with the great city of Antioch, which the first Seleucus founded on the Lower Orontes to gather up trade from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Asia Minor in the North Syrian country. But, as a matter of fact, that city owes its fame mainly to subsequent Roman masters. For it did not become the capital of Seleucid preference till the second century B.C.—till, by the year 180, the dynasty, which had lost both the Western and the Eastern provinces, had to content itself with Syria and Mesopotamia alone. Not only had the Parthians then come down from Turkestan to the south of the Caspian (their kings assumed Iranian names but were they not, like the present rulers of Persia, really Turks?), but Media too had asserted independence and Persia was fallen away to the rule of native princes in Fars. Seleucia on Tigris had become virtually a frontier city facing an Iranian and Parthian peril which the imperial incapacity of the Seleucids allowed to develop, and even Rome would never dispel. On the other flank of the empire a century of Seleucid efforts to plant headquarters in Western Asia Minor, whether at Ephesus or Sardes, and thence to prosecute ulterior designs on Macedonia and Greece, had been settled in favour of Pergamum by the arms and mandate of the coming arbiter of the East, the Republic of Rome. Bidden retire south of Taurus after the battle of Magnesia in 190, summarily ordered out of Egypt twenty years later, when Antiochus Epiphanes was hoping to compensate the loss of west and east with gain of the south, the Seleucids had no choice of a capital. It must thenceforth be Antioch or nothing.

That, however, a Macedonian dynasty was forced to concentrate in north Syria whatever Hellenism it had (though after Antiochus Epiphanes its Hellenism steadily grew less) during the last two centuries before the Christian era was to have a momentous effect on the history of the world. For it was one of the two determining causes of an increase in the influence of Hellenism upon the Western Semites, which issued ultimately in the Christian religion. From Cilicia on the north to Phoenicia and Palestine in the south, such higher culture, such philosophical study as there were came more and more under the influence of Greek ideas, particularly those of the Stoic School, whose founder and chief teacher (it should never be forgotten) had been a Semite, born some three hundred years before Jesus of Nazareth. The Hellenized University of Tarsus, which educated Saul, and the Hellenistic party in Palestine, whose desire to make Jerusalem a southern Antioch brought on the Maccabaean struggle, both owed in a measure their being and their continued vitality to the existence and larger growth of Antioch on the Orontes.

But Phoenicia and Palestine owed as much of their Hellenism (perhaps more) to another Hellenized city and another Macedonian dynasty—to Alexandria and to the Ptolemies. Because the short Maccabaean period of Palestinian history, during which a Seleucid did happen to be holding all Syria, is very well and widely known, it is apt to be forgotten that, throughout almost all other periods of the Hellenistic Age, southern Syria, that is Palestine and Phoenicia as well as Cyprus and the Levant coast right round to Pamphylia, was under the political domination of Egypt. The first Ptolemy added to his province some of these Asiatic districts and cities, and in particular Palestine and Coele-Syria, very soon after he had assumed command of Egypt, and making no secret of his intention to retain them, built a fleet to secure his end. He knew very well that if Egypt is to hold in permanency any territory outside Africa, she must be mistress of the sea. After a brief set-back at the hands of Antigonus' son, Ptolemy made good his hold when the father was dead; and Cyprus also became definitely his in 294. His successor, in whose favour he abdicated nine years later, completed the conquest of the mainland coasts right round the Levant at the expense of Seleucus' heir. In the event, the Ptolemies kept almost all that the first two kings of the dynasty had thus won until they were supplanted by Rome, except for an interval of a little more than fifty years from 199 to about 145; and even during the latter part of this period south Syria was under Egyptian influence once more, though nominally part of the tottering Seleucid realm.

The object pursued by the Macedonian kings of Egypt in conquering and holding a thin coastal fringe of mainland outside Africa and certain island posts from Cyprus to the Cyclades was plainly commercial, to get control of the general Levant trade and of certain particular supplies (notably ship-timber) for their royal port of Alexandria. The first Ptolemy had well understood why his master had founded this city after ruining Tyre, and why he had taken so great pains both earlier and later to secure his Mediterranean coasts. Their object the Ptolemies obtained sufficiently, although they never eliminated the competition of the Rhodian republic and had to resign to it the command of the Aegean after the battle of Cos in 246. But Alexandria had already become a great Semitic as well as Grecian city, and continued to be so for centuries to come. The first Ptolemy is said to have transplanted to Egypt many thousands of Jews who quickly reconciled themselves to their exile, if indeed it had ever been involuntary; and how large its Jewish population was by the reign of the second Ptolemy and how open to Hellenic influence, may be illustrated sufficiently by the fact that at Alexandria, during that reign, the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek by the body of Semitic scholars which has been known since as the Septuagint. Although it was consistent Ptolemaic policy not to countenance Hellenic proselytism, the inevitable influence of Alexandria on south Syria was stronger than that consciously exerted by Antiochus Epiphanes or any other Seleucid; and if Phoenician cities had become homes of Hellenic science and philosophy by the middle of the third century, and if Yeshua or Jason, High Priest of Jehovah, when he applied to his suzerain a hundred years later for leave to make Jerusalem a Greek city, had at his back a strong party anxious to wear hats in the street and nothing at all in the gymnasium, Alexandria rather than Antioch should have the chief credit—or chief blame!

Before, however, all this blending of Semitic religiosity with Hellenic philosophical ideas, and with something of the old Hellenic mansuetude, which had survived even under Macedonian masters to modify Asiatic minds, could issue in Christianity, half the East, with its dispersed heirs of Alexander, had passed under the common and stronger yoke of Rome. Ptolemaic Alexandria and Seleucid Antioch had prepared Semitic ground for seed of a new religion, but it was the wide and sure peace of the Roman Empire that brought it to birth and gave it room to grow. It was to grow, as all the world knows, westward not eastward, making patent by its first successes and by its first failures how much Hellenism had gone to the making of it. The Asian map of Christianity at the end, say, of the fourth century of the latter's existence, will show it very exactly bounded by the limits to which the Seleucid Empire had carried Greeks in any considerable body, and the further limits to which the Romans, who ruled effectively a good deal left aside by their Macedonian predecessors—much of central and eastern Asia Minor for example, and all Armenia—had advanced their Graeco-Roman subjects.

Beyond these bounds neither Hellenism nor Christianity was fated in that age to strike deep roots or bear lasting fruit. The Farther East—the East, that is to say, beyond Euphrates—remained unreceptive and intolerant of both influences. We have seen how almost all of it had fallen away from the Seleucids many generations before the birth of Christ, when a ring of principalities, Median, Parthian, Persian, Nabathsean, had emancipated the heart of the Orient from its short servitude to the West; and though Rome, and Byzantium after her, would push the frontier of effective European influence somewhat eastward again, their Hellenism could never capture again that heart which the Seleucids had failed to hold. This is not to say that nothing of Hellenism passed eastward of Mesopotamia and made an abiding mark. Parthian and Sassanian art, the earlier Buddhist art of north-western India and Chinese Turkestan, some features even of early Mohammedan art, and some, too, of early Mohammedan doctrine and imperial policy, disprove any sweeping assertion that nothing Greek took root beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire. But it was very little of Hellenism and not at all its essence. We must not be deceived by mere borrowings of exotic things or momentary appreciations of foreign luxuries. That the Parthians were witnessing a performance of the Bacchae of Euripides, when the head of hapless Crassus was brought to Ctesiphon, no more argues that they had the Western spirit than our taste for Chinese curios or Japanese plays proves us informed with the spirit of the East.

The East, in fine, remained the East. It was so little affected after all by the West that in due time its religiosity would be pregnant with yet another religion, antithetical to Hellenism, and it was so little weakened that it would win back again all it had lost and more, and keep Hither Asia in political and cultural independence of the West until our own day. If modern Europe has taken some parts of the gorgeous East in fee which were never held by Macedonian or Roman, let us remember in our pride of race that almost all that the Macedonians and the Romans did hold in Asia has been lost to the West ever since. Europe may and probably will prevail there again; but since it must be by virtue of a civilization in whose making a religion born of Asia has been the paramount indispensable factor, will the West even then be more creditor than debtor of the East?



NOTE ON BOOKS

The authorities cited at the end of Prof. J. L. Myres' Dawn of History (itself an authority), in the Home University Library, are to a great extent suitable for those who wish to read more widely round the theme of the present volume, since those (e.g. the geographical works given in Dawn of History, p. 253, paragraph 2) which are not more or less essential preliminaries to a study of the Ancient East at any period, mostly deal with the historic as well as the prehistoric age. To spare readers reference to another volume, however, I will repeat here the most useful books in Prof. Myres' list, adding at the same time certain others, some of which have appeared since the issue of his volume.

For the history of the whole region in the period covered by my volume, E. Meyer's Geschichte Alterthums, of a new edition of which a French translation is in progress and has already been partly issued, is the most authoritative. Sir G. Maspero's Histoire ancienne des peuples de l'Orient classique (English translation in 3 vols. under the titles The Dawn of Civilization (Egypt and Chaldaea); The Struggle of the Nations (Egypt, Syria, and Assyria); The Passing of the Empires) is still valuable, but rather out of date. There has appeared recently a more modern and handy book than either, Mr. H. R. Hall's The Ancient History of the Near East (1913), which gathers up, not only what was in the books by Mr. Hall and Mr. King cited by Prof. Myres, but also the contents of Meyer's and Maspero's books, and others, and the results of more recent research, in some of which the author has taken part. This book includes in its scope both Egypt and the Aegean area, besides Western Asia.

For the special history of Babylonia and Assyria and their Empires, R. W. Rogers' History of Babylonia and Assyria, 2 vols., has been kept up to date and is the most convenient summary for an English reader. H. Winckler's History of Babylonia and Assyria (translated from the German by J. A. Craig, 1907) is more brilliant and suggestive, but needs to be used with more caution. A. T. Olmstead's Western Asia in the Days of Sargon of Assyria (1908) is an instructive study of the Assyrian Empire at its height.

For the Hittite Empire and civilization J. Garstang's The Land of the Hittites (1910) is the best recent book which aims at being comprehensive. But it must be borne in mind that this subject is in the melting-pot at present, that excavations now in progress have added greatly to the available evidence, and that very few of the Boghazkeui archives were published when Garstang's book was issued. D. G. Hogarth's articles on the Hittites, in Enc. Brit, and Enc. Brit. Year-book, summarize some more recent research; but there is no compendium of Hittite research which is really up to date.

For Semitic Syrian history, Rogers and Winckler, as cited above, will probably be found sufficient; and also for the Urartu peoples. For Western Asia Minor and the Greeks, besides D.G. Hogarth's Ionia and the East, the new edition of Beloch's Griechische Geschichte gives all, and more than all, that the general reader will require. If German is a difficulty to him, he must turn to J.B. Bury's History of Greece and to the later part of Hall's Ancient History of the Near East, cited above. For Alexander's conquest he can go to J. Karst, Geschichte des hellenistischen Zeitalters, Vol. I (1901), B. Niese, Geschichte der griechischen und makedonischen Staaten (1899), or D.G. Hogarth, Philip and Alexander of Macedon (1897); but the great work of J.G. Droysen, Das Hellenismus (French translation), lies behind all these.

Finally, the fourth English volume of A. Holm's History of Greece (1898) and E.R. Bevan's House of Seleucus (1902) will supply most that is known of the Hellenistic Age in Asia.

THE END