Alexander

ALEXANDER (1893-192o), king of the Hellenes, second son of King Constantine and Queen Sophia, was born Aug. t, 1893, and ascended the throne of Greece on the dethronement of his father, June 14,1917. The Government itself was for the time in the hands of Venizelos, who had the confidence of the Allies; but the defeat of Germany, and Venizelos's diplomatic triumphs at the Peace Conference, seemed to breathe a new spirit into the young king. From the day of his triumphal entry into Adrian ople, he took an active personal interest in the prospect of being the ruler of Greater Greece.

He died Oct. 25, 192o, by blood poisoning from the bite of a pet monkey. In Nov. 'gig King Alexander made a morganatic marriage with an Athenian lady, Aspasia Manos; and after his death a daughter was born to her in Paris on March 25,1921. On Oct. 12, 1922, the marriage was declared valid by royal decree, so that Alexander's daughter became her father's legal heir, though she did not thereby acquire any rights in respect to the throne. ALEXANDER III., known as THE GREAT (356-323 B.C.), king of Macedon, was the son of Philip II. of Macedon and Olympias, an Epirote princess. His father was pre-eminent for practical genius, his mother a woman of half-wild blood, weird, visionary and terrible; and Alexander himself is singular among men of action for the imaginative splendours which guided him.

and among romantic dreamers for the things he achieved. He was born at Pella in 356 B.C., about October (Hogarth, pp. 284 seq.) . The court at which he grew up was the focus of great activ ities, for Philip, by war and diplomacy, was raising Macedon to the headship of the Greek states, and the air was charged with great ideas. To unite the Greek race in a war against the Persian empire was set up as the ultimate mark for ambition, the theme of idealists. The great literary achievements of the Greeks in the 5th century lay already far enough behind to have become in vested with a classical dignity; the meaning of Hellenic civiliza tion had been made concrete in a way which might sustain enthusi asm for a body of ideal values, authoritative by tradition. And upon Alexander in his i4th year this sum of tradition was brought to bear through the person of the man who beyond all others had gathered it up into an organic whole : in 343-342 Aristotle (q.v.) came to Pella at Philip's bidding to direct the education of his son. We do not know what faculty the master-thinker may have had for captivating this ardent spirit ; at any rate Alexander carried with him through life a passion for Homer, however he may have been disposed to greyer philosophic theory. But his educa tion was not all from books. The coming and going of envoys from many states, Greek and Oriental, taught him something of the actual conditions of the world. He was early schooled in war. At the age of 16 he commanded in Macedonia during Philip's absence and quelled a rising of the hill-tribes on the northern border; in the following year (338) he headed the charge which broke the Sacred Band at Chaeronea. Then came family dissen sions such as usually vex the polygamous courts of the East. In 337 Philip repudiated Olympias for another wife, Cleopatra. Alexander went with his mother to her home in Epirus, and, though he soon returned and an outward reconciliation between father and son was contrived, their hearts were estranged. The king's new wife was with child ; her kinsmen were in the ascend ant ; the succession of Alexander was imperilled. Some negotia tions which Pixodarus, the satrap of Caria, opened with the Mace donian court with a view to effecting a marriage alliance between his house and Philip's, brought Alexander into fresh broils. In Philip was suddenly assassinated whilst celebrating at Aegae the marriage of his daughter to Alexander I. of Epirus in the pres ence of a great concourse from all the Greek world. It is certain that the hand of the assassin was prompted by someone in the background ; suspicion could not fail to fall upon Alexander among others. But guilt of that sort would hardly be consistent with his character as it appears in those early days.

Accession.—Alexander was not the only claimant to the vacant throne, but, recognized by the army, he soon swept all rivals from his path. The newly born son of Philip by Cleopatra, and Alex ander's cousin Amyntas, were put to death, and Alexander took up the interrupted work of his father. That work was on the point of opening its most brilliant chapter by an invasion of the great king's dominions; the army was concentrated and certain forces bad already been sent on to occupy the opposite shore of the Hellespont. The assassination of Philip delayed the blow, for it immediately made the base, Macedonia, insecure, and in such an enterprise, plunging into the vast territories of the Persian empire, a secure base was everything. Philip's removal had made all the hill-peoples of the north and west raise their heads and set the Greek states free from their fears. A demonstration in Greece, led by the new king of Macedonia, momentarily checked the agitation, and at the diet at Corinth Alexander was recognized as captain-general (iry€µwv avroKparwp) of the Hellenes against the barbarians, in the place of his father Philip. In the spring of 335 he went out from Macedonia northwards, struck across the Balkans, by the Koja or Shipka pass, frustrating the mountain warfare of its tribes by a precision of discipline which, probably, no other army of the time could have approached, and traversed the land of the Triballians (Rumelia) to the Danube. To gratify his own imagination or strike the imagination of the world he took his army over the Danube and burnt a settlement of the Getae upon the other side. Meanwhile the Illyrians had seized Pelion (Pliassa), which commanded the passes on the west of Macedonia, and from the Danube. Alexander marched straight thither over the hills. He had hardly restored Macedonian prestige in this quarter when he heard that Greece was aflame. Thebes had taken up arms. By a forced march he took the Thebans completely by surprise, and in a few days the city, which a generation before had won the headship of Greece, was taken. There were to be no half-measures now ; the city was wiped out of existence with the exception of its temples and the house which had been Pindar's. Greece might now be trusted to lie quiet for some time to come. The Panhellenic alliance (from which Sparta still stood aloof) against the barbarians was renewed. Athens, although known to be hostile at heart to the Macedonian power, Alexander treated all through with eager courtesy.

Invasion of Asia Minor.

Inthe spring of 334, Alexander crossed with an army of between 30,00o and 40,00o men, Mace donians, Illyrians, Thracians and the contingents of the Greek states, into Asia. The place of concentration was Arisbe on the Hellespont. Alexander himself first visited the site of Troy and there went through those dramatic acts of sacrifice to the Ilian Athena, assumption of the shield believed to be that of Achilles and offerings to the great Homeric dead, which are significant of the poetic glamour shed, in the young king's mind, over the whole enterprise, and which men will estimate differently according to the part they assign to imagination in human affairs. To meet the invader the great king had in Asia Minor an army certainly not much larger than Alexander's, if as large, gathered under the satraps of the western provinces at Zeleia. He had also, what was more serious, command of the Aegean. Alexander could com municate with his base only by the narrow line of the Hellespont, and ran the risk, if he went far from it, of being cut off altogether. To draw him after them, while avoiding a conflict, was sound strategy for the Persian generals. It was urged upon them by their colleague the Rhodian Memnon.

Granicus.—Strategicconsiderations were cancelled by the Persian barons' code of chivalry, and Alexander found them waiting for him on the banks of the Granicus. It was a cavalry melee, in which the common code of honour caused Macedonian and Persian chieftains to engage hand to hand, and at the end of the day the relics of the Persian army were in flight, leaving the high-roads of Asia Minor clear for the invader. Alexander could now accomplish the first part of the task belonging to him as captain-general to the Hellenes, that liberation of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, for which Panhellenic enthusiasts had cried out so long. He went to take possession of the old Lydian capital Sardis, the headquarters of the Persian government on this side of the Taurus, and the strong city surrendered without a blow. And now in all the Greek cities of Aeolis and Ionia the oligarchies or tyrants friendly to Persia fell, and democracies were estab lished under the eye of Alexander's officers. Only where the cities were held by garrisons in the Persian service, garrisons composed mainly of Greek mercenaries, was the liberator likely to meet with any resistance. From Ephesus indeed the garrison fled upon the news of Granicus, but Miletus required a siege. The Persian fleet in vain endeavoured to relieve it, and Miletus did not long hold out against Alexander's attack. It was at Halicarnassus that Alex ander first encountered the stubborn resistance, at Halicarnassus where Memnon and the satraps of Caria had rallied what land forces yet belonged to Persia in the west. When winter fell, Alexander had captured the city itself, but the two citadels still held out against his blockade.

Meanwhile Alexander was making it plain that he had come not merely as captain-general for a war of reprisals, but to take the Persian's place as king of the land. The conquered provinces were organized under Macedonian governors and in Caria a de throned princess of the native dynasty, Ada, was restored to power. In the winter, whilst Parmenio advanced upon the central plateau to make the occupation of Phrygia effective, Alexander himself passed along the coast to receive the submission of the Lycians and the adherence of the Greek cities of the Pamphylian sea-board. The hills inland were the domain of fighting tribes which the Persian government had never been able to subdue. To conquer them, indeed, Alexander had no time, but he stormed some of their fortresses to hold them in check, and marched through their territory when he turned north from Pamphylia into the interior. The point of concentration for the following year's campaign had been fixed at Gordium, a meeting-place of roads in Northern Phrygia. The story of Alexander's cutting the fatal "Gordian knot" on the chariot of the ancient Phrygian king Gordius is connected with his stay in this place.

Extension of Alexander's Power.

WhilstAlexander had been grounding his power in Asia Minor, he had run a narrow risk of losing his base in Europe. He had after the siege of Miletus disbanded the Graeco-Macedonian fleet, surrendering for the time all attempts to challenge the command of the Aegean. Memnon the Rhodian, now in supreme command of the Persian fleet, saw the opportunity to detach the Greek island-states where discontent always smouldered in Alexander's rear. But Memnon died at the critical moment whilst laying siege to Mytilene and the great plan collapsed. A Persian fleet still held the sea, but it effected little, . and presently fresh Graeco-Macedonian squadrons began to hold it in check. It was, however, the need to ensure command of the sea and free all lines of communication behind him that determined Alexander's plan for the next campaign. If he mastered the whole coast-line of the Levant, the enemy's fleet would find itself left in the air. The Syrian coast was accordingly his immediate objective when he broke up from Gordium for the campaign of 333. He was through the Cilician Gates bef ore the Persian king, Darius III., had sent up a force adequate to hold them. His passage through Cilicia was marked by a violent fever that arrested him for a while in Tarsus, and meantime a. Persian army was waiting for him in northern Syria under the command of Darius himself. In the knot of mountains which close in about the head of the Gulf of Alexandretta, Alexander, following hard by the coast, marched past the Persian army whilst it was cross ing the Amanus chain more to the East: Battle of Issus.—Tocut Alexander's communications with the rear, Darius now committed the error of entangling his large force in the mountain defiles. Alexander turned, and near the town of Issus fought his second pitched battle, sending Darius and the relic of his army in wild flight back to the East.' It was an incident which did not modify Alexander's plan. He did not press the pursuit far, although the great king's camp with his harem fell into his hands. The chivalrous courtesy which he showed to the captive princesses was a favourite theme for later rhetoricians. He went on his way to occupy Syria and Phoenicia. It is now that we get definite evidence as to the scope of Alexander's de signs; for Darius opened negotiations in which he ultimately went so far as to offer a partition of the empire, all west of the Eu phrates, to be Alexander's. Alexander refused the bargain and definitely claimed the whole.' The conquest of the Phoenician coast was not to be altogether easy, for Tyre shut its gates and for seven months Alexander had to sit before it—one of those obstinate sieges which mark the history of the Semitic races. When it fell, Alexander had the old Tyrian people scattered to the winds, sold as slaves. Gaza offered a resistance equally heroic, lasting two months, and here too the old population was dis persed. The occupation of the rest of Syria and Palestine pro ceeded smoothly, and after the fall of Gaza Alexander's way lay open into Egypt.' Egypt was the last of the Mediterranean provinces to be won, and here no defence was made. To the native Egyptians Alexander appeared as a deliverer from the Persian tyranny, and he sacrificed piously to the gods of Mem phis. The winter (332-331) which Alexander spent in Egypt saw two memorable actions on his part. One was the expedition (problematic in its motive and details) to the oracle of Zeus Ammon (Oasis of Siwa), where Alexander was hailed by the priest as son of the god, a belief which the circle of Alexander, and perhaps Alexander himself, seem hereafter to have liked to play 'See Bauer, "Die Schlacht bei Issus" in Jahreshe f to d. osterr. archdol. Instit. ii., pp. io5 f.; A. Janke, Auf Alex. d. grossen Pfaden; Gruhn, Das Schlacht f eld von Issus; Lammert in Berl. Philol. Wochenschr. (1905), col. 1,596 f.

De Alex. Mag. epist. commercio (Dorpat, 1893) ; Schwartz, art. "Curtius" in Pauly-Wissowa, col. 1,884.

story of Alexander's visit to Jerusalem rests on no better authority than a later Jewish romance. .

with in that sort of semi-serious vein which still allowed him in the moments of every-day commonplace to be the son of Philip. The other action was the foundation of Alexandria at the Canopic mouth of the Nile, the place destined to be a new com mercial centre for the eastern Mediterranean world which Alex ander had now taken in possession, to rise to an importance which the founder, although obviously acting with intention, can hardly have foreseen. (E. Keller, Alex. d. Grosse nach der Schlacht bei Issas, i 904) • Invasion of Persia.—Inthe spring of 331 Alexander could at last leave the Mediterranean to strike into the heart of the Persian empire, for by his occupation of the coasts the Persian command of the sea had inevitably collapsed. Returning through Syria, and stopping at Tyre to make final arrangements for the conquered provinces, he traversed Mesopotamia and struck the Tigris some four marches above the site of Nineveh. It was near Nineveh that Darius was waiting with an army, stronger in cavalry than in infantry, mustered from all parts of the empire. The happy coincidence of a lunar eclipse gives us Sept. 20, 331, as the exact day upon which the Macedonian army crossed the Tigris.

Battle of

Arbela.—Alexander came within sight of the Per sian host without having met with any opposition since he quitted Tyre. He had now to settle the most serious problem which had yet faced him, for in the plains the Persian army was formi dable by sheer bulk. But the day showed the Macedonian army equal to the task. The last army gathered by an Achaemenian king was shattered in the battle called popularly after the city of Arbela some 6om. distant, or more precisely after the village of Gaugamela hard by. Darius fled eastwards into Media and again Alexander waited till he had secured the provinces to the south. He followed the Tigris into Babylonia, the central seat of the empire and its richest region, and from Babylon went on to seize the fabulous riches which the Persian kings had amassed in their spring residence, Susa. Thence he at last ascended upon the Iranian plateau. The mountain tribes on the road (the Uxii, Persian Huzha), accustomed to exact blackmail even from the king's train, learnt by a bitter lesson that a stronger hand had come to wield the empire. Alexander entered Persis, the cradle of the Achaemenian house, and came upon fresh masses of treasure in the royal city, Persepolis. He destroyed the royal palace by fire, an act which has been variously estimated by historians. Ostensibly a solemn revenge for the burning of Greek temples by Xerxes, it has been justified as a symbolical act calculated to impress usefully the imagination of the East, and condemned as a senseless and vainglorious work of destruction.

With the spring of 33o Alexander was prepared for further pursuit. Darius fled northwards from Ecbatana upon his ap proach. At Ecbatana new masses of treasure were seized, but when once the necessary measures which its disposal and the occupation of the Median capital entailed were taken, Alexander continued the pursuit. It was an exciting chase of king by king, in which each covered the ground by incredible exertions, shed ding their slower-going followers as they went, past Rhagae (Rai) and the Caspian gates, till early one morning Alexander came in sight of the broken train which still clung to the fallen king. He had become a puppet in the hands of his cousin Bessus and the Persian magnates with him (see DARIUS III.), and at this ex tremity they stabbed him and allowed Alexander to become master only of his corpse (summer 33o).

The pursuit had brought Alexander into that region of moun tains to the south of the Caspian which connects western Iran with the provinces to the east of the great central desert. To conquer this remaining portion of the empire, Alexander now went on through the mountain belt, teaching the power of his arms to the hillsmen, Tapyri and Mardi, till he came, passing through Zadracarta (Asterabad), to Parthia and thence to Aria. In these farther provinces of Iran the Macedonian invader had for the first time to encounter a serious national opposition, for in the west the Iranian rule had been merely the supremacy of an alien power over native populations indifferent or hostile. Here the ruling race was at home. In Asia, Alexander learnt that Bessus had taken the diadem as Darius's successor in Bactria, but so soon as he marched against him Aria rose in his rear, and Alex ander had to return in haste to subdue the revolt. Nor did he, when this was accomplished, again strike directly at Bac tria, but made a wide turning movement through Seistan over Kan dahar into the Kabul valley. It was on the way, in Seistan at Prophthasia (mod. Farrah?), that the alienation between Alex ander and his Macedonian followers, which becomes sensible in the latter part of his career, first showed itself in an ugly form. Alexander had come to merge the characters of Macedonian king and Hellenic captain-general, with which he had set out, in that of Oriental despot (Spieker, Hof u. Hofordnung Al. d. Gr., I904)• He wore on occasions of state the Persian dress. (According to pseudo-Plutarch, de fort. Al. i. 8, it was the simpler Persian dress, not the Median.) A discontent began to work among the Mace donians, and at Prophthasia the commander of the Mace donian cavalry, Philotas, the son of Parmenio, and certain others were arraigned before the army on the charge of conspiring against the king's life. They were condemned and put to death. Not sat isfied with procuring this, Alexander had Parmenio himself, who had been left in command in Media, put to death by secret orders. It is perhaps the worst crime, because the most cold-blooded and ungenerous, which can be laid to his charge. By the winter of 329.– 328 Alexander had reached the Kabul valley at the foot of the Paropamisadae (Hindu Kush).

The ordinarily received chronology makes Alexander reach the Kabul valley in the winter of 330-32g. That to fit the actions and distances covered by Alexander into such a scheme, assuming that he went by Seistan and Kandahar, would involve physical impossi bilities has been pointed out by Count Yorck v. Wartenburg and D. G. Hogarth.

Northern India.

Inthe spring of 328 Alexander crossed the Hindu Kush into Bactria and followed the retreat of Bessus across the Oxus and into Sogdiana (Bokhara). Here Bessus was at last caught and treated with the barbaric cruelty which the rule of the old Persian monarchy prescribed for rebels. Till the spring of 327 Alexander was moving to and fro in Bactria and Sogdiana, beat ing down the recurrent rebellions and planting Greek cities. Just as in 335 he had crossed the Danube, so he now made one raid across the frontier river, the Jaxartes (Sir Daria), to teach the fear of his name to the outlying peoples of the steppe (summer 328). And meanwhile the rift between Alexander and his Euro pean followers continued to show itself in dark incidents—the murder of Clitus at Maracanda (Samarkand), when Alexander struck down an old friend, both being hot with wine ; the claim that Alexander should be approached with prostration (proskyne sis), opposed somewhat strangely by the philosopher Callisthenes, Aristotle's nephew, who had come in the king's train and em broidered his history of the campaign with gross flatteries; the conspiracy of the pages in Bactria, which was made an occasion for putting Callisthenes to death. It was now that Alexander completed the conquest of the provinces north of the Hindu Kush by the reduction of the last mountain strongholds of the native princes. In one of them he captured Roxana, the daughter of Oxyartes, whom he made his wife. Before the summer of 327 he had once more crossed the Hindu Kush on his way to India (for the campaigns in the north-east see F. von Schwarz, Alex. d. Grossen Feldzuge in Turkestan, v. 1893).

'Whilst the heavier troops moved down the Kabul valley to Peucelaotis (Charsadda) under Perdiccas and Hephaestion, Alex ander with a body of lighter-armed troops and cavalry pushed up the valleys which join the Kabul from the north—through the regions now known as Bajour, Swat and Buner, inhabited by Indian hill peoples, as fierce then against the western intruder as their Pathan successors are against the British columns. The books give a number of their "cities" reduced by Alexander— walled mountain villages which can in some cases be identified more or less certainly with places where the clans are established to-day. The crowning exploit was the reduction of Aornus,1 a stronghold perched on a precipitous summit above the Indus, which it was said that Heracles had failed to take. How much of the story of Alexander's discovery of the sacred mountain of the Nysa and the traces of Dionysus is due to the invention of Aristo, bulus and Clitarchus (Arrian did not find it in Ptolemy) we cannot say. Meantime Perdiccas and Hephaestion had built a bridge over the Indus, and by this in the spring of 326 Alexander passed into the Punjab (at Ohind, 16m. above Attock, according to Foucher, Notes sur la geogr. anc. du Gandhcira, igo2). The country into which he came was dominated by three principalities, that of Ambhi (Gr. Omphis, Curt. viii. 12. 6) between the Indus and the Hydaspes (Jhelum, Jehlam), centred in the great city of Tak kasila (Gr. Taxila), that of the Paurava rajah (Gr. Porus) be 'Sir Aurel Stein believes that he has discovered Aornus; .see Geo graphical Journal, vol. 7o, No. 6, pp. 515-54o, 1927.

tween the Hydaspes and Acesines (Chenab), and that of Abhisara (Gr. Abisares) between the same two rivers higher up, on the confines of Kashmir (Stein, Rajatarangini, transl. bk. i. 18o, v. 217). The king of Taxila and Porus were at enmity, and for this cause the invader could reckon upon Omphis as a firm ally. Porus was prepared to contest the passage of the Hydaspes with all his strength. Abisares preferred to play a double game and wait upon events. Alexander reached the Hydaspes shortly before the rains broke, when the river was already swollen. Porus held the opposite bank with a powerful army, including 200 elephants. Alexander succeeded in taking a part of his forces across the river higher up during a night of torrential rain, and then he f ought the fourth and last of his pitched battles in Asia, the one which put to proof more shrewdly than any of the others the quality of the Macedonian army as an instrument of war, and yet again emerged victorious. Porus fell sorely wounded into his hands.' Porus had saved his honour, and now Alexander tried, and not in vain, to gain him as a friend. When he continued his progress eastwards across the Acesines, Porus was an active ally. Alexander moved along close under the hills. After crossing the Hydraotes (Ravi) he once more came into contact with hostile tribes, and the work of storming petty towns began again. Then the Hyphasis (Beas) was reached, and here the Macedonian army refused to go any farther. It was a bitter mortification to Alexander, who probably believed that he had not much farther to go to reach the ocean and the eastern limit of the inhabited world. For three days the will of king and people were locked in antagonism; then Alexander gave way ; the long eastward movement was ended ; the return began.

The Return.

Alexanderleft the conquered portion of India east of the Indus to be governed under Porus, Omphis of Taxila, and Abisares, the country west of the Indus under Macedonian governors, and set out to explore the great river to its mouth (for the organization of the Indian provinces, see especially Niese, vol. i., pp. 500). The fleet prepared on the Hydaspes sailed in Nov. 326, while a land army moved along the bank. The conflu ence of the Hydaspes and Acesines passed, the Macedonians were once more in a region of hostile tribes with towns to be stormed. It was at one of these, a town of the Malli, that a memorable incident occurred, such as characterized the personality of Alex ander for all succeeding time. He leapt from the wall with only three companions into the hostile town, and, before the army be hind him could effect an entrance, lay wounded almost to death.' He recovered and beat down the resistance of the tribes, leaving them annexed to the Macedonian satrapy west of the Indus. Below the confluence of the Punjab rivers into the single stream of the Indus the territory of loose tribes was succeeded by another group of regular principalities, under the rajahs called by the Greeks Musicanus, Oxycanus and Sambus. These opposed a national re sistance to the Macedonians, the fires of which were fanned by the Brahmans, but still the strong arm of the western people pre vailed. The rajah of Patala at the apex of the Indus delta aban doned his country and fled. It was the high summer of 325 when Alexander reached Patala. From there he explored both arms of the delta to the ocean, now seen by the Macedonians for the first time. He had determined that the Indus fleet should be used to explore this new world and try to find a waterway between the Indus and the Persian Gulf. A great part of the land-forces had been already sent off under Craterus in the earlier summer to re turn west by Kandahar and Seistan; the fleet was to sail under the Greek Nearchus from the Indus mouth with the winter mon soon ; Alexander himself with the rest of the land-forces set out in Sept. 325, to go by the coast of Baluchistan, through the ap palling sand-wastes of the 'Beside V. Smith (cited below) see Schubert, "Die Porusschlacht," in Rhein. Mus. lvi., 1901, p. 543.

'There seems nothing to fix the exact spot of this town ; the common identification with Multan is, according to Raverty and V. Smith, certainly wrong.

the Indian campaigns of Alexander see especially McCrindle, Invasion of India by Alexander the Great (1896) ; Vincent A. Smith, Early History of India (1904), and the references there given to the researches of Sir T. H. Holdich, Raverty and Foucher ; A. Anspach, De Alex. Magni exiled. ind. (1903).

He would seem to have kept down to the coast until the head land of Ras Malan was reached, scattering before him the bands of Arabitae and Oritae who were the inhabitants of this well provisioned tract. For the 15o miles between Ras Malan and Pasni, Alexander was compelled by the natural barriers to march inland, and it was here that his troops sank under the horrors of heat and thirst and sand. The coast once regained, the way was easy ; no such desert had to be traversed, when Alexander again struck inland for the chief city of the Gedrosians (Pura), and thence made his way into Carmania. Here the spent troops rested; here the army of Craterus joined them, and Nearchus came to announce his safe arrival at the entrance of the Persian gulf.' The machine of empire had not functioned altogether smoothly while the king had been absent, and on Alexander's reappearance many incapables and rogues in high office had to be replaced by better men. In Carmania, in Persis, complaints from the provinces continued to reach him, as well as the news of disorders in Mace donia and Greece. New orders and appointments served to bring the empire into hand again, and at Susa in the spring of Alexander rested, the task of conquering and compassing the Achaemenian realm achieved. The task of its internal reorganiza tion now began to occupy him—changes, for instance, in the mili tary system which tended to assimilate Macedonians and Orientals. The same policy of fusion was furthered by the great marriage festival at Susa, when Alexander took two more wives from the Persian royal house, married a number of his generals to Oriental princesses, and even induced as many as he could of the rank-and file to take Asiatic wives. This policy did not allay the discontent of the Macedonian army, and when Alexander in the summer of 324 moved to the cooler region of Media, an actual mutiny ui the Macedonians broke out on the way at Opis on the Tigris. It was occasioned by the discharge of the Macedonian veterans, and only the personal magnetism of Alexander and his threat to en trust himself altogether to the Orientals availed to quell it. At Ecbatana the death of Hephaestion for a time plunged Alexander into a passion of mourning. But by the winter (324-323) he was again active, bringing the hill-tribes on the south-west border of Media, the Cossaei, into subjection. In the spring of 323 he moved down to Babylon, receiving on the way embassies from lands as far as the confines of the known world, for the eyes of all nations were now turned with fear or wonder to the figure which had appeared with so superhuman an effect upon the world's stage. The embassy from Rome, however, is almost cer tainly a later, and an inevitable, invention. The exploration of the waterways round about the empire was Alexander's immediate concern, the discovery of the presumed connection of the Caspian with the Northern Ocean, the opening of a maritime route from Babylon to Egypt round Arabia. The latter enterprise Alexander designed to conduct in person; under his supervision was prepared in Babylon an immense fleet, a great basin dug out to contain 1,00o ships, and the water-communications of Babylonia taken in hand. Innovations were carried out in the tactical system of the army which were to modify considerably the methods of fu ture battle-fields. At last all was ready; the loth of the month Daesius (? June 5) was fixed for the king's setting forth. On the i 5th and i 6th Alexander caroused deep into the night at the house of the favourite Medius. On the 17th he developed fever; for a time he treated it as a momentary impediment to the ex pedition; but on the 27th his speech was gone, and the Mace donian army was suffered to pass, man by man, through his chamber to bid him farewell. On the 28th (June 13) Alexander died.' His son by Roxana, the so-called ALEXANDER "AECVS," was born a few months later. He and his uncle Philip, as joint kings, were placed under the guardianship of Perdiccas, Peithon and Anti pater in succession. After the death of Antipater (3i9) Roxana fled with him to Epirus, and was afterwards taken back to Mace 'Tomaschek, "Topographische Erlauterung der Kustenfahrt Nearchs' in the Sitzungsberichte der kaiserl. Akad. d. Wissensch. of Vienna (Philosoph.-histor. Klasse, vol. cxxi.) ; Major P. M. Sykes, Ten Thou sand Miles in Persia (1902) , pp. 166 et seq.

Alexander's funeral see F. Jacoby in Rhein. Mus. (19o3), pp. 461 et seq.

donia, together with Olympias, by Polyperchon. All three fell into the hands of Cassander ; Alexander and his mother were put to death in 31 o-309 by order of Cassander (Justin xiv. 6, xv. 2) . The meaningless surname of Aegus, still given in some books to this Alexander, is perhaps derived from a modern misreading of the text of the Astronomical Canon, AIFOT for AAAOT.

Character and Policy.

Alexanderthe Great is one of the instances of the vanity of appealing from contemporary disputes to "the verdict of posterity"; his character and his policy are esti mated to-day as variously as ever. Certain features—the high physical courage, the impulsive energy, the fervid imagination— stand out clear ; beyond that disagreement begins. That he was a great master of war is admitted by most of those who judge his character unfavourably, but even this has been seriously ques tioned (e.g., by Beloch, Griech, Gesch. iii. p. 66). There is a dispute as to his real designs. That he aimed at conquering the whole world and demanded to be worshipped as a god is the tra ditional view. Droysen denies the former, and Niese maintains that his ambition was limited by the bounds of the Persian em pire and that the claim to divine honours is fabulous (Historische Zeitschr, lxxix., 1897, i f.). It is true that our best authority, Arrian, fails to substantiate the traditional view satisfactorily; on the other hand those who maintain it urge that Arrian's inter ests were mainly military, and that the other authorities, if in ferior in trustworthiness, are more complete in range of vision. Of those, again, who maintain the traditional view, some, like Niebuhr and Grote, regard it as convicting Alexander of mad ambition and vainglory ; whilst to Kaerst, Alexander only incor porates ideas which were the timely fruit of a long historical development. The policy of fusing Greeks and Orientals again is diversely judged. To Droysen and Kaerst it accords with the historical conditions; to W. W. Tarn, whose chapters in the Cambridge Modern History, vol. vi., give an able survey of Alex ander's career in the light of the most recent studies, it was one of Alexander's great contributions to history; to Grote and to Beloch it is a betrayal of the prerogative of Hellenism.

Some notion of the personal appearance of Alexander may be got from the literature and the surviving monuments. He is de scribed as of an athletic frame, though not taller than the com mon, and a white and ruddy complexion. The expression of his eyes had something "liquid and melting" (rtvv oµµarwv 6L6A each Kai iryporrlra) and the hair which stood up over his fore head gave the suggestion of a lion. He had a way of carrying his head somewhat aslant. (See especially Plut. Alex. 4 ; de Alex. fort. ii. 2.) The greatest masters of the time executed portraits of him, Lysippus in sculpture, Apelles in painting and Pyrgoteles in graven gems. Among surviving monuments, we have no com pletely certified portraits except the Tivoli herm (now in the Louvre) and the coins struck by his successors. The herm is a dry work and the head upon the coins shows various degrees of idealization. There are, however, a considerable number of works which can make out a better or worse claim either to be por traits of Alexander or to reproduce his type, and a large field of discussion is therefore open as to their values and classification (F. Kopp, fiber dos Bildnis Alexanders d. Grossen (1892) ; K. J. Ujfalvy, Le Type physique d'Alexandre le Grand (1902) ; T. Schreiber, Studien Tuber das Bildnis Alexanders d. Grossen (i 9o3) ; J. J. Bernoulli, Die erhaltenen Darstellungen Alexanders d. Gros sen (I 905) . Alexander shaved clean, and set the fashion in this respect for the Graeco-Roman world for the next 50o years. The campaigns and life of Alexander did not lack contemporary historians, some of them eye-witnesses and even associates. They in cluded the philosopher Callisthenes, put to death by Alexander in 327, whose history went up to the death of Darius, Alexander's general Ptolemy, afterwards king in Egypt ; Nearchus, who commanded the fleet that sailed from the Indus to the Persian Gulf ; Onesicritus, who served as pilot in the same fleet, and Aristobulus who was with Alexander in India. Clitarchus, whose highly coloured version of the life of Alexander became the popular authority for succeeding genera tions, is now believed to have written in the 3rd century A.D. Besides the historical narrative, there were works mainly geographical or topo graphical left by persons like Baeton and Diognetus, whom Alexander had employed (as f3npartai a%) to survey the roads over which he passed. All such original sources have now perished. The fragments are collected in the Didot edition of Arrian by Karl Muller. Not reckoning scattered notices, we depend principally upon five later compositions, Diodorus, book xvii. (c. 20 B.e.), the work of Quintus Curtius (c. A.D. 42), Plutarch's (c. A.D. 45-125) Life of Alexander, Arrian's Ana basis and Indica (c. A.D. i5o), and the relevant books of Justin's abridgement (2nd cent. A.D.) of the history of Trogus (c. io B.C.?). To these we may add the Latin I tinerarium Alexandri, a skeleton outline of Alexander's campaigns dedicated to the Emperor Con stantius (A.D. 324-361), printed at the end of the Didot edition of Arrian, and the Epitome Rerum Gestarum Alexandri magni, an abridgement made in the 4th or 5th century of a lost Latin work of uncertain date, combining history with elements taken from the Romance (edited by O. Wagner, Leipzig, iqoo). The relation of these works to the various original sources constitutes the critical problem before the modern historian in reference to the history of Alexander. A bibliography of modern literature bearing on Alexander will be found connected with Mr. W. W. Tarn's chapters in the Cambridge Ancient History, vol. vi. (E. R. B.)