Macedonian Empire

Alexander, who set out as king of the Macedonians and cap tain-general of the Hellenes, assumed after the death of Darius the character of the oriental great king. He adopted the Persian garb, including a head-dress, the diadema, which was suggested by that of the Achaemenian king. We hear also of a sceptre as part of his insignia. The pomps and ceremonies which were tradi tional in the East were to be continued. To the Greeks and Mace donians such a regime was abhorrent, and the opposition roused by Alexander's attempt to introduce among them the practice of proskunesis (prostration before the royal presence) was bitter and effectual. The title of chiliarch, "commander of a thousand," i.e., of the royal body-guard, was conferred by Alexander upon his friend Hephaestion. The Greek Chares held the position of chief usher. Another Greek, Eumenes of Cardia, was chief sec retary. The figure of the eunuch, so long characteristic of the oriental court, was as prominent as ever.

Alexander, however, who impressed his contemporaries by his sexual continence, kept no harem. The number of his wives did not go beyond two, and the second, the daughter of Darius, he did not take till a year before his death. In closest contact with the king's person were the seven, or latterly eight, body-guards, Macedonians of high rank, including Ptolemy and Lysimachus, the future kings of Egypt and Thrace. The institution, which the Macedonian court before Alexander had borrowed from Persia, of a corps of pages composed of the young sons of the nobility, continued to hold an important place in the system of the court and in Alexander's campaigns.

Macedonian Army.

The army of Alexander was an instru ment which he inherited from his father Philip. (See MACEDO NIAN ARMY.) Later modifications in the army system were closely connected with Alexander's general policy, in which the fusion of Greeks and Asiatics held a prominent place. He had himself, as we have seen, assumed to some extent the guise of a Persian king. The most striking declaration of his ideals was the marriage feast at Susa in 324, when a large number of the Macedonian nobles were in duced to marry Persian princesses, and the rank and file were en couraged to take Eastern wives. Among the schemes registered in the state papers was one for transplanting large bodies of Asiatics into Europe and Europeans into Asia, for blending the peoples of the empire by intermarriage into a single whole.

Divine Honours.

High above all the medley of kindreds and tongues, untrammelled by national traditions, invested with the glory of achievements in which the old bounds of the possible seemed to f all away, stood in 324 the man Alexander. Was he a man? The question was explicitly suggested by the report that the Egyptian priest in the oasis had hailed him as the son of Ammon. The Egyptians had ascribed deity to their kings, and

were ready enough to add Alexander to the list. It is also not unlikely that the Persian kings had received some form of divine worship. (L. Taylor, Journ. Hellenic Studies, 1927, p. 153, ff.) From the Greeks he certainly received such honours. It has been supposed that in offering such worship the Greeks showed the effect of "Oriental" influence, but certainly we have not to look outside the Greek circle of ideas to explain it. As early as Aeschylus (sop. 991) the proffering of divine honours was a form of ex pression for intense feelings of reverence or gratitude towards men which naturally suggested itself—as a figure of speech in Aeschylus, but the figure had been translated into action before Alexander not in the well-known case of Lysander only (cf. the case of Dion, Plut. Dio. 29). Among educated Greeks ration alistic views of the old mythology had become so current that they could assimilate Alexander to Dionysus without supposing him to be supernatural, and to this temper the divine honours were a mere form, an elaborate sort of flattery. Did Alexander merely receive such honours? Or did he claim them himself ? It would seem that he did. We have well-authenticated utterances of Attic orators when the question of the cult of Alexander came up for debate, which seem to prove that an intimation of the king's pleasure had been conveyed to Athens.

Commerce and Discovery.

A new life entered the lands conquered by Alexander. Human intercourse was quickened to a degree not before known. Commercial enterprise now found open roads between the Aegean and India; the new Greek cities made stations in what had been for the earlier Greek traders un known lands ; an immense quantity of precious metal had been put into circulation which the Persian kings had kept locked up in their treasuries. At the same time Alexander himself sought to win fresh geographical knowledge, to open new ways. The voyage of Nearchus from the Indus to the Euphrates was meant to link India by a waterway with the Mediterranean lands. So too Her acleides was sent to explore the Caspian; the survey, and possible circumnavigation of the Arabian coasts was the last enterprise which occupied Alexander. The improvement of waterways in the interior of the empire was not neglected, the Babylonian canal system was repaired, the obstructions in the Tigris removed. The reports of the iflµarccrraE Baeton and Diognetus, who accom panied Alexander's army, gave a more exact knowledge of the geographical conformation of the empire. Greek natural science was enriched with a mass of new material from the observations of the philosophers who went with Alexander ; on the other hand, attempts were made to acclimatize the plants of the motherland in the foreign soil.