The possibility of its accomplishment was equally the result of geographical conditions. Macedonia is not quite Greece. It is more remote from the sea than any of the states of Greece; it has the largest rivers and the largest valleys of all Greece. Thus the Mace donians were not seamen as were the Greeks; they were landmen and mountaineers for the most part. They were civilized to a considerable extent by their nearness to the Greeks, yet because of their remote ness from the sea they retained more of their primitive habits, especially obedience to the authority of their chiefs. This made them excellent soldiers, in particular when fighting became more of a science, when energy was economized in fighting and the army became more of a machine, when some thousands of men were drilled to act as one. Somewhat remote from attack themselves, it was natural that when the time came, they should be successful, where men of other states had failed, in imposing their authority on all Greece.
Nor was Macedonia, like Persia, without all knowledge of the sea ; expansion beyond the river valleys brought her at once into touch with the far-projecting penin sulas of Chalcidice, with its many merchant cities de pendent on the sea. Further expansion brought her at once to a position by which she was able to control the Hellespont.
She was thus in a very different position from either Persia or Sparta, the other powers essentially based on the land, who had attempted to control Greece. The former from afar attempted to control the sea cities of Asia Minor; the latter for a short time, across the water of which she was not really mistress, had held the Hellespont. The position of Macedonia, as a land power holding the sea, was stronger than that of either ; there are no islands round Ohalcidice to form a base for an opposing sea-power, and the whole coast is within easy reach.
It was to be expected that with something new in life learned from the geographical conditions, the race of men inhabiting this mountain land should not pass away without having exerted some influence on their world ; it is conceivable that one of the other Greek states might have produced men who could do what Philip and Alexander accomplished, but if forces which had their origin in Greece were ever to overrun the world, it is most natural that they should come from Macedonia. Here, on the one hand, with a continent behind it, the idea of a land empire would have much more effect, and it would be much more evident that conquest of land must be by an army ; and, on the other hand, there would not be the fear of the sea natural to landmen, but it would be recognized, by acute minds at any rate, that the control of the sea was necessary as a preliminary condition.
Philip, taking advantage of the jealousy of the Greeks, bound all the separate units of Greece to Macedonia. Alexander the Great by means of fleet and army, a combination now used on a large scale successfully for the first time, conquered nearly all the lands that had a claim to be called civilized, and let in the flood of Greek civilization on the whole of Asia Minor, Egypt, Meso potamia, the Persian Plateau, Turan, and even for a moment stirred the peoples of India, who, largely shut off from all else, had slowly been perfecting a civilization of their own.
The Greek ideal was, however, not empire but politics. The empire had been set up by two men, while the capabilities of the Greeks for government were un changed. It is little wonder, then, that after Alex ander's death all his empire should have tumbled to pieces, that the natural geographical units—Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Asia Minor, Greece and Thrace— should have fallen into different hands ; that, in the turmoils that followed, these lands should gradually have drawn apart, though for the most part ruled by Greek or Macedonian dynasties; that Greece itself should still have been disturbed by internal dissensions, and that in no long time it should have been absorbed into the new empire of the west.
But the sea still continued to control Grecian history. The whole eastern end of the Mediterranean was per meated by Greek civilization. Greek cities arose in foreign lands. For the first time the capital of Egypt was placed by the sea. The ancient capitals of Thebes and Memphis were inland ; when the Greeks ruled, they had to place their capital, Alexandria, where they could gain fresh strength from their base of operations in Hellas over the water. Antioch, too, owed its growth and importance to its position in the gate between the highlands on the north and south, where, by way of the Euphrates, access might be had to Babylonia; and it was related not only to the sea-approach but to the land-approach, where the traveller coming by the land way from Byzantium, skirting the drier region in the centre of Asia Minor, has to make his choice between Babylonia or Egypt.
Though in the lands of Syria and Egypt the Greeks remained only as merchants and rulers, a caste apart, yet they gave an idea of social unity to the whole area which had been the world, and when again after centuries the Roman Empire in its turn broke up, the Greek city of Byzantium, controlling the coasts of the Aegean and the Black Sea, remained the seat of a great eastern empire, and these coasts were the last remnants of that Eastern empire to be submerged by the flood of Turkish races.
And the contrasts remain still; the Greeks still remain in the coasts and islands of the Aegean ; modern Greece was one of the first nations to appear independent of Turkish rule, and that independence was won for her by a sea-fight on her western shores at Navarino. Once again Salonica and Chalcidice are under Greek rule, but the coasts of Asia Minor inhabited by Greeks are held by a power based on the land.