A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
26.THE EMPIRE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
From 431 to 404 B.C. the Peloponnesian War wasted Greece. Meanwhile to the north of Greece, the kindred country of Macedonia was rising slowly to power and civilization. The Macedonians spoke a language closely akin to Greek, and on several occasions Macedonian competitors had taken part in the Olympic games. In 359 B.C. a man of very great abilities and ambition became king of this little country - Philip. Philip had previously been a hostage in Greece; he had had a thoroughly Greek education and he was probably aware of the ideas of Herodotus - which had also been developed by the philosopher Isocrates of a possible conquest of Asia by a consolidated Greece.
He set himself first to extend and organize his own realm and to
remodel his army. For a thousand years now the charging horse-chariot
had been the decisive factor in battles, that and the close-fighting
infantry. Mounted horsemen had also fought, but as a cloud of
skirmishers, individually and without discipline. Philip made his
infantry fight in a closely packed mass, the Macedonian phalanx, and he
trained his mounted gentlemen, the knights or companions, to fight in
formation and so invented cavalry. The master move in most of his
battles and in the battles of his son Alexander was a cavalry charge.
The phalanx _held_ the enemy infantry in front while the cavalry swept
away the enemy horse on his wings and poured in on the flank and rear
of his infantry. Chariots were disabled by bowmen, who shot the horses.
With this new army Philip extended his frontiers through Thessaly to
Greece; and the battle of Chæronia (338 B.C.), fought against Athens
and her allies, put all Greece at his feet. At last the dream of
Herodotus was bearing fruit. A congress of all the Greek states
appointed Philip captain-general of the Græco- Macedonian confederacy
against Persia, and in 336 B.C. his advanced guard crossed into Asia
upon this long premeditated adventure. But he never followed it. He
was assassinated; it is believed at the instigation of his queen
Olympias, Alexander’s mother. She was jealous because Philip had
married a second wife.
BUST OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
BUST OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT
_(As in the British Museum)_
But Philip had taken unusual pains with his son’s education. He had
not only secured Aristotle, the greatest philosopher in the world, as
this boy’s tutor, but he had shared his ideas with him and thrust
military experience upon him. At Chæronia Alexander, who was then only
eighteen years old, had been in command of the cavalry. And so it was
possible for this young man, who was still only twenty years old at the
time of his accession, to take up his father’s task at once and to
proceed successfully with the Persian adventure.
In 334 B.C.—for two years were needed to establish and confirm his
position in Macedonia and Greece—he crossed into Asia, defeated a not
very much bigger Persian army at the battle of the Granicus and
captured a number of cities in Asia Minor. He kept along the
sea-coast. It was necessary for him to reduce and garrison all the
coast towns as he advanced because the Persians had control of the
fleets of Tyre and Sidon and so had command of the sea. Had he left a
hostile port in his rear the Persians might have landed forces to raid
his communications and cut him off. At Issus (333 B.C.) he met and
smashed a vast conglomerate host under Darius III. Like the host of
Xerxes that had crossed the Dardanelles a century and a half before, it
was an incoherent accumulation of contingents and it was encumbered
with a multitude of court officials, the harem of Darius and many camp
followers. Sidon surrendered to Alexander but Tyre resisted
obstinately. Finally that great city was stormed and plundered and
destroyed. Gaza also was stormed, and towards the end of 332 B.C. the
conqueror entered Egypt and took over its rule from the Persians.
ALEXANDER’S VICTORY OVER THE PERSIANS AT ISSUS
ALEXANDER’S VICTORY OVER THE PERSIANS AT ISSUS
_(From the Pompeian Mosaic)_
Alexander charges in on the left, Darius is in the chariot to the right
At Alexandretta and at Alexandria in Egypt he built great cities,
accessible from the land and so incapable of revolt. To these the trade
of the Phœnician cities was diverted. The Phœnicians of the western
Mediterranean suddenly disappear from history—and as immediately the
Jews of Alexandria and the other new trading cities created by
Alexander appear.
In 331 B.C. Alexander marched out of Egypt upon Babylon as Thothmes and
Rameses and Necho had done before him. But he marched by way of Tyre.
At Arbela near the ruins of Nineveh, which was already a forgotten
city, he met Darius and fought the decisive battle of the war. The
Persian chariot charge failed, a Macedonian cavalry charge broke up the
great composite host and the phalanx completed the victory. Darius led
the retreat. He made no further attempt to resist the invader but fled
northward into the country of the Medes. Alexander marched on to
Babylon, still prosperous and important, and then to Susa and
Persepolis. There after a drunken festival he burnt down the palace of
Darius, the king of kings.
THE APOLLO BELVEDERE
Thence Alexander presently made a military parade of central Asia,
going to the utmost bounds of the Persian empire. At first he turned
northward. Darius was pursued; and he was overtaken at dawn dying in
his chariot, having been murdered by his own people. He was still
living when the foremost Greeks reached him. Alexander came up to find
him dead. Alexander skirted the Caspian Sea, he went up into the
mountains of western Turkestan, he came down by Herat (which he
founded) and Cabul and the Khyber Pass into India. He fought a great
battle on the Indus with an Indian king, Porus, and here the Macedonian
troops met elephants for the first time and defeated them. Finally he
built himself ships, sailed down to the mouth of the Indus, and marched
back by the coast of Beluchistan, reaching Susa again in 324 B.C. after
an absence of six years. He then prepared to consolidate and organize
this vast empire he had won. He sought to win over his new subjects.
He assumed the robes and tiara of a Persian monarch, and this roused
the jealousy of his Macedonian commanders. He had much trouble with
them. He arranged a number of marriages between these Macedonian
officers and Persian and Babylonian women: the “Marriage of the East
and West.” He never lived to effect the consolidation he had planned.
A fever seized him after a drinking bout in Babylon and he died in 323
B.C.
Immediately this vast dominion fell to pieces. One of his generals,
Seleucus, retained most of the old Persian empire from the Indus to
Ephesus; another, Ptolemy, seized Egypt, and Antigonus secured
Macedonia. The rest of the empire remained unstable, passing under the
control of a succession of local adventurers. Barbarian raids began
from the north and grew in scope and intensity. Until at last, as we
shall tell, a new power, the power of the Roman republic, came out of
the west to subjugate one fragment after another and weld them together
into a new and more enduring empire.