The Martyrdom of Man - Winwood Reade (golden son ebook txt) 📗
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attending the law courts, the parliament, and the theatre. It was also
ordered that all cases of importance would be tried at Athens, and judicial
decisions then as now were looked upon at Athens as saleable articles
belonging to the court. The Greeks soon discovered that the Athenians
were harder masters than the Persians. They began to envy the fate of the
Ionian cities, whose municipal rights were undisturbed. They rose up
against their tyrant; long wars ensued; and finally the ships of Athens
were burnt and its walls beaten down to the music of flutes. Then Sparta
became supreme, also tyrannised, and also fell; and then Thebes followed
its example, till at last all the states of Greece were so exhausted that the
ambition of supremacy died away, and each city cared only for its own
life.
The jealousy and distrust which prevented the union of the Greeks, and
the constant wars in which they were engaged, sufficiently explain how it
was that they did not conquer Persian, and by this time Persia had
discovered how to conquer them. When Xerxes was on his famous
march he was told by a Greek that if he chose to bribe the orators of
Greece he could do with that country what he pleased, but that he would
never conquer it by force. This method of making war was now adopted
by the king. When Agesilaus the Spartan had already begun the conquest
of the Persian empire, ten thousand golden coins marked with the effigy
of a bowman were sent to the demagogues of Athens, Corinth, and
Thebes. Those cities at once made war upon Sparta, and Agesilaus was
recalled—driven out of Asia, as he used to say, by ten thousand of the
king’s archers. In this manner the Greek orators, who were often very
eloquent men but who never refused a bribe, kept their country
continually at war, till at last it was in such an enfeebled state that the
Persian had no longer anything to fear, and even used his influence in
making peace. The land which might have been the mistress of the East
passed under the protection of an empire in its decay.
It was now that a new power sprang into life. Macedonia was a hilly
country on the northern boundaries of Greece; a Greek colony having
settled there in ancient times, the reigning house and the language of the
courts were Hellenic; the mass of the people were barbarians. It was an
old head placed on young shoulders—the intellect of the Greek united
with the strength and sinews of wild and courageous mountaineers.
The celebrated Philip, when a young man, had passed some time in
Greece; he had seen what could be done with money in that country; he
conjectured what might be done if the money were sustained by arms.
When he became king of Macedon, he made himself president of the
Greek confederation, obtaining by force and skilful address, by bribery
and intrigue, the position which Athens and Sparta had once possessed.
He was preparing to conquer Persia and to avenge the ancient wrongs of
Greece when he was murdered, and Alexander, like Frederick the Great,
inherited an army disciplined to perfection and the great design for which
that army had been prepared.
Alexander reduced and garrisoned the rebellious Greeks, passed over into
Asia Minor, defeated a Persian army at the Granicus, marched along the
Ionian coast, and crossed over the snowy range of Taurus, which the
Persians neglected to defend. He heard that the Great King was behind
him with his army entangled in the mountains. He went back, won the
battle of Issus, and took prisoner the mother and wife and daughter of
Darius. He passed into Syria and laid siege to Tyre, the Cherbourg of the
Persians, and took it after several months; this gave him possession of the
Mediterranean Sea. He passed down the Syrian coast, crossed the
desert—a three days’ journey—which separates Palestine from Egypt,
received the submission of that satrapy and made arrangements for its
administration, visited the oracle of Jupiter Ammon in The Sahara, and
returned to Tyre. Thence making a long detour to avoid the sandy deserts
of Arabia, he entered the plains of Mesopotami, inhabited only by the
ostrich and the wild ass, and marched towards the ruins of Nineveh, near
which he fought his third and last great battle with the Persians. He
proceeded to Babylon, which at once opened its vast gates. He restored
the Chaldean priesthood and the old idolatry of Belus. He took Susa,
Ecbatana, and Persepolis, the other three palatial cities, reducing the
highlanders who had so long levied black mail on the Persian monarchs.
He pursued Darius to the moist, forest-covered shores of the Caspian Sea,
and inflicted a terrible death on the assassins of that ill-fated king. The
Persian histories relate that Alexander discovered Darius apparently dead
upon the ground. He alighted from his horse; he raised his enemy’s head
upon his knees; he shed tears and kissed the expiring monarch who
opened his eyes and said, “The world has a thousand doors through which
its tenants continually enter and pass away.” “I swear to you,” cried
Alexander, “ I never wished a day like this. I desired not to see your
royal head in the dust, nor that blood should stain these cheeks.” The
legend is a fiction, but it illustrates the character of Alexander. Such
legends are not related of Genghis Khan or of Tamerlane by the people
whom they conquered.
Alexander now marched by way of Mushed, Herat, and the reedy shores
of Lake Zurrah to Kandahar and Kabul. He entered that delightful land in
which the magpies fluttering from tree to tree, and the white daisies
shining in the meadow grass, reminded the soldiers of their home.
Turning again towards the north, he climbed over the lofty back of the
Hindu Kush, where the people are kept inside their houses half the year
by snow, and descended into the province of Bactria, a land of low,
waving hills, destitute of trees and covered only with a dry kind of grass.
But as he passed on, crossing the muddy waters of the Oxus, he arrived at
the oases of Bokhara and Samarkand, regions of garden-land with smiling
orchards of fruit trees and poplars rustling their silvery leaves. Finally he
reached the banks of the Jaxartes, the frontier of the Persian empire.
Beyond that river was an ocean of salt and sandy plains, inhabited by
wild Tartar or Turkish tribes who boasted that they reposed beneath the
shade neither of a tree nor of a king, who lived by rapine like beasts of
prey, and whose wives rode forth to attack a passing caravan if their
husbands happened to be robbing elsewhere—a practice which gave rise
to the romantic stories of the Amazons. These people came down to the
banks of the river near Khojend and challenged Alexander to come across
and fight. He inflated the soldiers’ tents, which were made of skins,
formed them into rafts, paddled across and gave the Tartars as much as
they desired. He returned to Afghanistan and marched through the
western passes into the open plains of the Punjab, where perhaps at some
future day hordes of drilled Mongols and Hindu sepoys will fight under
Russian and English officers for the empire of the Asiatic world. He built
a fleet on the Indus, sailed down it to its mouth, and dispatched his
general Nearchus to the Persian Gulf by sea, while he himself marched
back through the terrific deserts which separate Persian from the Indus.
So ended Alexander’s journey of conquest, which was marked not only
by heaps of bones on battlefields and by the blackened ashes of ruined
towns, but also by cities and colonies which he planted as he passed. The
memory of that extraordinary man has never perished in the East. The
Turkomans still speak of his deeds of war as if they had been performed a
few years ago. In the tea booths of Bokhara it is yet the custom to read
aloud the biography in verse of Secunder Rooni—by some believed to be
a prophet, by others one of the believing genii. There are still existing
chiefs in the valleys of the Oxus and the Indus who claim to be heirs of
his royal person, and tribes who boast that their ancestors were soldiers of
his army, and who refuse to give their children in marriage to those who
are not of the same descent.
He returned to Babylon, and there found ambassadors from all parts of
the world waiting to offer him the homage of their masters. His success
was incredible; it had not met with a single check. The only men who
had ever given him cause to be alarmed were his own countrymen and
soldiers, but these also he had mastered by his skill and strength of mind.
The Macedonians had expected that he would adhere to the constitution
and customs of their own country, which gave the king small power in
time of peace and allowed full liberty and even licence of speech on the
part of the nobles round the throne. But Alexander now considered
himself not king of Macedonia but emperor of Asia, and successor of
Darius, the King of Kings. They had supposed that he would give them
the continent to plunder as a carcass; that they would have nothing to do
but plunder and enjoy. There were disappointed and alarmed when they
found that he was reappointing Persian gentlemen as satraps, everywhere
treating the conquered people with indulgence, everywhere levying native
troops. They were disgusted and alarmed when they saw him put on the
tiara of the Great King, and the woman’s girdle, and the white and purple
robe, and they burst into fierce wrath when he ordered that the ceremony
of prostration should be performed in his presence as it had been in that
of the Persian king.
In all this they saw only the presumption of a man intoxicated by success.
But Alexander knew well that he could only govern an empire so
immense by securing the allegiance of the Persian nobles; he knew that
they would not respect him unless they were made to humble themselves
before him after the manner of their country, and this they certainly
would not do unless his own officers did the same. He therefore
attempted to obtain the prostration of the Macedonians, and alleged as a
pretext for so extraordinary a demand the oracle of Ammon—that he was
the son of Jove.
It is possible, indeed, that he believed this himself, for his vanity
amounted to madness. He could not endure a candid word, and was
subject under wine and contradiction to fits of ungovernable rage. At
Samarkand he murdered Clitus, who had insulted him grossly but who
was his friend and associate, and who had saved his life. It was a
drunken action, and his repentance was as violent as his wrath. For
Alexander was a man of extremes: his magnanimity and his cruelty were
without bounds. If he forgave it was right royally; if he punished he
pounded to the dust and scattered to the winds. Yet with all his faults it is
certain that he had some conception of the art of governing a great
empire. Mr. Grote complains that “he had none of that sense of
correlative right and obligation which characterised the free Greeks,” but
Mr. Grote describes Alexander too much from the Athenian point of
view. In all municipalities, in all aristocratic bodies, in all corporate
assemblies, in all robber communities, in all savage families or clans, the
privileged members have a sense of correlative right and obligation. The
real question is, how far and to what extent this feeling prevails outside
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