The Historians' History of the World 03

It was of far more importance that Hellenism had a task in the West like that in the East; to save the Greeks of Italy and Sicily, to overcome the Carthaginians and the tribes of Italy, to turn the whole Mediterranean into a Greek sea, was just as urgently necessary as the conquest of Western Asia. It was the aim that Alcibiades had set himself and on which Athens had gone to wreck.

In the same years in which the Macedonian king was conquering the Persians, his brother-in-law, Alexander of Epirus, at the request of Tarentum, had devoted himself to this task. After some success at the beginning he had been overcome by the Lucanians and Bruttians and the opposition of Hellenic particularism (334-331 B.C.).

Now the Macedonian king made preparations to take up this work also and thus complete his conquest of the world. That the resources of Macedonia were inadequate for this purpose was perfectly clear to him. Since he had rejected the proposals of Darius he had employed the conquered Asiatics in the government of his empire, and above all had endeavoured to form an auxiliary force to his army out of the people that had previously ruled Asia. In his naïve overvaluation of education, due to the Socratic belief in the omnipotence of the intellect, he thought he could make Macedonians out of the young Persians. But as ruler of the world he must no longer bear the fetters which the usage of his people and the terms of the Hellenic league put upon him. He must stand above all men and peoples, his will must be law to them, like the commandment of the gods. The march to Ammon (331 B.C.), which at the time enjoyed the highest regard in the Greek world, inaugurated this departure. This elevation of the kingship to divinity was not an outgrowth of oriental views, although it resembles them, but of political necessity and of the loftiest ideas of Greek culture—of the teaching of Greek philosophy, common to all Socratic schools, of the unlimited sovereignty of the true sage, whose judgment no commandment can fetter; he is no other than the true king.

Henceforth this view is inseparable from the idea of kingship among all occidental nations down to our own times. It returns in the absolute monarchy that Cæsar wished to found at Rome and which then gradually develops out of the principate of Augustus, until Diocletian and Constantine bring it to perfection; it returns, only apparently modified by Christian views, in the absolute monarchy of modern times, in kingship by the grace of God as well as in the universal monarchy of Napoleon, and in the divine foundation of the autocracy of the Czar.

But Alexander was not able to bring his state to completion. In the midst of his plans, in the full vigour of youth, just as a boundless future seemed to lie before him, he was carried off by death at Babylon, on the thirteenth of June, 323 B.C., in the thirty-third year of his age.

With the death of Alexander his plans were buried. He left no heir who could have held the empire together; his generals fought for the spoils. The result of the mighty struggles of the period of the Diadochi, which covers almost fifty years (323-277 B.C.), is, that the Macedonian empire is divided into three great powers; the kingdom of the Lagidæ, who from the seaport of Alexandria on the extreme western border of Egypt control the eastern Mediterranean with all its coasts, and the valley of the Nile; the kingdom of the Seleucidæ, who strive in continual wars to hold Asia together; and the kingdom of the Antigonidæ, who obtained possession of Macedonia, depopulated by the conquest of the world and again by the fearful Celtic invasion (280), and who, when they wish to assert themselves as a great power, must attempt to acquire an ascendency in some form or other over Greece and the Ægean Sea.