D. G. Hogarth

“ As sole ruler of the vast area between the Danube and the Sutlej Alexander was to have no successor. But if we think of an empire as the realm of a race or nation, Greater Macedonia, though destined gradually to be diminished, would outlive its founder by nearly three hundred years; and moreover, in succession to it, another Western empire, made possible by his victory and carried on in some respects under his forms, was to persist in the East for several centuries more. As a political conquest, Alexander's had results as long lasting as can be credited to almost any conquest in history. ”

“ The Assyrian colossus which bestrid the west Asiatic world has failed and collapsed, and the Medes and the Chaldaeans--these two clouds no bigger than a man's hand which had lain on Assyria's horizon--fill her seat and her room. As we look back on it now, the political revolution is complete; but had we lived in the year 600 at Asshur or Damascus or Tyre or Tarsus, it might have impressed us less. A new master in the East did not and does not always mean either a new earth or a new heaven. ”

“ The knowledge that what the East demanded could be provided easily and safely even by Macedonians in the Nile valley alone was doubtless present to the sagacious mind of Ptolemy when, letting all wider lands pass to others, he selected Egypt in the first partition of the provinces.
The Greek, in a word, had only his philosophies to offer to the religiosity of the East. But a philosophy of religion is a complement to, a modifying influence on, religion, not a substitute sufficient to satisfy the instinctive and profound craving of mankind for God. ”

“ For Hellenism was and remained essentially a property of communities small enough for each individual to exert his own personal influence on political and social practice. So soon as a community became, in numbers or distribution, such as to call for centralized, or even representative, administration, patriotism of the Hellenic type languished and died. It was quite incapable of permeating whole peoples or of making a nation, whether in the East or anywhere else. Yet in the East peoples have always mattered more than cities, by whomsoever founded and maintained. ”

“ As it would be again in the age of the Crusades, in that of the Grand Companies, and in that of the Napoleonic conquests, every soldier knew that it rested only with himself and with opportunity, whether or no he should die a prince. It was a time for reaping harvests which others had sown, for getting anything for nothing, for frank and unashamed lust of loot, for selling body and soul to the highest bidder, for being a law to oneself. In such ages the voice of the priest goes for as little as the voice of conscience, and the higher a man climbs, the less is his faith in a power above him. ”

“ While this craving always possessed the Asiatic mind, the Greek himself, never naturally insensible to it, became more and more conscious of his own void as he lived in Asia. What had long stood to him for religion, namely passionate devotion to the community, was finding less and less to feed on under the restricted political freedom which was now his lot everywhere. Superior though he felt his culture to be in most respects, it lacked one thing needful, which inferior cultures around him possessed in full. ”

“ Among them, as in all societies, there were found temperaments to which transcendental speculation appealed, and these increasing in number, as with the loss of their freedom the city-states ceased to stand for the realization of the highest possible good in this world, made Orphism and other mystic cults prevail ever more and more in Hellas. But when Alexander carried Hellenism to Asia it was still broadly true that the mass of civilized Hellenes regarded anything that could not be apprehended by the intellect through the senses as not only outside their range of interest but non-existent. ”

“ As for the Seleucid kings themselves they leave on us, ill-known as their characters and actions are, a clear impression of approximation to the traditional type of the Greek of the Roman age and since. As a dynasty they seem to have been quickly spoilt by power, to have been ambitious but easily contented with the show and surface of success, to have been incapable and contemptuous of thorough organization, and to have had little in the way of policy, and less perseverance in the pursuit of it. ”

“ Before, however, we become absorbed in contemplation of a struggle which will take us into a wider history, let us pause a moment to consider the nature of the new power come out of the East, and the condition of such of its subject peoples as have mattered most in the later story of mankind. It should be remarked that the new universal power is not only non-Semitic for the first time in well-certified history, but controlled by a very pure Aryan stock, much nearer kin to the peoples of the West than any Oriental folk with which they have had intimate relations hitherto. ”

“ Having won the East, however, these irreligious Macedonians found they had under their hand a medley of peoples, diverse in many characteristics, but almost all alike in one, and that was their religiosity. Deities gathered and swarmed in Asia. Men showed them fierce fanatic devotion or spent lives in contemplation of the idea of them, careless of everything which Macedonians held worth living for, and even of life itself. Alexander had been quick to perceive the religiosity of the new world into which he had come. ”

“ Europe may and probably will prevail there again; but since it must be by virtue of a civilization in whose making a religion born of Asia has been the paramount indispensable factor, will the West even then be more creditor than debtor of the East? ”

“ The weakest spot in the Assyrian Empire proved weakest in the Persian. The natural barriers of desert, swamp and sea, set between Egypt and the neighbouring continent, are so strong that no Asiatic Power, which has been tempted to conquer the rich Nile valley, has ever been able to keep it long. Under its own leaders or some rebellious officer of its new masters it has reasserted independence sooner or later, and all history is witness that no one, whether in Asia or in Europe, holds Egypt as a foreign province unless he holds also the sea. ”

“ It is clear that they had little else to complain of than absence of a democratic freedom which, as a matter of fact, some of them had not enjoyed in the day of their independence. The satraps seem to have been supplied with few, or even no, Persian troops, and with few Persian aides on their administrative staff. The Persian element in the provinces must, in fact, have been extraordinarily small--so small that an Empire, which for more than two centuries comprehended nearly all western Asia, has left hardly a single provincial monument of itself, graven on rock or carved on stone. ”

“ Never was a fairer field for hostile enterprise, or one more easily harried without fear of reprisal, and well knowing this, Assyria set herself from Ashurnatsirpal's time forward systematically to bully and fleece Syria. It was almost the yearly practice of Shalmaneser II to march down to the Middle Euphrates, ferry his army across, and levy blackmail on Carchemish and the other north Syrian cities as far as Cilicia on the one hand and Damascus on the other. ”

“ Territories which formerly were overridden by the greater states, Babylonia, Egypt, Cappadocia and Assyria, seem to be not only self-governing but free from interference, although the vanished empires and a recent great movement of peoples have left them with altered political boundaries and sometimes with new dynasties. None of the political units has a much larger area than another, and it would not have been easy at the moment to prophesy which, or if any one, would grow at the expense of the rest. ”

“ Therefore, any definite venture into Asia aroused envy, not enthusiasm, among those who would be forestalled by its success. Neither with ships nor men had any leading Greek state come forward to help Alexander, and by the time he had taken Miletus he realized that he must play his game alone, with his own people for his own ends. Thenceforward, neglecting the Greeks, he postponed his march into the heart of the Persian Empire till he had secured every avenue leading thither from the sea, whether through Asia Minor or Syria or Egypt. ”

“ When we look at the East again in 600 B.C. after two centuries of war and tumultuous movements we perceive that almost all its lands have found fresh masters. The political changes are tremendous. Cataclysm has followed hard on cataclysm. The Phrygian dynasty has gone down in massacre and rapine, and from another seat of power its former client rules Asia Minor in its stead. The strongholds of the lesser Semitic peoples have almost all succumbed, and Syria is a well-picked bone snatched by one foreign dog from another. ”

“ It was so little affected after all by the West that in due time its religiosity would be pregnant with yet another religion, antithetical to Hellenism, and it was so little weakened that it would win back again all it had lost and more, and keep Hither Asia in political and cultural independence of the West until our own day. If modern Europe has taken some parts of the gorgeous East in fee which were never held by Macedonian or Roman, let us remember in our pride of race that almost all that the Macedonians and the Romans did hold in Asia has been lost to the West ever since. ”

“ An instinctive effort to realize it was his habitual attitude towards life. His motto anticipated the Roman poet's "I am human: nothing human do I hold no business of mine!"
By the time the Western conquest of Asia was complete, this attitude, which had grown more and more prevalent in the centres of Greek life throughout the fifth and fourth centuries, had come to exclude anything like religiosity from the typical Hellenic character. A religion the Greek had of course, but he held it lightly, neither possessed by it nor even looking to it for guidance in the affairs of his life. ”

“ The society so recognized was not a family or a tribe, but a city and its proper district, distinguished from all other cities and their districts. The geographical configuration and the history of Greece, a country made up in part of small plains ringed in by hills and sea, in part of islands, had brought about this limitation of political communities, and had made patriotism mean to the Greek devotion to his city-state. ”

“ For example, in History, the ill-defined period called the Middle and Dark Ages makes a considerable hiatus before, in the process of retrospection, we get back to a civilization which (in Europe at least) we ordinarily regard as Ancient. Again, in History, we distinguish commonly two provinces within the undoubted area of the Ancient, the Prehistoric and the Historic, the first comprising all the time to which human memory, as communicated by surviving literature, ran not, or, at least, not consciously, consistently and credibly. ”

“ The Persians, with the intelligence and versatility for which their race has always been remarkable, passed very rapidly from overweening contempt to excessive admiration of the Greeks. They set to work almost at once to attract Hellenic statesmen and men of science to their own society, and to make use of Hellenic soldiers and sailors. We soon find western satraps cultivating cordial relations with the Ionian cities, hospitably entertaining Greeks of distinction and conciliating Greek political and religious prepossessions. ”

“ The broad lands which are now Afghanistan, Russian Turkestan, the Punjab, Scinde, and Beluchistan had been subdued by him in person and were being held by his governors and garrisons. This Macedonian Greek who had become an emperor of the East greater than the greatest theretofore, had already determined that his Seat of Empire should be fixed in inner Asia; and he proposed that under his single sway East and West be distinct no longer, but one indivisible world, inhabited by united peoples. ”

“ If the Phoenicians were feeling the thrust of Steppe peoples, their southern neighbours, the Philistines, who had lived and grown rich on the tolls and trade of the great north road from Egypt for at least a century and a half, were feeling it too. During some centuries past there had come raiding from the south-east deserts certain sturdy and well-knit tribes, which long ago had displaced or assimilated the Canaanites along the highlands west of Jordan, and were now tending to settle down into a national unity, cemented by a common worship. ”