THE SECRET OF ALEXANDER.
MHE discovery of the sarcophagus of Alexander at Saida, in
Syria, is, if truly reported, an interesting incident ; but it will not help the historian much. The body has almost certainly perished, or if it were embalmed, we shall learn from seeing the mummy little that we did not know from coins and statues, and the tradition which has lived so long and burned so brightly. What men now desire of antiquarians and explorers, is to find for them new facts which may reveal to them more fully the personality of the wonderful boy with Shelley's face made strong, the first of European mankind who broke by force into the secluded life of Asia, and so stamped the impression of him- self into two continents, that to the Arab who knows nothing but his own legends, and the Hindoo peasant who knows nothing at all, his name is as familiar as to the European. We know in an unusually minute and, so to speak, in- telligible way the sources of his power ; we know that he must have been a true genius, a "daimonic being," rare as that character has been among legitimate dynasts— we cannot recall another of the first rank—but we know
comparatively little of the real character of the man who at twenty-two set out deliberately intending to master the world, and who in twelve years of a life magnificently full, conquered alike Greece and Persia, Egypt and Afghanistan, Turkey in Asia and the Punjab ; who stood master in Thebes, Babylon, and Samarcand ; who made the march we dare not try, through Beloochistan ; who founded a city which continued to flourish through ancient history, and the new barbarian time, and the Middle Ages, and modern history, and flourishes even now, though the greater conquerors of whose island Alexander had never heard, were supposed but yesterday to have burned it up ; who, above all, dared believe that he could reconcile Europe and Asia, and who alone among mankind succeeded, while he lived, in realising that dream. Alexander, as painted by historians, is still a sort of monster, a man with irreconcilable qualities, a wise statesman, a great ruler, a soldier beyond compare, gifted with insight that seemed independent of knowledge and almost supernatural, and yet amidst it all nearly a lunatic. There are points in his character which are as yet absolutely unintelligible, and it is chiefly on one of these that the present writer has to-day a word to speak.
About the beginning of the seventh century B.C., a family called the Temenids, which Dr. Curtius thinks may have sprung from a cadet of the great house of the Heraclidm, and which certainly claimed to be so descended, appeared among the fierce clans of the Macedonian highlands, and gradually assumed a position and pursued a policy which resemble with curious exactness those of the earlier Hohenzollerns. Always brave and competent men, always fighting, and generally victorious, they from generation to generation mastered, or conciliated, or bribed their neighbours, advanced their claims to an undefined superiority, and were at last recognised as in some more or less titular sense Kings in Macedonia. It was a kingship like that of the Stuarts in Scotland, which maintained itself above a hundred half-independent lower jurisdictions. At length, more than two centuries after its appearance, the race produced a great man, "Philip of Macedon," who, if we only knew of his difficulties as we know of his successes, would probably be pronounced one of the greatest Kings who ever lived. Born a barbarian, but bred a Greek in Thebes, he com- bined the barbaric force which in Greece had begun to wane, with the Hellenic intelligence and varied range of intellectual interest. He protected Aristotle, and he mastered Greece. A good soldier, a great diplomatist, a sound financier— he had discovered the value of honesty, and his gold coin was held in such esteem as was afterwards won by the by zant of Constantinople or the English sovereign—he was, above all, a capable administrator. Coercing or pur- chasing all his clan-chiefs, paying his followers regularly, and holding out magnificent hopes, he was able to keep together a small standing army, whom he called his companions, and, finally, by introducing what we now style "the conscription," to form a body destined to be known through all history as the Macedonian soldiers. The highlanders of Macedonia, aided by recruits from the North, supplied him with magnificent material ; their chiefs, whose descent rivalled or surpassed his own, he turned into efficient officers ; and he imposed upon all a discipline which many stories show to have been as rigid as that of Rome. When his army was complete, he found himself possessed of a weapon so matchless in his day, that he believed himself capable of conquering Greece, and even of trying conclusions with the Great King. He had, it would seem from all accounts, an army of fifty thousand men, four-fifths of whom were trained to charge with a long bayonet (sarim) in the resistless formation known as the phalanx, fed by the conscription with probably twelve thousand recruits a year, and drilled and disciplined like modern Germans. His work had been done when he had forged this weapon, and he died, murdered, in 336 B.C.
His son should by all analogies, previous and subsequent, have been a weak man of the indolently reflective, or even indolently sensual type, the force of a family exhausting itself in a man like Philip; but Nature had a kindness for the race of the Temenids. Philip's wife, Olympias, was a fiercely able woman of the Sarah Jennings type, with a power of saying things at once witty and brutal; and the race, drawing near its end, flowered in Alexander. The statesman-soldier of ability was succeeded by a man with the highest genius at once for war and statesmanship, a lad who at sixteen grudged victory to his father lest nothing should be left for him to do, who at eighteen crashed
the previously irresistible Theban organisation, and at twenty- two saw the Great King, as great to him at least as the Czar is to the King of Servia, flying before his arms, and at thirty was not only master of what his people knew as "the world," but was a master who had developed loyalty in the conquered. We are not about to weary our readers with his history ; that, so far as it can be known, is known well enough, though what we think its supreme incident has been generally forgotten ; our only business is with the quality in his mind which gave Alexander his surpassing strength. Recollect, he had neither experience nor the results of experience to help him. Neither he nor his had ever fought the Persians. He had no proof that his army was the resistless machine it proved itself to be. He had no reason for believing that, with an army not equal to a Persian division, he could conquer the Great King in his own home,—nay, every reason against it, for the Persians numbered millions, and were so little an exhausted or " effete " race that Alexander himself, the best judge on such a point of all mankind, believed that, with Persian soldiers only, he could conquer the Oriental world. He knew nothing, except from travellers' tales, of the countries he was to invade ; his notions of their geography were like the notions of schoolboys about South America ;—he took the Oxus for a continuation of the Don, and was astounded by the tide in the Persian Gulf,—yet he dared stake his throne, and his leadership in Greece, and all that leadership might yield him, on his chance of subduing what must have seemed to him like a new planet. No doubt in entering Asia "he broke," as Pyrrhus afterwards said, "into the women's chamber," while Pyrrhus himself, in meeting the Romans, "found himself in the men's;" and no doubt, also, with his wonderful insight, be may hays suspected the per- manent secret of Asia, which is that nowhere on the continent at any time has there been any race which, unmoved by religious feeling, could withstand for a day the onset of a competent European force. From Darius to Surajah Dowlah, that record has always been the same. But then, though he might have suspected this, he could not have known it, any more than he could have known the second secret of Asia, —which is, that her weakness is the weakness of an ocean that gives way to every keel, and every swimmer, and every little fish, but closes in on their path again, and remains for all their passage, swift and stormy as it may be, unchanged and im- mutable. Always throughout history the European wins, but always the Asiatic survives, and sits calmly reflecting upon death and eternity above his conqueror's grave. What was the secret of Alexander's magnificent audacity?
We believe it to have been mental courage springing from a quality in Alexander which in its degree was almost without a parallel. No man in history of whose mind we know anything, unless, indeed, it were Benvenuto Cellini, ever had a similar self- consciousness. Every story, every myth, every act recorded about Alexander, indicates this quality as the one which dominated his character. He felt in himself from the first, powers which in their degree, if not in their nature, separated him from all children of men, and gradually grew—what shall we say— intoxicated with the sense of his own genius. So brave, that the officers of the phalanx seemed like cowards by his side ; so learned in the knowledge of his day, that scholars were to him but ignorant men ; such a strategist, that he had nothing to learn from experience ; such a statesman by instinct, that his very victims were ready to die for him against his own followers, and all the while a lad, his veins full to bursting with life, capable of all enjoyment, even of the mad drinking-bouts of his highland chieftains, he stood in his own sight so separate from the ruck of mankind, that he half- doubted if he belonged to the same breed. His thoughts which produced such results, which, for example, crushed armies twenty- fold his own in number, seemed to him like inspirations. He began to ask—sincerely ask, and not as modern men would fancy—whether there must not be in himself something of the divine, some trace of actual godhead, some unknown relationship with the beings above man, from one of whom he, probably in all earnestness, believed himself descended. We of this century do not know the full difference between our thoughts and the thoughts of the men of old, and assume that Julius Ca3sar, in his ostentatious cult of Venus, his divine ancestress, was "playing to the gallery ;" but what if he believed it, or half- believed it, himself, and derived from it much of the audacity to master Rome ? There is no evidence whatever that Alexander was a sceptic, and to the Pagan of old, as to the Hindoo of to-
day, direct descent from the gods seemed neither monstrous nor unlikely, was, in fact, a concrete equivalent for what moderns call inspiration. It is certain that Alexander made a long and painful march into the desert only to ask of a great Oracle if he were indeed a son of Jupiter, that the response confirmed an inner conviction in his mind, and that thenceforward till he died, he expressed it so strongly as to rouse the angry scorn of his greatest captains, and to draw from Olympias the haughtily satirical remonstrance that "Alexander was always embroiling her with Juno." That sense of supernatural power once in his mind, separated him from all the remainder of humanity, made Persians and Greeks equal before his eyes, so that in one supreme hour of his life, he dared break his own enchanted sword of sharpness, and disband by decree his own Mace- donian Army, and gave him the courage which, when he refused the offer of Darius to partition the world, and when he turned South to conquer India, made him seem to his com- panions half-delirious, half-divine. The single reason he gave Parmenio for rejecting the offer of the Great King, then awaiting him with half-a-million of soldiers, was, "I am Alexander ;" and his whole scheme for reaching the Ganges and founding an Empire there—a scheme which must have succeeded had his soldiers consented to go on—must have been conceived and worked out and perfected within his own brain. In a man penetrated with an idea of that kind, pitifulness could hardly exist except for the submissive, for to him, as afterwards to Mahommed, resistance and blasphemy were identical. He was not, perhaps, cruel by nature, for though he looked coolly on torture, so did the Christian Judges of Europe down almost to our own time ; and though he slew Parmenio and his son, he probably knew that his friend and counsellor, the most powerful of the Macedonian clan-chiefs, and the keeper of his treasure-house—in which was stored gold enough to buy all Greece and every mer- cenary in Europe—had plotted to supersede him. An abso- lute King hears much. Alexander knew well the bitter hatred of some of the clan-chiefs for his ascendency, and may have known, as well as suspected, the plan of dividing his mar- vellous Empire which they, aided, there can be no doubt, by their hereditary rank—for most of them were not only soldiers, but ancient nobles of Macedonia—ultimately carried out. The biting insolence of Clitus, avenged by his death from the monarch's own hand, revealed the fiery spite lurking under Macedonian deference, as much as the strange scene that followed, the volun- tary plebiscite taken by the common soldiery that Alexander was right in killing him and ought not to die of remorse, manifested his perfect hold upon the hearts of Macedonians at large. It is at least possible that his attitude as a half-divine man, above counsel and beyond patriotism, as close to the Persians he conquered as to the Macedonians by whom he con- quered them, at last irritated his great officers to madness, and that he died, as was long suspected, neither of drinking nor of marsh-fever, but of poison. Even on his death-bed the same unconquerable belief in his own personality displayed itself. It was, in his thought, to himself, the semi-divine, that all his triumphs had been due ; and though he had been bred in a hereditary policy, and had been brought up to believe himself the last of the Heracleidm, he gave no thought to his dynasty, or his possible issue, but disdainfully bade "the strongest among you" take the world, his Empire, the merest fragments of which made kingdoms that lasted till Rome mastered all, to be herself swallowed up in the fullness of time by the returning Asiatic wave. There is only a fraction now of all Alexander's dominion in Asia—for he never annexed, though he conquered the Punjab—which is not within the dominion of some brown Asiatic King.
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