ALEXANDER'S EMPIRE.* Tins is almost a model book of its
kind. As its author (or rather the chief of its two authors) says,—" The story of the conquests of Alexander has been told many times, and his name is familiar in our months as household words ; but the history of the different portions of the Great Empire that he founded, how they rapidly gained and lost their independence, and finally were absorbed into the dominions of Rome, is by no. means equally well known." To tell this complicated history, which is the story not only of Alexander, but of Selencus, Antipater, Antigonns, Lysimachus, Demetrius Poliorketes, the Ptolemies, Pyrrhus, Philip and Perseus, Aratus and his Achmans, Cleomenes and his Spartans,—to give a bird's-eye view of the philosophies of Athens, the erudition of Alexandria, and the commerce of Rhodes, and yet to bear ever in mind that "The Story of the Nations" series, to which Alexander's Empire belongs, is intended mainly for boys, is no easy task. Yet it is this work that Professor Mahaffy, aided by Mr. Gilman, has accomplished with a wonderful success, to be accounted for mainly by the fact that he is steeped in the life of what he terms " Hellenedom." But, in addition, Pro- fessor Mahaffy, who could not write ill though he tried, writes. in Alexander's Empire a 'buoyantly modern, if not a boyish style. One may dislike certain of the words he uses, or invents, to give decision to his sentences, if not comprehen- siveness to his thought, such as "prowessee." An allasion to the Princess Dolgorooki, which is intended to vivify the life- of the Court of Alexandria in the days of Philadelphus, might. have been spared ; it is to be hoped that the constituency immediately addressed by Alexander's Empire takes no interest in the Princess Dolgorouki. Again, the superficial Hellenisation of Rome in the time of Cato may be tolerably reproduced by a picture of "a Roman snob posing as an Athenian," and the Politic of a school of Greek philosophers may be pithily rather than elegantly presented in the statement that they "argued that the public was an ass, and the majority fools, and that the rule of a few select men, or of one pre-eminent person, was the only form of government fit for civilised men," but we cannot say that we admire modes of expression so ostentatiously undignified.
Alexander's Empire is over-condensed, as, indeed, it cord& hardly fail to be. We understand Professor Mahaffy's difficulties, and yet we wish that—say at the cost of cutting down the story of some minor Ptolemy or Antigonus—he had given a page or two to the four years' intimacy between Alexander and Aristotle, or even dreamed regretfully with Lewes that the philosopher had not "passed with the conquering hosts to Tyre,
• Alexander's Empire. By John Pentland Mahaffy, DI)., with the ColLabora. ties if Arthur Gilman, ILL. London T. Palter Unwin. 1887.
witnessed the foundation of Alexandria ; lived through the agitations of the day at Arbela, when the countless hosts of Darius were assembled on the plain beneath the Koordish mountains, and there were slaughtered like sheep ; witnessed the successive subjection of Babylon and Sum, Persepolis and Ecbatana ; and, finally, seen the young Dionysus, maddened with the insolence of success, cut off suddenly in his youth." (Is it quite so certain, by-the-way, that in a contest between Thais and Aristotle for the soul of Alexander, the courtesan would have won ?) Then, again, seeing that Professor Mahaffy had necessarily to deal with Pyrrhus of Epirus, who, as he truly says, "with all his kingly qualities, was really fit only for a captain of condottieri," it is to be regretted that considera- tions of space, and doubtless also a desire not to trench on ground traversed by another volume of "The Story of the Nations" series, should have led him to sum up the most romantic exploits in the career of the greatest of Alexander's imitators in this sentence,—" His adventures in Italy and Sicily belong to Roman history." That maybe; bet a chapter devoted to Pyrrhus which does not deal with these " adventures " is Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Nor are these omissions—necessary, perhaps, but yet unfortunate—the only ones that could be pointed out.
Bat, taking Alexander's Empire from Professor lifahaffy's own point of view as the perhaps too brief day of triumphant Hellenism, it must be allowed that the book suggests a very bril- liant picture of what might have been, had there been any centre or unity in that Hellenism. We know whither the ways of Providence led the victory of Rome in Europe, and the estab- lishment of the Paz Romana in Asia, were to be. Yet it is per- missible to wonder—and, in fact, Professor Mahaffy's volume compels one to wonder—what would have been the chances of Rome against a homogeneous, or even a federated Hellenedom. We know what Pyrrhus very nearly did ; we know how the -phalanx very nearly won the day at Cynoscephalas and Pydna, in the degeneracy of Macedon. We know that if Antiochus, once truly "the great," had had the wisdom to entrust the discipline and conduct of his forces to Hannibal, the Battle of Magnesia, which practically handed over Asia to Rome, might have had a very different result. But suppose Alexander had matched himself against the Roman legions—and if he had lived five years longer, the force of circumstances, if not ambition, would have forced him to so match himself—what would have happened P Professor Mahaffy himself hazards this conjecture, when dealing with Alexander's intentions on his return to Babylon from India :— " With a new army and a new organisation, apparently with a dis- position of infantry looser and more manageable than the formidable but cumbrous phalanx, he meant to start on new conquests. We do not know whether he meant to subdue Arabia, and then start for Carthage and the Pillars of Hercules, or whether be had heard enough of the Romans and their stubborn infantry, to think it his noblest path to further glory to attack Italy. The patriotic Livy thinks the Romans would even then have stopped his progress. We who look at things with clearer impartiality feel sure that the conquest of Rome, though involving hard fighting and much loss, would have been quickly accomplished. If Hannibal easily defeated the far stronger ROM11119 of the day by superior cavalry, how would the legions have withstood the charge of Alexander and his companions ? Moreover, the Macedonians had siege-trains and devices for attacking fortresses, which Hannibal never possessed. We may regard it as certain that Rome would have succambed ; bat as equally certain that upon the King's death, she would have recovered her liberty, and resumed her natural history, with this difference, that Hellenistic culture would have invaded Rome four generations earlier, and her education would have been widely different."
Perhaps so ; but on a certain supposition, things might have turned out differently. Both before and after Alexander's death, the idea of federation had a strong attraction for the Hellenic mind. It has surrounded with the halo of patriotism the memory of the shifty, if not pusillanimous Aratus. It made the Achrean League for a time a power in Hellas proper. It made the Etolian League a dangerous enemy, and a still more dangerous friend. It is at least conceivable that a greater Aratue, working in an incomparably wider field, might have federated all Hellenedom against Rome ; and when one thinks of the aid that Asia Minor, and Egypt, and Rhodes, could have brought to a Macedonian monarch established in a friendly Magna-Grrecia, and of the calibre of Alexander, or even of Demetrius Poliorketes or of Pyrrhus, who can doubt that the result would have been the same as the result of a combat between a buffalo and a boa-constrictor? Professor Mahaffy comments,in language which is not unduly severe, on the brutal treatment accorded to Rhodes by Rome in the day of her victory. But Rhodes was very nearly as great a rival of Rome as Carthago herself. As the commercial centre of a federated Hellenedom, she would have been an even greater danger than Carthage. It is not surprising, therefore, that a sort of Delenda decree should have been issued against her.
Professor Mahaffy has to be very concise in his treatment of Athens and Alexandria, as the intellectual centres of Hellenedom, although he finds room for a somewhat lengthy quotation from Calverley's version of Theocritus. His condensations are often very happy,—for example, his summing-up of Alexandria in the one word "erudition." Again, here is a good thumb-nail sketch of the ideal Stoic :—"He who co-operated with Divine Providence might be a slave, a prisoner, in misery, in torture ; yet he was really free, wealthy, royal, supreme. His judgment was in- fallible, his happiness secure. To use a modern phrase for the same kind of theory, he had found peace." Finally, here is a choice Malmffian morsel, which we find it quite impossible to withhold :—" The coteries of the museum at Alexandria were probably quite as narrow as those of the Oxford and Cambridge Dons nowadays. There was the same weighing of syllables, the same mania for emendations, the same glory to be obtained by the barren ingenuity which lays exclusive claim to the grand title of scholarship ; but then the field was new, and a great harvest was to be reaped."
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