The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

Parmenio, Philotas, Cassander, Ptolemy.
Par.
Arrived in time: our transports, there they lie!
Embark the troops! He throws on me the tasks
That need the practised hand. Calas, yon tide
Will try the nerves of your Thessalian steeds,
And point their boding ears.

Phi.
Nicanor, mark!
Sea-born Abydos beckons us with smile
Saucy as Hero's. Death is death, or else
I'd have Leander's luck.

Par.
In this, my sons,
Our visionary prince shows fair ensample:
Glory he woos, not Pleasure.

Ptol.
Glory, or Empire?
For these are twain.

Par.
And which he most affects,
Then when your chronicle is writ and ended
The Athenian dialectic shall resolve.
Old Macedon, by Greeks barbaric styled,

Thank thou thy gods, and, after them, thy snows,
The strong heart still is thine!

Cas.
How those huge galleys
Dash the dark wave to silver! Touching the king—

Par.
What know I of the king? He sits in Persia.

Cas.
I meant our Macedonian.

Par.
Alexander?
Then call him by his name. A babe, I danced him;
A child, before me held him on my horse:
I am too old to orientalize.

Ptol.
He owes you much.

Par.
A realm his father owed me,
And knew it well. The son is reverent too,
But with a difference, sir. In Philip's time
My voice was Delphic on the battle-field:
This young man taps the springs of my experience
As though with water to allay his wine
Of keener inspirations. “Speak thy thought,
Parmenio!” Ere my words are half way out
He nods approval, or he smiles dissent.
Still, there is like him none! I marvelled oft
To see him breast that tempest from the north,
Drowning revolt in the Danubian wave.
The foe in sight, instant he knew their numbers;
If distant, guessed their whereabout—how lay
The intermediate tract—if fordable
The streams—the vales accessible to horse:
'Twas like the craft of beasts remote from man.

Phi.
Father, you ever boast the king reveres you;
I say, he flouts you in the army's face:
You rail; but still he conquers.

Par.
Son, 'tis so;
Young gamesters have their luck.

Phi.
He slights you daily,

And for your sake slights me. Last eve he passed me
(His hand was heavy on Hephestion's shoulder,
The Phalanx saw it, and the Silver Shields),
Vouchsafing me no word.

Scene II.—Troy.

Hephestion, Seleucus, Craterus, Citizens, Priests.
Cra.
He likes not Troy. His gaze, that's onward ever,
Like gaze of one that watches for the dawn,
Is bent to the earth.

Sel.
Far otherwise it beamed
When, in mid channel, lifting high the bowl,
He poured to great Poseidon and the nymphs
Their dues; far other when he flung far forth
Nighing the shore, his spear that shook for gladness,
Rooted in Asia's soil!

Alexander joins them, attended by Hephestion.
Tro. Cit.
Great King of Greeks!
Welcome! Atrides treads once more in Troy!

Alex.
Where is Achilles' fane—mine ancestor's?
I see it not.

Tro. Priest.
No fanes stand here to mortals.

Alex.
Ay, mortal was his sire. His arms, where are they?

2nd Cit.
Ulysses won them by the Greeks' decree.

Alex.
The Greeks! I knew you Phrygian by your garb
And medicated voice. Whose fane is that?

2nd Cit.
'Tis Aphrodite's, sire, that won the prize
On yonder Ida.

Alex.
Ay, your Aphrodite!
She that, the Helena among the gods—
I ever scorned that son of hers, Æneas:
But for his mother's veil around him flung
Tydides' hand had slain him. Troy consumed,
Where fled he?

Tro. Priest.
First to Carthage; next to Rome:
He founded there a State.

Alex.
A fugitive
Then founded what a bandit horde built up:
The twain were aptly yoked. That State shall crumble.
Whose fane is this? 'tis small, but fair.

Tro. Priest.
Athenè's.

Alex.
A man may enter this, and unashamed:
What arms are those that shine from yonder wall?

Tro. Priest.
The arms of Greeks who died at Troy.

Alex.
Remove them!
Into whatever battle-field I ride,
Those arms shall go before me. Where they hang
Suspend the panoply I wear. Athenè,
This night 'tis dedicate to thee.

A Tro. Cit.
Great king!
Behold the boast of Troy! My kindred guard it—
The lyre of Helen's husband!

Alex.
Mark, Hephestion,
The legend-mongers at their work! 'Twas thus
They forged in Macedon that preposterous tale,
Scandalous alike to me and to my mother,
Touching great Zeus. It made the God my sire:
'Twas false! my mother to her lord was true
Till, wronged, she slew him. Juggler, your lyre's a lie!
Show it to girls! I seek Achilles' tomb.
Hephestion, be thou with me. Sirs, farewell.

[Alexander and Hephestion walk on together.

Scene III.—Troy. The Portico of Aphrodite's Temple.

Philotas and Phylax.
Phi.
Banquet at sunset! Yonder priest morose
Has barred those gates, and swears the keys are stolen!
Our revel must be here: we'll have at feast
All wit and wisdom extant in our host;—
I am its Wit, and you, good Leech, its Wisdom!
You know my cooks of old! I pray you, Phylax,
Teach them to make the dish that richliest spiced
The wholesomest likewise! I have wealth and beauty,
My father's greatness, and the army's love:
One thing remains which men like me must fear—
Sickness; a serious sickness.

Phy.
Sage, though young!
Our craft was born to make delights less baneful.

Phi.
You shun delights yourself: I pardon you,
Knowing your sour mood comes from spite, not virtue:
Age should have spite: with scoffs the dry lip quickens:—
We are friends albeit unlike.

Phy.
Unlike in likeness:
We both speak truth: in youth I lived like you:
Age—if it comes—in time will make you acrid;—
If—for the vain like you, have many foes:
I am anatomist; 'neath the flesh that is
Mine eye notes still the skeleton to be
Whose grin diverts me better than youth's smile.
How like you battle-fields?

Phi.
In thought, not much:

But when the trumpets sound their music warms me:
Not less my valour is a reasoning thing:
In the onset fenced am I by huge strong men
Whose fortunes rest on mine. There's Ptolemy!
I call him “Empty head and stately step!”
I'd rather dine upon that man than with him!
Phylax, I think you love me!

Phy.
In my way—
Not with that love which fain would die to save you,
Yet love enough to avenge if slain by wrong.

Phi.
A league!

Phy.
I swear.

Phi.
Good friend, be here at sunset!

Scene IV.—Troy: near the Tomb of Achilles.

Alexander and Hephestion.
Alex.
My master ofttimes, the wise Stagyrite,
Condemn'd the Passions, branded them as a yoke
Which Action's strenuous sons should scorn to bear,
And chiefly praised the Tragic Muse for this,
That, showing these as monsters, she with fire
Of Pity and Terror cleanses the clear soul
Lifted above all passions. This is Troy!
Dreamland ends here.

Heph.
Alas! how small an urn
Suffices for the earth-o' erstriding dust
Which one time shook the world!

Alex.
Must they too shrink,
Simois, and yon Scamander! Children ford
The flood that drown'd Greek warriors! Here the Sphinx
Makes banquet large: her riddle's hard to read.
That Ten Years' War, what fruit thereof remains?

What empire lives, its witness and its crown?
What shall we say? That those were common men
Made large by mists of Time? Or shall we rather
Conclude them real, and our age a fraud;
Determine that in them old Homer saw
Some greatness hidden from the blinded herd;
Foresaw some far result?

Heph.
Sir, from Achilles
Descendeth not Olympias?

Alex.
Ay.

Heph.
Through her
The spirit of the Strong Ones came on you:
I make my answer thus. The Trojan War
Begins its work decreed—in you begins it:
It finds not end in ashes and a song:
The empire you shall found must stand its witness.
But hush! The Tomb is here: the headstone o'er it
Half lost in brambles!

Alex.
(Anointing the pillar on the grave of Achilles).

Mighty Sire, Achilles!
Lift from the dimness of the dolorous realm
Thy face upon thy son! In it—I see it—
Survives, though sad, the unvanquishable youth;
In it alone. The phantom of a spear
Is all that now can weight that phantom hand
Which awed the Atridæ; and as though chain-bound
Move the swift feet that once outsped thy mother's
Bounding from wave to wave; yet, not the less,
Monarch thou walkest. 'Mid the Strengthless Heads
That, reverent, round thee flock—like thee lamenting,
Despite the embalm'd purpureal airs and gleam
Immeasurable of amaranthine meads,
Lamenting still the strenuous airs of earth,
And blasts from battlefields; like thee detesting

That frustrate, stagnant, ineffectual bourne
Where substance melts to shadow—lift, great king,
Once more from out the gloom a face sun-bright,
Elysium's wonder, on thy son's, and hear him:
To thee this day he consecrates his greatness:
Whate'er malign and intercepting Death
Detracted from thy greatness he concedes thee;
Remands thee from the gulf the deed unborn;
Yields thee, ere won, his victory and his empire:
This is the anointing, this the sacrifice,

Wherewith he crowns thy tomb.

[After a pause.

The night descends.
Hephestion, I depart.

[Hephestion crowns the pillar on the grave of Patroclus, and rejoins Alexander.
Alex.
You tarried:—wherefore?

Heph.
For justice's sake, and friendship's. Is there room
For nothing, then, but greatness on the earth?
I crown'd that other tomb.

Alex.
What tomb?

Heph.
It stood
Close by, the loftier;—greater love had raised it;
Patroclus' tomb.

Alex.
'Tis strange I marked it not.

Heph.
These two were friends.

Alex.
Ay; nor in death divided.

Heph.
Therefore, despite that insolent cynic sect,
The gods have care for things on earth.

Alex.
Hephestion!
That which Patroclus to Achilles was
Art thou to me—my nearest and mine inmost.
In them, not lives alone, but fates were join'd:
Patroclus died; Achilles follow'd soon.

But lo, that glare! Abydos glances forth
Through the olive copse far off. A thousand wrinkles
Even now run up Parmenio's wintry brows
Shaping our battle's scheme. It rests not with him;
Yet be it his in fancy!

Scene V.—The Palace at Susa.

The Queen of Persia.
The Queen.
The morn is stiller than the night. How sweetly
The green of yon tall garden-trees o'erlays
Those golden bars of stationary light
That cut the marbles of the palace floor!
How pleasant, too, that fount's monotonous chime,
Wakening the self-same echoes in the courts
They heard in bygone years! May no change come!

[Arsinoe and the other royal children enter.
Ars.
Here is a lily, mother, pluck'd at dawn:
The dews were on it thick; upon the dews
I laid my kiss, because for you 'twas destined:
Now dews and kiss are gone!

The Queen.
The dews lie yet
Bright on your curls; I drop my kiss upon them:
May never rude hand touch my flower! You caught
The Spring asleep, and caged it in your bosom;
I feel its songsters there!

A Younger Child.
Mother! We found
A plant that showed us butterflies for blossoms:
We clapp'd our hands to fright them, but they moved not!

The Queen.
I see no butterflies; but these warm hands

Are more to me. This is your father's birthday.
He has heard ill tidings.

Ars.
Tidings! I remember
Some gardeners told us, but in mockery only,
'Twas said that pirates from an isle far off
Which one time had been liegeful to our Persia,
Wild men who drag their living from sea-waves,
By hunger roused to wrath had flung themselves
In war against mankind. We'll sell our gems,
And bid them purchase bread.

The Queen.
Their king invades us:
From hill to hill our watch-fires flashed the news.

The Younger Child.
How fair that sight must be! May we not see it?

The Queen.
That sight! Ah, child, thou know'st not what it means!
It means the torch laid to the poor man's roof:
The hamlet—older than these Halls—a-flaming!
It means the mother's wail; the shriek of babe
Half mad with fear, yet knowing not the danger!
It means that awful silence of the brave
When hope is past. It means the stream blood-red:
It means the lately disunited lips
Of lovers, blanched with death. It means a life
Made frustrate, and the grey-beard weeping sore
Above the ruined lands his youth reclaimed.
[A pause. She proceeds.
It means God's world become the prey of demons:
It means worst passions lion-like unbound.
Ah me! ah me!

A Lady.
The great, sweet eyes grow wild!
She sees that wreck!

The Queen.
Thank God, this Persian Realm
Though vast, is unaggressive—Persia's king,

Oh how unlike this king of savage hordes!

Ars.
I thought all kings were righteous, kind, paternal!
How old may be his kingdom?

The Queen.
'Tis a realm
Novel, yet proud; made up of rocks and vales,
With here and there a field where corn can grow;
'Tis smaller than our smallest Persian province.

Astar
(entering).
Gone mad at last! They've much to make them mad!
They're mad with false philosophies, and schemes
For building cloudy fabrics, brief as clouds,
Which they style Polities. They're mad, beside,
With orators that rouse to tempest mood
The popular sea wrath-ridden. They're madder yet
With rival altars and with warring gods
More bestial than themselves. Their Greece lay long
Prone in her intertangled, blind republics,
A knot of serpents glistening in the sun:
This day, in Alexander raised too late,
She stands erect—to die.

Ars.
Can nothing save them?

Ast.
In three weeks more, their heads from Susa's walls
Will frown against the sun.

Ars.
Not so! Not so!
'Twere shame to deal with misery thus. We're strong:
The sound must needs compassionate the sick:
The wise protect the weak. Ah me, I babble.

The Queen.
Because your sisters and your head strong brother
Name you their Intercessor, and because
Your little flock salute you Little Mother,
You'd throw your veil above a rebel race,

And hide them from their doom!

Ars.
Plead for them, mother!
Our agèd Sisygambis too shall plead:
Her heart is great.

The Queen.
She walk'd a lioness once;
Butsince her brethren died she's changed: there's in her
A tremor like the tremor in a tree
Which staggers o'er the axe. Three nights, moreover,
She's vision rack'd. She saw a portent wing'd
That storm-like from the West, against the storm,
Made way, and smote the East.

Ast.
The silver altars
Lift, day and night, that ever-living flame
The witness, bodiless, yet visible,
Of Him, that Spirit all-piercing, girdling all things,
All-quickening like the sun, though seal'd from sense
Lest man should see and die. His hand alone
Shines, lightning-like, through error of man's night,
Cleansing base shapes, or else, with happier change
Of dissolution glorious, raising high
And throning in clear skies. Great Persian Realm!
Whose stable basis is the strength of man,
Whose height his hope; within whose sea-like breadth
The storms but wrestle on the lap of calm;
The vigil of whose worship draws to earth
Her peace; whose centuries, misnamed of slumber,
Are fruitfuller to man than cyclic dreams
Of seeming-wakeful nations all whose life
Is lodged in foot and tongne; great Persian Realm!
Let the fly buzz upon thy wall world-wide,
The viper creep unheeded till it reaches

Thy trampling heel!

[An acclaim is heard without.
The Queen.
That sound might wake the dead!
The king returns: his people flock to meet him.

Scene VI.—The Western side of the Granicus.

The Greek army approaches it.
Alexander, Parmenio, and other Generals.
Par.
The crown of courage, boy, is self-restraint
When clamourers goad us. Pitch thy camp. They'll fly:
At dawn we pass the flood unquestion'd.

Alex.
Greeks!
To the water's edge! (To Parmenio.)
The morning sun would daze us:
This hour it spites the foe.

Scene VII.—The Eastern bank of the Granicus.

The Persian Army commanded by Memnon of Rhodes. With him are Spithridates, Satrap of Lydia, Arsites, Satrap of Phrygia, and others.
Mem.
There's the famed Phalanx—by yon river's side—
Place the horse opposite; in them we're strongest:
Arsites, with your Phrygians guard yon bank:
Keep the south marge; nor threat them till they're crossing:
Then welcome them with javelins.

Ars.
I misdoubt
Our Grecian mercenaries.

Mem.
They will fight
If hearten'd by the event, or anger'd. Place them
On yonder rearward hill. The odds are with us.

Scene VIII.—The Western bank of the Granicus.

Alexander and his Generals.
Par.
Come what come may, this battle should be lost!
A chance may save it, or the gods may save it:—
By laws of war this battle should be lost.

Alex.
You're sure of that?

Par.
Here all things are against us;
The stream is swollen with April-melted snows;
The banks are treacherous, the fords infrequent,
And shifting with the eddies. Alexander,
You fight not here with Thracians. Mark yon mount!
Nor Dacian there, nor Mœsian rules the war:
Old Rhodian Memnon sets his teeth, and knots
The tangle of his wiles to lash you homewards:
See him there gather'd on his war-horse staid
That 'mid those trivial prancers knows to stand;
Firm-set he sits, crook-kneed, with hand o'er eyes
That slowly take their survey of the field,
A man that deals with war in the way of business.
Lo, there, he hurls his horsemen forth in squadrons!
Your Phalanx next must cross the flood. What then?
The uneven ground will loose their wedged array
Like a spread hedgehog.

Alex.
Shake our standard forth!
Let sound the trumpets! Send our battle down,
The Macedonian and Pæonian horse,
And infantry light-arm'd, upon the right;
And on the left the Thracian; in the centre
Our moving fortress, fenced with brazen walls,
Our Phalanx inexpugnable. Amyntas,

See it march, slanting, up the river's bed
There where the brighter current marks the shoal:
Already hath it served us. Persia's horse
Forms opposite, beguiled, on broken ground,
That shall not help them. March with shields high held,
For turning of their shafts.

Scene IX.—The Eastern bank of the Granicus.

The Hypaspists, Seleucus, and Cassander.
Cas.
We have left the waves behind; the worst is over!
Their shafts are straws, but these our spears have weight:
Thrust them into their faces! So—'tis well:
Spoil their fine looks, and spite their Asian brides:
Beat out Arabia's unguents from their curls:
Spare not the gem-wrought corselet!

Sel.
Alexander
Cried thus,—“My brave Hypaspists landed once,
The fight is fought, and won!” I heard him speak it!
Have at thee, silken Syrian! Next for thee,
Bactrian or Mede!

Cas.
How long it takes in crossing!
The Phalanx boasts itself a tortoise mail'd:
It moves as slowly.

[He falls, wounded by an arrow.
Sel.
Well charged, Pæonian horse! That charge has saved us!
Good friends, this blood is Persia's more than mine;
Pray gods it enter not my veins and taint them
With cowardice of Persia!

A Soldier.
Hark! it thunders!

[The Persian cavalry comes up, headed by Mithridates, and at the same moment Alexander from the opposite side.]
Alex.
(Striking down Mithridates with his spear.)
Give that to thy great cousin, King Darius!

Rhœ.
(Smiting Alexander on the helmet, which bursts asunder.)
Hail! Philip's son!

Alex.

Well aim'd, and nigh the mark!
From Philip this!

[Pierces his breast; Spithridates, riding up from behind has just raised his sword above Alexander's head when Cleitus severs his arm with a sword-cut.]

'Twas timely; Lanicè
Shall thank her brother Cleitus for that stroke;
Else had she mourn'd her foster-child.

[The Phalanx pushes against the Persian centre, which bends inward. The disorder gradually reaches the extremities of the Persian line, and the Macedonian cavalry breaks through its weaker parts. The left wing, under Parmenio, charges. The whole Persian army falls into rout.]
Alex.
The field is ours! Persia to Parthian changes!
After them, Thracian horse; but not too far!
Drive them some twenty stadia; wheeling then,
Take in the rear those Grecian mercenaries:
At them in front, strong Phalanx! close them round
Northward with your Hypaspists, brave Seleucus!
These are the Greeks that sold their Greece for gold:

Grant others mercy; let no traitor live!
How now, Parmenio? Is it their strategy
That feigns this politic flight?

Par.
Sir, all the gods
Ride in the train of your triumphant fortune,
And hold the gold-cloth o'er your head ablaze;
For your sake they reverse all laws of war:
I said they might.

Eum.
Our horse has lost but sixty:
The victory's cheap.

Alex.
See that those dead be honoured
With kingly obsequies. No man of their kin
Not one, while Greece is Greece, shall stand amerced
With civil tax or toll.

Ptol.
Two thousand prisoners—

Alex.
We'll not forget them. Let them sweat, foot-chained,
In cities both of Macedon and Greece.

Eum.
The body-guard have lost but twenty-five.

Alex.
Write on thy tablets, we decree them statues
In Pella, where my tomb shall stand one day,
My task complete. Lysippus be the sculptor:
We grace the Persian dead with funeral rites:
They fought in their allegiance. Send to Athens
Three hundred suits of armour stripped from these
The stone-cold dead: upon the Acropolis
See they be ranged—in great Athenè's fane—
With this inscription 'neath them: “Alexander,
The son of Philip, when the Persian host
Fell at Granicus, sent to Greece this spoil:
The Grecians holp to take it, save alone
The men of Lacedemon.” Grave it in marble.

Eum.
It shall be so ordain'd.

Alex.
Hephestion, send

Our noblest spoils to Ilium's maiden fane:
Let Ilium bear henceforth a city's title.

Mith.
(the governor of Sardis, arriving).
Sardis submits, laying before her king
The keys of her great treasury.

Alex.
Tell me, sir,
How many factions rage there in your city?

Mith.
Two, mighty king, the nobles and the people:
The nobles rule.

Alex.
Their rule is over-ruled:
We prop the weaker; they shall need us most.
Proclaim to Sardis that all privileges
Ravished from her by Persia, we to her
Revindicate. To Ephesian Artemis,
A goddess friendly still to Macedon,
Whose temple at our birth-hour fell by fire,
We shall be helpful likewise. Ephesus
Herself by penitence shall purge that wrong
Done to my father's statue. Tell those realms
Betwixt the Euxine and Pamphylian seas,
That Grecian galaxy of Lesser Asia,
That Argive choir in eastern exile sad,
That Doric garland on base Persia's brow,
We came not here to crush them, but exalt:
This hand shall lift them to their first estate,
And lodge them 'mid the skiey heights of Greece.
Let it be noised abroad.

Scene X.—Near the Granicus.

Philotas, Antisthenes.
Phi.
To me alone he spake no word of honour:—
Is that Hephestion's malice, or his own?

Ant.
His own. This king is valued past his worth:
I join'd his march to write his deeds, and note
He deigns to touch no book save blind old Homer.
He nothing says that's sage, like Ptolemy,
Or keen of edge like Craterus. I grant him,
Sagacity supreme in observation:
He sees with more than sight: seeing with him,
Is Act and Thought, not sense.

Phi.
'Twas said of old,
“Philip is but Parmenio:” others cried
In Thrace, “What's Alexander but Philotas!”
Yet this is he that scorns me! All save life
I'd peril for revenge.

Ant.
Nor valour here,
Nor learning meets its guerdon. Yet remember
In scheme or act to place Parmenio first;
He's rooted in the popular mind so deep
No storm can shake him. Be it whisper'd still,
“Parmenio frown'd,” “Parmenio disapproved,”
“Parmenio censured much the young man's rashness:”
When Fortune swerves the king shall bear the brunt:
Parmenio fill his throne.

Phi.
I hear of plots.

Ant.
Hear, heed, and hide; but help not. Wait, and win;
Let others run the risk.

Phi.
You'll meet at supper
Phylax, my leech.

ACT II.

Scene I.—A Sea-cliff opposite New Tyre.

Alexander
(alone).
Wings without body! Such—no more—is Commerce
Which rests not upon Empire! Commerce, ruling,
Disperses man's chief forces; commerce ruled
By spirit heroic, yields increase of thoughts
That give a wider base to greatness. Tyre!
How soon thy golden feathers forth shall fly
Upon the storm of War! Lo, where she sits
Upon her rock, wave-girt, and turret-crown'd,
Gazing toward her western daughter, Carthage!—
Tyre of the ships! Phœnicia gave us letters,
Which are to mind as fingers to the hand,
And shape, dividing, Thought's articulate world:—
For Greece she found them, using them not herself;
Men stumble thus on glories not for them,
The rightful appanage of the capable.
The Empire which I found shall tread the earth,
Yet ever it go flying. From its vans
The twin-born beams of Grecian Song and Science
Shall send perpetual dawn. Hephestion, welcome!

Heph.
(joining him).
How long you gaze on yonder beaming sea!
It burns mine eyes like fire.

Alex.

It gladdens mine,
Being irradiate and illimitable.
Hephestion, hold this map,—the sea-wind curls it—

We'll find my City's site.

[After a pause.

Not Babylon,
That vilest of dead Empires—no, not that!

Not Nineveh: Persepolis stands too far:
Ecbatana's nought, and Susa's Persian only:
Byzantium well might serve if north were all.
In Egypt is the spot. 'Tis here! I have it!
Westward, beyond Pelusium. There the Euxine
Thaws in the hot winds from the Arabian Gulf:
There meet the east and west: dusk Indian kings
Thither shall send their ivory and their gold,
And thence to far Hesperia!

Heph.
I can see it:
Hard by Canobus stretches, long and thin,
Sharp, like an adder's tongue, a promontory—

Alex.
It guards the region's harbour, one and sole:
Thereon my world's great diadem shall rest:
On Alexandria's quays Greek and Egyptian
Shall join in traffic: through the populous streets
My Phalanx shall return from conquer'd lands;
There shall old Egypt lisp our Grecian tongue
The Phidian hand subdue the hieroglyph;
Athenè share with Isis! Hail, Seleucus!
A cloud is on your countenance.

Sel.
(arriving).
Alexander!
I have fought your battles, and I love you inly
But fawn on no man's follies. What is this?
Shall soldiers sweat and toil like beasts of burthen,
And I their task-master to pare the wage?
Month after month they toil, to make this causeway
'Twixt Ancient Tyre and New; our gallant steeds
That chased so oft the foe—

Alex.
'Tis well: three stadia
The causeway's made. Remains to make the fourth:
That done, we reach the gates of Tyre, and knock.

Sel.
The fourth is thrice the three for time and labour:

We're now in deepening water: from its rock
Yon city walls ascend two hundred palms:
Their arrows gall us: on their towers they raise
Huge furnaces.

Alex.
Seleucus, all is cared for;
Two thousand arms have striven three days and more
In controversy with the centuried pine
On Libanus; in four my towers shall stand
High as their towers, and make them large reply.
Return, my friend. Tell them their king, ere long,
Will lead them into Tyre. (Seleucus departs moodily.)
Mark you, Hephestion,
They're in one tale, Seleucus and the rest:
Seleucus loves me well, nor boasts himself:
Another's gloom it is that clouds his brow:
Parmenio hates this march to Tyre and Egypt:
His mind grows leaner than the threaded sails
Of yonder bark so worn the wind goes through them:
It holds no thought that's new. I count that man
My chief of dangers. 'Tis a desperate game:
I'll have no shrewish counsellor near, to shake
My soldiers' hearts with cavils.

Heph.
Old Parmenio
Is spleenful when he thinks: he's best in action.

Alex.
I, who defer not easily to facts
Which cross my purpose, see them when they're plain:
Those which confront me reason of themselves.
Demosthenes, the wonder-working voice,
In Athens roars against me. Lacedæmon
Pushes her horn, dull Agis, at my sides:
Strong-hearted Thebes remembers. In old time
But one Thersites stood 'mid many kings;

Therein, methinks, great Homer show'd his wit;
Those States are, each, Thersites, windier grown,
And I their monarch one and sole. If Persia
Should join with those, and fire the world behind me,
Advance were hard; retreat impossible.
Therefore I cleave from Persia Tyre and Egypt,
Their ports, their ships, harbours, and mariners;
So shall she turn her face from Greece, and I
Sleep without dream. I told Parmenio this.

Heph.
He answered?

Alex.
Still the old note—“Darius arms:
A year, and all his empire will be on you.”

Heph.
He boasts a million soldiers.

Alex.
Let them come!
A moiety of their numbers fought at Issus.
Let him bring up his empire's total strength:
Be it embattled, we will bring it under.
The enmity I fear is that which lurks
A dull swamp-fever in that people's veins
Which hates its lord because it scorns itself,
And, having striven but half, knows not its limit.
This is the hate which bides its time. A realm
Shall stand confuted in war's argument
Then when its say is said: well silenced, Time
Takes still the conqueror's side.

Heph.
Is there forgiveness
For conquerors?

Alex.
Ay; but for half conquerors, none.
The realms which earlier conquerors won, they stole,
Using for personal ends. What rule all glorious
That primal usurpation counterpoised?
What victories swathed the grub in light? What hand
Beneficent in sternness, or, if soft,

Parental, not seductive, raised on high,
With virtue strengthened, or with knowledge lit
Those kingdoms subjugate? I wrest them back
In the name of honesty and upright dealing,
And give them to mankind. If sword of mine
Had slept in the iron ore for endless ages,
Spurning its call divine, the mocking gods
Bending from heaven had swept with menial besom,
As from fair pavements, dust, those menial kings,
The opprobrium of authentic royalty.
The realms I rule shall love me.

Heph.
Lesser Asia
'Tis true this day is with you.

Alex.
Persia shall be:
But till she does her best, and worst, and fails,
The work I work is temporal. Let her do it!
Then comes my time:—
Strong hand makes empire: hand that heals retains it.
I came not to be Cyrus o'er again;
Another reign begins. Enough: 'tis late:—
How fares that fallen House?

Heph.
As Patience fares
In the extreme of sadness. Sisygambis,
Under the great weight of her ninety years,
Sits heavy, slowly moving tearless eyes
Which seek her son Darius, or, it may be,
Her eighty brothers, slaughtered in one day
Long since by Ochus. She that was the queen
On the queen-mother gazes without speech,
And, pitying that high grief, tempers her own.
The royal children stand, now glad, now pensive,
'Twixt light and shade.

Alex.
I chose for them the best,
Consigning them to you.

Heph.
The palace pile
Of olden Tyre affords them kind repose:
The sea-dirge scarce can pierce its massive walls:
There they have woodland shades for grief to hide in,
And streams to lull the voice of memory.
Those Easterns call such places Paradises,
And much affect them.

Alex.
Seek that aged queen,
Hephestion. When my leisure serves I'll see her.

Scene II.—The Senate House in New Tyre.

Hanno, Hamilcar, Asdrubal, Ithocles, and other Tyrians.
Han.
He says we're merchants, and in merchant wise
We trafficked with him, and equivocated,
First sending him in pomp a golden crown,
Next, when he fain had offered vows to Melkart,
Denying access.

Asd.
Let him pray outside:
He makes no landing here.

Ith.
We're strong enough,
And victuall'd for two years. 'Twixt Greece and Persia
The issue hangs in doubt: if Greece should fail,
Persia shall be beholden much to us,
That kept her foe far from her. If she wins—

Ham.
Ten citizens have dream'd Apollo's statue,
Ta'en 'mid the chiefest spoils when Gela fell,
And now by gift of Carthage ours, stood up
Beside their beds with stormy brow though bright,
And said, “I leave this city.”

Asd.
Close those gates!
Whene'er they're opened such a din comes o'er us
From keels half laid, and blasts from new-forged engines,
I hear not him that speaks.

Ith.
The gates, ye slaves!

A Herald
(entering).
Lords of the Senate, hail!
Great Carthage honours
The queenly womb from which her greatness sprang,
Accepts your terms, the Cypriot port, and trade
In gums Arabian shared on equal terms,

And stands your mate in arms.

[Shouts of applause.
A Senator.
Who speaks of yielding?

2nd Sen.
The gods are with us.

3rd Sen.
Thus my sentence stands—
Bind we with golden chains Apollo's statue
To the altar of great Melkart! Tyre's new guest
Shall love his city. Thus the Ephesians wrought:
And with them bode their god thenceforth in peace.

Scene III.—Sea-shore near Old Tyre.

Alexander, Ptolemy, Hephestion.
Alex.
There's truth on earth still extant. Read that missive:

Ptol.
(reads aloud).
“‘The Hebrew people, subject long to Persia,
Revolt not. Neither war they with the Greek
That wrong'd them not. Their God shall guard His own.’”

Alex.
These men speak plainly; Tyre prevaricated:
These stand at neither side; but Tyre at both:
I somewhat love thee, Hierosolyma!

I'll find a time ere Tyre has met her doom
To look upon that city. Lo, Philotas!
[Philotas approaches.
He has been a-prospering, and his heart is high.

Ptol.
'Tis higher than his head; and that he tosses
As though he supp'd with gods. His thoughts, what are they?
Brain-bubbles from infructuous restlessness:
Alone the slowly-gender'd thought lives long:
The rest I deem of as the buzzing swarm
Teem'd from the mud of Nile.

Phi.
Hail, Alexander!
Damascus sups with Death!

Alex.
It ne'er was strong.

Phi.
Oh, 'tis a mighty city, and a rich!
It stands in meads well-water'd, girt with gardens
That charge the winds with fragrance. Then the captives!
Their ransom shall enrich you with a flood
Beggaring the all-gold Pactolus;—princely ladies
From Issus, and three daughters of King Ochus;
Dead Memnon's widow, and his daughters three.
We've clutch'd, 'mid other spoils, Darius' wardrobe!
If all Old Tyre were turn'd to theatre,
And all our soldiers changed to mimes, the least
Might choose his part, and play it with fit garb!
I'd end this tedious siege with one great drama,
“The tragic comedy of Persia's fall,”
(Myself the extempore Aristophanes)
And homeward speed next morn!

Alex.
The royal treasure?

Phi.
Sir, 'tis a world of ingots and of gems.

Alex.
That means a fleet. The price of Sidon's paid.

Phi.
The treasure's well; but oh, the way we won it!
Upon an intercepted messenger
We found a scroll from him that ruled Damascus,
Proffering submission, friendship, and the gold.
We sent him back—a smile our only answer—
And follow'd to the city. From its gates
A long procession issued streaming forth,
Sleek courtiers, nobles, magistrates, and priests,
Seven thousand beasts of burthen in their midst
Beneath the treasure bent. Old Syphax cried,
“They'll claim reward.” Like lightning, while they near'd us,
As though we took that concourse huge for war,
We hurled on them a squadron of our horse,
With orders not to spare. The sight was merry:
The wonder in their stupid eyes upturn'd
Surpass'd, methought, the terror!

Alex.

A deed accursed,
Hateful to all the gods, to me, your king,
Opprobrious, and the total state of Greece,
Your father wrought, and you, than him more vile,
So much his weakness leans upon your folly.
Necessities of war compel at times
Complicity with traitors: double treason
Traitors themselves abhor. Corrupt them first,
Then cheat and slay them! Name of Macedon!
With what a clownish shoon have knaves in dance,
Yea, thine own children trampled thee to mud,
Pale Persia's scorn! The Dacian had not done it!
I'll learn of this at large from men not false
And with just vengeance wash my household clean.
Back to Damascus! Send your father hither
Andromachus shall rule there in his stead.

I'll trust no more Parmenio with that honour
Which he dishonours

[Philotas makes obeisance and retires.

After him, Ptolemy!
He'll bruit abroad this massacre. Lo, Hephestion,
How thin a varnish coats the ingrain'd baseness
Of these new-mounted upstarts! Kings and trinkets
Have eaten out his honest heart! In Thrace
Man-like he fought: the man has swell'd to boyhood,
Vainglorious, petulant, restless, garrulous, loud,
The prey of his necessities. Beware him!
A man of faculties without a head;
Passions, but yet no heart. His cruelty
Finds provocation still in mirth, not anger.

Heph.
I've noted that long since. The man's still young:
Coldness in youth is twice the cold of eld:
Beneath the ashes of a fire burnt out
Some heat may lurk; but from the unfuell'd hearth
And dusk bars of a never-lighted fire
The chillness comes of death. Not Macedon,
'Twas warm Greece taught me that.

Alex.
Beware the man!
Twice, while I rated him, he glanced at you
With sidelong eye. He'll hurt you when he may.

Scene IV.—The Causeway between Old and New Tyre.

Phylax, Antisthenes.
Ant.
Methinks our king grows proud.

Phy.
It is high diet
Turns pack-horse into charger. The o'er-fed gods
Are emulous pampering this youth with triumphs.

Ant.
Let him take Tyre, and then he may be proud;
But if he fails, these fingers shall record it,
“At Tyre it was the Greeks first call'd him proud.”
Our patron loves him not, nor loves Hephestion.

Phy.
Philotas hates the king; but scorns Hephestion:
Our patron's hasty. Time befriends the slow.

Scene V.—The Gardens of the Palace at Old Tyre.

Hephestion, Arsinoe.
Ars.
Hephestion, well return'd! My mother sits
To-day recluse. She bade me show you flowers:
Here is a rose unblown. My mother thinks
God made the world for peace, not war, Hephestion,
Or he had never planted roses in it;
But what think you?

Heph.
Princess, the rose hath thorns:
'Tis sweetness mixed with sharpness: such is war.
I see your cousin walks beneath the palms.

Ars.
Is she not fair?

Heph.
None fairer. Three days since
Passing, she fix'd on us her great blue eyes,
That seem'd to shine through tears.

Ars.
They're tearful ever:
She is an orphan, nursed within our house:
She told you once that we were like two sisters;
But more she loves me far than sisters love.
Amastris reads—her wont—a book all gold:
'Tis full of songs: I fear they're chiefly war-songs.
Were there in all times wars?

Heph.
Princess, there were:
Our Homer sang of battles.

Ars.
Think you not
He sang of battles in his songs' behoof,
Lest, singing only little lays of love,
Strong hearts had scorn'd his music? This I know,
War is not hatred only; for our king,
Hearing of some great deed your king had wrought,
Some deed both just and brave, lifted his hands
And pray'd—“Preserve, Dread Power, this Persian crown!
Yet, if from us thou rend it, let it light
On Alexander's brows!”

Heph.
That was a prayer
Fit for a king!

Ars.
Your king in reverence greets
Our Sisygambis with a “mother's” name:
And yet, methinks, he neither loves nor hates.

Heph.
He loves not many, and himself the least:
His purposes to him are wife and child.
He couch'd on frosty rocks while huddled crowds
Shut out the watch fires. When the summer heat
More late had dried the marrow in our bones,
And now, a spring discover'd, crawling came
A soldier with a water-cup, one moment
He gazed into the eyes of those around,
Then pour'd that water on the sands. Alone
He would not drink it.

Ars.
Ask me not, Hephestion,
To love your king, or wish him what you wish:
That were, in me, disloyal, faithless, false;
I needs must wish him failure. Oh for the time
When all the good shall war on all things evil,
And none upon each other! It shall come!
The Light shall vanquish Dark. Who made mankind
Will tell us, one day, all we need to know.

Heph.
Then why so late?

Ars.
No doubt that man may learn
His need of light, and prize it well when granted;
For thus by question apt, and feign'd delay,
Parent in child quickens the appetite
For knowledge first, and after that rewards it;
And what are years—or ages—to a god?
Then wars shall cease.

Heph.
War is an instinct, princess;
The gods have given it, and the god-like praised:
It lifts us o'er the petty love of life,
The quest for pleasure, and the greed for gold;
It makes a nation's manhood; stifles factions;
Crowns the great head watching the whole night long
For them that sleep. War, like a healthful tempest,
Scatters the infection.

Ars.
Ah, the Greek is hard!
I guess'd it once; I know it now. Last year
I saw a palace fill'd with Grecian statues:
How beautiful they were; but yet how loveless!
Sweetness was theirs, and majesty, and grace;
Yet theirs, methought, a world that knew no pity:
A thing hard-hearted seem'd your Grecian Art.
Our art was rule: Persia held high her head;—
The Power Divine beheld, and brought it low:
What if the heart of Greece should turn to stone?
Shall she escape?

Heph.
I have had my boding thoughts:—
She's great in war.

Ars.
Praise not that murderer, War!
Persia had Empery; Greece hath Art and Science:
Why not content them, each, with what she hath?
Or as a youth in marriage takes a maid,

And of these twain a lovely race is born,
Why should not warring nations wed their gifts
And breed some god-like gain? What hope from war?
What fruit but breaking hearts?

Heph.
That shade comes o'er you
Which veil'd you when we met:—when, Issus won,
The king and I entered a wailing tent
With speed to tell you that your father lived.

Ars.
How gentle seem'd you then! He, too, was gentle:
We knelt to you, misdeeming you the king:
Your king but laugh'd. He lacked not royal face,
Albeit too eager-eyed.

Heph.
The other Greeks,
Of them what say you?

Ars.
They are light and boastful,
Save Ptolemy, upon whose grave, broad brow
Empire might sit: they spurn the earth, not tread it:
Here is the one I like the least. Abide
Till he is gone, Hephestion.

Phi.
(approaching).
Beam and breeze,
Maiden, to you, and these, the inferior flowers,
Are boon alike. Suspecting in that rose
Your beauty's future rival you were wise
To pluck it still unblown. You'll prove as kind
Bestowing it on me.

Ars.
The Royal House
Accords its gifts to those who claim them least:
I pluck'd it for Hephestion.

Phi.
He is happy:
The favourites of a prince are favourites still
With those around him—nobles, courtiers, captives—

Warriors alone, attent on graver cares,
Catch not the lesser whispers of a court:
Rustlings of silk for others, not for them,
Reveal their oracles.

Ars.
Hephestion—

Phi.
Lady,
Your mother, doubtless, would have news of friends
Housed in Damascus: I am lately thence.

Ars.
Her majesty sojourns with the palace:
It may be she will see you.

Phi.
Lady, farewell!
[Aside, departing.
One day Hephestion shall remember this.

Ars.
He's gone:—the day grows still. Hold you, Hephestion,
A favourite 'mid the flowers?

Heph.
Princess, in this
The oft-erring public vote I deem not erring.
You have heard the legend of the Flowers' Debate.
The Rose advanced her claim: “Love's flower am I!
The nightingale loves more my fragrant breast
Than his own feather'd mate.” The Lily next,
“The flower of Purity am I: young maids
Boast me their snowy standard.” At the word,
The Rose put forth her first white bud, and wears
Since then the double crown.

Ars.
I like that legend:
Who made it?

Heph.
I—unless you made it, princess:
My eyes were on you when the thought descended.

Ars.
Hephestion, I have not forgot my promise;
This rose-bud take; 'tis white. Could rose-buds live
As long as grateful thoughts, or were they loved

Their freshness past, 'twould help you to remember
In hours to come, what else you might forget,
Kindness in prison'd days to burthen'd hearts,
Kindness to helpless womanhood, sad old age,
Childhood—or what was childhood till our woes
Had changed young hearts to serious. I must go:
By this time our sweet mother will expect me.
For his sake whom you love, your king, your friend,
Jest not with dangers in the wars before you.

Heph.
Princess, for me this flower will keep its freshness.

Scene VI.—Gate of the Temple of Jerusalem.

Ptolemy, with a squadron of Thessalian Horse, which passes on.
Ptol.
Till he returns, this fig-tree be my shade!
[Alone.
He's right, and yet he's wrong, you kingly builder.
That kingdom which he spake of—one o'er earth—
Would prove a god-like work indeed if built
Upon the good alone within man's breast,
If on its ill, then ill were lord of all,
Since in all lands the ill-workers would be one,
Weakened till now by realms and states at variance.
But what shall sever 'twixt man's good and ill?
Not power, it works with each by turn; not law,
Law deals but with man's actions, not his heart;
Not science, science rules but worlds of thought;
Not art, 'tis a child's warble; not religion,
Men fear the gods, but serve not less their lusts:
The things without us are but casual to us:
The things within us share our human taint.

On something deeper in us than self-love,
He who would lift mankind must build. That something
No child of man has found, or e'er can find:—
Therefore, like isle from sunless waters raised
And fix'd where nothing was, that Power who made us,
Who knows alone our spirit's depths, and sees
Alone the eddies of the restless waters,
Must raise some under realm, all adamant,
There build—if he will build. Shall that be ever?
I know not. He who made the world is strong:
Yet miracle were that passing the dream
Of prophet, priest, or bard. 'Tis still the old round:
Realm wars on realm lest wrong should meet no scourge.
This youth must plan; and pass.

Scene VII.—Interior of the Temple.

The Jewish High Priest, Alexander.
High Priest.
This is that scroll whereof I spake to thee;
That Vision which the exiled prophet saw,
Sitting in Susa, by Choaspes' flood:
“In vision I beheld a Beast two-horn'd;
Westward he push'd, and northward, and to south,
Nor any stood before him, After that,
Another, mightier portent, swifter far
Rush'd from the west, o'er face of all the earth
Which yet he touch'd not, flying upon wings;
He smote against that Beast, and trod him down;
Nor any might deliver. Then, a Voice
There reach'd me from betwixt the river banks:

‘That Beast which thou beheldest is that king,
Lord of the Median and the Persian realms:
He that shall overcome him is the Greek.’”
This is that Vision which our prophet saw.

Alex.
That Voice your prophet heard was Voice of
God—
(after musing)
You will not wed my cause, and save your city?

High Priest.
We may not, and we will not.

Alex.
Yet you know
Mine is the empire?

High Priest.
What is writ is writ.

Alex.
What was that sacrifice you offer'd late?
The like I have not seen.

High Priest.
The shadow 'twas
Of substance onward striding. Ask no more:
We are prophet-people: ours the Hope:
We are God's people, and we stand apart:
The kings of the earth may speed us, or may rend;
Know us they cannot.

Alex.
I too had a vision—
I yield you credence, Priest. I have repented
My first resolve, and fling it from me far:
I tribute none demand, and in your city
Challenge no rule.
Your prophets spake in ancient days of me;
Spake they in earlier days of Persian Cyrus?

High Priest.
By name, before his birth two hundred years:
Hear thou God's Edict. “Cyrus is my shepherd:
I hold his right hand, loosening at his feet
The hearts of Monarchs. I will cut in twain
The bars of iron and the brazen gates.”

Alex.
The Babylonian gates stood wide that night
When back Euphrates shrank.

High Priest
(reading).
“Be dry, ye rivers!
In Babylon the desert beast shall hide;
The dragon couch within her palaces;
The bittern shriek above her shallow pools.”
Young man, hold thou no hand to Babylon,
For God hath judged her, lest thou share her plagues.

Alex.
Hers was the first of Empires, and the worst—
(After a pause.)
The day goes by; lead onward to the gates.
O'er all the earth my empire shall be just,
Godlike my rule.

High Priest.
Young man, beware! God's prophet
Awards thee Persia's crown, but not the world's:
He who wears that should be the Prince of Peace.
Thy portion lies in bounds. Limit and Term
Govern the world. Thou know'st the Voice was God's
That spake. Two ways there are—between them choose.

Alex.
I shall not fail to meditate these twain;
Then make election.

High Priest.
Pardon, royal sir,
A little moment past your choice was made:
'Tis known above; and you one day will know it.
You trust not God: the man you trust will fail you.

Alex.
What man?

High Priest.
Yourself.

Alex.
At least I trust none other.

High Priest.
My message is delivered: Sir, farewell!

[High Priest departs. Ptolemy enters
Alex.
There sits unwonted wonder on your brow,
My Ptolemy!

Ptol.
Sir, all men kneel to you,’
You but to one, and him a man unknown!
When first that long and strange procession reach'd us
I saw an earnest inquest in your eye,
A pallor on your cheek.

Alex.
You err, my friend:
I knelt, but not to one unseen till then.
Three years gone by, three months, and twenty days,
At noon I sat in Macedonian Dium,
(Its witless sons acclaimed me as a god)
Musing the fortunes of this Asian war
Then but decreed. There fell on me a trance
Filled with strange fear. Never save in that trance
Have I known fear.

Ptol.
What saw you in it, sir?

Alex.
Things as they were.

Ptol.
No more?

Alex.
Yea, things beside:
My captains grew ape-visaged, and chattering rush'd
On errands all confused, while down the street,
In the wide Agora, on the temple's steps,
The concourse, shrunk to pigmies, scream'd and strove;—
The tallest like a three years' child. Meanwhile,
There where benignant plains had spread but late,
Heaven-high there hung in the east a mount, firecrown'd,
And ruin-flank'd—a mount which seemed a world
Huger than man's. The pigmies and the apes
Saw it and laughed.

Ptol.
'Twas strange!

Alex.
It was not slumber:
Parmenio and Philotas at my right,

You, Ptolemy, at my left, witnessed and sware
That from my session ta'en till, sunset nigh,
The priesthood issued from the fane of Zeus
I had not ceased from audience and command
Though sterner than my wont. The trance was long,
And, as it deepen'd, darkness closed around:
Then from that darkness like a god this man
Drew near, methought, that mitre on his brow,
That gem-illumined breast-plate on his breast.
He spake,—“Fear nought; the God I serve shall lay
His hand upon thy head, and lead thee on
Triumphant through the danger and the gloom.”
This world is full of wonders, Ptolemy,
Or else it were not world for man, since man
Is marvellous most. Divulge this thing to none,
Nor write it in thine annals of the war.

Scene VIII.—The Causeway between Old Tyre and New Tyre.

Hephestion, Craterus, Seleucus.
Cra.
We've waited for the king, and for a wind:
The wind is ours at last.

Sel.
And in fit time
The king, that's wafted still by fortunate winds.

Alex.
(arriving).
The wind is fair, and all the gods are with us!
Bear up, my Cypriot and Sidonian fleets;
I've bought you with a price! cut well the seas,
And as the sword into the scabbard glides,
So rush into their harbours! The boarding ships,
You're sure they lie beside our mole, Seleucus,
And moor'd by chains, not ropes? Those Tyrian divers
Will cut them else adrift.

Sel.
They tried it thrice,
You baffled them. We're ready, sire.

Heph.
Lo, there!
They drag their prisoners round yon city's walls—
Each after each they bend them to the block;—
They hurl their headless trunks into the flood!

Sel.
Hark to that shout!

Alex.
Our fleets have forced the harbours!
Up with the engines and the storming-parties!
I cross the right-hand galley with Admetus;
You, Cœnus, with Lysander, cross the left.
Forth with the landing-planks and scaling-ladders!
On, on, and up!

[Alexander is the first to mount the walls.
Hamilcar
(from the tower).
Men of Phœnicia,
still the heights are ours.
Hurl on them sleet of fire!

Hanno.
'Tis life or death!

Alex.
(striking him down).
Then take thy death!

Heph.
And take, Hamilcar, thine!

[His sword breaks; he closes with Hamilcar, and flings him from the right-hand tower into the sea. At the same moment Cœnus gains the left-hand tower.
Alex.
'Tis won! They fly!

Scene IX.—The Palace of New Tyre.

The Tyrian King, Azelmicus, Asdrubal, Ithocles, Generals and Senators. The Ambassadors from Carthage.
The King.
I'm old for fight, but young enough to die:
I'll wait them on my throne.

Asd.
Within the vaults
'Neath Melkart's fane, amid our heaps of treasure,
Conceal him with those envoys from the west:
And see they bear the Tyrian crown to Carthage;
Old Tyre has done with it. A ceremony
[Senators bear away the king and ambassadors.
Remains or ere we die.

Ith.
The torch? 'Tis here.
The palace of great Tyre shall house them never.

[The Tyrians are driven in from all sides on the Palace, which bursts into flame. At this moment Alexander arrives.
Asd.
Tyrians, we fight for vengeance, not for life—
Tyre ne'er forewent that solace.

Ith.
Vengeance! Vengeance!

[The battle rages till the whole Tyrian garrison has been cut down.
Alex.
So perish sea-born Tyre that ruled the waters!
She sinks, like yonder sun, in a sea all blood.
At dawn with feast and military honours,
We'll thank the just and promise-keeping gods
Who have led us thus far forth on victory's way.
Seleucus, see the priesthood dedicate
Yonder in Melkart's fane that conquering engine
Which shatter'd first yon wall. Ye sons of Greece!
Your country thanks you: many a song of hers
Will celebrate this deed! A spoil is yours
Well earn'd. Three days we rest: the fourth for Egypt!

ACT III.

Scene I.—The Road to Rhagæ near the Caspian Gates.

Parmenio and Philotas.
Phi.
You are a greater man, sir, than you know,
And bear your honours meekly. Pray you pardon
My sometimes halting reverence.

Par.
Here's a change!
I have warned you oft to bate your perilous pride
Saying, “My son be less.” Your whim is now
To show all humbleness.

Phi.
I should be humble
To one who for his master has a god:
Unseen I heard the king expound his schemes,
Hephestion mildly plausive.

Par.
Schemes! What schemes?

Phi.
Kneel, Hercules, and Dionysus tremble!
Tremble, thou Caucasus that hid'st thy head
In snows eterne! Our great stage-king has sworn
To plant his buskin on thy wintry scalp!

Par.
What seeks the boy?

Phi.
From eastern Caucasus
Two rivers rush, the Indus and the Oxus,
One south, one north. He'd tie them, tail to tail,
Like foxes caught, to test their strength and prowess;
Next, on those heights he seeks some herb to enrich
The Stagyrite's medicine shop: and, lastly, thence
He'd o'er-gaze Scythia, which with proximate place
Is honour'd in the order of his conquests.

Par.
Renounce great Persia for a realm of bears!
I march with him no more!

Phi.
You shall not need:
Besieging Tyre, he sent you to Damascus
To seal up sacred balms, and perfume-phials,
And inventory the wardrobe of Darius.
In Egypt, you had no conspicuous place:
Now, for like cause, the Caspian Gates you pass not,
Ecbatana your charge. Upon his treasure
He bids you sit like an old hen, and hatch it
While he strides on to victory. Snows of age
With what auspicious calm ye crown old heads,
And hearts virile no more!

Par.
The king's a madman:—
The worse for us! Free him from that conceit
That he's a god, the man of men were he:
Since Marathon we have seen none other like him.

Phi.
One-half his victories come but of his blindness,
And noting not the hindrance.

Par.
At Granicus—
But that was chance. At Issus he was greater:
I set small store on Egypt or on Tyre:
Next came Arbela. Half a million foes
Melted like snow. To him Epaminondas
Was as the wingless creature to the wing'd.

Phi.
I grant his greatness were his godship sane!
But note his brow; 'tis Thought's least earthly temple:
Then mark, beneath, that round, not human eye,
Still glowing like a panther's! In his body
No passion dwells; but all his mind is passion,
Wild intellectual appetite and instinct
That works without a law.

Par.
But half you know him.
There is a zigzag lightning in his brain

That flies in random flashes, yet not errs:
His victories seem but chances:—link those chances,
And under them a science you shall find,
Though unauthentic, contraband, illicit,
Yea, contumelious oft to laws of war.
Fortune, that as a mistress smiles on others,
Serves him as duty-bound: her blood is he,
Born in the purple of her royalties.
On me she frown'd long time: these mailèd fists
Smote her on breast and brow for thirty years,
From Athos westward to the Illyrian coasts,
Ere yet she learn'd to love me. He too loves me!
Though jealous of my fame.

Phi.
You dream, good father!
A tent's small fissure and a moonless night
Help'd me to better knowledge. Thus he spake:
“Hephestion, till Arbela's fight I loved him:
I know him now, poor shell of that he was,
For baggage-tendence best.”

Par.
Blunderer and traitor!
He placed me at Arbela, naked of friends,
Amid unnumber'd foes. He lied, and lies!

Phi.
How far to India, father?

Par.
'Tis earth's bound:
Beyond is nothing save the rising sun.

Phi.
'Tis the beginning of his last ambition.
Phœbus Apollo, stand on guard! this youth
Will take a leap into thy flaming chair;
He'll clutch thee by the bright locks never shorn;
Far forth o'er earth he'll cast thee, there to tend
Once more Admetus' herds! I tell you, father,
Three times that night I heard him boast his schemes;
Heard, and not laugh'd. 'Twas Scythia, first; then India.

Par.
I reck not of his injuries to myself;—
But shall a new Cambyses drown in sands
The best and bravest army bred by Greece?
Not so, Parmenio living!

Phi.
Other help
Greece lacks this hour. The camp is full of murmurs;
Vacant of aid.

Par.
Your drift?

Phi.
A word suffices:
Better a man should perish than a people.

Par.
(after a long silence).
The day grows chill.

Phi.
A hundred ways there are—

Par.
Hark! 'Tis the royal trumpet. Son, be patient:
The gods are helpful.

Phi.
Pious hand is his
That helps the helpful gods!

Par.
We've time before us:
Likeliest, a thousand hidden dangers 'scaped,
He'll dash his bark against some mountainous rock,
And vanish in flat seas. And yet, it may be
That growing years will tame him.

Phi.
It were needful:
If ere that time he perish in his cups
One man there lives on whom the whole Greek host
Would fix its gaze.

Par.
His name?

Phi.
'Twas once Parmenio:—
The man from war to war the battle's king;
The man who grudged no soldier drink or victual,
Nor sold his life for nought; the man who now
Holds in his charge an empire's treasure. Well!
If you're sent back, you'll know I fabled not.

Scene II.—At Rhagæ.

Seleucus, Craterus, and Ptolemy.
Sel.
Too late! The hunted stag has ta'en the leap;
His lair is cold.

Cra.
The king will storm at this:
He's quicklier moved than once: I mark him changing:
He wills not opposition to his will.
Since first he breathed this Asian air of kingship
Divinity of kings hath touch'd him much:
First, in his blood it play'd, like other lusts:
It mounted next to fancy's seat; and now,
His eye usurping, purples all his world.
Injury to kings he deems not injury only,
But sacrilege.

Sel.
Craterus, I scorn your words,
I say I scorn them! Ptolemy, our wisest,
In sophist balance never weighs his king,
Nor scans him from the critic's fancied height.

Cra.
A speculative man that knows not men,
A man whose blood flows sweetly through his veins,
Leaving at every point a sleepy pleasure
That needs must overflow to all our race
In vague, complacent kindness. All his thoughts
In orbits as of planets curving go,
And grasp, like them, blank space. Your minds majestic,
Like Ptolemy's, are oft but stately triflers.

Sel.
Has the king faults? So be it! He can afford them.

Scene III.—Rhagæ.

Alexander attended by Parmenio, Hephestion, and other Generals, and surrounded by soldiers.
Alex.
Darius is fled forth. I have chased a shadow:
He'll raise new hosts; and I from realm to realm,
From year to year must hunt him. Lords, three days
Here we make rest perforce. Thus much, Parmenio,
You cost me at Arbela!

Par.
Gods of Greece!
Hear ye this man? My hand it was, my hand,
Raised from the dust your late-crown'd Macedon:
And lo! this day the heir of all this greatness
Upbraids me as a boy!

Alex.
I said, and say it:
Arbela all but won, to prop your squadrons
You call'd me back: Darius made escape:
I saw his chariot sink beneath the hills
Lit by the last gleam of a sun that set;
Let him that dares deny it.

Par.
I deny it!
My best and bravest from my squadrons drain'd,
Me with a trivial force your blindness placed
'Mid countless foes. With less consummate skill
Than mine that hour your whole left wing had perish'd.
In wrath, not fear, I warn'd you of your error:
You saw it, and you made retreat aghast:
Ere you had reach'd us the Thessalian horse
With fortunate charge piercing the Persian ranks
Had given us air to breathe. You spurn'd my counsel,
Or earlier than Arbela's fight began

Had come its glorious ending.

Alex.
Aye! your counsel!
You will'd me to attack the foe by night:
I answer'd that I steal not victory:
The craven craft trips in the cloak that hides it
And falls to the earth. With slender force like mine
The worst defeat were victory incomplete:—
This Persian foe is as a mist that melts,
Re-forms, and swells against me. Oh, your counsels!
I scorn'd them from the first, or foot of mine
Had trod not Persian soil.

Par.
Shade of dead Philip!
Make answer in my name!

Alex.
You counsell'd me
Beside Granicus, not to cross the stream:
At Ephesus—by auguries back'd, and omens
That deepliest dint the craziest brain—you counsell'd
To fight by sea, not land, the Persian fleet
My ships exceeding fourfold, and with theirs
Phœnicia's mated. Issus won, you counsell'd
Naked to leave the Asian coasts, their prey
Their appanage, who, sailing from safe ports
Had raised revolted Greece from north to south
And barr'd me from return.

Par.
This too I counsell'd—
Omit not from that inventory of sins
So diligently register'd, my greatest—
To dash the red torch from a wanton's hand;
Flameless to leave royal Persepolis,
And shame the drunken revel!

Alex.
Hoary dotard!
Darest thou remind me of that sole offence
Which spots my sun-like fame? All-reverend mocker,

At whose false breath dead bones of seeming truth
In blasphemy are flesh'd, of shames thou speakest!
One shame there rests—not merited—not mine—
On me and Greece! I spared to file my tongue
With thy transgression till this hour. Damascus
Madden'd, beholding from her centuried throne
The unutterable, obscene, impious act,
When they whom thou hadst bribed to sell their trust,
A long procession, from her gates advanced,
Their treasure in the midst, unarm'd, unfearing,
Old nobles, women, gown'd defenceless priests,
And thou, the fool-led pupil of that son
Whose boyish babble tunes thy senile drivel,
Perfidiously didst on them launch thy power,
And in their own blood drown.

Par.
It is a lie!
The impeachment is a lie; the man a liar!
That deed I wrought not, and I knew not of it:
In the rear I rode. Captains of Macedon,
Your ears have heard. I brand him for a liar!
Your king has lied, and lies!

Alex.

Caitiff and coward!
The grey hair—well thou know'st it—saves that head
Which else this sword had from thy shoulders swept.
I am requited justly who, unjustly
In glorious offices above thy peers
Stayed thee so long, for those high tasks unmeet
Which by Hephestion or by Ptolemy,
In silence were vicariously discharged.
I strip thee of all functions to the last:—

Take from him chain and sword!

[After a pause.

I stand rebuked;

And, gazing on your countenances, lords,
Remember that the ruins of a man
Have in them ruin's claims.
The man who smote his king upon the face,
Who on his forehead nail'd the name of lie,
Shall live, but not beside him, and not near,
Honours shall keep, but sway no battle field,
Back to Ecbatana! Get thee hence, Parmenio!
And guard its citadel with Harpalus,
A pardon'd man like thee. My purpose stood
Thou thence shouldst join us with our Thracian aids:
It shall not be; for I distrust thy sword,
Though one time sharp; distrust, detest thy counsel,
Yet trust thy faithfulness to guard my gold
And keep my Median capital in awe.
Depart: work waits. Thy son shall take no hurt
From his sire's fall. On earth we meet no more.

Par.
King—for that pride which maddens, and will wreck you,
Demands such lessening titles—I depart.
I too, like you, have mused, and changed my purpose:
That which it was, and is, let no man ask.
This is the ending of a life-long league.
I laid my strong sword by your cradle's side;
I taught you how to walk, and how to run,
To ride, to swim; and when you sought to fly
I bade you to beware.
Could all this thing be painted, patch'd, adjusted,
Reduced to spleen of fancy, proven a dream,
This day from out the starry count of time
Be blotted, cancell'd, buried, and trod out,
I'd not so have it, for my heart is changed.
My head, you say, through age hath lost its cunning;
My heart hath insight still: I see your end:

I'll whisper it to Philip in the shades,
For I shall see him soon.
You shall succeed, and your success be ruin:
You shall achieve a name: in after years
The byeword it shall live of madness crown'd:
By night the dagger, and the spear by day
From you shall glance: snow-wastes and burning sands
To you obsequious, shall but choke the just:
Yet all your greatness shall be changed to bane:
Your virtues shall not walk in Virtue's ways,
But glorify your vices, and the beam
Of your bright mind blacken that mind to madness:
The empire you shall build in cloudy wreck
Shall melt around your deathbed premature,
Which shall not be a warrior's: that first realm,
Your father's work and mine, to dust shall fall;
The Royal House evanish as a wind,
Your mother, and your sisters, sons, and wife,

Alexander's whole family was thus cut off. His wife, Arsinoe, and her sister Drypetis, the wife of Hephestion, were treacherously invited to Babylon, and there murdered by Roxana (the beautiful daughter of the Bactrian, Oxyartes), whom Alexander had married immediately after capturing her and her father during his march through Sogdiana. Roxana herself was put to death by order of Cassander, together with Alexander's son by her, then sixteen years of age, who bore his father's name. Hercules, the son of Alexander by Barsine, was murdered by Polysperchon at the instigation of Cassander. Yet more tragic was the fate of that wonderful woman, Alexander's mother, Olympias. Cassander had never forgotten the persistent enmity of Olympias to his father, Antipater. The day of his triumph came at last. He entered Macedonia, and after various vicissitudes of fortune, Olympias was obliged to take refuge in Pydna, with a large number of royal and noble persons attached to her court. The siege of Pydna was long and terrible; but the horrors of plague and of famine became at last unendurable; Olympias found herself deserted by her army, and Macedonia was in the hands of Cassander. At his instance the kinsmen of those whom Olympias had put to death in her hour of triumph accused her in a general assembly. There were none to plead her cause, and she was condemned to death. The aged queen was equal to the occasion. She clothed herself in her royal robes, and leaning on two of her women, came with a haughty mien to meet the party of soldiers which had been sent to despatch her. They stood before her helpless, overcome by the majesty of her aspect, and the great recollections connected with her name. Cassander then sent her accusers to be her executioners. The end is thus related by the historian Justin: ‘They slew her as she stood, not shrinking from sword, or wounds, nor clamouring aloud in womanly fashion, but meeting her death in a manner becoming her great race, so that in his dying mother Alexander might still be seen. In death she wrapped her person round in her robes, and covered her face with her hair, that nothing might attend her close inconsistent with the royal dignity.’

Struck down successive by a vassal hand
In bloody, base, and ignominious death.
Lords, give ye way. Some blood-drops in my brain
At times make dim mine eyes; but help I need not.
Who's this? Hephestion? Tell my son, Philotas,
That after-musings on this morn's discourse
Have somewhat changed my sentence. Home, they say,
Is best for age. I seek it. Eighty years
I have made my home on horseback. Sirs, farewell.

[Parmenio departs.
Alex.
To business! We have heard of clamours late
From men with homeward cravings. Let them know
That, though their service-time is unexpired,

We grant them to depart, nor that alone,
But praised of him they served. We give the horse
Two thousand talents: to the rest we grant
For every man the tenth part of a talent,
Their pay continuing till they set their feet
On Grecian shores.

Ant.
We're weak without the horsemen.

Alex.

Or with them, or without them, we are weak;
But these, with glory gladden'd and with gain,
Where'er they move—and wealth will make them restless—
Shall noise our name, and send our camp recruits
For each man lost, a score. To Grecian horsemen
Electing to abide we give three talents,
Foot-soldiers in proportion. Epocillus
Escorts them to the coast, and Menes thence
Shall steer them to Eubœa. Macedonians

Are free not less.

[A shout.

We bide! There's none will go.

Alex.
So be it! The satrapy of conquer'd Media
On Oxodates we confer, a Mede,
But one by King Darius wrong'd—thence safe;
With him, for military government,
Joining Tlepomenus of Macedon.
The garrison at Ecbatana late left,
And with it three battalions of the Phalanx,
By Cleitus led, will make us soon forget
Those fissures in our ranks. Lords, fare ye well!
On the fourth morn once more we chase Darius:
I have heard that he has traitors in his ranks:
No friends are they of mine.

Scene IV.—The Persian Camp.

Darius lies on the ground, bleeding. A Greek soldier gives him water to drink from his helmet.
Dar.
Sir, you have stain'd, I fear, your scarf. I thank you
For this good office. Kings should have more than thanks
For friendly service. Bessus and his knaves
Have fled before your face.

Sol.
Ye gods! Ye gods!

Dar.
My friends have been my foes; a foe my friend:—
Likewise your king show'd reverence to my mother:
Tell him I stretch'd to him my hand in death.
Persia, farewell!

[Dies. Alexander arrives with Hephestion, Eumenes, and Philotas.
Sol.
Behold the Persian king!

Alex.
(after long silence).
If that reproof had lodged upon thy brow,
Or any sneer had curl'd that quiet lip,
I could have brook'd it better. See, Hephestion,
How humble he doth look, and unupbraiding;
How charitable, peaceful, and content!
What hath he found? An empire he hath lost,
And lo, he smiles in death! Remove that cloak:
Lo, there the wounds through which his life-blood rush'd—
The blood of Cyrus! Traitors foul and fell!
King, he that caused thy death strove yet to save thee:

Me too those sacrilegious daggers struck,
My fame and me, through that deep-trenchèd breast:
I'll slay them on thy grave.

Phi.
'Twas true! Darius
Of Persia's sons was comeliest.

Eum.
Of her daughters
They say his queen was fairest. Issus lost,
How soon she slept in death!

Heph.
Alas, Arsinoe!

Alex.
(removing his own mantle).
Take, crownless monarch, take, insensate clay,
From whom thine empire like a vesture slid,
This mantle immemorial of my house;
Wear it as thou had'st conquer'd Macedon,
Yea, wear it in thy grave.
The king is dead. The royal obsequies
By ancient use are his successor's care:
I'll have his body to his mother borne
With ceremonial of the Persian wont,
With Magian death-dirge, and procession long,
The silver altars moving at his head,
The Sacred Fire ascending; in the rear
Those mystic youths that emblem night and day,
Three hundred, and three score, and five. A sun
For ever rising, o'er the bier shall shine,
Persia's high pledge of immortality.
Thus to the burial-place of eastern kings
Darius shall be borne, and with them sleep.
Why stand ye silent, lords? Battle is battle,
Kings too must die. To Hecatompylus!
Hephestion, move we on. This thing is ill:
But who of men is greater than the Fates?
Less than my empire what is mine I'd give.

To undo this deed. This deed, though not undone,
Another deed shall expiate. Till that hour
I must forget him.

Scene V.—The Southern Shore of the Caspian.

Ptolemy, Seleucus, Craterus, Antigonus, Cassander.
Cra.
Hyrcania's bears are her best citizens;
Their borrow'd coats protect us from her storms
Intolerable else.

Cas.
Her mountains pass'd,
All else looks gentle, even those hurrying waves
Spray-dimm'd and whitening 'neath the hustling gale,
And the vapours Fury-like along them scudding.

Ptol.
I hate not mountains when they keep their distance;
When near, they're vile—crazed Nature's bombast vein,
Or worse, her Delphic vein, suggesting meanings
Which or she cannot or she will not speak,
Yearnings unutterable, at least unutter'd,
Vexatious and disquieting. The edge
Of yonder cliff is like a Memnon's head,
Seen sideways.

Alex.
(arriving with Heph.)
'Tis more like Darius' mother
As once I saw her, gazing on dark skies
An hour and more unmoving.

Heph.
Craterus, mark,
In the purple glens those wandering isles of light!
Down each green vale a tempest sweeps, and bears
A rainbow smoke that cannot make a rainbow,

Still, as the promontory's gate is reach'd,
Blown loose in the misty air!

Sel.
How fresh and biting
The odour from the weeds on yonder shelf,
Sway'd by the brine! No foot of man till now
Printed these sands!

Alex.
What! soldiers turn'd to poets!
Fancy is best when imping action's wings:—
Forth with your fancies, then! Were gods your slaves,
What fortunes would ye choose? Speak one and all!
Ptolemy, Seleucus, Antigonus, and Cassander, cry aloud together—
A kingdom!

Alex.
Why, an empire costs no more!
I'd rather be a hunter on the hills
Than wall'd by one small, limitable kingdom!
The gods you serve have thrift. Note this Hephestion,
Imagination is economist,
And vastest ends move less its appetite
Than small things near and easier of acquest.
Say, next, what kingdoms choose ye?

Ptol.
Give me Egypt;
'Tis much in little with its fruitful Nile.

Sel.
Syria for me: I grant it desert-cumber'd:
Aye, but 'tis ample!

Anti.
Mine be Lesser Asia!
'Tis Greece grown softer—maid to matron changed,
Asperities subdued—a mould benigner,
A grace less saucy, but a richer smile.
The round green mountains are as thrones of gods:

The white fane glances far o'er violet seas:
The sands are golden ore: there wealth and wit
Have made a pleasant sort of random bridal.
I'll build my house on Taurus' slopes that look
To Aphrodite's isle.

Cas.
For me the old land,
Our Macedon and Thrace! The climate's rough;
The hearts are sound.

Alex.

Fair kingdoms, lords, I wish you,
Albeit not those. A future too have I:
Dubious it is, yet bright. See ye yon clouds,
The near, and those beyond snow-white and still
Which gaze on us from some austerer world,
Thronging like phantom kings, with ice-cold crown?
These nearer clouds are like my daily battles
Wherein I ever triumph; those remote,
And minatory more, are fates not fortunes,
That bide their time. For fortunes and for fates
I stand alike prepared. What mean those horsemen?
Forth, sirs, and meet them: Craterus, abide,

Hephestion likewise.

[The rest depart.

These desire a kingdom,
Yet these are they that most with jealous eye
Mislike my royal leanings. They misdeem them:
The empire I desired was military,
And naked as the statues of the gods,
Not ceremonious, Persian, gilt with pomps
Like that which now draws near.
I saw it coming, and I waved it from me;
I march'd to Egypt; I deferred the time;
But these, my fates, are closing gradually round,
Nor am I wont to fly. Asian and Greek
Henceforth must be as one. I know my people:

They'll say, “Shall Persia, now a dotard grown,
By help of Greece have lordship over Greece
That scourged her in her prime?” I answer thus,
I came to rule a world, and not to make one;
My empire is of men.

Heph.
Sir, Greek is Greek:
The Greek will feast with Persian or with Mede,
Will pray with Syrian, or with Bactrian dance,
But equall'd in the ranks of war he'll march
With Greek alone.

Alex.
'Tis not this Persia only:—
Assyria, Babylonia, Susiana,
Armenia, Media,—this we learn but late!
Greece is to these but as a drop to ocean;
She yields me but a handful of recruits:
I stand confuted by each conquest new,
Soon won, but kept at cost: horizons fresh
Outface me still with kingdom beyond kingdom.
To overrun a world, and then forsake it—
That means but glory: I demand an empire.

Heph.
With time your strength—

Alex.
No friend of mine is Time;
I have to build an empire in few years:
My armies must be Greek at once, and Persian:
Persia that sees in me a conqueror now,
Must find in me her king. How win her love?
The vanquish'd must connive, or victory's self
Digs its own grave in the end. Abuses old
I with far-reaching and vindictive hand
Drag from their pride of place. Barbaric hordes,
With whom the Persian traffick'd, I hunt down
For easing of the poor, that so their tribute
Be paid in steel, not gold. Yet Artabazus,
The faithfullest to Darius while he lived,

To me now faithful for his country's sake,
Still whispers, “Wouldst thou win the Persian's love?
Win first his awe.” Never was Persian yet
Who, empire plain before him, could discern it,
Though proved by gifts, or patent in destructions,
Without the obeisance, pageants, adorations

That stamp the man a God.

[The generals return.
Eum.
(holding up a letter).
From Artabazus.

Alex.
(reading).
“Bessus, but late a traitor fugitive,
More late hath donn'd the Persian diadem,
Assumed the sacred name of Artaxerxes,
And, claiming kinship with the royal house,
Stands up a king. The Bactrians join his hosts.”
So! I foresaw it! Said I not, Hephestion,
He that would rule them through the sense must rule,
Must walk apparell'd in their customed pomps
And rituals of their throne?

Heph.
I fear 'tis true.

Alex.
You fear: I laugh: they're not so all unlike us:
The Greek is proud of self, and, self abated,
Stands gall'd: the Persian's pride is in his king,
And, stinted of his trappings, starves in the cold:
In either country greatness wears the buskin,
Plays now his part, who, being great, appears such,
Now his, the man's that's greater than he seems—
With worm-like scruples, and with bat-like doubts
I have traffick'd all too long.

A Messenger
(entering).
From Greece a missive.

Alex.
(reading).
Antipater writes thus: “Keenwitted Greece
Grudges no triumph that allures you eastward

Imperilling your return. Sparta, but now,
Close-linked with Thrace, at Megalopolis
Launched twenty thousand men. I march'd to meet her:
Our victory bled us badly.”—Battles of flies!
Here's more: “Expect not plentiful recruits;
Revolt has left us few.”

Eum.
Will leave him fewer.

Alex.
I thank thee, Zeus! My path is plain henceforward!
Send edicts, Eumenes, to my eastern realms:
Bid them to lodge their youths, the best and noblest,
Straightway in schools where they shall learn at once
Greek arms, Greek letters. These, their training perfect,
We with our Phalanx will incorporate,
Distinctions, save of merit, knowing none.
Command them that they gird me in three years
With thirty thousand such. Write, and at once.

Scene VI.—The mountains in Aria.

Philotas, Antisthenes the sophist, Phylax the physician.
Phi.
How the cold bites! When sets the sun, Death's hood
Descends on yonder snows. Antisthenes,
You sup with me. O'er twenty leagues in Media
My hunters spread their nets that I might dine
While fish from Persia gamboll'd in my tanks:
Now fare we as we may.

Ant.
I'll trust your luck:
The king, because his soldiers' bread is black,

Devours hard crusts himself.

Phy.
Great Esculapius!
Who sinn'd this time? What drags this idiot hither?

Phi.
You know not! Aristotle, his sage master,
In every science train'd him, one except:
He's come abroad to learn geography!

Ant.
I suffer'd less tracking Egyptian sands
To Ammon's fane—his father's.

Phy.
I feigned sickness
And cheated Ammon! Still I pitch my tent
With those keen heads that see in earth and heaven
The unalarming reign of Matter only,
Midway their flowery haunt unvex'd by gods,
And, peacefuller yet, the innocuous bourn of Nought.
Religions mean but priestcraft.

Ant.
Cobwebs! Rend them!

Phi.
I tell you, no! men must have gods to swear by.

Ant.
Here are three atheists; and the worst are you.

Phy.
Yea, thrice the worst!

Phi.
I stand by law and order;
We cannot live without our “Ho!” and “Ha!”
Religion is a nation's interjection:
Let statesmen look to that!

Phy.
Statesmen may pass:
They have this merit—that they war on priests:
Impartial science loathes them both alike,
Will strangle both—unless they slay each other:
But here, a priest and statesman, roll'd in one,
Grows to a god. Oh, to have heard that whisper
From Ammon's shrine!

Phi.
The king divulged it not:
He's great in silence.

Ant.
There was heard a rumour—
It died by slow degrees, but now revives—
That Zeus, at Ammon served in serpent form,
Is father of this king.

Phy.
A priestly lie!
I have track'd it to its den. The Mænad women,
When spring bewitches earth snow-crusted still
And the last frosts resist yet yield to sunshine,
Partake the madness of that mother old;
Then, raging on the Thyrsus-smitten hills,
O'er Thrace they roam, and hymn their Dionysus,
That god whose altar 'neath the Athenian rock
Sends up its smoke while round it on the stage
The moon-struck chorus dancing hurls its chaunt,
And the Æschylean tragedy, with tales
Of king-bewildering Passion crown'd by Fate,
Freezes men's hearts. Thus raging, fancies black,
Audacities of nature unfulfill'd
Inbreathed through those that would be more than nature,
Earth-fires, that mock the lightning of the heavens,
Assail them. Poison-flowers they suck unscathed,
And from the serpent rive his poison-fangs
Amorous of pain, spleenful not less to inflict it,
Boastful to sport with death! With these Olympias,
In her fierce youth, unwed but marriageable,
Walk'd in her pride, and learn'd their arts: more late
At Samothracia's Mysteries met with Philip,
They loved, and wed. In wedlock's stormy dawn,
At times for sport, at times to flout her lord,
She tamed a snake, and now for crown would wear it,
Now for her zone. The legend thence arose
Of Zeus, a serpent.

Ant.
Each man is a poet

In his own art. Beneath your pestle, Phylax,
A fire-eyed Muse leaps up!

Phy.
I track'd the tale—

Ant.
Which Alexander fathers not, but fosters:
His pride still grows.

Phi.
Meantime his Persian pomps
Sharpen Greek daggers. Thus much Dimnus whispers.

Ant.
Likewise his anger-fits: the royal pages
Taste these the oftenest. Hermolaus, late,
While the king rush'd—they hunted—on a boar,
Flinging a javelin graceless but well aim'd,
Laid the beast dead. The king gave word to scourge him:
This youth has vowed revenge, albeit the wrong
Is little noised. But hush! He comes; say nought;

He needs no whetting.

[Hermolaus joins them.
Phi.
Gentle Hermolaus,
This heinous outrage, dinn'd through camp and court,
Deplored by all, to me is worse than grievous:
I knew your father. Silence friends that prate!
Shames to great houses, bruited once, live long,
In Macedon long; longer in garrulous Greece.
Antisthenes, be true to time, and with you
Bring Hermolaus. Keep me sound, good Phylax!
I swim in glories, pleasures, golden fortunes:
One peccant nerve in all this frame ajar,
What were all these? We've quails—I think—for supper.

Scene VII.—Alexander's Tent on the Jaxartes.

Alexander and Craterus.
Alex.
That's shout the third: whatmoves their rage?

Cra.
Philotas
Should answer that: he's masterful in gibes:
The soldiers say that once, to spite a woman,
He kiss'd a viper's mouth: the viper died.
He's venom-tongued, and mischievous more for this—
He holds his sneers for truths.

Alex.
In Egypt first
I learn'd his malice. For his father's sake
I will'd not his disgrace, and so advanced him:
The man's not won.

Cra.
He scorns your Persian pomps;
Scoffs at that legend of your birth divine:
There are who swear that in the Ammonian fane
You learn'd the secret.

Alex.
This was what I learn'd,
That earth is mine to rule. The legend's little;
Baseless 'tis not, nor now unseasonable.
Whence comes the soul? We know not. What if souls
Heroic, from the great heart of some god
Forth-flashing as a beam from sun or star,
Blend, thus detach'd, with soul-expectant frames
Worthiest such mate, and stamp the demi-god,
While meaner souls float blind down streams Lethean?

Cra.
All men are children of the Power Divine.

Alex.
All men, I grant, win a creative touch
From hand divine. The hand is not the heart!
If heroes issue from the heart of gods
As from the head of Zeus Athenè sprang,

I say they are sons of gods. If here on earth
We grant a father's god-like name to those
Who generate these our earthly bulks, why then
Grudge to our spirits' sire a father's title?
This is that truth which, in its mean disguise,
My soldiers recognize.

Cra.
Philotas saith
'Tis base to kneel before the sceptred hand.

Alex.
Because himself is base. This is the baseness—
To quick or dead, the sceptred or unsceptred,
To yield the meed of worship not deserved:
From them that have deserved it to withhold it
Is theft, and may be sacrilege. Who comes?

[Hephestion and Perdiccas enter hurriedly.
Per.
Dimnus, a known conspirator, and proven—

Alex.
I heard it three hours since.

Heph.
Dimnus is dead:
He sware that, living, they should take him never.

Alex.
I like not that.

Per.
Philotas schemed the plot.

Alex.
I saw Philotas; charged him with his crime.
He knelt; he wept; protested innocence;
Had deem'd the rumour but an empty tale:
I sent him forth absolved.

Per.
This letter cancels
That absolution. Sir, 'tis from Parmenio;
He weighs the plot; approves it; urges caution
Which, wed with valour, breeds alone success:
We found it 'mid the traitor's papers. Read!

Alex.
(after reading).
What is it that you demand?

Per.
This man, Philotas,
By you from dust uplifted to the heights,
This man who might have flown, by preference blind
And native instinct, creeping through base life,

Hath, like the worm that slimes his path, made vile
The paths he crawl'd upon. This man of old
Walk'd with Amyntas, him that, Philip dead,
Schemed for your throne. This man, three days or more—
He not denies it—cognizant of the plot,
Held him in silence till the hour itself
Of butchery decreed. You ask, what claim we?
Sir, this your army claims—the right to live:
This plot is neither plot the first, nor second;
And we are here to warn you that your host
Which oft for wanton risking of his life
Hath censured its great chief, this day condemns him
As one who, set apart and seal'd by gods,
Perils his army, and his empire perils,
Yea, with conspirators himself conspires,
Boy-like to boast great heart.

Alex.
Their fears are vain:
On my last field, grey-headed, I shall die,
Circled by subject kings. What seek my soldiers?

Per.
They make two claims; first, that the great Assembly
Should sift and judge the crime; next, that the award,
Once pass'd, should take effect without appeal.

Alex.
(after musing).
We grant them both demands. Call in those Indians.

Scene VIII.—On the Jaxartes.

Philotas in prison, and Phylax.
Phi.
You've let me blood full oft—cured many a headache:
The king with sharper steel than yours, old friend,
Will cure to-day's. The surfeit long of life

Ceases at set of sun. Can'st cure my heartache?

Phy.
'Tis vengeance you demand?

Phi.
You have read my soul
That, sitting in mine eyes and all ways turning
To watch those dreadful ministers of fate,
Sees something still behind. 'Twould sweeten death!

Phy.
One day I vowed to avenge you.

Phi.
Can I trust you?
They say the mirthful nature does not love:
And yet I think I somewhat loved you, Phylax:
No hypocrite were you. I knew that much.

Phy.
You'd have me kill this king?

Phi.
Not him—Hephestion!
'Tis there he's vulnerable. Be it done
When the Alexandrian star is at its highest.
That too will set.

Phy.
I have pledged my faith.

Phi.
Remember!
An ice-film gathers on my shivering blood.
Oh happy days of youth! They'll laugh at me
A shadow 'mid the shades, as I have laugh'd
At Homer's ghosts bending to victim blood
A sieve-like throat incapable of joy!
Tell me these things are fables. I'd not live
A second time; for life's too dangerous!
We come from nothing; and another nothing,
A hoary Hunger, couchant at Death's gate,
Waits to devour us.

Phy.
(Placing his hand on the heart of Philotas).
Slowly, faintly, slowly :—
The failure's there.

Phi.
Murderers! The law's against them
For if I knew that plot, or if I will'd it,

I spared to join it. Murderers!—lawless murderers!
I tripped an inch at this side Fortune's goal:
Parmenio king, his successor were I.

Phy.
Their plea is equity—the culprit's plea
Then when his law-plea fails.

Phi.
Is that a jibe?
He needs must jeer and gibber!—Vengeance! Vengeance!
Happy the serpent that with death for death
Enriches its last pang! Olympias only
Escaped its tooth. Once more I laugh! Forget not—
I've left you in my will a hundred talents.
Ah, hark! a step—

Scene IX.—A Hill close to the Jaxartes.

Alexander, Hephestion, Eumenes.
Heph.
Beyond that infinite, pale, grassy plain
Rise those white peaks like pyramids o'er sands:
Is this your northern limit?

Alex.
Scythia's horse
Watch still their chance. They are no way barbarous:
I guess them at twelve thousand. Stealthily,
In ever widening gyres they near the bank,
Poor gilded swarmers in their warmthless sun:—
I have baulked their game. Resume we our dispute!
What if the race of gods began with men?
If nature, evermore through strife educing
Stronger from strong, throned on Olympus, first
The heroic-proved of men as demi-gods,

And these through strife worked out the gods that rule?
Concede me this as true, and man's ambition
May kindred claim with gods.

Heph.
Concede it! never.
Greatness, be sure, came never from below:
That thought would drag from heaven itself its greatness:
Rather the gods themselves make manifest
One higher still than they.
Sir, there are whispers, trust me, from beneath—
These should be trampled and not parleyed with:
Esteem such thoughts among them.

Alex.
This, that's great
My thought suggests; an infinite progression.

Heph.
Nay, but a finite mocking infinite
And murdering what it mocks:—the highest term
In such a series but repeats the first
Exaggerating still inherent flaws,
And in a nakeder shape, though vaster scale,
Showing man's nature shamed.

Alex.
The gods have passions,
Not minds alone: in this they are like to men.

Heph.
They act like men who have them:—that proves little:
Our ignorance doubtless misconceives their acts:
'Twas not Apollo's spite that sentenced Marsyas:
Twas no earth-instinct on Endymion smiled:
The self-same acts, in gods, in men, in beasts,
Know difference large. Acts lawful in the man
Are crimes in boys.

Alex.
A race of gods hath fallen:
Then Zeus in turn may fall. I find no thrones
Whereon the gods themselves may sit secure:

I find to man's advance no term or limit;
No certain truth amid contending rites;
No base for Faith.

Heph.
Then man must live by Hope.

Alex.
And whence our hope?

Heph.
From all things good around us,
From all things fair—the brightness of the world,
The glory of its rivers and its seas,
The music in the wandering of its winds,
The magic in the spring-flowers fresh accost,
The gladdening sweetness and pure grace of woman,
The questioning eyes of childhood. With one voice
They preach one hope—that virtue shall be crowned
One day, and Truth be known.

Alex.
The trumpet! Hark!
We Greeks must wrangle on in the battle's mouth!
Six kingdoms have I clutched within two years;
The seventh shall be the greatest.

Ant.
(entering).
Tidings, sire!
The Satrap of Aria yields submission.

[Perdiccas and Craterus enter.
Alex.
The Satrap keeps his office. Craterus, speak:
The Assembly of the Army, hath it judged?

Cra.
The court was faithful to procedure's law,
And, spite the wrathful host that stormed around,
Pronounced not judgment till Philotas, first
Heard in his own defence, but after, tortured,
Had made confession full, his proper guilt,
The crime of Dimnus and of Hermolaus,
His sire's complicity. The traitor pushed
Before its time the plot, though hatched by others,
Lest he who guards your treasure-house far off
Might drop ere all was ripe. The High Tribunal

Proceeded to the award—death to Philotas,
Death to Parmenio, and the rest. The host
Raged in its joy; so oft his pride had galled them;
So often had they gaped on frosty roads
While passed his baggage train. His sister's husband
Raised the first stone.

Alex.
How died he?

Cra.
Ill enough.

Per.
A traitor died this day.

Cra.
A traitor proved.

Alex.
A man whose death was needful died this day;
Likewise a man whose guilt was probable
Well-nigh to certainty—but yet not certain,
Since cowards, tortured, may confess things false.
Philotas or conspired or else connived,
And each of these is capital, or changed
From keen to dullard in a sort that's death
In nature's capital code. I, in his place,
Had ta'en small umbrage at my days abridged:
There lived nor scope nor purpose in his life
Which death could mar.

Cra.
For instant doom they clamoured,
Fearing your leniency—

Alex.
I am not lenient:
When prodigal I have seemed, and lax in pardons,
'Twas with a politic aim. Nor am I cruel:
For needful warning I have shed man's blood,
Full often to the bound extreme of justice,
Seldom beyond. I say not that the bound
In wrath or peril never was transgressed.
It was no will of mine to try this man:
But, judged and sentenced, never had I spared him
Certain thenceforward in my blood to seek,
Likeliest at some high crisis of my empire,

Ablution for his name. Lo, there! They launch
A flag of truce.

Ptol.
(arriving).
The Scythians send us envoys.
With proffer of firm peace. Their terms are these:
North of the river their old hunting-grounds
Remain their own: this granted, they, in turn,
Acknowledge, sire, for yours, the manifold realms
From that wide water to the mountain bound
And limitless beyond to the Indian deep,
Thenceforth your sworn allies.

Alex.
Their terms are just;
Accept them, and engross. Those Indian Heralds—

Ant.
(entering).
That murderer, Satabarzanes, is slain;
And Spitamenes, honouring his own head,
Surrenders Bessus.

Alex.
Let the self-same court
That judged Philotas judge this bloodier traitor;
When sentenced, be he sent to Sysigambis,
The dead king's mother: her award is mine.
Alas for old Parmenio!

Heph.
Bid him live!

Alex.
His guilt is mixed and tangled with that other's:
The father spared, the son had foully died.

Heph.
The time to come—

Alex.
As ignorantly on this,
And in its ignorance as confidently,
Shall pass its judgment as on things beside:
Its plaudits I shall have for things ill done:
Its censure for the needful and the just:
Too much, no doubt, of both.

Heph.
Slay not Parmenio!

Alex.
Shall I for propping of a flag-staff bent

Trouble a half-raised empire's base? Hephestion
Save that I know thee in the battle-field
Except myself the foremost, there are times
When I could deem thee weakling. To your tasks,
Friends, one and all.
[The Generals depart.
Hephestion's cause is stronger than he knows:
Parmenio's death will much offend the army;
Their panic quenched, their loves will back to him:
Yet he must die. He'll hear of his son's death
Ere my best speed could reach Ecbatana:
The troops around him there are as his children,
And, with the imperial treasury at his beck,
Nations will be his friends.
Parmenio's death will much offend the army,
Bound by old memories more to him than me:
New wars will aptliest teach it to forget—
To India then! Thus stands my doubt resolved!
To that through all this tanglement I leant,
Yet knew it not till now.
Yon priest at Hierosolyma forbade it—
'Tis strange how oft that man before me stands—
Spake much of “Term and Limit.” That's for others:
To grasp a world for me is feasible;
To keep a half-world, not.

Scene X.—Susa. The Cypress Cemetery.

Arsinoe, Amastris.
Ama.
Return ere long, my gentle litter-bearers—
How cool this cypress shade! how fair this spot
So soon to be my grave! Chide not, Arsinoe;
I would not die; I would not be unhappy:
I would live blest, and making blest. Ah me!

I think, I think that I was gathering strength
Till came those tidings from Arbela's field
Of my brave brothers dead. Others I loved:
I loved but these in hope.

Ars.
Hope still, my cousin:
Hope more! The day that lifts you from these arms
Will give you back your brothers!

Ama.
I have hope,
Though scarce like yours. Oh for a strong-winged hope,
Swan-like to soar, lighting that dim domain
Eclipsed by death's cold shade! I loved the Songs:
Am I ungrateful if at times I feel
Like one that trusts and has not found?

Ars.
Beloved,
Things greater than the things we loved and found not
One day shall find us. Let me see your book:
'Tis that you read in Tyre's old palace garden—

Ama.
The day we saw him last.

Ars.
Hephestion?

Ama.
Him:
Your eyes grow large.

Ars.
That day you scarce were near us.

Ama.
His love wasfor the child and not the maiden:
I left him with you then and many a time
Before that morning. Cousin, here's a song:
Read it; my eyes grow dim.

Ars.
It is of Cyrus.

Ama.
We'll not read that. Assyrians wept that day
As we weep now: the Babylonian air
Was thick with sobs: above Chaldæa's plain
Like a great wind the orphans' cry rang out:

The bards are less than generous.

Ars.

And for that cause
Unjust. Here's one that's not a song of triumph.

[Reads.

Marriage Song.

I

Love begins upon the heights
As on tree-tops in the spring
April with green foot alights
While the birds are carolling:
Ay, but April ends with May:
Love must have the marriage-day!

II

Love begins upon the heights
As o'er snowy summits sail
First the dewy matin lights
Destined soon to reach the vale:
Ay, but maidens must not grieve
That morn of love hath noon and eve.

III

Love is Dream and Vision first:
Proud young Love the earth disdains;
But his cold streams, mountain-nursed,
Warm them in the fruitful plains
Ere the marriage-day is sped:
Peal the bells! The bride is wed!

Ama.
If Love indeed begins upon the heights,
'Twere well he ended there. His starry feet

Would thus their splendour best retain. It may be
Maidens that, loving well, unwedded die,
In this are happier yet than those who find
Love's loveliest human home.

Ars.
I would not wed;
And you have turned from many a suit—scarce gently.

Ama.
Arsinoe! you will wed, who would not wed;
I die, who would not die. Our life's amiss!
I must not say it:—no, our life is gentle:
You'd rather live ill-matched than fail in duty;
I'd rather die than prove to friendship false,
Of love unworthy. Each will have her best.

Ars.
O friend, my earliest friend, my best! how much
I owe to you! how hard had been without you!
In the deep bosom of your boundless love
I breathed a generous and a healing clime:
In all our sorrows you, yourself an orphan,
Out of your poverty for me had wealth,
And pitied me so sweetly that perforce
Self-pity left me, and I smiled through tears.
You only lived in others. The Songs you loved
Served you full well: they clothed your spirit with light:
In them you bathed as in some wood-girt stream
Crystalline ever. I, upon the bank,
But felt the dew upon its breath, the drops
Showered from your hand:—they cooled an aching forehead.

Ama.
Ah! ere we clothe us with that water-light,
We drop the warm, protecting garb of earth!
Who feigned the nymphs feigned them invulnerable
By bitter north-wind, or the hunter's dart.
My mother said the Songs would teach me sorrow—

They taught me sorrow and joy; would leave me weak—
They left me weak and strong. I lived in others;
But you for others lived. Arsinoe,
Should he return you'll lead him to this spot;
You'll give him here this book of songs:—he knew it—
Read him some few—not this, for he is blithesome,
This song as plaintive as the voice of child
Heard lonely from the harvest field afar
When twilight wraps the land. Bordering the scroll
Are golden stars, and little pictured fancies:
Here is the mother-bird that feeds her brood
From her own bleeding breast; and here's a young one
That bends above the on-rushing stream, athirst,
And yet afraid to drink:—the spray is bending:—
Most are the work of others: one was mine,
Ere yet this hand had learned its trick of shaking.
If you should name my name, mark well his face
So bright that day, and note if he remembers.
Say that we spake of him—that I was happy
In life—in death. You'll say not that I loved him.
Give me one kiss. You're welcome, merry maidens,
Albeit so soon returned. Set down my litter.

ACT IV.

Scene I.—Susa, in front of the Palace.

Antigonus, Eumenes, Seleucus, Craterus, Peucestas, Amyntas, Phylax.
Ant.
At Susa once again! Why, this is Greece!
One time it seemed the eastern edge of earth;
Measured by that great space we have tracked, 'tis home.

Eum.
Six years ago we gazed on yonder palace:
In three we conquered Asia's eastern half;
India in three!

Sel.
India! once more I ee it,
Once more I tread its palm-groves and its plains,
I scan the red sun through the sandy mist,
And hear the lion's roar. Our earlier conquests
Were prelude notes—no more.

Amy.
I am late arrived:
Recount the tale.

Sel.
'Twas victory, day by day:
'Twas victory till, the appetite itself
Satiate with triumphs, in our host remained
Nought but the base uxorious homeward craving.
The Indus and Hydaspes we had crossed,
The Hydraotes and the Acecines;
Then, as a gathering tide, or desert flame
That nearer draws, was heard a deepening murmur
And as on banks of Hyphasis we stood
That murmur found a voice. The army sware
To march no farther east. The king but smiled,
And bade them make encampment, and take rest.
Next day, at noon, he flung that strength of words,
Upon them which till then they ne'er withstood,
And, ceasing, looked around with eye ablaze.
Then first I saw a wonder in that face:
He gazed, and passed into his tent alone;
There lonely sat three days. The silence 'twas
Taught him the host's resolve.

Amy.
What held it silent?

Sel.
Fate, or the reverence of remorseful gods
That knew their man. That Indian Seer at last
Made good his way into the royal tent:

What passed none knows. At eve the king gave word:—
Ere long we sailed a-down Hydaspes' flood.

Ant.
Hydaspes never saw a sight like that!
An army on each side, and, in the midst,
Two thousand ships!

Peu.
Forests were felled to build them!
The winds will miss their playmates many an age.
The nations shivered that beheld our coming,
Sibas, Ossadian, Sogdian, Sudracæ;—
The Malli fought the best.

Sel.
The world's great scales
Trembled that day! Our king—I see him still—
By him three friends—a host of foes in front!
'Twas you that saved him!

Peu.
'Twas that Argive shield
In fortunate hour plucked from the Trojan fane.
I held it high: it triumphed!

Sel.
Down we sailed
To the ocean flood, and made our vows, and buried
The sacrificial goblet in the wave.
Next, month by month we tracked Gedrosian sands:
The army of Semiramis slept beneath them,
The army of great Cyrus. Thousands died:
The rest pushed on. At last green-girt Carmania
Embowered us in her ever-flowering vales;
And, chapleted with vine, westward we sped,
Till, past all hope, we kenned our fleet and clasped
Old comrades mourned as dead.

Ptol.
We have told our story,
And made an honest boast. Our toils have rest:
Not less the king may find that peace hath dangers
Worse than the worst in war.

Ant.
The gods are with him.

Sel.
The gods of Greece are with him, but not all;
And gods can change, like men.

Ant.
'Tis true! let none
That's pious trust the gods, however friendly,
But, sharp-eyed watch and serve them.

Phy.
O ye gods!
I'll keep a dog to help me at my watch,
Noting your humours! Lords, if danger threaten,
'Tis Persia breeds that danger. Orxines—
There was a Persian, noble, brave, their richest
Satrap of Persis, faithful to our king—
He's dead, and by the king's command, and wherefore?

‘He (Alexander) was strangely disturbed in mind when he came to understand what havock had been made of the tomb of Cyrus, which, as Aristobulus tells us, he found rifled and broken in pieces. This tomb was placed in the Royal Gardens at Pasargadæ, and round it was planted a grove of all kinds of trees: the place also was well watered, and the surface of the earth all round clothed with a beautiful verdure. The basis thereof consisted of one large stone of a quadrangular form. Above was a small edifice with an arched roof of stone, and a door, or entrance, so very narrow that the slenderest man could scarce pass through. Within this edifice was the golden coffin, wherein the body of Cyrus was preserved, as also the bed whose supporters were of massy gold curiously wrought; the covering thereof was of Babylonian tapestry; the carpets underneath of the finest wrought purple. . . . The inscription, which was wrote in the Persian language, was to this purpose: “O mortal, I am Cyrus, the son of Cambyses, founder of the Persian monarchy, and Sovereign of Asia. Grudge me not therefore this monument.”’—Arrian, translated by Rooke, vol. ii. p. 132.

Why, 'twas a cry from bones, from offal, dust!
We passed Pasargadæ upon our march:
We found the tomb of Cyrus sack'd for gold:—
A crime they called it—named it some strange name—
'Twas sacrilege!

Ptol.
Persia is not the danger:
He's vulnerable inly, not without,
Through that fierce will which makes of wrath a madness,
Turns love to doom. Hephestion's brave and wise;
He takes an ample sweep of virtues; still
In valour he's not greater than Seleucus,
Than Craterus in insight: yet the king
Holds him more precious than the total host:
Such love is peril: 'tis to keep two bodies,
Two separate tenements of one frail life,
And obvious each to Fortune's shaft—or Fate's.

Sel.
Phylax, what mean you by those twinkling eyes?
You are bright, yet dark. In you two Demons kiss
With love malign.

Phy.
Your pardon, mighty lord;
I smiled at perils bred from the affections:
I've heard of such ere now, but met them never.

A Messenger
(entering).
The council meets at sunset, lords.

Several Generals.

Make speed!

[They depart.
Phy.
Philotas, you were wiser than I knew!
“'Tis there he's vulnerable.” Hate is insight.

Scene II.—Palace at Susa.

Alexander, Hephestion.
Alex.
The time is come; you stare;—the time decreed;
Of Empire safe henceforth, or lost for ever:
With a fierce joy I clasp this chief of battles
Which dares me in my day of seeming peace.
What think you of my fortunes?

Heph.
More and more
They are like yourself: they wear a royal aspect.

Alex.
False! I am substance; and my fortunes hollow!
To keep that little handful of my Greeks
In girl-proud severance from the conquered world
A dream it was, a dream!

Heph.
You said so early.

Alex.
To dispossess them of that dream-dominion;—
I told you this must be:—Craterus—yourself—
Seleucus—all—conspired in one reply,
“The Greek will rather die.”

Heph.
We knew, and said it.

Alex.
I sought evasions; I deferred the time;
I marched to Scythia, then to India on,
Trusting that mellowing years might work a change.
Prerogatives I linked, yet kept apart,
To native hands conceding civil functions,
Reserving still the warlike for the Greek;
What find I now returning? Faction's fruits:
The cry comes up:—discords, corruptions, slaughters,
The honour of great houses violated,
Their lands laid waste—
These things must end: this missive comes to end them:
Three years ago I pledged my royal word
Asian recruits should stand at one with Greeks;
A month, and thirty thousand join my ranks:
Come weal, come woe, I keep my sacred pledge.

Heph.
All Greece will rise in storm.

Alex.
A storm shall meet it.

Heph.
Till now you have lived for ever in their praise.

Alex.
To breathe applauses is to breathe an air
Defiled by breath of men: I stand, and stood
On the mountain-tops, breathing the breath of gods.
Fear nought: I see my way. Those Asian Empires
Were things mechanic.

Heph.
Greek and Asian equalled,
The Greek supremacy has died at birth.

Alex.
You see but half. Equality, when based
On merit, means supremacy of Greek;
For mind is merit, and the great Greek mind
Supreme in nature's right. Our Greece shall rule
Like elemental gods with nature blent,
Yet not in nature merged.

Heph.
The first inception—

Alex.
I had foreseen it; and I'll have no first:
Three changes I have welded into one.
Thanks to Parmenio's death, the treasure's mine:
It buys an Empire's safety. Half my Greeks
Stagger beneath a load of debt: I'll pay it:
That's change the first. I'll wed the races next:
My bravest and my best—that's change the second—
Shall marry Asian maids, by me so dowered
As Hope had feared to hope. My generals, likewise,
Shall mate the noblest ladies in the land;
Which done, all war henceforth were household war.
At that high marriage-feast mine earlier pledge
Shall stand redeemed. Persian shall rise to Greek:
Ay, but Greek soldiers rise to Asian kings!
That's change the third. I blend these three in one.

Heph.
The gods inspired that scheme! Their help go with it!

Alex.
The gods are with me ever: but the Fates—
Those whom the immortals dread, I too may fear.

Heph.
Touching the gods, I mark in you a change:
At first you honoured much this Persian Faith,
A Faith that soared, and yet went deep, insisting
For ever on the oppugnancy divine
'Twixt Good and Ill, unlike those nymph-like Fancies,
Glad offspring of Hellenic poet-priests,
That, draped in Faith's grave garb, yet loosely zoned,
But glide above the surfaces of things,
And tutor us with smiles. That time is past.
You honour still Egyptian rites and Asian;
Persian no more.

Alex.
The man that founds an Empire
Must measure all things by the needs of Empire:
This Magian Faith will prove refractory:
That truth it claims to hold, and hold alone,

Burns in its eye, and eyes of them that serve it,
A portion of their never-quenchèd Fire:
Its spirit is the spirit of domination:
I'll own no Persian worship.

Heph.
Is this just?
You smile on Persia's court, upon its camp,
Its nobles, and its merchants, and its peasants;
Upon the noblest thing it hath you frown.
Its domination means that Truth should rule,
It seeks no thrones: you find no foe, but make one.

Alex.
'Tis so. I ever make my choice of foes
Not less than friends. I know this Faith must hate me:
Like it there's none: the rest at heart are brothers;
Their priests alike contented to be ruled,
Their rites not hard to reconcile. Moreover,
I know Calanus now: his Faith for me
Holds something Persia's lacks. The Indian Seer
Who scorns both kingly throne and beggar's cloak,
Contemplative unvested 'neath the palms,
Seems than the Magian more abstruse in lore
And seated farther back in lordlier depths
Of world-defying pride.

Heph.
His pride I doubt not:
When first you found him on the banks of Indus
In meditation 'mid his brethren throned,
They to the greeting of a king vouchsafed not
So much as this—the uplifting of their eyes.

Alex.
Not less he joined my march—though on conditions.

Heph.
The Indian's faith may soar as high as heaven:
His pride is narrow as the Cynic's tub.

Alex.
You hate Calanus.

Heph.
What I love is Truth

'Tis great: and therefore humbleness must win it,
Not pride, if won at all.

Alex.
We know but this—
We walk upon a world not knowable
Save in those things which least deserve our knowing.
Yet capable, not less, of task sublime.
My trust is in my work: on that I fling me,
Trampling all questionings down.

Heph.
From realm to realm
You have chased the foe like dreams.

Alex.
I sometimes think
That I am less a person than a power,
Some engine in the right hand of the gods,
Some fateful wheel that, rolling round in darkness,
Knows this—its work; but not that work's far scope.
Hephestion, what is life? My life, since boyhood,
Hath been an agony of means to ends:
An ultimate end I find not. For that cause,
On-reeling in the oppression of a void,
At times I welcome what I once scarce brooked,
The opprobrium of blank sleep—
Enough of this. Discoursing of my plan
I passed unnamed its needfullest part: you guess it:
My marriage must inaugurate the rest,
And yours, with mine: our captains, one and all,
Will shape their course by yours.

Heph.
I understand not.

Alex.
Brothers till now we are not save in love:
Within our children's veins one blood shall flow,
Children of sisters. Now you know my meaning.

Heph.
I hear a music as of gods borne nigh;
See nought.

Alex.
The scheme's not policy alone:
'Tis expiation likewise. Hearken, Hephestion:

Above the body of Darius dead
I vowed to reinstate his Royal House,
My own just rights secured, nor hid my vow,
Sending that holy corse to Sisygambis,
The mother of the murdered, for the tomb.
Of those fair sisters—children then they were—
I chose the younger, destining my crown
For her fair brows. Arsinbe to you
(I named her once, but thought the theme unwelcome)
My fancy gave. I find this may not be:
Old Persia rests on laws immutable:
The eldest daughter of the Royal House
Must share the oldest throne on earth, and chief,
Except her sire's. A marriage less than this
To Persia were a stain, to Greece a weakness.
These things are nought. The maids are good alike:
You'll have the lovelier bride, the nobler I
In Asian heraldry. That setting sun
Dazzles my eyes, or else you're pale, Hephestion,
You that paled never 'mid Gedrosian sands:—
We buried many there. Deny the army
The lists of the dead.

Sel.
(entering).
So please the king, his council—

Alex.
I shall divulge this marriage to the council,
And show this missive from the agèd queen
So lofty, sad, yet grateful. I had forgotten:—
Those spoils that Xerxes filched, those statues twinned
That shine in brass before the palace portals,
Harmodius and Aristogeiton styled,
(I deem them unauthentic, like the merit
Of those seditious boors whose names they boast)
To Athens send, ordaining for their site

100

Great Theseus' temple. Be it done ere morn.

[Alexander departs, followed by Seleucus.
Heph.
'Twas all but won: 'tis lost, and lost for ever!
To her no loss: she knew not of my love:
I half foresaw, and sent her never message.
'Twas but a child! Ah yes, yet childish eyes
Shining through darkness could illume my dreams,
Star-like could pierce the low-hung battle-cloud,
In victory's hour could wake in me a heart
Tenderly righteous. Palace of Old Tyre!
Dark groves wherein the night-bird sang by day!—
'Twas but a child! Ah yes, yet childish hands
'Mid burning wastes could bind my brow with wreaths
Cold as the northern morn; a childish voice,
Still heard 'mid Lydian measures, could expel
Their venomed softness leaving them but plaintive.
Must all end thus? Oh mockery, mockery, mockery!
Shall one be zealous for my body's health,
Make inquisition of mine alter'd cheek,
Adventure to exalt that fame I laugh at,
The dignities I spurn, my golden fortunes,
Yet, there where only lives my spirit, lay
A hand more callous than his courser's hoof,
And crush that thing he feels not?—Down, base thoughts!
The crisis of his fortunes is upon him:
A perilous crisis; it may be a fatal.
I will not fail him at his utmost need:
His love is with me, though he knew me never—
Ill time were this, ill time for traitor's work!
Her duty's plain: necessity goes with it—
The thing that is must be.

101

Scene III.

Phylax (alone).
Phy.
Hephestion is daily more hard of access. I
know not how I shall approach him near enough to
wind him in my toils. Ho! sirrah! [to his Page]
know
you any among them that attend on Hephestion?

Page.
Sir, there is among them a youth, Peitho
by name, one with as many humours as a monkey.
Many a time hath he kept the suitors of Hephestion
waiting three hours in the ante-room while we played
at games.

Phy.
Play with him to-morrow, and lose. Give
him these gold pieces. Tell him that thy master hath
heard much of his trustiness, and holds him in
esteem. Bid him come here at his leisure, and play
games with thee.

Scene IV.—Palace at Susa.

Sisygambis, the Magian Astar.
Ast.
Madam, fear nought: she'll know the right and do it:
The maid's no Greek, nimble of spirit but small:
Her mind is spacious, and her heart is strong:
In all things still she sees the thing essential.
Such is the royal nature.

Sis.
For this marriage
The royal in her nature is against it:
She neither loves the Greek nor leans to marriage.
She's younger than her years, tho' when a child
Seemingly older.

102

Ast.
Madam, in high courage
She's older than her mother at her death,
And less through weakness of her sex dependent.
She will not wreck the realm.

Sis.
She comes: farewell.
[Astar departs. Arsinoe enters, and, after kneeling, sits at the feet of Sisygambis.
O large and lustrous eyes through tears up-gazing,
What find you in these agèd eyes of mine,
Murky and dim, these wan, discrownèd brows,
Worthy such sweet regard? Large eyes, gaze on!
You see dead Persia and her fallen House:
Their monument am I.

Ars.
Mother! my mother!

Sis.
That name you gave me when your mother died:
It reach'd me first from younger lips than yours:
It was not mine to kiss those lips in death:
Another closed those eyes.

Ars.
Mother! my mother!

Sis.
To them that with officious zeal presumed
Whispering of comfort, thus I made reply,
“He died contending for this Persian realm:
Comfort, save that, I spurn.”

Ars.
Though earth were ashes
That comfort still remains. We needs must weep;
We need not fear, methinks, nor hate, nor murmur.

Sis.
The strongest hand of earth let fall the sceptre:
The wide world shuddered like a shrine profaned:
Then from the gulf there rose a voice, “That sceptre
A slender hand shall lift from out the dust.”
The voice was low. I heard it and survived.

Ars.
Whose hand?

Sis.
The hand that lies across my knees:

103

This missive's heavy with a royal suit:
The Greek king claims that hand.

Ars.
He claim it!—Never!

Sis.
Then from a Persian hand comes Persia's doom:
This bridal had restored her Royal House.

Ars.
It was the Greek king laid it low, my mother.

Sis.
That laid it low, and now that fain would raise it:
The Greeks have given consent.

Ars.
The Greeks consent!
The Greeks! The Greeks dispose of Persia's daughters!
I'd have them nor for arbiters nor subjects!
Of all those Greeks, I know but one, one only,
Not shallow, loud, ignoble and untrue—
Hephestion; him who charmed for us at Tyre
Sadness to peace. Mother, if he has sisters
I think they are hard to win.

Sis.
He weds your sister.

Ars.
Hephestion weds my sister!

Sis.
Woos her and weds her.
You love your sister: does her marriage please you?

Ars.
I know not.

Sis.
Or perhaps displease?

Ars.
I know not.

Sis.
These marriages must be, or both, or neither:
By Persia's law the princess eldest-born
Mustfill earth's proudest throne: that throne is yours—
Unless you spurn it, yours. The king is proud:
The king's one friend will teach you how to win him
And make him father of this fallen realm:
Your sister's husband needs must be your brother.

104

Ars.
There's sweetness in that thought. Oh mother, mother!

Sis.
Now that your hands are shifted from your face
The pallor's less.

Ars.
Oh mother! Spare to urge me!
Scarce for love's sake, methinks, could I surrender
That maiden life, so holy, calm, and clear:
I cannot wed, not loving.

Sis.
I have done.
The nobly-modest usage of the East
Left marriages to parents. Yours are dead:
And therefore you are free.
This day a pact is broken with a grave:
It was a dead king, not a king that lives,
Who made this marriage: in his death he conquered:
Earth's victor stood above a shape sword-pierced:
A stricken shape he stood, a paler shape;
He saw the royal blood, the blood of Persia,
And lo, the conqueror changed to penitent:
That hour he vowed, suspending his advance,
To chase the murderer's steps from land to land
Thenceforth avenger. This too, this he vowed,
To set thy race, Darius, on thy throne
Partaken, not usurped. The tidings reached me,
Child, with your father's corse.

Ars.
'Tis past! My father!
Forgive this base deserter of thy blood,
Trivial impugner of thy sacred will,
Withstander of thy country's peace and greatness!
My mother, write—write quick—that I consent.

[Arsinoe moves to a window. The Queenmother writes. As her letter is finished Arsinoe returns.

105

Sis.
You've been a gazer on our Persian heavens:
The stars are in your face. 'Tis sad no more.

Ars.
The tears which I should weep are bright on yours.

Sis.
Age frets at all. Whoe'er had been your husband
It may be I had wept. Persia is saved.

Scene V.—Susa.

Alexander, Calanus.
Alex.
Father, think well of it. Our Faith offends you.

Cal.
'Tis a child's babble: and a child were he
That either loved or loathed it. Wisdom's sons—
None else in things divine have serious part—
Can mark the shadows dance upon the dust,
With brow that knows no change.

Alex.
I am not Greek,
Though king of Greeks. My race belongs to Greece
Of the kingly age alone. Commend you Persia?

Cal.
A priest of Persia bows his head to kings.
One time their Magians, at a king's command,
Linked with their order one who was a Greek,
Themistocles by name. Their wisdom's earthly:
Their Faith is but a law, and not a thought:
They make their God a king, give him a rival,
An Ahriman with Ormuzd still at feud,
Vexing with war the everlasting Rest,
The One Existence in and under all,
For all things else but seem, and are illusions,
The Intelligence unmoved whose thoughts are things,
Who dreams, and worlds are made.

106

Alex.
Is Egypt nobler?

Cal.
Egypt had wisdom once: her kings have slain it;
With them her priests connived; the guiltier far:
They shared with kings; and government was all.
Egypt is but a kingdom; kingdoms pass:
A race alone survives. Son, what wouldest thou?

Alex.
A single kingdom one o'er all the earth.

Cal.
So much of earth as shall suffice for grave
Is man's, my son—no more. The on-striding foot
No whither tends. The way is up, not onward.
Ten years you have wasted conquering half the world.

Alex.
Ay! Time is needed. There's the pang—none sharper!

Cal.
Eternity alone from Time can free you;
One step can lodge you in her changeless realm:
There from the palm eternal drops no scale:
The ambrosial rose never lets fall a leaf:
The ever-setting sun is never set:—
That realm is Thought. My son, you have won your kingdom:
Spurn it, and live.

Alex.
But half my task is finished.
Once wrought—

Cal.
You'd be a god on earth, and do
What God has left undone. The external world
To the end must be a world of blind confusions,
Some little curbed by little chiefs and kings,
With others who in industries cognate
Partake with these. Be still: the Eternal Patience
Preserves that world the Eternal Thought creates.

Alex.
(after a pause).
How many are your lesser deities?

Cal.
Their number's infinite. Divinity

107

Had ne'er been plural else. A finite number
Would spawn us idols.

Alex.
They are less than Brahm?

Cal.
Less than his priests, my son, of whom am I.
Men know us not. Of old the patriarch Brahmins
Sat in still groves, their flocks their kingdoms then,
For man was then a Household, not a Realm,
And lived for their Creator, not for things.
When riot filled the earth, and lust, and war,
These from the embraces of the race depraved
Severed their sons. They dwelt apart revered
Even by the vile. What man first was, we are:
We keep our heritage and know not change:

The inferior castes fell from us.

[Craterus enters.
Alex.
I must leave you.

Cal.
I claim your pledge. You're in my debt a pyre.

Alex.
What mean you?

Cal.
King, you sware to speed me home:
My body fails: my spirit's freedom nears me:
The God I serve rejects reluctant guests.
I mount that pyre alive: the finite atom
Rejoins the infinite.

Alex.
A pride there is
That dwarfs the pride of kings. Calanus, live!
Your pupil, not your king, kneels to implore you.

Cal.
I have taught you nought.

Cra.
I see it in his eye:
His will is fix'd.

Alex.
(rising).
I'll have no part in this:
Craterus, subdue that overweening will;
Win him to live:—but still revere my pledge.

[Departs.

108

Scene VI.—A Terrace of the Queen-mother's Palace at Susa.

Arsinoe, Hephestion.
Ars.
You knew her: that is well.

Heph.
Who knew your mother
Till death shall reverence woman's kind. In her,
Though doubly-dowered, a mother and a queen,
There lived a soft perpetual maidenhood,
An inexperienced trust, timid, yet frank,
Shy, yet through guilelessness forgetting shyness.
She seemed a flower-like creature come to fruit:
She moved among her babes, an elder sister;
Then, wakened by an infant cry or laugh,
Full motherhood returned.

Ars.
Had you but known her
In later days, and in her deeper woe!
It nought embittered her. Flower-like you called her:
She was a flower that sweetened with like breath
The darkness and the day: she turned from none:
Her heart was liberal in accepting comfort
Such as the least might minister. In griefs
She died; but not from grief.

Heph.
It was her death
That changed you first to grave?

Ars.
Not that alone;
The guidance of her orphans fell to me,
And taught me soon my weakness. You, Hephestion,
Have known severer labours, cares more stern;
Have won great battles; captured mighty cities;
You—none but you—could knit those rival chiefs:—

109

“His weight of duties seemed but weight of wings,”
The king spake thus.

Heph.
His fortunes were the wind
That raised those wings aloft.

Ars.
You owe him much.

Heph.
You think so? Ha!

Ars.
You loved him; and you served him:
What kindness equals this—to accept our aid?
What anguish bitterer than the aid rejected?
He told me of a fame so wide—

Heph.
I spurn it!
To me 'twas ever little: now 'tis nought.

Ars.
You praise him; yet you will not I should praise him:
I praise him ill in truth. The king was kind:
He sent me ofttimes greeting. You sent none:—
“Children,” thus mused I, “seem so soon forgotten.”

Heph.
I see a glare in the sky. What light is that?

Ars.
Our Persian moon, ascending, sends before her
A splendour as of morn.

Heph.
The sun sets red:
The heaped clouds totter round his burning halls
Like inward-tumbling bulwarks of a city
Consumed by flames of war—by earthquake rocked—
Twin dooms!—I would—

Ars.
Hephestion, look not on them:
They fling upon your face a threatening light,
Hiding that face I knew. Beside me stand:
Watch we that moon. The West is like the past;
The East grows bright; the eternal hope is hers.
We stand between these two. Your hand is hot:
Your tasks consume you: pray you to remit them!

110

My prayer will soon have won a bolder right:
Your king, that knew not of my young ambition,
Has crowned it, as you know.

Heph.
The crown? You sought it!

Ars.
To be your sister was that young ambition—
One to a child so gentle, to a woman
Must needs be gentler, sister of his wife,
And wife of one far less his king than friend:
You'll make me know him, teach me how to serve him,
My censor, yet my brother.

Heph.
Oh my sister!
The ambitions of this world could ne'er be yours:—
The doubt's not there. Arsinoe, are you happy?

Ars.
Is happiness much worth? I am at peace.

Heph.
Youth craves delight.

Ars.
Not always. If in others
We deem the greediness for joy ignoble,
Almost immodest, what were it in me?
I am the daughter of a fallen house:
My father died deserted and betrayed,
Vanquished, discrowned, with none but foes for mourners:
My mother— Oh, Hephestion, it were sin
In me to crave delight!

Heph.
Unceasing vigils,
Unsparing labours, dangers, ay, and worse,
Domestic treasons—these have been the lot
Of him you wed. The immeasurable soul
That in him, sea-like, swells to the light sustains him:—
The afflictions which he feels not for himself,
You needs must feel and fear.

Ars.
Feel them I may:
I know not if I ever feared; I think

111

I never shall. Fear not for me, Hephestion.
Not wholly sorrows were the sorrows past:
Those that must come will not be wholly sorrows.
Oh, there's a sweetness spread o'er all the earth
Grief's trampling foot makes sweeter! Stormiest clouds
Sweep on in splendour to some heavenly music
By us unheard. Hephestion, I can trust
That Power who will not always keep His secret:
The life He sends must needs, though sad, be great;
The death he sends be timely. Life is peace
To those who live for duty. Purer peace
Will find us after death.

Heph.
The moon is risen:
I see it not, but see you in its light
Like some young warrior, silver-mailed and chaste;
Or liker yet to her, my childhood's wonder,
Great Artemis, as I saw her statue first
Against the broad full moon, while snows high heaped
Ridged her dark wintry porch. Farewell, Arsinoe!
There was a mist that brooded on my spirit:
That mist is raised. To you no ill can come
That virtue will not change to its own essence:
Your life, if long, will prove a glorious life;
If short—you wish it short—revive in glory:
The king will give you of his great, strong heart
What he can spare to woman, and revere
More than he loves. He honoured once your Faith:
Would it were his!

Ars.
I think that will not be.

Heph.
My tasks are heavy now: until this marriage
We meet not oft.

Ars.
See you that grove, Hephestion,

112

Still dark, yet glistening in the ascended moon?
A grave lies there that covers one you knew.
She was my friend. My heart was held to hers
So oft in watches of the long, sweet night
And couch partaken, that a part thereof
Went down with her into that grave. One day
Beside that spot we spake: she died soon after.
She sent to you a message. We will sit
The eve before this bridal by that grave.
Something I'll tell you of her; but not much;
Show you a book of Persian songs that pleased her;
And haply read you one. Till then farewell.

Scene VII.—Susa. The Gate of the Bridal Pavilion.

A crowd of Greeks and Asiatics.
A Greek Soldier.

Push on, spiritual Magian!
Would thou wert pure spirit: so should I push
through thee!

2nd Greek Soldier.

The king hath spent the revenue
of Persia for two years in discharging of his soldiers'
debts. At first we Greeks would not send in our
names, for a rumour lived that the king had a
design to incorporate the Barbarians with Greeks in
the ranks. We are no dullards. Then the king
gave command to spread gold heaps on tables
throughout the camp, and paid off all debts without
registration of names.

A Bactrian.

Fie upon you, Greeks! Ye can
neither trust nor be trusted. For one of you that
leaps into the pit, there be three that lose all out of
over wariness. Greeks new as bubbles are mated
with Persian princesses! Back, soldiers! back,
guards; make way for them that bear on their heads
the cooling drinks!

113

2nd Greek Soldier.

I crept into the hall and beheld
the glory. It is three stadia in length within, and
swathed in purple. The pillars are sixty feet high,
plated with gold; and between them are tables.
Our generals wore crowns higher than those of the
Asian kings. By Hephestion walked Drypetis, sister
of Arsinoe; by Perdiccas the daughter of Atropates;
by Ptolemy and Eumenes the two daughters
of Artabazus; and by Nearchus the daughter of old
Mentor. There were a hundred generals mated,
and ten thousand soldiers besides.

3rd Greek Soldier.

I saw, outside, more than all
thou saw'st within; and that was the good and useful
kicking bestowed upon Phylax! His face was
as though he had swallowed his own ratsbane.
Hephestion had passed into the hall; and they that
attended him, as if by urgency of the crowd, pressed
on the doctor. Hephestion is the bravest of all our
generals, and the most loving to boot, and he looks
ruddier than he hath looked of late. For three
weeks past his step has been less buoyant than once,
and fever-quickened at times.

A Persian Barber.

Good woman, my wife, answer
me this if washing for the Greeks hath made thee a
philosopher: what profit shall fall to us poor folk
from all this royal marrying and junketing?

Barber's Wife.

Tush, thou foolish man! know'st
thou not that ere three days are past the price of
unguents—yea, and of bread—will have fallen to
one-half?

The Sentinels.

Back from the gates! A passage!

[Generals walk out in procession, wearing crowns, Seleucus and Ptolemy first.
Sel.
A sight for gods! That last libation paid,

114

Each feaster lifting still his hand, on the sudden
A sunbeam smote along the golden cups,
Till half the chamber flashed from end to end
Like the sun's path o'er sea!

Ptol.
Far things I saw not:
My place was on the dais, near the queen.
The strong eye of the king made inquest ever,
As when, ere fight, it roams the battle-field,
Around the hall. Courteous and kind, though grave,
Hephestion reassured a startled bride,
And on a face, whose smiles with tears were spangled,
Made light at last prevail. She sat at first
Heart-wildered—yet amused; her roe-like eyes
The darker for the paleness of her cheeks
And garland-shaded brows. The feast not over,
Peace came to her through trust in him close by:
Wife-love had made a seven years' growth.

Sel.
Arsinoe?

Ptol.
Nor startled she, nor pensive, glad or sad:
She looked like one who, some deep chasm o'erpassed,
Sits thenceforth safe; who—all things sacrificed—
Within their monumental urn retains them
Securer for that funeral prison cold,
Or else in some far hope.

(A cry, “Way for the king!”)
[Alexander issues forth, attended by Craterus and Asian princes. The Persians kneel as he passes: the Greeks stand.
Alex.
Rejoice, ye men of Maced on and Persia:
Two realms this day are joined as body and soul:—
Craterus, I miss Calanus.

Cra.
Sir, he's dead.
He sent for me last eve, at set of sun,
Demanding swift fulfilment of your pledge,

115

Or else you were forsworn. Ere rose the day
On whose white brow I wished no shade to fall,
The pyre had reached its height; but he who claimed it
Refused to issue from his cloud of thought
Till noon had come.

Alex.
I marked a smoke at noon,
Susa in sight, upon my homeward way:
Relate the order of your grim proceeding.

Cra.
The rites were his of Indian death when proudest.
First in the death-procession was a horse
Snow-white, of breed Nisæan; next, slave-borne,
The jewelled vases, and the robes, your gifts;
Calanus, in his litter, last, flower-crowned,
With old white head clear shining in the sun,
And chaunting hymns. King-like the man dispersed,
The pyre attained, your gifts among his friends,
And bade them with a cheerful face and strong
Rejoice till night. King-like he clomb the pyre;
In the host's sight he waved his hand—then sank.
The elephants shrilled sharp; the trumpets pealed;
The flames rushed up. We saw that hand no more.

Alex.
He sent me no farewell.

Cra.
Your pardon, sir:
His last was this:—“Commend me to the king:
Tell him we meet once more at Babylon.”

Alex.
Ill day he chose; and spleenful his departure:
A man should lack not manners in his death:
His parting words excuse him: he was mad:
“At Babylon”—he's dead, and ne'er will see it;
Nor I, who live. I ever hated ruins.

116

Scene VIII.—Opis, on the Tigris.

Large bodies of soldiers assembled before a platform occupied by Alexander's Generals.
1st Soldier.

Would that Alexander were taller; so
should we have a sight of him! The Scythian
ambassadors showed their discretion when they
wondered. They looked to see a reasonably sized
giant.

An Officer.

Who gave thee leave, sirrah, to see
that the king is not tall?

2nd Soldier.

He that is a Greek, let him be wary
as a Greek this day! There is a design, and it is
bad. The king is good: therefore it was Craterus
that moved him.

1st Soldier.

Nay, Craterus is honest, and loves
soldiers worn in the wars.

2nd Soldier.

Craterus is honest: therefore it was
Antigonus that deceived the king. He shall bleed
for it. We let pass the Persian pomps and the shame
of the cavalry; but if Barbarians be equalled with us
in the infantry, better it were that all the Greeks
were drowned in one day! Three years since, when
the king promised equality to the Barbarians, we
Greeks inwardly believed that he spake in craft.
This can be proved upon oath. Therefore, if he
keepeth his promise, he deceiveth his friends and
fawneth on his foes. But for these new-married we
should all be of one mind.

1st Soldier.

The Persians be all liars! They pretend
that they are not equalled with us Greeks. They are
equalled but for their own bad heart. Let them worship
the gods, and not grovel in their idolatry of fire!
What hindereth piety but a bad heart? Therefore, if

117

a bad Persian be made equal to a good Greek, the
Greeks have a manifest wrong. Besides, if the many
be equalled with the few, the few shall be drowned in
the many. The Phalanx grins, the Hydaspists growl,
the Escort knows itself doomed. Papers have been
found scattered abroad:—here is one that lay near
the tent of old Phylax: “Sleep ye, O ye Greeks, or
be ye awake? There was one that watched for the
army—Philotas.” All night long, in our encampments,
thirteen men lectured us of our wrongs, and
twelve times the army gave acclamations.

A Mede.

Silence is stronger than acclamations.

Soldiers.

Eavesdropper, who sent thee hither?
Take that!

(Striking their daggers through him.)

To spite us the more he died in silence. The gods
be pitiful to all poor dumb beasts!

[A cry, “Push forward; the king has arrived.”]
Alex.
Ye sons of Macedon and Greece, attend:
'Tis rumoured there are still among you debtors:
A debtor is a slave: who serves his king
Must serve in freedom. I discharge those debts.

A Mutineer.
He must not be suffered to speak.

Alex.
You are mostly strong; but some are men in years,
War-wearied and outworn. Would any homeward?
At home they shall not sit abjects in age,
But largess-laden say to those that praise them,
“The ranks wherein our glorying manhood toiled
Are open still to all.”

A Ringleader of the Mutineers.

Are open, he means,
to Persians! He the son of Zeus! Lift up them
that shall speak for you!

[Thirteen ringleaders are lifted up on the shoulders of the crowd, and wave standards.
118

A cry is raised on all sides. “Send us all home, since you need us no longer. Go to war with none to help you save Zeus, your father!”]
Ptol.
(to Alexander).
They'll turn on you, like hunds upon the huntsman!

[Alexander leaps down among the crowd, followed by his Generals. They seize the thirteen ringleaders, and drag them up the steps of the platform.
Alex.
Speed! To this headless rabble give their heads!
[The Generals fling the heads of the ringleaders among the mutineers.
Stand back! I go alone: let none attend me.

[Alexander takes his stand on a low part of the platform, level with the heads of the crowd.
Alex.
Ye swine-herds, and ye goat-herds, and ye shepherds,
That shamelessly in warlike garb usurped
Cloak your vile clay, my words are not for you;
There stand among you others, soldiers' sons,
Male breasts, o'er-writ with chronicles of wars,
To them I speak. What made you that ye are
The world's wide wonder and the dread of nations?
Your king! What king? Some king that ruled o'er lands
Illimitable, and golden-harvested
From ocean's rim to ocean? Sirs, 'twas one
With petty realm, foe-girt and cleft with treasons,
Dragged up from darkness late and half alive.
From these beginnings I subdued the earth:—
For whom? For you! The increase is yours: for me

119

Whose forehead sweated and whose eyes kept watch,
Remains the barren crown and power imperial.
I found but seventy talents in my chest:
Full many a soldier with his late-spoused bride
Gat better dower. I found within my ports
A fleet to Persia's but as one to ten;
I sold my royal farms and built me ships;
I found an army lean as winter wolves
On Rodope snow-piled; I changed to bread
My sceptre's gems and fed it. Forth from nothing
I called that empire which this day I rule.
My father left me this—his Name: I took it
And kneaded in the hollows of my hands:
I moulded it to substance, nerved it, boned it;
I breathed through it my spirit to be its life;
Clothed it with vanquished nations, sent it forth
Sworded with justice, wisdom for its helm,
The one just empire of a world made one.
Forget ye, sirs, the things ye saw—the States
Redeemed of Lesser Asia, our own blood,
The States subdued, first Syria, then Phœnicia,
Old Tyre the war-winged tigress of the seas,
And Egypt next? The Pyramids broad-based
Descrying far our advent rocked for fear
Above their buried kings: Assyria bowed:
The realm of Ninus fought upon her knees
Not long: the realm of Cyrus kissed the dust:
From lost Granicus rang the vanquished wail
To Issus: on Arbela's plain it died.
Chaldæa, Persis, Media, Susiana—
We stepped above these corpses in our might
To Parthia, and Hyrcania, Bactriana,
And Scythia's endless waste—
The cry from Paromisus gave response

120

To Drangiana's dirge: thy doom, Aria,
To wan-faced Acherosia spake her own:
In vain the Indian Caucasus hurled down
From heaven-topped crags her floods to bar my way:
Flood-like we dashed on valleys known till then
To gods, not men, of Greece. Bear witness, ye
Aornos, from thine eagle-baffling crest
Vainly by Hercules himself assailed,
Plucked down by us; and Nysa, Bacchus-built,
When Bacchus trod the East. What hands were those
Which from the grove Nysæan and fissured rocks
Dragged the green ivies? Whose the brows that wore them?
Whose lips upraised the Bacchus-praising hymn?
Whose hands consummated his work—restored
To liberty and laws the god-built city?—
Sirs, the vile end of all is briefly told.
We pierced the precinct of the Rivers Five,
Indus, and other four. The jewelled crowns
Of those dusk sovereigns fell flat before us:
The innumerous armies opened like the wind
That sighs around an arrow, while we passed:
Those moving mountains, the broad elephants,
Went down with all their towers. We reached Hydaspes:
Nations, the horizon blackening, o'er it hung:—
Porus, exult! In ruin thine were true;
While mine, in conquest's hour, upon the banks
Of Hyphasis—What stayed me on my way?
An idiot army in mid victory dumb!
I gave them time; three days: those three days past,
Ye heard a voice, “The gods forbid our march:”
Sirs, 'twas a falsehood! On the Olympian height

121

That day the immortal concourse crouched for shame:
Their oracles were dead. 'Twas I that spake it!
I was, that hour, the Olympian height twelve-throned
That hid the happy auspice in the cloud,
And this mine oracle; “Of those dumb traitors
Not one shall wash his foot in Ganges' wave.”
I built twelve altars on that margin, each
A temple's height, and fronting eastward—why?
To lift my witness 'gainst you to the gods!
Once more as then I spurn you, slaves! Your place
Is vacant. Time shall judge this base desertion
Which leaves me but the conquered to complete
The circle of my conquests. Gods, it may be,
Shall vouch it holy, men confirm it just;—
Your places in the ranks are yours no more.

[Alexander departs, attended by his Generals.
1st Mutineer.

We are out of the ranks.

2nd Mutineer.

He will conquer the rest of the
world with the Persians. He will give unto Persians
the title of kinsmen, and the privilege of the kiss.

3rd Mutineer.

We must throng unto the palace
and throw down our arms: we must kneel in the
courts day by day, and lie before the gates. He
will come out, and forgive us, and lead us with him
to Ecbatana.

4th Mutineer.

As for those thirteen, it is certain
they died very justly, since they deceived the army.

Scene IX.—Ecbatana. The House of Phylax.

Phy.
(to his Page).

Sirrah, attend! The king
hath arrived newly from Opis, and this day maketh

122

a discourse in the great temple. I am lame yet,
and go not forth. Report unto me that which he
delivereth. Spy out likewise where Hephestion
lodgeth. [The Page departs.]
The hatreds that I
sowed have but lifted the king to higher greatness.
As he subdued them of Asia, so now hath he subdued
the Greeks. It is but through that other that
he can be dealt with. For one so young, Philotas
could see. While he lived I went whither I would
under his wings: now the generals look blacker on
me day by day. It is Hephestion that setteth them
against me. Since that disgrace I have eaten no
meal with relish. The queen and the princess are
arrived from Susa: and all Ecbatana is overswarmed
with a vermin of Asian princes. Yea,
verily, it is the hour of his triumph.

Scene X.—Postern of the Great Temple at Ecbatana.

A Soldier
(approaching it).

Ho, friend sentinel!
Let me pass thee, for ancient love. Art thou in a
trance, or art thou dead, with that white face?

Sentinel.

Thou saw'st him not—him that entered
but now?

Soldier.

Thou dreamest. The agora swarms: but
at this side there hath been none in sight.

Sentinel.

As I live I saw him draw nigh. I drew
both bars across the gate. He entered as though
there had been no hindrance.

Soldier.

Knewest thou the man?

Sentinel.

When close to me, yea. The armour
was the same; and the gleam of the steel shone
through the blood. The iron-grey hair bristled up
as of old, like a winter hedge with hail on it; but

123

the scar on the forehead was redder, and there stood
blood-drops in his eyes. I served him for fifteen
years, and saw him every day to the last, save five.
It was he that once when I struck a woman left me
this mark on my hand.

Soldier.

Who was he?

Sentinel.

In thine ear—Parmenio! He is gone in
among the lords in council. Hush! I know by
that shout that Alexander is entering the temple.

Scene XI.—The Great Temple at Ecbatana.

Alexander, his Generals, and the Magnates of his Empire, Greek and Asiatic.
Alex.
I greet you, lords of every race alike
And every nation, joined henceforth in one:
Well meet we in old Media's mother-city,
And fair the omen. Lords, that doubt which dogged
My steps, extinguished with revolt extinguished,
My fortunes touch at last their zenith height
And sail among the stars. The future waits us.
'Tis rumoured that my face is toward the West:
There's time enough for that. Limit and Term
Govern the world. Completion of my work
Here in the orient inchoate needs ten years
Which past will leave me still a man in prime.
India of Ganges yet remains to conquer:
We have still to stud with western colonies
Our eastern realms, to light them with Greek schools,
And link our Indian with our Persian thrones
By politic commerce. Lords, I have given command
To free insulted Tygris from her dykes,
Built up by kings who feared both trade and freedom.

124

I have sent Nearchus to the Arabian coasts
To burn the pirates' ships and drown their crews:
Indus shall wed Euphrates, devious thence
Shall brim Orontes, and make broad Ilissus.
A word on Greece: Craterus makes speed to her:
Antipater, that ruled in Macedon,
Shall yield him place and here reply to charges
That touch both fame and life. I smiled to hear
That, militant against our Persian pomps,
He wears plain raiment edged with border grey
Alike at banquet and on judgment-throne:
His purple is within! I trust 'tis false
He traffics with the Ætolians: trust 'tis falser
That when, by sentence of the assembled host,
The long time nameless ruler of this city
Who filled of old yon seat—now vacant—died,
He said, “Parmenio false! then who is true?
Parmenio falsely slain! then who is safe?”
These things I nought prejudge. To weightier matters.
We send this day to Greece two great decrees;
The first, amid the Olympian games proclaimed,
Shall spread a general gladness. It remands
All exiled citizens to their ancient homes
Save those convict of sacrilege or murder,
And wins us friends in every Grecian state.
The last demands for me that titular meed
Decorous wont of ceremonial worship,
Which, not alone an offspring of the gods,
But likewise upon mortals well-deserving
Though wanting Death's immortalizing touch,
Confers mankind's award—honours divine.
Lords, ere this council separates — (Turning to Perdiccas)
Where's Hephestion?

125

Per.
Hephestion, sir, is slightly fever-touched
And keeps his house.

Alex.
Command that Phylax tend him.
Hephestion's much for peace, and willed this day
In speech to praise it: that shall serve to-morrow:
Till then my further purpose I withhold.
This day the Feast of Dionysus rules:
He played me false the night that Cleitus died;
The rights of the Dioscuri that night
Supplanted his: in that no part was mine;
But kings remember benefits alone:—
At Thebes, his chiefest seat, I did him wrong:
I do repent that slaughter Lords, farewell!

Scene XI.—Ecbatana.

Phylax and his Page.
The Page.

I heard all. The king made a gladsome
speech, and showed that now at last his fortune
had topped the summit, and sailed away among the
stars. There shall be wars no more; but here he
will abide in glory and feasting for ever and ever.
Hephestion is sick in the lesser palace; and this
missive commandeth that thou shalt raise him up,
and make him a sound man by eleven o'clock tomorrow;
for he must exhort the council at noon.

Phy.
It is well: depart!
[The Page retires.]

The gods are turned cynic, and will have Jest to
rule! My master, Diogenes, is dead, and is carried
to Olympus: his sign is the Constellation of the
Tub, and he raineth influence upon earth. Many a
month have I lain in wait for Hephestion, and now
the king putteth him into my hand! Now also the

126

Alexandrian star is at its highest! Philotas! I
were an infidel if I recognized not the omen. A
fresh wind bloweth in from the garden. Red rose,
thou blushest unto me! White lily, thou curtsiest
unto me! Thais of the Feast and Phryne of the
Bath, I scorn you alike! These sealed packets hold
minerals more mastering than ever built up womanbones.
Here is “courage by the ounce,” and there
is “needful flight.” This is “jealousy;” and here
is—I have found it at last—“long silence.” I could
label these heart-quellers with heavenly names; but
it sufficeth. Hephestion, if thou meetest Philotas in
the shades, salute him from me!

ACT V.

Scene I.—The Road to Babylon.

Ptolemy, Seleucus, Eumenes, and Antigonus.
Ptol.
Wait we the king: he lags not far behind us.
Sirs, be ye wary in your homeward letters;
The Greeks are reverential of the gods:
The fane of Esculapius razed to earth
In vengeance for Hephestion's death, may move them.

Eum.
Ulysses, keenest-witted of man's race,
Made boast, “No Greek with hand so large as mine
Has paid the gods their dues.”

Ant.
The Medes are wroth:
Their mules and horses shorn, they deemed the rite
The obsequious tribute of a royal mourning:
When from their city walls the summit fell
The rite was new: they frowned.

127

Ptol.
So frowned the Persians,
Their “Quenchless Fire” extinguished.

Sel.
Let them frown!
When that mute tent rolled forth its thunder-peals
I drew my breath. I said, “The king will live.”

Ptol.
There lives no Greek that wept not for Hephestion:
Men say, “The army's strength remains: its youth—
The beauty of the battle—victory's gladness—
These, these are dead.” 'Twas not his words or deeds:
For this they loved him—that the good in each
Flowered in his presence, making fresh the soul.

Sel.
His cavalry shall bear his name for ever:
Henceforth who rules it as his vicar rules,
Armed with his ring. His sister-tended bride
Delights her sad sick-bed with his last words,
“My faithful, true, and honourable wife:”
If any happy lived, and timely died,
It is the man we miss.

Eum.
He, too, died timely—
Phylax—the king struck never wholesomer stroke!
The soldiers grudged him burial; for which cause
The four-legged cynics of his sect interred him.

Sel.
The king draws near: he sees it now, yon city,
The tower; the palace-front; the hanging gardens;
The cliff-like walls unending!

Eum.
A procession!

[A sacerdotal procession advances. At the same time Alexander joins them, attended by Generals.
Chaldœan Priest
(kneeling to Alexander).
Berosus, and the priesthood of Chaldæa

128

In us, dread sovereign, at your feet—

Alex.
Speak on.

Chaldœan Priest.
Since first that royal face made bright our world,
Since first that royal voice sent forth command
To raise once more the temple of great Belus—
[The other priests cry out:
“At Persia's cost! at hated Persia's cost”—

Chaldœan Priest continues.
High as it stood ere marred by Xerxes' crime,
Our prayer was this, to welcome earth's supreme
To Babylon, his seat. Vain hopes of man!
The omens frown on us.

Alex.
The worse for them!

Chaldœan Priest.
Approach not Babylon, at least, with brow
Dusk from a sunset sky! Make circuit first
Round gate and wall: and enter, face to east!

Alex.
What thinks of omens Ptolemy, our wisest?

Ptol.
Sir, than the sceptics I am sceptic more:
They scoff to boast their wit: I scoff at witlings.
Sir, Reason rules but in her own domain,
Beyond whose lawful bounds, her “Yea” and “Nay”
I hold for equal weights in equal scales
That rest in poise. Of things beyond the sense,
Whereon in part this visible order rests,
As spirits, ghosts, auguries, and mystic warnings
Reason says nought: their sphere and ours are diverse:
We know not if at points they intersect;
If—casual, or by laws—their inmates touch.
Our world's a part, and not a whole: its surface
We pierce at points: the depth remains unknown.
Sir, in these labyrinths there be phrenzies twain,

129

Unreasoning each, whereof the proudest errs
From Reason's path most far.

Alex.
Reason but walks
Secure in footprints of Experience old,
Whose testimony is diversely reported.

Ptol.
The affirmative experience is strong;
The negative is nought, and breeds us nothing.

Alex.
What help remains where Reason speaks not?

Ptol.
Instinct:
And as material instincts plainlier show
In bird and beast than man, so spiritual instincts
Speak plainlier haply through the popular voice
Than censure of the wise.

Alex.
The people trust them:
To ignore such things they count as ignorance:
And deem themselves more knowing than the great:
To spurn them were to chill the popular heart
In the hour of need. I make the city's circuit,
And enter not till morn—What ho! a herald!
And pale with haste!

Messenger
(arriving).
The river's banks have burst,
The harvest's lost! uncounted herds are drowned,
And eastward of the city all is flood:—
All entrance there is barred.

Alex.
So ends the doubt:
Westward! The shortest road is ever best.

130

Scene II.—Palace Terrace at Babylon.

Ptolemy, Seleucus, Eumenes, Cassander.
Eum.
You shall do wisely, sir, not angering him:
The king is triply altered since you saw him:
Antipater, your father, should know this:—
He is sad, and stern, and proud.

Cas.
My father's honour
Is sacred as your king's. Year following year,
Olympias, haughtiest of her sex, and subtlest,
Scorning an equal, hating a superior,
Warred on his worth. He deigned her no reply:
He kept his charge, old Macedon, in peace:
Yearly he sent his king recruits, and ever
Held his firm foot upon revolted Greece.
He's strong in truth.

Ptol.
The king can bear all truth;
Yet trusts not truth when braggart. This remember;
Be ceremonious when you see him first:
Hating these pomps, he hates those too that grudge them.

Sel.
Hephestion's death some whit disturbed the king:
The obsequies complete, he brightens daily:
Would you had seen the pyre!

Ptol.
Describe that pyre:
'Twill make him understand the royal sorrow:
It was grief's madness—yet its beauty too.

Sel.
Sir, 'twas a work of nations in a month:
A mile of Babylon's huge wall went down
To fashion forth its base: the cost thereof
Had ten times built the Athenian Parthenon:

131

'Twas earth's supremest structure, seen, and lost.
Forests down-felled sent forth its colonnades,
Huge pines, that, range o'er range to heaven ascending,
Forgat not yet their friends, the winds, but sighed
As on their native hills. In silver robes
Those far-retiring columns shone, sun-touched,
Tier above tier; the level spaces 'twixt them
Gold-zoned in circling cornices distinct
With sculptured frieze Titanic—giant wars,
The strength upheaved of earth assailing heaven
Kept down by overhanging weight of gods.
Seen 'gainst the blue, were Syren shapes that lured
The seeming mariner to death; with these,
White groups of sea-nymphs weeping round a wreck:
So fine the art, half Asian and half Greek,
That, from their wreathèd conchs and shells unwinding,
The tube-enthrallèd zephyrs breathed around
Such strains as sailors hear on haunted shores:
Far off the song was sweetest, saddest near.

Eum.
To me 'twas marvellous most by night.

Sel.
The stars
Died out: the purple vault deepened to black
Above that lower firmament of lights
Which seemed a heaven more festive, nearer earth
A many-shining city of the gods.
All night the wind increased, till that strange music
Swelled to a dirge so deep that some who heard
Went mad, they say, and died.

Eum.
When midnight came
The king gave word. The omnipresent fire
Leaped to mid-heaven. The packed horizon showed
As though the innumerous glebe had turned to man;

132

And each face pale as death!

Ptol.
You have seen the site:
'Twill need the gales of many a stormy winter
To clear away those ashes.

Cas.
True: chest-deep
My horse staggered among them. Griefs like these
Tread out our lesser woes. The king would teach us
The transience of man's greatness and his joy:
Now know I why he built of wood not stone:
He built us up a lesson.

Eum.
What? that grief
Is transient likewise?

Cas.
Nay, I meant not that.

Ptol.
He taught a nobler lesson. Has he learned it?

Scene III.—Hall of the Palace of Babylon.

Alexander on his throne surrounded by his Generals. The nobles of Babylon and the neighbouring provinces are ranged round the hall.
Alex.
I have had enough of councils. We'll be brief:
The Grecian embassies shall take precedence
In the order of their temples' dignity,
First Elis, Delphi second, Corinth third.
Whence come the others?

Eum.
Sire, from Carthage one;
She sinned with Tyre: four from Italian States,
The Bruttians, the Lucanians, the Tyrrhenians,
And that new city, Rome.

Alex.
A bandit's den!
Its earliest citizens were robber tribes;
And, faithful to their past, they are leagued this day

133

With Antium's pirates. Drive them home! One day
They'll know a Grecian heel. To the work in hand.
Princes of long-dejected Babylon
That yearly bent her brow more near the ground,
Rejoice! her days of mourning are gone by.
I had decreed never to see this city,
Chief seat of Earth's first empire and her worst.
What changed that edict? Sirs, the advancing knowledge
That that true Empire shaped and made by me—
That Empire which, the hour Parmenio died,
I vowed, from Scythia marching on to India,
Should know no limit and no term—that Empire
High as the mind of man and wide as earth—
The knowledge that that Empire ne'er can die.
That knowledge mine, I willed to weld in one
The first link and the last in the chain of Empires;
Once here, the spirit of the past came o'er me:
The earliest seat of Empire claimed its right:
The on-flowing tide of power, 'gainst nature's law
At my command rolled back. A conqueror's hand,
Forgetting this, that victory should be just,
Was heavy on your nation, sirs, of old,
Grudged you your great Euphrates, sluiced it hence,
Dried up its city-channel: I restore it.
I have dug for you a harbour: Indian fleets
Therein shall sway their masts with lighter crafts
Freighted from Egypt, and our Grecian Isles
With help of broad canals from Syrian shores
By Grecian science planned, by Asian gold
'Mid deserts excavated. Yestereve
Your eyes beheld a pledge of this high future,
The meeting of two fleets, from India one,

134

The other, recent from Ægean waves,
Dragged overland to Thapsacus, and thence
Launched on Euphrates' stream. Assyrian lords,
Your Babylon shall sit among her meads
An inland Tyre, secure: your Temple and Tower,
Passing the height of Egypt's pyramids,
Revindicate their state. He nothing erred
Who fixed of old in Babylon the seat
Of eastern Empire. Round her throne shall stand
Persepolis, Susa, and Ecbatana,
Handmaids, not rivals. In the West shall rise
Cities like these. Half-way! twixt East and West
In single majesty supreme o'er all
Shall Alexandria reign.

[Acclamation from all sides: “It is the voice of a god,” during which Cassander enters the hall. He approaches the king, but without making the customary “Adoration.”
Alex.
Who's he that enters like the forest beast
Irreverent, and unshamed? Remove the man.
[Cassander is forcibly removed.
The rest is brief. My purpose was—men knew it—
To spend ten years consolidating in peace
The eastern world. That purpose I discard:
I trust the years no more: presuming death
Strikes down the loftiest as the lowliest head,
Rendering no count. I seek the West at once.
West joined to East, and raised by subjugation,
Since to be wisely ruled alone is freedom,
Shall leave my work complete. Two mighty armies
Divide the triumph. Southward one shall coast
The midland sea through Egypt to Cyrene
And on through Lybia to the Atlantic deep;
Northward the other, from Illyria's shore

135

To far Iberia's verge. From you I need
Fully fifty thousand soldiers in three months:
Your bravest. To subdue the West, and mould it,
Demands three years: for these the queen is regent,
Not more among my captains to rebate
Envy's fell tooth, than in requital just
Of royal gifts which I revere in her,
Enough. Call in those Grecian embassies.
[First enter the Envoys from the Greeks assembled at the Olympic games: the eldest speaks—
King, and our lord, the Greeks with reverence true,
Though not without misgiving, heard that edict
But lately from Ecbatana sent to them,
Remanding to their homes all Grecian exiles—

Alex.
Does Greece accept that ordinance?

Envoys
(with hesitation).
Greece accepts.
[Next, ambassadors from all the Greek States enter, habited like heralds deputed with offerings to temples. They advance to Alexander with golden crowns, and kneeling, lay them at his feet. The eldest speaks—
To Alexander, Philip's conquering son,
The States of Greece concede, unanimous,
Honours divine, and hail him as a god.

Scene IV.—Hanging Gardens at Babylon.

Ptolemy, the Magian, Astar.
Ast.
War with the West! Your king has changed his purpose.

Ptol.
Sharp grief hath changed it. Grief, that should be gentle,

136

To him is storm. Fiercely it bears him on
Through Action's angriest skies.

Ast.
The king is strong:
His eye is bright and keen, but glad no more:
That iron Will still clutches its Hephestion.

Ptol.
The tyranny of love outlives its use.
He loves Hephestion as of old. Not less
His friend's benigner power—he's false to that:
Hephestion was for peace: the royal mind
Broods but on wars.

Ast.
His household life is past:
His Persian wife, the sweetest of all ladies,
And lordliest-souled, attends her widowed sister
Far off. He'd have it so.

Ptol.
He destined first
Ten years to moulding of the East—

Ast.
Ten years!
These insect tribes beat quick their filmy wings,
Live quickly, quickly die! Great Persia spent
A hundred years knitting her realm in one:
The spirit of Cyrus in her kings lived on:
Cold airs from Median hills strengthened their arm:
Our Magian sages—we too are from Media—
Ordered alike religion and the state:
Our nobles then were frugal, just, severe;
They never shunned a foe, nor feared a truth:
We conquered Asia's western half, and Egypt:
Her idols knew it. But for Marathon—

Ptol.
I thought you of a temper more sedate:
With us philosophy laughs passion down.

Ast.
Sir, truth that lives not militant on earth
Traffics with falsehood in complicity,
More false than she, as sinning against light.
Our Faith was warlike while a heart was in it:

137

So long we conquered. But a vanquished race
Finds this revenge, its direst, and its last:—
With poison of its vices it infects
In time its conqueror's blood. 'Twas so with us:
The lands we vanquished mixed our light with night:
Then temples first confined our boundless worship;
Then first with Oromasdes Zeus had part;
Then first was weakness deemed a kingdom's wisdom,
Promiscuous tolerance her maternal love;—
I say they lied! 'Tis not a mother's arms
That open are at all times, and to all!

Ptol.
Themes speculative these that end in heats:
Our king, you see, moves on.

Ast.
Moves on! you err!
I say his course is retrograde, not onward.
This city's Babylon!

Ptol.
What then?

Ast.
The seat
Of earth's first empire:—sordid 'twas, and base:
Its gods were idols viler far than Egypt's,
For hers concealed a meaning. Our great Xerxes
Brought low the boastings of their brick-built tower
Your king rebuilds it, fawns on Babylon,
Would renovate a demon-haunted ruin:
I have heard him laud Semiramis herself:—
He heir of Cyrus!

Ptol.
Persian, have a care!
You need our king.

Ast.
Greek! I have ne'er denied it:
Ah, would I might! A realm's not wholly fallen
Till this, the last dishonour, it has reached,
To need its conqueror. This marriage blends us:
I, that abhorred it, worked against it never;
These hands were pressed upon that contract's seal.

138

The effect? Look forth from those o'erhanging gardens!
Far down, a priest-procession winds in pomp;
Who are they? Magians? Greeks? Not so! Chaldæans!
They hymn your king!

Ptol.
He loves not slaves: o'er earth
He wills to build one Greece.

Ast.
He builds meanwhile
The tomb of all the greatness earth can know,
Gold-smeared without; within a heap of bones.
“He wills to build one Greece!” Her kingdom's Thought:
Greece must do penance ere she wins that kingdom,
He drowns his Greece with gold: slays her with honours:
He breeds a Greece to undo the work of Greece:
He'll leave on earth nor honest ignorance,
Nor knowledge just. He'll raise a pigmy race
To mock dead Titans. From the highway dust
He'll quicken with corruption's base conception
Sophists in swarm. The locust-cloud will spread,
And leave the world a waste.

Ptol.
Your augury's ill:
The mind of Greece—

Ast.
The heart of Greece is rotten!
That soil, whence intellect's root in darkness springs:
'Twas false to heaven; and now, malicious grown,
Is false to nature. At their feasts I've heard them,
Defend worse sin with dialectic leprous!
I raised my head at last, and answered thus—
Nations have vanished 'neath a conqueror's tread;
Nations have perished, worn by civil strife;
Nations have withered, famine-plagued: but Greece,

139

The beautiful, the wise, the once heroic,
Shall die in prime a suicide, nor leave,
Amerced of household ties by fleshly shames,
A child to inearth the corpse.

An Attendant
(entering).
Sirs, be ye prompt!
The royal barge approaches,

Ast.
(to Ptolemy).
Join him thou!
Philosopher of Greece, your lord lacks tendance!

Scene V.—The Lake of Pallacopas, near Babylon.

Alexander in the Royal Barge, attended by Artabazus, Seleucus, Antigonus, Peucestas, and others.
Alex.
Ten thousand men at break of day, Peucestas!
The spot is there! we'll cut through yonder rock:
O'er-pround Euphrates there shall find a channel—
To work ere noon!

Peu.
It shall be ordered, sir.

Sel.
A mystery of sadness girds this region:
Those trackless wastes, half water and half land,
Those low-hung, hueless clouds above them streaming,
The piping of the willow-bending wind,
Upon the horizon far yon city-wall—
Some curse is on this spot!

Alex.
Misrule's that curse:
In ignorant kindness noxious as in hate:
The country drowned, the city drained of waters—
Old Xerxes did his work! Look well around:
We need a fortress next, wherein to entrench
The warders of our strait. I see a crag:
Steer to its base.

Art.
A tomb it is of kings.

140

Alex.
Those slaves whom late we passed knee-deep in water
With bloodshot eyes half blinded by the glare
And light thin frames, were not of stock Chaldæan:
Whence came they?

Art.
Sire, from Hierosolyma:
The Assyrian razed their city, burned their Temple,
To exile dragged them—greybeards, women, babes:
In fifty years the Assyrian's empire fell:
Cyrus, the Persian, loved that Hebrew people
And loosed them from their bonds. Some few remained:
Their progeny are those you marked but now.

Alex.
A vision rose before me as I watched them:
I too have stood in Hierosolyma:
My will was fixed to look on it once more:
Chance, or some humour, on my way from Egypt—
Near it I marched—made hindrance, and I passed.

Art.
Sir, you have shown much kindness to that people:
A race that scarce can live, yet never dies:
They are always ill at ease. Their ancient Law
Forbade their task—rebuilding Belus' temple:—
'Tis six leagues off, yet there it rises plain:
Your clemency vouchsafed a licit toil:
They deepen yonder channel.

Alex.
Better thus:
The Persians scorn the Assyrians, they, the Hebrews:
Between the rival races, and their gods,
I hold the balance just. What strain is that?
The Persian and the Babylonian barges
Since morn have followed mine with hymn, or chaunt:
This has a different note.

141

The Song.

We sate beside the Babylonian river:
Within the conqueror's bound, weeping we sate:
We hung our harps upon the trees that quiver
Above the onrushing waters desolate.

A song they claimed—the men our task who meted—
“A song of Sion sing us, exile band!”
For song they sued, in pride around us seated:
How can we sing it in the Stranger's land?

Alex.
That song's a dirge, with notes of anger in it:
I hate the grief that nothing is save grief.

Art.
Sire, these are maidens of that Hebrew race.

Sel.
They have passed the osier banks. Once more that strain!

The Song.

If I forget thee, Salem, in thy sadness,
May this right hand forget the harper's art!
If I forget thee, Salem, in my gladness,
My tongue dry up, and wither, like my heart!

Daughter of Babylon, with misery wasted,
Blest shall he be, the man who hears thy moans;
Who gives thee back the cup that we have tasted;
Who lifts thy babes, and hurls them on the stones!

Alex.
That race can boast a history. Search its annals!

Sel.
Our Grecian songs, for all their grace and light,
Measured with such were as a wind-tossed tress
Matched with yon sailing rack.

142

Art.
A galley comes—
Those Babylonian braggarts make their revel.

Chaldæan Song.

Belus shall reign! Higher, each day, and higher
Rises his temple. Crouch, pale Hebrew slave!
Proud Persian lord, thy never-quenchèd fire
Trembles like death-flames o'er a murderer's grave.
Ashur, rejoice!—

Alex.
The ages pass, like winds;
The old wrong remains, rooted like tombs and moves not:
All may be done through Time; yet Time does nought.
Let kings look well to that. We have reached our goal.
Is that a tomb?

Art.
The Assyrian monarchs, sir,
Squandered their lives in banquets, yet desired
A solitary precinct for their graves:
They reverenced Death:—the Greeks but deck and mock it.
Those dusky crypts that pierce the sedge-girt rock,
Are sepulchres of kings.

[As Alexander turns, a gust blows his Causia into the water. The diadem that girdled it remains suspended on the reeds at the base of the tomb. A sailor plunges into the lake, and swims to the tomb, but, in his desire to keep the royal diadem dry, inadvertently sets it on his head. Thus crowned he re-enters the royal barge.

143

A Sailor.
The omen's ill!

2nd Sailor.
The omen's black as night!

Sel.
(drawing his sword).
I'll drown it in his blood!

Alex.
Give him a talent
In guerdon for his bath and his good will,
And, when we land, the scourge, to teach him manners.
Omens! That priest Chaldæan spake of such:
Passing this morn his city-gates, I laughed:
I wore a cope of lead three months:—to-day
I am stronger than at Tyre!

Sel.
May it please you, sir,
The wind hath changed: we need three hours, or more,
To reach the city.

Alex.
Mark that spot: 'tis there
I build my fortress. Now to Babylon: haste!
Drops fall apace: yon circlets on the mere
Denote them heavy. Hark, a distant thunder!
The heat is changed to cold. Our Artabazus
Is old for summer drenchings.

Art.
Twenty years
Press down my seventy. Sire, I should have passed
Long since, yet may outlive the three years' child.

Scene VI.—A Street in Babylon.

Amyntas and Socrates.
Amy.
The royal throne was on the dais set:
The generals' seats were ranged at either side:
The Persian guard kept watch around the hall,
Waiting earth's Master. Sudden, in the midst

144

A Nubian stood—the meanest of his race;
A moment more, and on that regal seat
The ill-featured shadow sat. They dared not touch him:
The throne makes holy all that rests thereon:
They beat their breasts with wailing long and loud.
The king arrived. Still sat that slave all calm
With smile like that on idol faces vast
Throned 'mid Egyptian sands.

Soc.
They stoned him, doubtless?

Amy.
The king forbade it. On the rack that slave
Confessed no crime: confederates he had none;
Was conscious of no purpose. Like a shaft
Some inspiration from on high had pierced him;
He pushed his spade into Euphrates' slime,
He pushed his way into the royal palace,
And round him stared, enthroned. The king said little:
He took his place, and bade them hold debate.
Now know you why, forth-issuing, men were pale;
Why, here and there, in groups or pairs they whispered;
Why hung that storm upon Seleucus' brow.
Never hath royal throne endured this wrong
That changed not owner soon. The king will die.

Soc.
A rush of citizens. Hark! Hark! they come!

Citizens
(hurrying past).
The king is sick, they say! To the palace on! On!

145

Scene VII.—The Palace at Babylon. Ante-room of the Royal Apartment.

Antigonus, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Eumenes, Peucestas, Perdiccas, various Priests, and the Magian, Astar.
Ptol.
Sirs, know the truth: this sickness is to death:
The king must die.

Greek Priest.
This thing I feared since first
I marked him drifting from his native gods
To alien—yea, to Belus.

Per.
Gods, sir priest,
Grudge not each others' gains. To gods of Greece
Each morn he offered duteous sacrifice,
In sickness or in health. To foreign gods
He was observant more, since gods less known
Are formidable more than customed gods,
Like-minded with ourselves. In this he erred—
When certain Brahmins roused their king to war,
Of that high race he crucified full six
To awe the rest. That hour I feared! that hour
No priest protested!

Ant.
Yea, and at Sangala,
The city his already, he smote and slew
Ten thousand warriors. I would give this head
That deed had never been!

Sel.
Idiots! be mute!—
This thing he did; that thing he left undone;
Was born in such a year; in such was married;
Why, lords, men speak as if our king were dead
And they the embalmers, or the grave-diggers!
He's sick. The tempest drenched him. Shall a shower

146

Wash out the one great glory from the earth?
We hid his sickness first: the secret's known:
Since then, the world's gone mad.

Chaldœan Priest.
The strength of prayer
Is his, and shall be. We Chaldæan priests
Nor incense stint, nor victim.

Greek Priest.
Not a throne
Brightens Olympus but our prayer hath beat it!

Egyptian Priest.
Serapis knows if we have prayed or not,
He in whose image all the metals blend
As all divinities are one in essence;
Serapis knows.

Sel.
I see a Magian there:
He stands, and speaks not: let the Magian speak.

Ast.
Sir, since the quenching of their Sacred Fire
The Magian race stands silent. Be it so.

A Royal Page
(entering).
The king has sent for Ptolemy.

Scene VIII.—Alexander's Chamber.

Alexander, Ptolemy.
Alex.
We're stayed in the midst.

Ptol.
Sire, may the mighty gods—

Alex.
I'm hindered of my own: my march is hindered!
That march was ordered for the third day hence:
This bends it to the fifth.

Ptol.
Too quickly pass—

Alex.
Thus much the malice of o'erweening gods,
Or else their negligence, can fret our course!
I'm maimed, and tamed, and shamed: but mind can act

147

When the outward act is barred. Six audiences
I have given. The chief of my Thessalian horse
Had failed to impress his blacksmiths. Nehordates
Had sent no corn to Opis.

Ptol.
Sire, your eyes
Are blood—all blood. Where is it you feel the pain?

Alex.
I have wrestled oft with pain, and flung it ever:
Save for that fire in brain, and heart, and hand,
I am well enough. My strength as yet is whole.
To work! You need the map. Despatch, this even,
Heraclides to the Caspian, there to build
A fleet for exploration: let him search
If thence a passage lead not to the Euxine:
That found, a six weeks' march were spared, and more,
'Twixt Hellespont and Indus.

Ptol.
One hour, my king,
But one, give rest to that—

Alex.
Recall Nearchus!
Command that he forbear those Arab pirates:
Bid him through help of theirs—an army with him—
Circle all Afric, reach the Atlantic Pillars:
Thence, eastward curving on the midland sea,
He'll meet, near Carthage, or that coast Italic,
Our westward-marching host. You're staring, sir!

Ptol.
All shall be done.

Alex.
Ere sunset send to Egypt:
We need a road to coast her sea. Her sands
Are fire that blasts my eyes.

Ptol.
The brain o'er heated
Recalls Gedrosia's waste.

Alex.
My brain's not touched:
I watch it: if there rise beyond its verge

148

A cloud, the slenderest, of bewildered thought,
You'll learn it thus—I close my lips for ever.

Ptol.
Your thoughts are strong, my king, distinct, and plain.

Alex.
A light of conflagration makes them plain:
'Tis sent me from a pyre.

Ptol.
Immortal gods!
Grant to this sufferer the balm of sleep!

Alex.
Sleep! Can you guard me 'gainst ill dreams in slumber?
I'll tell you one. I died; and lay in death
A century 'mid those dead Assyrian kings
In their old tomb by yonder stagnant lake.
Then came a trumpet-blast that might have waked,
Methought, a sleeping world. It woke not them.
I could not rise: I could not join the battle:
Yet I saw all.

Ptol.
What saw you, sire?

Alex.
Twelve tents,
Each with my standard. On twelve hills they stood
Which either on their foreheads blazoned wore,
Or from my spirit's instinct took, great names,
Cithæron, Hæmus, Taurus, Libanus,
Parapomisus, and huge Caucasus,
With other five, and Athos in the midst.
Then from my royal tents on those twelve hills,
Mailed in mine arms, twelve Alexanders crowned
With all their armies rushed into a plain
Which quaked for fear, and dashed across twelve floods,
Euphrates, Issus, Tigris, Indus, Oxus,
And others with great names. They met — those Twelve—
And, meeting, swelled in stature to the skies,

149

And grappled, breast to breast, and fought, and died
Save four that, bleeding, each on other stared,
And leaned upon their swords. As thus they stood,
Slow from that western heaven which domes the accursed—
Rome's bandit brood—there moved a cloud night-black,
Which, onward-gathering, mastered all the East,
And o'er it rained a rain of fire. The earth
Split, and the rivers twelve in darkness sank;
The twelve great mountains crumbled to the plain;
The bones of those twelve armies ceased from sight:
Then from the sun that died, and dying moon,
And stars death-sentenced, fell great drops of blood
Large as their spheres, till all the earth was blood;
And o'er that blood-sea rang a female cry,
“The Royal House is dead.”

Ptol.
My king, my friend—

Alex.
Phylax is dust. You cannot bid him tend me!

Ptol.
Olympias, prescient, sent you, sire, from Greece
But late its wisest leech. How oft you've said,
“A mother's prayers are hard to be withstood!”

Alex.
I loved her in the old days: nor years, nor wars
Disturbed that image. But a greater love
In its great anguish tramples out all others.
Impostors are they all—those heart-affections:
They're dupes that make us dupes—
There's not on earth a confidence unflawed:
I think he kept from me at Tyre a secret
Touching that princess. I from him concealed
That warning strange at Hierosolyma,

150

Whereof, it may be, my contempt more late
When, old Parmenio doomed, I marched to India,
Bore me ill fruit. Betwixt that warning strange
And this, my sickness, was there aught in common?

Ptol.
It may be, sire, there was,

Alex.
Ere yet that darkness
Hurled by injurious and malignant Fates
Against this unsubverted head, had found me—
The Fates that hustle heroes out of life;
The Fates that hustled gods into the abyss;
The unobsequious Fates that mock all things—
In diligent musings at Ecbatana
I thus resolved; to see once more that priest:
Then came that death—
And in the gloomy raptures of just wrath
That mood went by. I marched to Babylon:
Then came the end. Who sings?

Ptol.
Poor Hebrew slaves;
They weed the palace court.

The Song.

Behold, He giveth His belovèd sleep,
And they shall waken in a land of rest:
Behold, He leadeth Israel like a sheep:
His pasture is the mountain of the Blest.

Blessed are they whose hands are pure from guilt;
Who bore the yoke from childhood, yet are free:
Jerusalem is as a city built
Wherein the dwellers dwell in unity.

Alex.
That song's amiss.

Ptol.
Sire, for your army's sake,
Which, like a wounded warrior, moans in sleep,

151

Your Empire's sake, that, immature and weak,
Is threatened in its cradle—

Alex.
'Tis so: 'tis so:
It lacks completion; and the years, the months,
The hours, like ravening wolves that hunt a stag,
Come up upon my haunches. Six o' the clock
On the fifth morn! At noon we cross Euphrates:
That hour you'll learn my plans:
I'll cast this sickness from me, like the rags
Flung from some lazar-house! Whose step is that?

Ptol.
Sire, there is none.

Alex.
Let not Seleucus near me!
Those onsets of his blundering, blind devotion,
So unlike his that perished—

Ptol.
Sire, none comes.

Alex.
Be strong! What shall be must. Shake not: bend nearer!
I have a secret; one for thee alone:
'Twas not the mists from that morass disastrous,
Nor death of him that died, nor adverse gods,
Nor the Fates themselves; 'twas something mightier yet,
And secreter in the great night, that slew me.
[Seleucus enters.
Welcome, Seleucus!

Sel.
Sire, I come unbidden:
This Ptolemy—has Greece but one who loves you?

Alex.

Welcome, my brave Seleucus! In five days
We march, at earliest dawn. A month shall find us
Nighing old Egypt's coast. This scroll be yours:
It is a code for Alexandria's rule:
Therein I have made you lord. Till morn, farewell.

[Seleucus departs reluctantly.

I note you shaken, Ptolemy: learn thence

152

Philosophy's a crutch for strength to play with:
It mocks us when we're weak. On the fifth day—

Farewell.

[As Ptolemy is departing.

Return. Your tablets—I would see them.
Write down—the duty this of Eumenes—
He cheats his tasks—write down my burial place.
Likeliest you guess it.

Ptol.
Macedonian Pella?
Old ties are strong. You said, when leaving Greece,
“Pella, not Athens, if I die.”

Alex.
Not Pella.

Ptol.
This Babylon, where he you loved lies dead?

Alex.
'Mid sands Egyptian—by the Ammonian grove—
In my great Father's fane.

Scene IX.—Ecbatana.

Arsinoe
(On a balcony of Drypetris' Palace).

She sleeps. Thou blessed sleep that most dost bless us
When we in thy great gift forget the gift,
Oh, call us not ingrate! She sleeps: there's nought
Like sleep to help a heavy heart; not music;
That brings her back the memory of old times;
Not love like mine; that whispers of another's;
Not flowers nor song of birds, nor airs sweet-laden:
If these poor flatteries force a smile upon her,
Brief infidelity how soon avenged,
The unwonted apparition leaves her dim;
And those sad eyes make inquest without words,
“Shall we no more behold him?”

153

Silent stars
That flash from yonder firmament serene,
Ye have no portion in these pangs of earth;
Ye mock not man with infirm sympathy:
I thank you for your clear, unpitying brightness
That freezes Time's deceits. The Lord of Light
Sternly in you hath writ his four great Names
Truth, Justice, Wisdom, Order. Ye endure:
Our storms sweep o'er you but they shake you not:
Darkness, your foe, but brings your hour of triumph:
Your teaching is—to bear.

The Lord of Light—
Is it a woman's weakness that would wish him
Another, tenderer name, the Lord of Love?
A love that out of love created all things;
A love that, warring ever, willeth peace;
A patient love, from ill educing good;
A conquering love, triumphant over death?
Ah me! No land there is that clasps this Faith!
To hold it were to feel from heaven a hand
Laid on the aching breast of human kind,
Laid on our own, and softer than the kiss
Of some imagined babe. Come quickly, Death!
Beyond thy gate is Truth.

A Lady
(entering).
Madam, but now
Your sister woke, and gently breathed your name,
But slept ere I could answer.

Ars.

Watch beside her:
When next she moves, make sign.

Eternal Truth,
Why has our Persia missed you? Truth she loved:
She trained her sons in valour and in truth:
And yet in vain for you our Magians strained
Their night-dividing eyes! From sceptred watchers

154

Turned she her all-pure countenance to reward
More late some humbler vigil? It must be!
The unceasing longing cannot be in vain:
The agony of virtue crownless here,
And great love sorrow-crowned. If earth can find,
Indeed, no answer to her children's cry,
Wandering from yon bright host a star will lead
The lowliest of her wanderers, lowly and wise,
In age still faithful to their childhood's longing,
To where in some obscurest spot lies hid
The saviour-soul of self-subsistent Truth,
Some great world-conquering, world-delivering Might,
The future's cradled Hope.

The Lady
(re-entering).
Madam, she wakes.

Scene X.—The Palace of Babylon.

In the centre of the council hall is a pallet on which Alexander lies. The royal pages kneel at each side. Around, or in groups at the entrance, stand Eumenes, Cassander, Ptolemy, Amyntas, Socrates, Peucestas, Perdiccas, Seleucus, and other Generals.
Ptol.
It is a six days' journey: ere the noon
That young, pale queen in far Ecbatana's palace
Will break our seal, and read.

Soc.
(near the gate of the hall).
The day draws near:
The scared, wan dawn blends in yon cave of death
With the red torch-light.

Amy.
Eight brief days ago
That was a hall of council whence the world

155

Waited her sentence. I could deem its air
Was thick with phantom shapes. Is all hope lost?

Soc.
At midnight hope surceased. The fever sank;
With it his strength. He bade them bear him hither:
He speaks not since.

Amy.
In yon black palace lies
The agèd queen! from window on to window
The lights pass quick. There's sorrow there. 'Tis cold!

Soc.
You shake.

Amy.
They woke me sudden with the news.

Ant.
(entering).
The Persian has his trouble as the Greek.
Old Sisygambis sinks from hour to hour:
She came from Susa hither, vexed by dreams,
Found the king sick; foodless she sits since then
Upon the palace floor. Dread gifts, men say,
Of prophecy are hers. A funeral veil
O'erhangs her glittering eyes and plaited forehead:
Her Magians stand around: the royal children
Kneel at her feet.

Soc.
In great Serapis' temple
Four generals watched from early night to morn,
Hoping some intimation from the god:
Nor oracle nor vision was vouchsafed.
At last Seleucus, kneeling at the shrine,
Besought, “Shall the sick king, a suppliant, lay him
Beneath the healing shadow of this fane?”
'Twas answered, “Where he lies, there let him bide.”

Amy.
That meant, that here abiding, he shall live.

Ant.
It meant, that death is better than to live.

Ptol.
(near the pallet).
Seleucus, you were with him?

156

Sel.
Half the night
My tears bedewed his hand.

Ptol.
Knew he things round him?

Sel.
He knew them well; and knew of things beyond.
Long time he watched, or seemed to watch, the passions
Of some great fight that makes a world or mars,
And saw all lost. “Parmenio fought against me:
'Twas death's cold river gave him back his youth,”
He muttered. Next he spake as to some priest:
And seemed to grasp his wrist, and reasoned with him—
I caught no word—two hours with lips foam-flecked,
As one who proudly pleads, yet pleads for life;
Then ceased, and slept.

Eum.
Keep silence at the gates!

Ant.
(drawing near).
The soldiers will to see him.

Ptol.
Let it be:
'Tis now too late for aught to work him ill.

[The soldiers stream in, circling successively the royal pallet, till the whole hall is thronged.
Sel.
The soldiers' friend! He hears their stifled moaning:
His eye is following them; he fain would stretch
His hand toward them!

Eum.
Speak to him, Ptolemy!

Ptol.
Sire, it is come! the king is king in death:
Speak the king's ordinance. Who shall wear his crown?

Alex.

The worthiest head.

[A long silence.
Ptol.
Once more his lips are moving:
Perdiccas, you are keen of ear: bend low—
Bend to his lips.

157

Eum.
His fingers move: he slides
The royal ring into Perdiccas' hand.

Ptol.
Hear you no words?

Per.
I think he said, “Patroclus.”

Ptol.
Once more?

Per.
He said, “Achilles followed soon.”

Ptol.
Bend down once more.

Per.
He spake it plain: I heard it;
“Patroclus died: Achilles followed soon.”

Sel.
And died in saying it. 'Tis past. He's gone!

Ptol.
The greatest spirit that ever trod this earth
Has passed from earth. He, swifter than the morn
O'er-rushed the globe. Expectant centuries
Condensed themselves into a few brief years
To work his will; and all the buried ages
Summed their old wealth, to enrich, for man's behoof,
With virtuous wisdom one Olympian mind
Which, grappling all things — needing not experience—
Yet scorned no diligence, the weapons shaped,
Itself, that hewed its way, nor left to others
The pettiest of those cares that, small themselves,
Are rivets which make whole the mail of greatness.
The world hath had its conquerors: one alone
Conquered for weal of them who bowed beneath him,
And in the vanquished found his firmest friends
And passionatest mourners.
The world hath had its kings: but one alone
To whom a kingdom meant a radiant fabric,
No tyrant's dungeon-keep, no merchant's mart,
But all intelligential, so combining
All interests, aspirations, efforts, aims,
That man's great mind, therein made one o'er earth,
Might show all knowledge in its boundless glass,

158

As the sea shows the sun. Rough Macedon,
Boast; yet be just! Thou wert this wonder's nurse:
A mightier was his mother. Earth, take back
Thy chief of sons! Henceforth his tomb art thou.

Sel.
Lords, he is gone who made us what we are;
And we, remanded to our nothingness,
Have that, not words, to offer him for praise.
There stand among us some that watched his boyhood;
They have had their wish; he lived his life. The gods,
Feared they the next step of their earthly rival,
Who pressed so near their thrones? Your pardon, lords!
He's dead who should this day have praised the dead,
Happiest in this, he died before his friend.
Lords, we have lived in festival till now,
And knew it not. The approaching woes, they best
Shall measure greatness gone. The men who 'scape,
Building new fortunes on the wreck-strewn shore,
Shall to their children speak in life's sad eve
Of him who made its morning. Let them tell
His deeds but half, or no man will believe them:
It may be they will scarce themselves believe,
Deeming the past a dream. That hour, their tears
Down-streaming unashamed like tears in sleep
Will better their poor words: who hear shall cry.
Pale with strong faith, “There lived an Alexander.”

[A passage opens in the crowd, and Astar stands up beside the body of Alexander.
Ast.
Conquerors of Persia, now yourselves death-conquered,
Another royal corse makes dumb the world.
The mother of Darius, Sisygambis,

159

As o'er the horizon's verge the rising sun
Lifted its Persia-worshipped forehead, dropped
Her brow discrowned down on the dust, and died.

Ptol.
Empire o'er empire topples: Persia first
Above her, she that vanquished Persia—Greece.

University of Virginia Library

ALEXANDER THE GREAT.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.

GREEKS.

EASTERNS.

WOMEN.

ACT I.

Scene I.—The Shore at Sestos.

Scene II.—Troy.

Scene III.—Troy. The Portico of Aphrodite's Temple.

Scene IV.—Troy: near the Tomb of Achilles.

Scene V.—The Palace at Susa.

Scene VI.—The Western side of the Granicus.

Scene VII.—The Eastern bank of the Granicus.

Scene VIII.—The Western bank of the Granicus.

Scene IX.—The Eastern bank of the Granicus.

Scene X.—Near the Granicus.

ACT II.

Scene I.—A Sea-cliff opposite New Tyre.

Scene II.—The Senate House in New Tyre.

Scene III.—Sea-shore near Old Tyre.

Scene IV.—The Causeway between Old and New Tyre.

Scene V.—The Gardens of the Palace at Old Tyre.

Scene VI.—Gate of the Temple of Jerusalem.

Scene VII.—Interior of the Temple.

Scene VIII.—The Causeway between Old Tyre and New Tyre.

Scene IX.—The Palace of New Tyre.

ACT III.

Scene I.—The Road to Rhagæ near the Caspian Gates.

Scene II.—At Rhagæ.

Scene III.—Rhagæ.

Scene IV.—The Persian Camp.

Scene V.—The Southern Shore of the Caspian.

Scene VI.—The mountains in Aria.

Scene VII.—Alexander's Tent on the Jaxartes.

Scene VIII.—On the Jaxartes.

Scene IX.—A Hill close to the Jaxartes.

Scene X.—Susa. The Cypress Cemetery.

Marriage Song.

I

II

III

ACT IV.

Scene I.—Susa, in front of the Palace.

Scene II.—Palace at Susa.

Scene III.

Scene IV.—Palace at Susa.

Scene V.—Susa.

Scene VI.—A Terrace of the Queen-mother's Palace at Susa.

Scene VII.—Susa. The Gate of the Bridal Pavilion.

Scene VIII.—Opis, on the Tigris.

Scene IX.—Ecbatana. The House of Phylax.

Scene X.—Postern of the Great Temple at Ecbatana.

Scene XI.—The Great Temple at Ecbatana.

Scene XI.—Ecbatana.

ACT V.

Scene I.—The Road to Babylon.

Scene II.—Palace Terrace at Babylon.

Scene III.—Hall of the Palace of Babylon.

Scene IV.—Hanging Gardens at Babylon.

Scene V.—The Lake of Pallacopas, near Babylon.

The Song.

The Song.

Chaldæan Song.

Scene VI.—A Street in Babylon.

Scene VII.—The Palace at Babylon. Ante-room of the Royal Apartment.

Scene VIII.—Alexander's Chamber.

The Song.

Scene IX.—Ecbatana.

Scene X.—The Palace of Babylon.