He did not set out upon his expedition till he had
secured Macedonia against the neighbouring barbarians, and completed the
reduction of Greece; he availed himself of this conquest for no other
end than for the execution of his grand enterprise; he rendered the
jealousy of the Lacedmonians of no effect; he attacked the maritime
provinces; he caused his land forces to keep close to the sea-coast,
that they might not be separated from his fleet; he made an admirable
use of discipline against numbers; he never wanted provisions; and if it
be true that victory gave him everything, he, in his turn, did
everything to obtain it.
In the beginning of his enterprise — a time when the least check
might have proved his destruction — he trusted very little to fortune;
but when his reputation was established by a series of prosperous
events, he sometimes had recourse to temerity. When before his departure
for Asia he marched against the Triballians and Illyrians, you find he
waged war
[10]
against those people in the very same manner as Csar
afterwards conducted that against the Gauls. Upon his return to
Greece,
[11]
it was in some measure against his will that he took and
destroyed Thebes. When he invested that city, he wanted the inhabitants
to come into terms of peace; but they hastened their own ruin. When it
was debated whether he should attack the Persian fleet,
[12]
it is Parmenio who shows his presumption, Alexander his wisdom. His aim was to
draw the Persians from the sea-coast, and to lay them under a necessity
of abandoning their marine, in which they had a manifest superiority.
Tyre being from principle attached to the Persians, who could not
subsist without the commerce and navigation of that city, Alexander
destroyed it. He subdued Egypt, which Darius had left bare of troops
while he was assembling immense armies in another world.
To the passage of the Granicus, Alexander owed the conquest of the
Greek colonies; to the battle of Issus, the reduction of Tyre and Egypt;
to the battle of Arbela, the empire of the world.
After the battle of Issus, he suffered Darius to escape, and
employed his time in securing and regulating his conquests: after the
battle of Arbela, he pursued him so close
[13]
as to leave him no place
of refuge in his empire. Darius enters his towns, his provinces, to quit
them the next moment; and Alexander marches with such rapidity that the
empire of the world seems to be rather the prize of an Olympian race
than the fruit of a great victory. In this manner he carried on his
conquests: let us now see how he preserved them.
He opposed those who would have had him treat the Greeks as
masters
[14]
and the Persians as slaves. He thought only of uniting the
two nations, and of abolishing the distinctions of a conquering and a
conquered people. After he had completed his victories, he relinquished
all those prejudices that had helped him to obtain them. He assumed the
manners of the Persians, that he might not chagrin them too much by
obliging them to conform to those of the Greeks. It was this humanity
which made him show so great a respect for the wife and mother of
Darius; and this that made him so continent. What a conqueror! He is
lamented by all the nations he has subdued! What a usurper! At his death
the very family he has cast from the throne is all in tears. These were
the most glorious passages in his life, and such as history cannot
produce an instance of in any other conqueror.
Nothing consolidates a conquest more than the union formed between
the two nations by marriages.
[15]
Alexander chose his wives from the
nation he had subdued; he insisted on his courtiers doing the same; and
the rest of the Macedonians followed the example. The Franks and
Burgundians permitted those marriages;
[16]
the Visigoths forbade them in
Spain, and afterwards allowed them.
[17]
By the Lombards they were not
only allowed but encouraged.
[18]
When the Romans wanted to weaken
Macedonia, they ordered that there should be no intermarriages between
the people of different provinces.
Alexander, whose aim was to unite the two nations, thought fit to
establish in Persia a great number of Greek colonies. He built,
therefore, a multitude of towns; and so strongly were all the parts of
this new empire cemented, that after his decease, amidst the
disturbances and confusion of the most frightful civil wars, when the
Greeks had reduced themselves, as it were, to a state of annihilation,
not a single province of Persia revolted.
To prevent Greece and Macedon from being too much exhausted, he sent
a colony of Jews
[19]
to Alexandria; the manners of those people
signified nothing to him, provided he could be sure of their fidelity.
He not only suffered the conquered nations to retain their own
customs and manners, but likewise their civil laws; and frequently the
very kings and governors to whom they had been subject: the
Macedonians
[20]
he placed at the head of the troops, and the natives of
the country at the head of the government, rather choosing to run the
hazard of a particular disloyalty (which sometimes happened) than of a
general revolt.
He paid great respect to the ancient traditions, and to all the
public monuments of the glory or vanity of nations. The Persian monarchs
having destroyed the temples of the Greeks, Babylonians, and Egyptians,
Alexander rebuilt them:
[21]
few nations submitted to his yoke to whose
religion he did not conform; and his conquests seem to have been
intended only to make him the particular monarch of each nation, and the
first inhabitant of each city. The aim of the Romans in conquest was to
destroy, his to preserve; and wherever he directed his victorious arms,
his chief view was to achieve something whence that country might derive
an increase of prosperity and power. To attain this end, he was enabled
first of all by the greatness of his genius; secondly, by his frugality
and private economy;
[22]
thirdly, by his profusion in matters of
importance. He was close and reserved in his private expenses, but
generous to the highest degree in those of a public nature. In
regulating his household, he was the private Macedonian; but in paying
the troops, in sharing his conquests with the Greeks, and in his
largesses to every soldier in his army, he was Alexander.
He committed two very bad actions in setting Persepolis on fire and
slaying Clitus; but he rendered them famous by his repentance. Hence it
is that his crimes are forgotten, while his regard for virtue was
recorded: they were considered rather as unlucky accidents than as his
own deliberate acts. Posterity, struck with the beauty of his mind, even
in the midst of his irregular passion, can view him only with pity, but
never with an eye of hatred.
Let us draw a comparison between him and Csar. The Roman general, by
attempting to imitate the Asiatic monarch, flung his fellow-citizens
into a state of despair for a matter of mere ostentation; the Macedonian
prince, by the same imitation, did a thing which was quite agreeable to
his original scheme of conquest.
