Part 10

He found that they had spirit and capacity comparable to those of the Greeks and Macedonians themselves. That they caused him no physical repulsion is shown by his falling in love with and marrying Roxane. Teach them the Greek language, draw them along with the immigrant Greeks into the body politic of the new cities, equip them with Macedonian weapons, drill them in the Macedonian fashion, and distribute them in the Macedonian regiments; above all, use the nobles in the high administrative posts, and it seemed to Alexander possible, within a short time, to fuse the new masters of Asia with the old into a new cosmopolitan race.

With iron resolution he carried this policy forward despite all opposition. Then, choosing the dramatic moment of his return to Susa after his Indian campaign, he arranged an extraordinary marriage as a symbol of the contemplated fusion of the dominant peoples of Europe and Asia. "He himself," says Arrian in his _Anabasis_,[69] quoting Aristobulus, an eye-witness, "married Barsine (rather Stateira), the eldest of the daughters of Darius, and, in addition to her, another, the youngest of the daughters of Ochus (the able predecessor of Darius), Parysatis. Earlier, too, he had wedded Roxane, the daughter of Oxyartes of Bactria. To Hephæstion he gave Drypetis, who, too, was a daughter of Darius and sister of the wife he took himself; for he wished the children of Hephæstion to be cousins of his own children. To Craterus he gave Amastrine, the daughter of Oxyartes, Darius's brother; to Perdiccas, the daughter of Atropates, satrap of Media; to Ptolemy, his aide, and to Eumenes, his private secretary, children of Artabazus, to the one Artacama, to the other, Artonis. To Nearchus he gave the daughter of Barsine and Mentor, to Seleucus the daughter of Spitamenes of Bactria; and in like manner to his other companions he gave the most famous of the daughters of the Medes and Persians, to the number of eighty. The marriages were celebrated in the Persian manner. Seats were placed in order, and on them the bridegrooms reclined"; and at this point we may let Chares, master of ceremonies, interrupt Arrian and describe the setting which he had arranged for the service.

"It was," he says,[70] "a hall of a hundred couches, each large enough for two to recline at table, and in it each couch, made of twenty minas' worth of silver, was decked as for a wedding. Alexander's had feet of gold. And to the feast were bidden all his Persian friends, and given places on the opposite side of the hall from himself and the other bridegrooms. And all the army and the sailors and the embassies and the visitors were assembled in the outer court. The hall was decorated in most sumptuous style, with expensive rugs, and hangings of fine linen, and tapestries of many colors wrought with threads of gold. And for the support of the vast tent which formed the hall there were pillars thirty feet high, plated with silver and gold, and set with precious stones. And around about the sides were costly portières, embroidered with figures and shot through with gold threads, hung on gilded and silvered rods.

"The circuit of the court was half a mile. Everything was started at the signal of a trumpet-blast, whether it was the beginning of the feast, the celebration of the marriages, or the pouring of one of the various libations, so that all the army might know." "After the banquet," resumes Arrian,[71] "the brides entered and seated themselves each beside her fiancé, who thereupon took her by the hand and kissed her; and the first to do this was the king.... Then each man, taking his wife, led her away. Their dowries Alexander gave to every one of them. And he caused the names to be written down of all the other Macedonians who had married Asiatic women, and there were said to be over ten thousand of them. To these, too, gifts were given by Alexander at the marriage feast."

For five consecutive days artists from every land and people entertained the cosmopolitan assembly with displays of skill as various as were the ideas and interests to which they catered. But the discord was lessened and the dominant _motiv_ repeated again and again by the appearance and reappearance of the greatest Greek masters of the dramatic and musical arts.

* * * * *

It being established by these many incidents that it was a salient trait of Alexander's character to disclose his fundamental policies by acts elaborately staged and performed before the largest possible audiences, we may return to his extraordinary visit to the temple of Ammon of Cyrene. He had first to proceed one hundred and seventy-five miles along the Libyan coast and then southwest for about seven days before reaching his goal. A month of the most difficult marching, at a time when every day was precious, was the high price which Alexander thought it economical to pay for the recognition which he there received as the son of Zeus. What was, then, the value of this well-advertised recognition?

That it had none for Egypt and the nations of Asia, to whom the god of Siwah, like the prophet in his own country, was without honor, implies that Alexander esteemed highly its value in the Greek world, where the voice heard at Siwah was in fact an admonition to the pious and might be an embarrassment to all in official positions. An oracle, however, was always addressed primarily to him who received it. Other persons could neglect it with impunity. Nevertheless, Alexander had made it improbable that anybody should be unaware that Zeus had acknowledged him as his son. Doubtless, much discussion was provoked; but there the matter seems to have ended so far as Hellas was concerned till seven years later, at the time of the feast at Susa, when Alexander issued a mandate to all the Greek city-states, new and old, that they should recognize him as a god.

Strange as it may seem to us, among whom church and state are separated sharply, and religion depends upon a revelation which can be interpreted but not supplemented, the question was one which came properly within the province of the general assembly of the citizens of each city. At this very time the Athenians, for example, had waiting within their gates many foreign deities whose claims to official recognition were being pressed upon the ecclesia by votaries among both the alien and the native population. Such were Isis the Egyptian, and the Cypriote Aphrodite. In comparatively recent times, moreover, the ecclesia had yielded to similar solicitations, and had enrolled among the deities of the Athenian people Asclepius and the Thracian Bendis.

In a polytheistic world there is no logical limit to the possible number of gods; so that the chance always existed that there were deities whom a given community had not yet discovered at any given moment. There is, in such a world, a logical necessity that anarchy should be absent from heaven. Hence each community had to rank its gods and goddesses according to their power and spheres of activity. The lowest god, demigod or hero was, accordingly, separated from mankind by no deep or broad chasm. With most of their deities, in fact, the Greeks were on terms of familiar intimacy, as were mediæval Christians with their saints. Various of the lesser gods, Theseus and Heracles among the ancestors of Alexander for example, had once been men who had been elevated to Olympus by the grace of Zeus because of the many services which they had rendered to men. It is true that they were the children of Zeus; but had not Zeus also claimed Alexander as his own son? Why, then, should not he too be deified?

The difficulty from the standpoint of religion--of the sentiment which had led in the past to the heroizing of men--was that he was still living. And this was an insurmountable difficulty. From the religious conceptions of the Greeks the worship of the living ruler could never be derived; and, in fact, it was by pious people and for theological reasons that the rendering of divine honors to Alexander was opposed in Athens and elsewhere.[72] The most that could be expected from men of religious convictions was a sullen acquiescence in something which they could not prevent.

The apotheosis of Alexander was grounded in impiety, in disbelief in the supernatural altogether. For the age in which he lived was marked by this very thing. In that time of storm and stress the ancient Greek religion became bankrupt. For enlightened people--and their name was then legion--the gods had ceased to have objective reality. Like the spirits of the departed whom Ulysses had recalled to consciousness by giving them blood to drink, they were dependent for their existence upon the kindliness of men. Without the ministrations of the living they would not merely be forgotten; they would be annihilated. It was the gratitude of mankind which had kept the memory of benefactors green by rites deemed and called religious. Once, to be sure, the deities had been real beings, but that was before they had died, while they were living upon the earth as men. Then they had performed great services--had founded cities, conquered worlds, established laws, invented arts, developed grains and fruits, and trained animals. So at least many men of talent and learning already taught. But it remained for Euhemerus of Messene, about fifty years later (_ca._ 280 B.C.), to give the idea classic expression in an entertaining work of popularization.[73] With all the circumstantiality of Defoe, he tells how, in the course of his voyaging, he was driven southward into the Indian Ocean from Araby the Blest, till he came to the island of Panchæa. There he found a model community whose social and political organization he described in the manner familiar to us from Plato's _Republic_. There, too, he made a remarkable discovery--an account written on golden tablets in "reformed Egyptian" by Hermes of the lives and achievements of Chronus, Zeus, and all the other gods and goddesses of the Greek hierarchy. They had been kings and notables of Panchæa, and some of them, like Zeus and Dionysus, had been world conquerors. Others, indeed, had earned the favorable verdict of posterity by very questionable acts. Aphrodite was the first prostitute, and Cadmus, the grandfather of Dionysus, was the cook of a king in Sidon and had run away with a flute girl named Harmonia.

This "sacred writ" was naturally the latest and most authoritative revelation. It was saved, moreover, from being a gospel of atheism because, as Cumont[74] says, "It left to the eternal and incorruptible stars ... the dignity of original gods and exalted them in proportion as it lowered their rivals of bygone days." The signal merit of Chronus had been to introduce the worship of the heavenly bodies in Panchæa.

In this respect the _Scriptures_ of Euhemerus accorded with a strong current of both earlier and contemporary religious thought. Most men at that time recognized supernatural powers of a certain sort, like Tyche, "Chance,"--the favorite deity of the Hellenistic world,--whose play in human affairs modern disbelievers in religion also would be the last to deny. But they declined to recognize as efficacious the gods and goddesses in whose honor the cities maintained temples, priests, sacrifices, and games, except when they had lived on the earth as men and women.

At the best, therefore, these deities were simply prototypes of Alexander, who had founded seventy cities and given them their constitutions and laws, who had conquered all the territory which Dionysus had once overrun, and who was planning to build a highway along the coast of North Africa to the pillars set by Heracles at the limits of the world; who, moreover, was moulding the masses of Europe and Asia into a new race, and upheld, as no god had ever done, the social and political framework of the world.

Religion was unable to elevate a living man to godhood. Even in Egypt the sacred animals were but sacred animals till seventy days after their death, when they became deities. But irreligion, having degraded all gods to the level of human beings, had no reason to withhold from great men the homage which it accorded to the great dead.

The fundamental document on the deification of Greek kings comes to us stamped with the seal of the Athenian state. It was sung by the multitude at the official reception of its sovereign, the young Macedonian king, Demetrius Poliorcetes, on his return to Athens in 290 B.C.[75] "The king comes, light-hearted as befits a god, fair and laughing, yet majestic withal in his circle of courtiers, he the sun, they the stars: hail! child of mighty Poseidon and of Aphrodite. The other gods are a long way off, or have no ears, or no existence, or take no care of us, but thee we see face to face--a true god, not one of wood and stone." This catchy bit of blasphemy makes it impossible for any reasonable doubt to linger as to the regions of thought from which the worship of Greek rulers sprang.

But why should men who regarded the gods they already had as useless burden the state with the cult of another whose power was only too real? Why abandon King Log for a possible King Stork? It is on this point chiefly that scholars disagree to-day. There are those who make the apotheosis of Alexander a tribute paid by the Greeks to transcendant genius, a result of the reverence-compelling personality of the man. I confess, however, that enthusiastic admiration such as this presupposes does not seem to me to harmonize with the contemptuous expressions which marked the establishment of his cult in certain places in Greece.[76] In Sparta, Damis moved, in regard to Alexander's message that he be decreed a god, that the Spartans "let him be called a god if he wishes it"; while in Athens Demosthenes advised his fellow-citizens "to acknowledge the king as the son of Zeus, or, for all he cared, as the son of Poseidon, if such was his pleasure." In other places, however, the recognition seems to have been spontaneous enough, and to have been an expression of real gratitude for services rendered or expected. But Greeks on earlier occasions, and other peoples as well, were equally grateful and no less servile without deifying the object of those sentiments. Why then did admiration, gratitude, or servility take this form in this particular instance?

It is true that deification was _demanded_ of the Greek cities by Alexander, and that it was in response to a mandate sent out by him from Susa in 324 B.C. that "sacred ambassadors," such as were sent to gods and not to kings or states, arrived at Babylon in the spring of 323 B.C. a few weeks before Alexander's death, bearing the decrees in which his request was granted. But for the following fifty years it was at the initiative of the Greek cities, and, at times, against the will and interest of the recipient, that such honors were conferred upon later rulers. Hence we may be certain that in the first instance deification was an accommodation both to Alexander and to the cities in his realm. Nor can we, I think, be in serious doubt as to the character of the service it rendered.

It gave a legal position to Alexander in the world of city-states which he was organizing. It was unjust, Aristotle had taught him, that a man of supreme political capacity--such as he had displayed--should be treated as worthy of mere equality in the cities of his realm. Yet he could be treated in no other fashion if he were to be a citizen of them. On the other hand, now that he had freed himself from the constitutional limitations placed upon the earlier kings of Macedon and from the treaties which he had formed with the Hellenic cities at the opening of his reign, he ran the risk of being put to death or outlawed or ostracized, if he were not, as Aristotle suggested, rated as a deity upon the earth.

From his point of view, his rule was legitimatized when he was enrolled among the deities recognized by each city; for thereafter he had a clear right to issue orders to all the citizens of his world. From their point of view, on the other hand, by deifying Alexander they escaped from the intolerable necessity of obeying the commands of a foreigner. They thereby gave their consent to be ruled by him. They subordinated their will to his.

The deification of rulers was, accordingly, simply the proskynesis of cities. Its consequences were an absolutism such as Europe--and for that matter Asia--had never known before and has never ceased to know since. And it is this melancholy consequence of apotheosis which has only too frequently obscured its signal service: that it made possible the lasting union of all the city-states of the world in a single great territorial state.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Hogarth, D. _The Deification of Alexander the Great._ In _English Historical Review_, II (1887), pp. 317 _ff._

2. Niese, B. _Zur Würdigung Alexander's des Grossen._ In _Historische Zeitschrift_, LXXIX (1897), pp. 1 _ff._

3. Wheeler, B.I. _Alexander the Great_, (1900).

4. Bevan, E. _The Deification of Kings in the Greek Cities._ In _English Historical Review_, XVI (1901), pp. 625 _ff._

5. Meyer, Eduard. _Alexander der Grosse und die absolute Monarchie._ In _Kleine Schriften_ (1910), pp. 283 _ff._

6. Kärst, J. _Der hellenistische Herrscherkult._ Beilage 2 in _Geschichte des hellenistischen Zeitalters_, II, 1 (1909), pp. 374 _ff._

7. Ferguson, W.S. _Legalized Absolutism en route from Greece to Rome._ In _American Historical Review_, XVIII (1912), pp. 29 _ff._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 58: Arrian, _Anabasis_, VII, 9, 2 _ff._]

[Footnote 59: _De Cor._ 67.]

[Footnote 60: Müller, F.H.G., I, _Frg._ 27.]

[Footnote 61: _Politics_, III, 11 (17), 12, p. 1288 _a_.]

[Footnote 62: _Politics_, III, 8 (13), 1, p. 1284 _a_.]

[Footnote 63: _Politics_, I, 1 (2), 9, p. 1253 _a_.]

[Footnote 64: Aulus Gellius, _Noctes Atticæ_, IX.]

[Footnote 65: Johnston, R.M., _The Corsican_, p. 498.]

[Footnote 66: See above, page 28, and below, page 243.]

[Footnote 67: Plut., _Alex._ 54.]

[Footnote 68: _Kleine Schriften_, pp. 314 _ff._]

[Footnote 69: VII, 4, 4 _ff._]

[Footnote 70: Athenaeus, XII, pp. 538 _ff._ (Translated by Wheeler in his _Alexander the Great_, pp. 477 _f._)]

[Footnote 71: VII, 4, 7 _f._]

[Footnote 72: In Macedon, by the regent Αντιτροϛ ἁσεβἑϛ τοὑτο κριναϛ (Suidas).]

[Footnote 73: Pauly-Wissowa, _Real-encyclopädie_, VI, 1, pp. 952 _ff._; Wendland, _Die Hellenistisch-römische Kultur_ (1907), pp. 67 _ff._]

[Footnote 74: _Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans_ (1912), p. 55.]

[Footnote 75: Ferguson, _Hellenistic Athens_, p. 143.]

[Footnote 76: Meyer, Ed., _Kleine Schriften_, p. 330, n. 2.]

V

THE EMPIRE OF THE PTOLEMIES

The death of Alexander the Great was followed by some days of indescribable confusion. When a certain semblance of order was restored the view was officially promulgated that he had not died at all, but had simply "departed from the life among men." His memory was, accordingly, not damned; and, in a sense, his presence in the world which he had transformed continued to be recognized. But not in any real sense. The imperial coins, wherever issued, bore for some time the great king's face as Zeus Ammon; but no imperial cult existed to bring steadily to men's consciousness the idea that their dead lord had an honored place among the Olympians. It was not by the will of those who succeeded to his power, but by the force of historic developments, that his _acta_ were validated.

His heirs were the Macedonians whom he had recently tried to oust from their ancestral partnership with him. They were now to be found, partly in Macedon, partly in detachments throughout the empire, and partly in Babylon where Alexander had died. Those in Babylon took it upon themselves to act for the whole people; and what they did was to establish a regency in the interest of Philip Arrhidæus and the son whom Roxane was expected to bear, and to concur in the "grab" of the important western satrapies which was at once made by their chief officers.

It was they, too, who decided not to proceed with Alexander's ambitious projects. These, as read to them from his papers,[77] were "to build in Phoenicia, Syria, Cilicia, and Cyprus one thousand battleships of the super-trireme pattern for the campaign against the Carthaginians and the other peoples dwelling on the shores of the Mediterranean from Libya and Iberia clear round to Sicily; to construct a road along the coast from Cyrene to the Pillars of Hercules, and prepare harbors and naval stations at suitable places; to erect six temples at the enormous cost of $1,890,000 each (fifteen hundred talents); to found cities and transplant men and women both from Asia into Europe and from Europe into Asia, thus linking the two greatest continents by understandings based upon friendly intercourse and by brotherly feeling due to intermarriages." Alexander, it appeared, had looked upon his work as only half done: the Macedonians were eager to enjoy the fruits of an enterprise which they regarded as already finished.

Their sentiment was shared by Ptolemy, son of Lagos, formerly one of Alexander's aides. He had married a Persian princess at Alexander's order, but now he deserted her, and, taking his Athenian mistress, Thais, with him, he went off to Egypt, which had been given to him as his province. There he established himself securely, governed with power and sagacity for forty years, and, marrying in succession two Macedonian princesses, founded a dynasty which gave to Egypt its last great queen, Cleopatra VI, and prior to her accession, ten kings,[78] all of whom were named Ptolemy. Between them they reigned two hundred and seventy-one years; the average length of the reign was over thirty-two years; several of them were expelled temporarily and several of them had colleagues, but nine of them died in possession of the throne. That constitutes a statistical record which it is hard to parallel in all history.

It would be a fascinating study of human enterprise and human depravity to trace the careers of these eleven monarchs. But to do so would be to exhaust the space at my disposal without reaching the special subject of my essay. It must suffice, therefore, to observe that the history of the Ptolemies falls into an imperial period of four reigns and one hundred and twenty years (323-203 B.C.); and a domestic period, likewise of one hundred and twenty years (200-80 B.C.), in which the native peoples, encouraged by the weakness of the Ptolemies abroad, and by a ruinous schism between the military and the civil elements of the foreign-resident population, gained point after point at the expense of the dynasty. A third period follows of fifty years' duration, in which Egypt was at the mercy, not now of the Roman Senate, but of the all-powerful generals who had dethroned it.

The last king of Egypt, Ptolemy the Piper, a bastard by birth and instinct, demeaned himself for twenty-eight years (80-52 B.C.); but by bankrupting his treasury and sacrificing the good opinion of his countrymen, he managed to transmit a badly tarnished crown to his famous daughter, then a girl of seventeen years.

Cleopatra VI had an asset of much greater value than the servility and buffoonery of her father, namely, her personal attractiveness. She early lost all repugnance against using her physical charms, as well as her even more notable mental graces, in what, with all our dislike for the imperial courtesan, we must characterize as her gallant and patriotic effort to rescue her country from the spoiler, to make the queen of Egypt the consort instead of the slave of the coming Roman monarch, to set proud Alexandria beside imperious Rome at the head of the Mediterranean peoples.