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and mere regard for political expediencies, and held him at temple and oracle in awe before the mysteries of the great unseen, stamped him, too, as the son of Olympias.

HEAD OF ALEXANDER, OBVERSE OF ONE OF THE GOLD MEDALLIONS OF TARSUS.

See the note to the medallion on page 19.

In Philip there predominated the characteristics which mark in modern times the practical politician. He was sagacious and alert of mind. His eye followed sharply and unceasingly every turn of events that might yield him an advantage. The weakness, the embarrassment, the preoccupation, of his opponent, he always made his opportunity. He was a keen judge of character, and adapted himself readily to those with whom he came in contact. He knew how to gratify the weaknesses, ambitions, lusts, and ideals of men, and chain them to his service. Few who came in contact with him failed to be captivated by him. He was perfectly unscrupulous as to the methods to be employed in attaining an end. Nothing of the sort ordinarily known as principles ever impeded his movement. He was an opportunist of the deepest dye. Flattery, promises, beneficence, cruelty, deceit, and gold he used when and where each would avail; but bribery was his most familiar tool. He allowed no one to reckon with him as a constant quantity. His ultimate plans and purposes were concealed from friends and foes alike. In announcing his decisions and proclaiming his views, he followed the ordinary politician's watchword: "We will not cross the bridge till we come to it." As success was to him the only right, and availability the only justice, radical

changes of attitude and plan in the very face of action involved no difficulty. They rather served his purpose, and were his wont. He remained, as he wished to remain, a puzzle to his foes, and a mystery to his friends.

His character was full of apparent contradictions. Perhaps, after all, it was only his extraordinary versatility that was responsible for them. At one time he appears as a creature of passion enraged by anger or lust, again he is cool, deliberate, calculating, when others are carried away with excitement or prejudice; now he is a half-savage, again he is a smooth, subtle, temperate Greek; now he is pitilessly brutal, again he is generous and large-hearted; now he gives himself, body and soul, to some petty aim of lust or envy, again he is the prophet and preacher of a national ideal. In everything he was, however, a strong individuality. His personality dominated every enterprise in which he was concerned. He was a natural leader of men. He could organize as well as lead. He not only made himself absolute master of Macedon, but he so organized its force that it became of permanent value and could be transmitted to his successor. His organizing talent was, however, military rather than political. He lacked that fine

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armies. And yet without him Alexander's achievements would have been impossible.

Philip's great permanent achievements are two: the first is the organization of a power which Alexander was able, after him, to use for the founding of an empire; the second is the formulation and practical initiation of the idea of uniting Greece through a great national undertaking. These two are enough to set upon him the stamp of greatness. He was certainly great-great in personal force, in practical alertness, in organizing talent, and in sagacious intelligence. Theopompus says well:

"Taking all in all, Europe has never seen such a man as the son of Amyntas."

So much for the parents of Alexander. How truly he was their son the story of his life will tell. The improvement which he made upon their record, particularly in point of greater self-restraint, of higher and more ideal interests, and of nobler ideas of life and duty, this is to be traced, at least in some degree, to his excellent training and education.

ing Pæonia, about the size and shape of Connecticut and Rhode Island. The sea-coast in Philip's early days was occupied by a fringe of Greek settlements, and the early history of Macedonia is that of an inland state. Not until it acquired a sea-coast did it figure as an international quantity.

The people themselves were a plain, hardy, peasant population, preserving the older conditions of life and the older institutions of the kingship and the tribal organization

THE NAPOLEON MEDAL COMMEMORATING THE BATTLE OF JENA.

much, indeed, as they appear in the society of Homer's times. Only among the Spartans, the Molossians, and the Macedonians, says Aristotle, had the form of the ancient kingship survived, and only among the Macedonians the full exercise of its prerogatives. The consolidation of the classes into a strong opposition, which in the other states had first, in the form of an aristocratic opposition, throttled the kingship, and later, in the form of a democratic opposition, throttled the aristocracy, was in Macedonia prevented by the predominance of peasant life and the persistence of tribal unity. The state consisted of tribes and clans, not divided into orders and classes. The kingship belonged always in one and the same family, but definite rules for the succession within the family seem not to have been fully established. Seniority alone was not enough to determine a selection among the princes. In the turmoils that almost certainly followed the death of a king, force, daring, and leadership often asserted, by a species of natural right, their superior claim.

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It is clear by comparison with the reverse of the medal on the previous page that Napoleon's medalist borrowed from the Roman medals of Commodus and Constantine what the medalists of their day had taken from those of Alexander.

Alexander was born at Pella, the city which his father, in place of ancient Egæ, had made the capital of Macedonia. Hard by a vast swamp lake, and on the banks of the sluggish Ludias, it stood near the center of the plain which formed the nucleus of the little kingdom. The sea, the modern Gulf of Saloniki, was twenty miles away. Twenty miles to the east or west or north brought one to the foot-hills of the highlands that raised their amphitheater about the plain. One great river, the Axius, modern Vardar, came down through the northern hills and traversed the plain. The Ludias was a lesser stream a little to the west. From the west, draining the mountain-locked plain of Elimea, came the Haliacmon. Philip's ancestors from their old citadel at Ægæ, near the modern Vodena, had long ruled the plain, and various tribes in the highlands behind had recognized a more or less stable allegiance to their power. Such were the Elimiota of the Haliacmon valley, the Lyncestæ of the Erigon valley, and the Pæonians on the upper courses of the Axius. The congeries of tribes which made up this loosely jointed Macedonian state covered a territory, exclud

The larger landed proprietors owed to the king a military allegiance as vassals and companions-at-arms, and constituted a body known as the hetairoi (companions), not unlike the comitatus of the early Germans. The army consisted entirely of the free landholding peasantry. Mercenaries were unknown. It was this force that the stern discipline and careful organization of Philip raised into the most terrible war-machine that ancient Greece had ever yet known, in firmness and energy the equal of the Spartan, in size, organization, and suppleness immeasurably its superior. That the Macedonians were Greek by race there can be no

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ARISTOTLE. AFTER THE STATUE IN THE SPADA PALACE, ROME.

longer any doubt. They were the northernmost fragments of the race left stranded behind the barriers of Olympus. They had not shared the historical experience of their kinsmen to the south, and had not been kneaded with the mass. If isolation from the Egean had withheld them from progress in the arts of civilization, still they had kept the freshness and purity of the Northern blood better than those who had mixed with the primitive populations of Greece and were sinking the old fair-haired, blue-eyed type of the Northmen in the dark-haired type of the South. It is the experience of history that force and will must be continually replenished from the North, and the Macedonians were waiting only for their turn.

Their language, mere patois as it was, and

never used, so far as we know, in written form, has left evidences of its Greek character in stray words that have crept into the glossaries, and from soldiers' lips into the common speech. It is evident that the dialect was regarded as so base a patois that even when Macedon rose to world-power no attempt was made to elevate it into use as a literary language. The higher classes, presumably, all learned Attic Greek, much as the children in the Tyrol to-day are taught Hochdeutsch, which is to them a half-foreign tongue. Plutarch reports that Attic Greek was the medium of intercourse at Philip's court. Macedonian was, however, the common spoken language of the Macedonian soldiery. Thus Plutarch reports a scene in the camp before Eumenes's tent: "And

when they saw him, they saluted him in the Macedonian dialect, and took up their shields, and, striking them with their pikes, gave a great shout." That Alexander himself usually spoke Attic Greek may be inferred from the statement of Plutarch that when he did speak in Macedonian it was interpreted by his attendants as indicating unusual excitement or perturbation.

Rude people as the Macedonians were, we have no reason to think that the Greeks generally classed them as "barbarians." When Demosthenes seeks to arouse political antipathy against Philip by calling him and his people barbarians, we shall interpret his words as we do ante-election editorials, and not as a sober contribution to ethnology. Bitterest is his expression in a passage of the Third Philippic: "Philip-a man who not only is no Greek, and no way akin to the Greeks, but is not even a barbarian from a respectable country-no, a pestilent fellow of Macedon, a country from which we never get even a decent slave." If this tirade contains any basis of fact, it is that the Macedonians were rarely found in slavery, a testimony, on the one hand, to their own manliness, and, on the other, to their general recognition as Greeks. There is no evidence that Demosthenes's detestation of the Macedonians was commonly shared by his Athenian countrymen, though the two peoples surely had very little in common. In institutions, customs, and culture they represented the extreme contrast afforded within the limits of the Greek race.

Whatever may have been the current opinions in Greece concerning the Macedonian people, there can be no doubt that their royal family had been for generations regarded with great respect. They claimed to be descended from the ancient royal family of Argos, a branch of which, tradition said, had in the early days of Grecian history taken refuge in the north. Though it is impossible for us to test the reliability of this tradition, or to determine whether the name borne by the family, the Argeadæ, is to be regarded as evidence to the truth of the tradition, or merely as the deceptive cause of its origin, certain it is that it was generally accepted among the Greeks, and had received the most decisive official verification from the highest Greek tribunal. When Alexander, a Macedonian king of the earlier part of the fifth century (498-454 B. C.), presented himself as a competitor at the Olympian games, Herodotus says that the other "competitors undertook to exclude him, say

ing that barbarians had no right to enter the competition, but only Greeks. But when Alexander proved that he was an Argive, he was formally adjudged a Greek, and on participating in the race, he came off with the first prize."

It was this same king who, during the invasion of Xerxes, showed himself so firm a friend of the Greek cause as to win the title "Philhellene." The memory of his action on this occasion became an heirloom in his family. The espousal of Hellenic interests as against the power of Persia remained the policy and the ideal of his successors. It was left to his namesake, a century and a quarter after him, to realize the ideal in its fullest sense. However the other Greek states might vacillate in alternately opposing Persia or paying court to her, according to the momentary advantage, the Macedonian kings always remained firm in their hereditary aversion to the effeminate empire and civilization of the East; and in this we may find one of the strongest grounds of their popularity with the Greeks at large, as it surely also gave a certain moral basis for the claims of their ambition to lead the united force of Hellenism against the East.

Another family tradition that took its rise with Alexander the Philhellene, or perhaps even with his father, Amyntas (540–499), associated itself with the cultivation and patronage of the higher elements of Greek civilization. It was the natural tribute which the lesser pays the greater, but it was none the less a credit to have discerned the greater. Alexander's eagerness to participate in the Olympian games was part of a general desire to be recognized by the Greeks. He showed himself highly sensitive to their opinions about him. He sought the acquaintance and society of their eminent men, and brought it about that Pindar, then the first literary name of Greece, should celebrate his Olympian victories in verse.

The efforts to introduce Greek culture into Macedonian society, which began with Alexander the Philhellene, were continued under his successors. History gives us no connected account-only stray hints, but they are broad enough to follow. Greek settlers were welcomed. Men eminent in letters and in art were induced to visit the country and reside at court. Thus Alexander's immediate successor, Perdiccas II (454-413 B. C.), entertained at his court. Melanippides, the dithyrambic poet of Melos, who was regarded as one of the foremost lyric composers of his day; and tradition,

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which was ever busy with the half-mythical career of Hippocrates, did not fail to report that the great physician had once been called to practise his art at the palace of the same king.

In the reign of the next king, Archelaus (413-399), the Philhellenist tendency, which had become almost a craze of imitation, reached its climax, and by developing a nationalist party drew after it a reaction. Archelaus sought to make his court a Weimar. Though Sophocles and Socrates declined his invitations, Euripides spent the last years of his life in Macedonia, dying

there in 406. The tragedian Agathon, the epic poet Chœrilus, the musician and poet Timotheus, and the artist Zeuxis all resided there for longer or shorter periods, finding under the hospitable roof of the king a welcome refuge from the turmoils that the long course of the Peloponnesian war was bringing to the Greek states. Great progress was made in all the arts and practices of peaceful civilized life. Thucydides says of Archelaus: "He built the fortresses now existing in the country, and built direct roads, and, among other things, regulated the military system with provision of horses, equipment,

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