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THE CENTURY MAGAZINE

VOL. LVII.

NOVEMBER, 1898.

No. 1.

No

ALEXANDER THE GREAT.

HIS BOYHOOD AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PHILIP.

BY BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER,
Professor of Greek, Cornell University.

O single personality, excepting the carpenter's son of Nazareth, has done so much to make the world of civilization we live in what it is as Alexander of Macedon. He leveled the terrace upon which European history built. Whatever lay within the range of his conquests contributed its part to form that Mediterranean civilization which, under Rome's administration, became the basis of European life. What lay beyond was as if on another planet. Alexander checked his eastward march at the Sutlej, and India and China were left in a world of their own, with their own mechanisms for man and society, their own theories of God and the world. Alexander's world, to which we all belong, went on its own separate way until, in these latter days, a new greed of conquest, begotten of commercial ambition, promises at last to level the barriers which through the centuries have stood as monuments to the outmost stations of the Macedonian phalanx, and have divided the world of men in twain.

rain-gage, of rivers and mountains, weights and values, materials, tools, and machines. It is a history warm with the life-blood of a man. It is instinct with personality, and speaks in terms of the human will and the soul. History and biography blend. Events. unfold in an order that conforms to the opening intelligence and forming will of personality, and matter is the obedient tool of spirit. The story of the times must therefore be told, if truly told, in terms of a personal experience. When and where the personal Alexander was absent from the scene, history in those days either tarried or moved in eddies; the current was where he was. This will be excuse enough for making this narrative of a great historic period peculiarly the story of a man, and not merely of a conqueror.

Plutarch says that King Philip of Macedonia, shortly after the capture of Potidæa, received three different pieces of good news. He learned that "Parmenion, his general, had overthrown the Illyrians in a great battle, that his race-horse had won the course at the Olympic games, and that his wife had given birth to Alexander." Another story tells how on the very night of the birth an ominous calamity fell upon Asia: the temple of the great Diana of the Ephesians went Copyright, 1898, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved.

The story of the great Macedonian's life, inseparable as it is from history in its widest range, stands none the less in stubborn protest against that view of history which makes it a thing of thermometers and the

VOL. LVII.-1.

up in flames. So events tend to swarm together in history-at least, in the telling of history. The year was undoubtedly 356 B. C., and the best combination of all the indications we have makes the month October, though Plutarch, in deference to the horse-race, says it was July.

Philip had been three years on the throne of Macedon. The year before he had occupied Amphipolis, and so opened for his little state a breathing-place on the Egean; at the same time he introduced it to the long struggle with Athens. Athens herself, two hundred miles off to the south, was in the midst of a war that was to cost her the most of her island empire in the Egean. This or the following year marked, too, the publication of Xenophon's pamphlet "On the Revenues," and of Isocrates's essay "On the Peace." Demosthenes, twenty-eight years old, was just entering on his career as statesman and public orator. Eschines was thirty-four. Aristotle, the future tutor of Alexander, was twenty-eight. Plato, seventy-one years old, had nine years more to live; Xenophon had one, Isocrates eighteen. An old order for which Athens and Sparta had made the history was just dying

out, and a new order, with new men and new motives, was coming in.

The child whose destiny it was to give this new world its shape was born outside the pale of the older world, and in his blood joined the blood of two lines of ancient Northern kings. Alexander's mother was Olympias, the daughter of Neoptolemus, King of Epirus, who traced his lineage back through a distinguished line to Neoptolemus, the son of the hero Achilles. So it was said, or, as Plutarch puts it, "confidently believed," that Alexander was descended on his father's side from Hercules, through Caranus, and on his mother's from Eacus, through Neoptolemus. Plutarch does not even withhold from us a story of Philip's falling in love that constitutes a fair parallel to what we know of his promptitude and directness of action in other fields. "Philip is said to have fallen in love with Olympias at Samothrace, where they happened to be initiated together into a religious circle, he being a mere stripling, and she an orphan. And having obtained the consent of her brother Arymbas, he shortly married her." Refreshing as it is to read of a marriage for love in these old Greek

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THE RUINS OF AMPHIPOLIS-VALLEY OF THE STRYMON. (SEE TEXT, PAGE 2, AND MAP, PAGE 10.)

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MARBLE HEAD OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT. FOUND AT PTOLEMAIS, IN EGYPT; RECENTLY ACQUIRED BY THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON.

times, it must be reported that the match was never a happy one.

They were both persons of decided individuality, and in both the instinct of selfpreservation was strongly developed. Both were preeminently ambitious, aggressive, and energetic; but while Philip's ambition was guided by a cool, crafty sagacity, that of his queen manifested itself rather in impetuous outbursts of almost barbaric emotion. In her joined a marvelous compound of the mother, the queen, the shrew, and the witch. The passionate ardor of her nature found its fullest expression in the wild ecstasies and crude superstitions of her native religious rites. Another account is," says Plutarch, "that all the women of this country, having always been addicted to the Orphic and the Dionysiac mystery-rites, imitated largely the practices of the Edonian and Thracian women about Mount Hæmus, and that Olympias, in her abnormal zeal to surround these states of trance and inspiration with

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more barbaric dread, was wont in the sacred dances to have about her great tame serpents, which, sometimes creeping out of the ivy and the mystic fans, and sometimes winding themselves about the staffs and the chaplets which the women bore, presented a sight of horror to the men who beheld."

While it was from his father that Alexander inherited his sagacious insight into men and things, and his brilliant capacity for timely and determined action, it was to his mother that he undoubtedly owed that passionate warmth of nature which betrayed itself not only in the furious outbursts of temper occasionally characteristic of him, but quite as much in a romantic fervor of attachment and love for friends, a delicate tenderness of sympathy for the weak, and a princely largeness and generosity of soul toward all, that made him so deeply beloved of men and so enthusiastically followed. His deep religious sentiment, which, wherever he was, carried him beyond the limits. of mere respect for the proprieties of form

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