The Ancient East
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D. G. Hogarth >> The Ancient East
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SECTION 2. PERSIA AND THE WEST
It had been marked in the West as well, and its fruits were patent
within five years. The dominant Greek state of the hour, avowing an
ambition which no Greek had betrayed before, sent its king, Agesilaus,
across to Asia Minor to follow up the establishment of Spartan hegemony
on the coasts by an invasion of inland Persia. He never penetrated
farther than about half-way up the Maeander Valley, and did Persia no
harm worth speaking of; for he was not the leader, nor had he the
resources in men and in money, to carry through so distant and doubtful
an adventure. But Agesilaus' campaigning in Asia Minor between 397 and
394 has this historical significance: it demonstrates that Greeks had
come to regard a march on Susa as feasible and desirable.
It was not, however, in fact feasible even then. Apart from the lack of
a military force in any one state of Greece large enough, sufficiently
trained, and led by a leader of the necessary magnetism and genius for
organization, to undertake, unaided by allies on the way, a successful
march to a point many months distant from its base--apart from this
deficiency, the Empire to be conquered had not yet been really shaken.
The Ten Thousand Greeks would in all likelihood never have got under
Clearchus to Cunaxa or anywhere within hundreds of miles of it, but for
the fact that Cyrus was with them and the adherents of his rising star
were supplying their wants and had cleared a road for them through Asia
Minor and Syria. In their Retreat they were desperate men, of whom the
Great King was glad to be quit. The successful accomplishment of that
retreat must not blind us to the almost certain failure which would have
befallen the advance had it been attempted under like conditions.
SECTION 3. THE SATRAPS
What, ultimately, was to reduce the Persian Empire to such weakness that
a Western power would be able to strike at its heart with little more
than forty thousand men, was the disease of disloyalty which spread
among the great officers during the first half of the fourth century.
Before Cyrus' expedition we have not heard of either satraps or client
provinces raising the standard of revolt (except in Egypt), since the
Empire had been well established; and if there was evident collusion
with that expedition on the part of provincial officers in Asia Minor
and Syria, the fact has little political significance, seeing that Cyrus
was a scion of the royal House, and the favourite of the Queen-Mother.
But the fourth century is hardly well begun before we find satraps and
princes aiding the king's enemies and fighting for their own hand
against him or a rival officer. Agesilaus was helped in Asia Minor both
by the prince of Paphlagonia and by a Persian noble. Twenty years later
Ariobarzanes of Pontus rises in revolt; and hard on his defection
follows a great rebellion planned by the satraps of Caria, Ionia, Lydia,
Phrygia and Cappadocia--nearly all Asia Minor in fact--in concert with
coastal cities of Syria and Phoenicia. Another ten years pass and new
governors of Mysia and Lydia rise against their king with the help of
the Egyptians and Mausolus, client prince of Halicarnassus. Treachery or
lack of resources and stability brought these rebels one after another
to disaster; but an Empire whose great officers so often dare such
adventures is drawing apace to its catastrophe.
The causes of this growing disaffection among the satraps are not far to
seek. At the close of the last chapter we remarked the deterioration of
the harem-ridden court in the early days of Artaxerxes; and as time
passed, the spectacle of a Great King governing by treachery, buying his
enemies, and impotent to recover Egypt even with their mercenary help
had its effect. Belief gained ground that the ship of Empire was
sinking, and even in Susa the fear grew that a wind from the West was to
finish her. The Great King's court officers watched Greek politics
during the first seventy years of the fourth century with ever closer
attention. Not content with enrolling as many Greeks as possible in the
royal service, they used the royal gold to such effect to buy or support
Greek politicians whose influence could be directed to hindering a union
of Greek states and checking the rising power of any unit, that a Greek
orator said in a famous passage that the archers stamped on the Great
King's coins were already a greater danger to Greece than his real
archers had ever been.
By such lavish corruption, by buying the soldiers and the politicians of
the enemy, a better face was put for a while on the fortunes of the
dynasty and the Empire. Before the death of the aged Artaxerxes Mnemon
in 358, the revolt of the Western satraps had collapsed. His successor,
Ochus, who, to reach the throne, murdered his kin like any
eighteenth-century sultan of Stambul, overcame Egyptian obstinacy about
346, after two abortive attempts, by means of hireling Greek troops, and
by similar vicarious help he recovered Sidon and the Isle of Cyprus. But
it was little more than the dying flicker of a flame fanned for the
moment by that same Western wind which was already blowing up to the
gale that would extinguish it. The heart of the Empire was not less
rotten because its shell was patched, and in the event, when the storm
broke a few years later, nothing in West Asia was able to make any stand
except two or three maritime cities, which fought, not for Persia, but
for their own commercial monopolies.
SECTION 4. MACEDONIA
The storm had been gathering on the Western horizon for some time past.
Twenty years earlier there had come to the throne of Macedonia a man of
singular constructive ability and most definite ambition. His
heritage--or rather his prize, for he was not next of kin to his
predecessor--was the central southern part of the Balkan peninsula, a
region of broad fat plains fringed and crossed by rough hills. It was
inhabited by sturdy gentry and peasantry and by agile highlanders, all
composed of the same racial elements as the Greeks, with perhaps a
preponderant infusion of northern blood which had come south long ago
with emigrants from the Danubian lands. The social development of the
Macedonians--to give various peoples one generic name--had, for certain
reasons, not been nearly so rapid as that of their southern cousins.
They had never come in contact with the higher Aegean civilization, nor
had they mixed their blood with that of cultivated predecessors; their
land was continental, poor in harbours, remote from the luxurious
centres of life, and of comparatively rigorous climate; its
configuration had offered them no inducement to form city-states and
enter on intense political life. But, in compensation, they entered the
fourth century unexhausted, without tribal or political impediments to
unity, and with a broad territory of greater natural resources than any
southern Greek state. Macedonia could supply itself with the best cereal
foods and to spare, and had unexploited veins of gold ore. But the most
important thing to remark is this--that, compared with Greece, Macedonia
was a region of Central Europe. In the latter's progress to imperial
power we shall watch for the first time in recorded history a
continental European folk bearing down peninsular populations of the
Mediterranean.
Philip of Macedon, who had been trained in the arts of both war and
peace in a Greek city, saw the weakness of the divided Hellenes, and the
possible strength of his own people, and he set to work from the first
with abounding energy, dogged persistence and immense talent for
organization to make a single armed nation, which should be more than a
match for the many communities of Hellas. How he accomplished his
purpose in about twenty years: how he began by opening mines of precious
metal on his south-eastern coast, and with the proceeds hired
mercenaries: how he had Macedonian peasants drilled to fight in a
phalanx formation more mobile than the Theban and with a longer spear,
while the gentry were trained as heavy cavalry: how he made experiments
with his new soldiers on the inland tribes, and so enlarged his
effective dominions that he was able to marshal henceforward far more
than his own Emathian clansmen: how for six years he perfected this
national army till it was as professional a fighting machine as any
condottiere's band of that day, while at the same time larger and of
much better temper: how, when it was ready in the spring of the year
353, he began a fifteen years' war of encroachment on the holdings of
the Greek states and particularly of Athens, attacking some of her
maritime colonies in Macedonia and Thrace: how, after a campaign in
inland Thrace and on the Chersonese, he appeared in Greece, where he
pushed at last through Thermopylae: how, again, he withdrew for several
seasons into the Balkan Peninsula, raided it from the Adriatic to the
Black Sea, and ended with an attack on the last and greatest of its free
Greek coastal cities, Perinthus and Byzantium: how, finally, in 338,
coming south in full force, he crushed in the single battle of Chaeronea
the two considerable powers of Greece, Athens and Thebes, and secured at
last from every Greek state except Sparta (which he could afford to
neglect) recognition of his suzerainty--these stages in Philip's making
of a European nation and a European empire must not be described more
fully here. What concerns us is the end of it all; for the end was the
arraying of that new nation and that new empire for a descent on Asia. A
year after Chaeronea Philip was named by the Congress of Corinth
Captain-General of all Greeks to wreak the secular vengeance of Hellas
on Persia.
How long he had consciously destined his fighting machine to an ultimate
invasion of Asia we do not know. The Athenians had explicitly stated to
the Great King in 341 that such was the Macedonian's ambition, and four
years earlier public suggestion of it had been made by the famous
orator, Isocrates, in an open letter written to Philip himself. Since
the last named was a man of long sight and sustained purpose, it is not
impossible that he had conceived such an ambition in youth and had been
cherishing it all along. While Philip was in Thebes as a young man, old
Agesilaus, who first of Greeks had conceived the idea of invading the
inland East, was still seeking a way to realize his oft-frustrated
project; and in the end he went off to Egypt to make a last effort after
Philip was already on the throne. The idea had certainly been long in
the air that any military power which might dominate Hellas would be
bound primarily by self-interest and secondarily by racial duty to turn
its arms against Asia. The Great King himself knew this as well as any
one. After the Athenian warning in 341, his satraps in the north-west of
Asia Minor were bidden assist Philip's enemies in every possible way;
and it was thanks in no small measure to their help, that the Byzantines
repulsed the Macedonians from their walls in 339.
Philip had already made friends of the princely house of Caria, and was
now at pains to secure a footing in north-west Asia Minor. He threw,
therefore, an advance column across the Dardanelles under his chief
lieutenant, Parmenio, and proposed to follow it in the autumn of the
year 336 with a Grand Army which he had been recruiting, training and
equipping for a twelvemonth. The day of festival which should inaugurate
his great venture arrived; but the venture was not to be his. As he
issued from his tent to attend the games he fell by the hand of a
private enemy; and his young son, Alexander, had at first enough to do
to re-establish a throne which proved to have more foes than friends.
SECTION 5. ALEXANDER'S CONQUEST OF THE EAST
A year and a half later Alexander's friends and foes knew that a greater
soldier and empire-maker than Philip ruled in his stead, and that the
father's plan of Asiatic conquest would suffer nothing at the hands of
the son. The neighbours of Macedonia as far as the Danube and all the
states of the Greek peninsula had been cowed to submission again in one
swift and decisive campaign. The States-General of Greece, re-convoked
at Corinth, confirmed Philip's son in the Captain-Generalship of Hellas,
and Parmenio, once more despatched to Asia, secured the farther shore of
the Hellespont. With about forty thousand seasoned horse and foot, and
with auxiliary services unusually efficient for the age, Alexander
crossed to Persian soil in the spring of 334.
There was no other army in Asia Minor to offer him battle in form than a
force about equal in numbers to his own, which had been collected
locally by the western satraps. Except for its contingent of Greek
mercenaries, this was much inferior to the Macedonian force in fighting
value. Fended by Parmenio from the Hellespontine shore, it did the best
it could by waiting on the farther bank of the Granicus, the nearest
considerable stream which enters the Marmora, in order either to draw
Alexander's attack, or to cut his communications, should he move on into
the continent. It did not wait long. The heavy Macedonian cavalry dashed
through the stream late on an afternoon, made short work of the Asiatic
constituents, and having cleared a way for the phalanx helped it to cut
up the Greek contingent almost to a man before night fell. Alexander was
left with nothing but city defences and hill tribes to deal with till a
fuller levy could be collected from other provinces of the Persian
Empire and brought down to the west, a process which would take many
months, and in fact did take a full year. But some of the Western cities
offered no small impediment to his progress. If Aeolia, Lydia and Ionia
made no resistance worth mentioning, the two chief cities of Caria,
Miletus and Halicarnassus, which had been enjoying in virtual freedom a
lion's share of Aegean trade for the past century, were not disposed to
become appanages of a military empire. The pretension of Alexander to
lead a crusade against the ancient oppressor of the Hellenic race
weighed neither with them, nor, for that matter, with any of the Greeks
in Asia or Europe, except a few enthusiasts. During the past seventy
years, ever since celebrations of the deliverance of Hellas from the
Persian had been replaced by aspirations towards counter invasion, the
desire to wreak holy vengeance had gone for little or nothing, but
desire to plunder Persia had gone for a great deal. Therefore, any
definite venture into Asia aroused envy, not enthusiasm, among those who
would be forestalled by its success. Neither with ships nor men had any
leading Greek state come forward to help Alexander, and by the time he
had taken Miletus he realized that he must play his game alone, with his
own people for his own ends. Thenceforward, neglecting the Greeks, he
postponed his march into the heart of the Persian Empire till he had
secured every avenue leading thither from the sea, whether through Asia
Minor or Syria or Egypt.
After reducing Halicarnassus and Caria, Alexander did no more in Asia
Minor than parade the western part of it, the better to secure the
footing he had gained in the continent. Here and there he had a brush
with hill-men, who had long been unused to effective control, while with
one or two of their towns he had to make terms; but on the approach of
winter, Anatolia was at his feet, and he seated himself at Gordion, in
the Sakaria valley, where he could at once guard his communications with
the Hellespont and prepare for advance into farther Asia by an easy
road. Eastern Asia Minor, that is Cappadocia, Pontus and Armenia, he
left alone, and its contingents would still be arrayed on the Persian
side in both the great battles to come. Certain northern districts also,
which had long been practically independent of Persia, e.g. Bithynia and
Paphlagonia, had not been touched yet. It was not worth his while at
that moment to spend time in fighting for lands which would fall in any
case if the Empire fell, and could easily be held in check from western
Asia Minor in the meantime. His goal was far inland, his danger he well
knew, on the sea--danger of possible co-operation between Greek fleets
and the greater coastal cities of the Aegean and the Levant. Therefore,
with the first of the spring he moved down into Cilicia to make the
ports of Syria and Egypt his, before striking at the heart of the
Empire.
The Great King, last and weakest of the Darius name, had realized the
greatness of his peril and come down with the levy of all the Empire to
try to crush the invader in the gate of the south lands. Letting his foe
pass round the angle of the Levant coast, Darius, who had been waiting
behind the screen of Amanus, slipped through the hills and cut off the
Macedonian's retreat in the defile of Issus between mountain and sea.
Against another general and less seasoned troops a compact and
disciplined Oriental force would probably have ended the invasion there
and then; but that of Darius was neither compact nor disciplined. The
narrowness of the field compressed it into a mob; and Alexander and his
men, facing about, saw the Persians delivered into their hand. The fight
lasted little longer than at Granicus and the result was as decisive a
butchery. Camp, baggage-train, the royal harem, letters from Greek
states, and the persons of Greek envoys sent to devise the destruction
of the Captain-General--all fell to Alexander.
Assured against meeting another levy of the Empire for at least a
twelvemonth, he moved on into Syria. In this narrow land his chief
business, as we have seen, was with the coast towns. He must have all
the ports in his hand before going up into Asia. The lesser dared not
gainsay the victorious phalanx; but the queen of them all, Tyre,
mistress of the eastern trade, shut the gates of her island citadel and
set the western intruder the hardest military task of his life. But the
capture of the chief base of the hostile fleets which still ranged the
Aegean was all essential to Alexander, and he bridged the sea to effect
it. One other city, Gaza, commanding the road to Egypt, showed the same
spirit with less resources, and the year was far spent before the
Macedonians appeared on the Nile to receive the ready submission of a
people which had never willingly served the Persian. Here again,
Alexander's chief solicitude was for the coasts. Independent Cyrene,
lying farthest west, was one remaining danger and the openness of the
Nile mouths another. The first danger dissolved with the submission,
which Cyrene sent to meet him as he moved into Marmarica to the attack;
the second was conjured by the creation of the port of Alexandria,
perhaps the most signal act of Alexander's life, seeing to what stature
the city would grow, what part play in the development of Greek and Jew,
and what vigour retain to this day. For the moment, however, the new
foundation served primarily to rivet its founder's hold on the shores of
the Greek and Persian waters. Within a few months the hostile fleets
disappeared from the Levant and Alexander obtained at last that command
of the sea without which invasion of inner Asia would have been more
than perilous, and permanent retention of Egypt impossible.
Thus secure of his base, he could strike inland. He went up slowly in
the early part of 331 by the traditional North Road through Philistia
and Palestine and round the head of the Syrian Hamad to Thapsacus on
Euphrates, paying, on the way, a visit of precaution to Tyre, which had
cost him so much toil and time a year before. None opposed his crossing
of the Great River; none stayed him in Mesopotamia; none disputed his
passage of the Tigris, though the ferrying of his force took five days.
The Great King himself, however, was lying a few marches south of the
mounds of Nineveh, in the plain of Gaugamela, to which roads converging
from south, east and north had brought the levies of all the empire
which remained to him. To hordes drawn from fighting tribes living as
far distant as frontiers of India, banks of the Oxus, and foothills of
the Caucasus, was added a phalanx of hireling Greeks more than three
times as numerous as that which had been cut up on the Granicus. Thus
awaited by ten soldiers to each one of his own on open ground chosen by
his enemy, Alexander went still more slowly forward and halted four and
twenty hours to breathe his army in sight of the Persian out posts.
Refusing to risk an attack on that immense host in the dark, he slept
soundly within his entrenchments till sunrise of the first day of
October, and then in the full light led out his men to decide the fate
of Persia. It was decided by sundown, and half a million broken men were
flying south and east into the gathering night. But the Battle of
Arbela, as it is commonly called--the greatest contest of armies before
the rise of Rome--had not been lightly won. The active resistance of the
Greek mercenaries, and the passive resistance of the enormous mass of
the Asiatic hordes, which stayed attack by mere weight of flesh and
closed again behind every penetrating column, made the issue doubtful,
till Darius himself, terrified at the oncoming of the heavy Macedonian
cavalry, turned his chariot and lost the day. Alexander's men had to
thank the steadiness which Philip's system had given them, but also, in
the last resort, the cowardice of the opposing chief.
The Persian King survived to be hunted a year later, and caught, a dying
man, on the road to Central Asia; but long before that and without
another pitched battle the Persian throne had passed to Alexander.
Within six months he had marched to and entered in turn, without other
let or hindrance than resistance of mountain tribesmen in the passes,
the capitals of the Empire--Babylon, Susa, Persepolis, Ecbatana; and
since these cities all held by him during his subsequent absence of six
years in farther Asia, the victory of the West over the Ancient East may
be regarded as achieved on the day of Arbela.
CHAPTER VI
EPILOGUE
Less than ten years later, Alexander lay dead in Babylon. He had gone
forward to the east to acquire more territories than we have surveyed in
any chapter of this book or his fathers had so much as known to exist.
The broad lands which are now Afghanistan, Russian Turkestan, the
Punjab, Scinde, and Beluchistan had been subdued by him in person and
were being held by his governors and garrisons. This Macedonian Greek
who had become an emperor of the East greater than the greatest
theretofore, had already determined that his Seat of Empire should be
fixed in inner Asia; and he proposed that under his single sway East and
West be distinct no longer, but one indivisible world, inhabited by
united peoples. Then, suddenly, he was called to his account, leaving no
legitimate heir of his body except a babe in its mother's womb. What
would happen? What, in fact, did happen?
It is often said that the empire which Alexander created died with him.
This is true if we think of empire as the realm of a single emperor. As
sole ruler of the vast area between the Danube and the Sutlej Alexander
was to have no successor. But if we think of an empire as the realm of a
race or nation, Greater Macedonia, though destined gradually to be
diminished, would outlive its founder by nearly three hundred years; and
moreover, in succession to it, another Western empire, made possible by
his victory and carried on in some respects under his forms, was to
persist in the East for several centuries more. As a political conquest,
Alexander's had results as long lasting as can be credited to almost any
conquest in history. As the victory of one civilization over another it
was never to be brought quite to nothing, and it had certain permanent
effects. These this chapter is designed to show: but first, since the
development of the victorious civilization on alien soil depended
primarily on the continued political supremacy of the men in whom it was
congenital, it is necessary to see how long and to what extent political
dominion was actually held in the East by men who were Greeks, either by
birth or by training.
Out of the turmoil and stress of the thirty years which followed
Alexander's death, two Macedonians emerged to divide the Eastern Empire
between them. The rest--transient embarrassed phantoms of the Royal
House, regents of the Empire hardly less transient, upstart satraps, and
even one-eyed Antigonus, who for a brief moment claimed jurisdiction
over all the East--never mattered long to the world at large and matter
not at all here and now. The end of the fourth century sees Seleucus of
Babylonia lording it over the most part of West Asia which was best
worth having, except the southern half of Syria and the coasts of Asia
Minor and certain isles in sight of them, which, if not subject to
Ptolemy of Egypt, were free of both kings or dominated by a third,
resident in Europe and soon to disappear. In the event those two,
Seleucus and Ptolemy, alone of all the Macedonian successors, would
found dynasties destined to endure long enough in kingdoms great enough
to affect the general history of civilization in the Ancient East.
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