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The Historians' History of the World 04 [Greece to the Roman Conquest]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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HIS EFFECT ON FEDERALISATION (PÖHLMANN)
[Every one admits that the lack of unity among the Greek towns was the cause of evils innumerable, and that some form of federation was vitally needed. Many have felt that Alexander furnished the needed unifaction by his centralised empire; but Pöhlmann is of contrary mind.]
Droysen’s peculiar way of seeing history has led him greatly to overrate the blessings of the new federal régime. It is true that in Hellas, under the old party names of aristocrat and democrat, the hostile interests of rich and poor were engaged in a pitiless and passionate struggle, and, if we consider the decomposition that was killing the life of communities, a monarchy would appear to be exactly what was needed to exercise a levelling and reconciliatory influence. But a kingdom of this national character, whose first aim would be to satisfy the most vital interests of the nation and create a true internal peace—such a kingdom was not at all the ideal of the Macedonian monarchy. So far from standing superior to party warfare, the monarchy supported itself by favouring the particular interests of that party which came over to the Macedonian camp. The immense emigration produced by the consequent oppression of those who belonged to the opposition, is proof enough that the new order did not produce a citizenship of inner peace, but, on the contrary, gave new food to the differences from which the communities suffered. So far as the policy of Philip was concerned, the object of the bond was attained when it brought the power of the Greek people into its own service; and even if the war against Persia had its national and Hellenic side, yet so early an authority as Polybius rightly and soberly judged that the Macedonian king was chiefly acting in the matter to satisfy a personal end. It is an illusion of Droysen’s to imagine that this subjection of Greece to a policy which was, by its nature, bound to serve dynastic and personal interests, at the same time secured to the Greeks a common national policy.
The consolidation of the new world power was a consequence of Alexander’s irresistible and victorious progress through the heart of the Persian kingdom. His policy was to bring about a new “Hellenistic” régime which should lead to a peaceful blending of Greek and barbarian, and the object was to be gained by putting the oriental and the Græco-Macedonian elements on an equality in army and administration—setting Asiatics, for example, as satraps beside European military governors and treasury officers. He triumphed over opposition, which he encountered chiefly in the army.
This policy was certainly an inevitable consequence of his undertaking and of the conditions which were necessary to its success; but need he have so exaggerated it as to make a complete return to the traditions of oriental despotism? This is a question we do not find so easy to answer in the affirmative, as Droysen does, for he sees nothing but “prejudice” in the resistance which Alexander’s claims to apotheosis and genuflexion encountered in the old Macedonian spirit and the Greek love of freedom.
As Ranke rightly declared, it meant a complete break with their entire national history that the Greeks as well should be subjected to the sway of an authority which was no other than that against which they had warred for centuries. Certainly the “city” had outlived its time as the final political unit. The needs of the day called for “an ascent from the city constitution to state constitutions,” in which the cities themselves would enjoy only a communal independence. But then they must, to use Droysen’s own words, “find in the universal bond their right and their safeguard.” And this safeguard could be offered by no orientalising despotism.n
HIS HERITAGE (HEGEL)
Alexander had the good fortune to die at the proper time—i.e., it may be called good fortune, but it is rather a necessity. That he may stand before the eyes of posterity as a youth, an early death must hurry him away. Achilles begins the Greek world, and his antitype Alexander concludes it: and these youths not only supply a picture of the fairest kind in their own persons, but at the same time afford a complete and perfect type of Hellenic existence. Alexander finished his work and completed his ideal; and thus bequeathed to the world one of the noblest and most brilliant of visions, which our poor reflections only serve to obscure. For the great world-historical form of Alexander, the modern standard applied by recent historical “Philistines”—that of virtue or morality—will by no means suffice. And if it be alleged in depreciation of his merit, that he had no successor, and left behind no dynasty, we may remark that the Greek kingdoms that arose in Asia after him are his dynasty. The Græco-Bactrian kingdom lasted for two centuries. Thence the Greeks came into connection with India, and even with China. The Greek dominion spread itself over northern India. Other Greek kingdoms arose in Asia Minor, in Armenia, in Syria, and Babylonia. But Egypt especially, among the kingdoms of the successors of Alexander, became a great centre of science and art; for a great number of its architectural works belong to the time of the Ptolemies, as has been made out from the deciphered inscriptions. Alexandria became the chief centre of commerce—the point of union for Eastern manners and tradition with Western civilisation. Besides these, the Macedonian kingdom, that of Thrace, stretching beyond the Danube, that of Illyria, and that of Epirus, flourished under the sway of Greek princes.m
ALEXANDER’S TRUE GLORY (WHEELER)
If a man’s life-work is to be judged only by what he erects into formal organisation, then we must pronounce the career of Alexander a failure, and more than a failure. He had dismantled what he found, and built nothing sure in its place. His dream of fusing the East and the West had been fulfilled and embodied in no visible institution, no form of government or law, of state or church. Greece, Egypt, and the Orient were still in government asunder.
No wonder that historians have written the story of Greece—among them great names like Niebuhr and Grote—and seen nothing more in the career of Alexander than a brilliant disturbance of the world’s order, an enthronement of militarism, an annihilation of Greek liberty, and an undoing of Greece in all that makes her life of interest to the world. It is another thing that their blindness could see in Alexander himself only a mad opportunist and greedy conqueror, whose life, had it been spared, could have wrought no more than further conquest; for Alexander was of all things an idealist, and they who have not read that in the story of his life, may as well not have read it at all. Grote and Demosthenes are, each in his way, types of historians and statesmen who have spent their strength in deploring the waste of goodly seed-corn scattered on the fields, their eyes turned towards the former harvest, not the next. The old maxims, the old creeds, and the good old times are reasserted, defended, and bewailed long after they have passed to their larger fruitage in the unfolding of a larger life.
When Alexander’s career began, the culture of the world, fixed in two main types, the feminine and the masculine, if we may broadly characterise them so, was still centralised and located, on the one hand in the wealth and settled industrial life of the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian river valleys, on the other in the free energy of the old Greek city communities. When his career ended, the barrier separating these domains had been broken down, never to be raised again.