Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 1.djvu/35

 ALEXANDER THE GREAT 13 said that the Magi foretold that the latter city would prove fatal to him ; but he despised their warnings. On the way, he was met by ambassadors from all parts of the world Libya, Italy, Carthage, Greece, the Scythians, Celts, and Iberians. At Babylon he was busy with gigantic plans for the future, both of conquest and civilization, when he was suddenly taken ill after a banquet, and died eleven days later* 323 B.C., in the thirty-second year of his age, and the thirteenth of his reign. His body was deposited in a golden coffin at Alexandria, by Ptole- masus, and divine honors were paid to him, not only in Egypt, but in other coun- tries. He had appointed no heir to his immense dominions ; but to the question of his friends, "Who should inherit them ?" he replied, "The most worthy." After many disturbances, his generals recognized as Kings the weak-minded Aridneus a son of Philip by Philinna, the dancer and Alexander's posthumous son by Roxana, Alexander ^Egus, while they shared the provinces among them- selves, assuming the title of satraps. Perdiccas, to whom Alexander had, on his death-bed, delivered his ring, became guardian of the kings during their minor- ity. The empire of Alexander soon broke up, and his dominions were divided among his generals. Alexander was more than a conqueror. He diffused the language and civili- zation of Greece wherever victory led him, and planted Greek kingdoms in Asia, which continued to exist for some centuries. At the very time of his death, he was engaged in devising plans for the drainage of the unhealthy marshes around Babylon, and a better irrigation of the extensive plains. It is even supposed that the fever which he caught there, rather than his famous drinking-bout, was the real cause of his death. To Alexander, the ancient world owed a vast increase of its knowledge in geography, natural history, etc. He taught Europeans the road to India, and gave them the first glimpses of that magnificence and splen- dor which has dazzled and captivated their imagination for more than two thou- sand years. See Freeman's "Historical Essays" (2d series, 1873), and Mahaffy's "Alexander's Empire" (1887). The wonderful element in the campaigns of Alexander, and his tragical death at the height of his power, threw a rare romantic interest around his figure. It is ever the fate of a great name to be enshrined in fable, and Alexander soon be- came the hero of romantic story, scarcely more wonderful than the actual, but growing from age to age with the mythopoeic spirit which can work as freely in fact as fiction. The earliest form of the story which we know is the great ro- mance connected with the name of Callisthenes, which, under the influence of the living popular tradition, arose in Egypt about 200 A.D., and was carried through Latin translations to the West, through Armenian and Syriac versions to the East. It became widely popular during the middle ages, and was worked into poetic form by many writers in French and German. Alberich of Besancon wrote in Middle High German an epic on the subject in the first half of the twelfth century, which was the basis of the German " Pfaffe " Lamprecht's " Alexanderbuch," also of the twelfth century. The French poets Lambert li Court and Alexandre de Bernay composed, between 1180 and 1190, a romance