Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/258

228 broke out at Thebes, as well as in Ætolia, Elis, and Arcadia. But Alexander marched rapidly south- wards. He besieged and took Thebes, which was destroyed, and its inhabitants for the most part sold into slavery. In the rest of Greece the rebellion immediately died out; and next year (B.C. 334) Alexander started on his expedition against Darius.

The marvellous conquests of Alexander, achieved in little more than ten years (B.C. 334-323), were the beginning of a new and more extensive Hellenism, which, however, was not to have its chief home in Greece, but in Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. For more than a thousand years Europe was no longer to fear invasion from the East; and though Greece was to be no more really free, the next great empire to which it was to belong would absorb its ideas and give them a world-wide influence.

Alexander's campaigns must be only briefly summarised here, and the general plan indicated. His army consisted of about 40,000 men of various nationalities. His phalanx—infantry trained to charge sixteen deep, and armed with long spears, or sarissae—consisted principally of 12,000 Macedonians. He did not strike straight at the heart of the Persian Empire—at the capitals on the Euphrates or Tigris. His plan was first to secure Asia Minor and all the lands held by the Persian king bordering on the Mediterranean. This was done in three years. Crossing early in the spring of B.C. 334 from Sestos to Abydos, and first visiting Ilium, he won a decisive victory in a cavalry engagement at the River Granicus (May), and then captured in rapid succes-