Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/265

Rh finally at Babylon. His object was now to make a great European-Asiatic Empire, as far as possible uniform in administration, and with inhabitants of mixed race. He sent home a large number of veterans who had mutinied in the Punjaub, he married a daughter of Darius, having already married a beautiful Bactrian named Roxana, and encouraged Macedonian officers to marry Persian wives. He also filled up the places of the veterans sent home with Persian recruits. He was planning further conquests in Arabia, and issuing orders as to the internal affairs of Greece, when all his schemes were cut short by a fever, to which he succumbed on the 11th of June, B.C. 323.

The death of Alexander was the signal for universal disruption. It did not come at once, or professedly as a consequence of his death. His half-brother, Philip Arrhidaeus, was declared King of Macedonia, with a reservation of the right of the child of Roxana by Alexander, if it should prove to be a boy, and meanwhile Perdiccas (to whom Alexander is said to have given his signet-ring) was to be guardian and chief director of the Empire, with the title of Chiliarch. Nevertheless the ultimate division of the Empire into separate and independent kingdoms was foreshadowed by the division of the provinces among the chief generals of Alexander, who were not likely long to submit to any one chief, or to act together. In fact, from this time to B.C. 301 there was a constant succession of wars—the result of which was the formation of four considerable kingdoms: Macedonia, Syria, Egypt, and Thrace.