Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/290

 258 HISTORY OF GREECE. plvatic comparison illustrates the immediate, powerful, and wide- reaching impression produced by the sudden extinction of the great conqueror. It was felt by each of the many remote envoys who had so recently come to propitiate this far-shooting Apollo — by every man among the nations who had sent these envoys — throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, as then known, — to affect either his actual condition or his probable future.* The first growth and development of Macedonia, during the twenty-two years preceding the battle of Choeroneia, from an embarrassed secondary State into the first of all known powers, had excited the astonishment of contemporaries, and admiration for Philip's organizing genius. But the achievements of Alexander, during his twelve years of reign, throwing Philip into the shade, had been on a scale so much grander and vaster, and so completely with- out serious reverse or even interruption, as to transcend the measure, not only of human expectation, but almost of human belief. The Great King (as the king of Persia was called by ex- cellence) was, and had long been, the type of worldly power and felicity, even down to the time when Alexander crossed the Hel- lespont. Within four years and three months from this event, by one stupendous defeat after another, Darius had lost all his Western Empire, and had become a fugitive eastward of the Cas- pian Gates, escaping captivity at the hands of Alexander only to perish by those of the satrap Bessus. All antecedent historical parallels — the ruin and captivity of the Lydian Croesus, the ex- pulsion and mean life of the Syracusan Dionysius, both of them impressive examples of the mutability of human condition, — sank into trifles compared with the overthrow of this towering Persian colossus. The orator ^schines expressed the genuine sentiment of a Grecian spectator, when he exclaimed (in a speech delivered at Athens shortly before the death of Darius) : — " What is there among the list of strange and unexpected events, that has not occurred in our time ? Our lives have transcended tlie limits of humanity ; we are born to serve as a theme for in- credible tales to posterity. Is not the Persian king — who dug 1 Dionysius, despot of the Pontic Herakleia, fainted away with joy when lie heard of Alexander's death, and erected a statue of Ev'&vpia or Comfort (Mcmn. Ileracl. Fragra. ap. Photium, Cod. 224. c. 4).