Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/299

 ASIATIZIXG TENDENCIES OF ALEXANDER 267 cian community was based. Aristotle did not wish to degrade the Asiatics below the level to which they had been accustomed, but rather to preserve the Greeks from being degraded to the same level. Now Alexander recognized no such distinction as that drawn by his preceptor. He treated Greeks and Asiatics alike, not by elevating the latter, but by degrading the former. Though he employed all indiscriminately as instruments, yet he presently found the free speech of Greeks, imd even of Mace- donians, so distasteful and offensive, that his preferences turned more and more in favor of the servile Asiatic sentiment and cus- toms. Instead of hellenizing Asia, he was tending to asiatize Macedonia and Hellas. His temper and character, as modified by a few years of conquest, rendered him quite unfit to follow the course recommended by Aristotle towards the Greeks — quite as unfit as any of the Persian kings, or as the French Em- peror Napoleon, to endure that partial frustration, compromise, and smart from free criticism, which is inseparable from the po- sition of a limited chief. Among a multitude of subjects more diverse-colored than even the army of Xerxes, it is quite possi- ble that he might have turned his power towards the improve- ment of the rudest portions. We are told (though the fact is difficult to credit, from his want of time) that he abolished vari- ous barbarisms of the Hyrkanians, Arachosians, and Sogdians.^ But Macedonians as well as Greeks would have been pure losers by being absorbed into an immense Asiatic aggregate. Plutai'ch states that Alexander founded more than seventy new cities in Asia.^ So large a number of them is neither veri- ' Plutarch, Fortun. Alex. M. p. 328. The stay of Alexander in these countries was however so short, that even with the best will he could not have enforced the suppression of any inveterate customs. wards, Seleukeia in Mesopotamia, as if he thought that it was amonp th-i cities established by Alexander himself. This shows that he has not been exact in distinguishing foundations made by Alexander, from those origi- nated by Seleukus and the other Diadochi. The elaborate article of Droysen (in the Appendix to his Geschichte des Hellenismus, p. 588-651), ascribes to Alexander the largest plans of colo nization in Asia, and enumerates a great number of cities alleged to have been founded by him. But in regard to the majority of these foundations, the evidence upon which Proysen grounds his belief that Alexander was
 * Plutarch, Fortun. Al. ^I. p. 328. Plutarch mentions, a few lines after-