Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/305

 INCREASED COMMUNICATION. 273 have been another regular road from Susa and Ekbatana to Bak- tria, Sogdiana, and India. Alexander, had he lived, would doubt* less have multiplied on a still larger scale the communications both by sea and land between the various parts of his world- empire. We read that among the gigantic projects which he was contemplating when surprised by death, one was, the construc- tion of a road all along the northern coast of Africa, as far as the Pillars of Herakles.^ He had intended to found a new maritime city on the Persian Gulf, at the mouth of the Euphrates, and to incur much outlay for regulating the flow of water in its lower course. The river would probably have been thus made again to afford the same conveniences, both for navigation and irriga- tion, as it appears to have furnished in earlier times under the ancient Babylonian kings. Orders had been also given for con- structing a fleet to explore the Caspian Sea. Alexander be- lieved that sea to be connected with the Eastern Ocean,'2 and in- tended to make it his point of departure for circumnavigating the eastern limits of Asia, which country yet remained for him to conquer. The voyage already performed by Nearchus, from the mouth of the Indus to that of the Euphrates, was in those days a splendid maritime achievement ; to which another still greater was on the point of being added — the circumnavigation of Ara- bia from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea ; though here we must remark, that this same voyage (from the mouth of the Indus round Arabia into the Red Sea) had been performed in thirty months, a century and a half before, by Skylax of Karyanda, un- der the orders of Darius son of Hystaspes ; * yet, though re- 1 Diodor. xviii. 4. Pausanias (ii. 1. 5) observes that Alexander wished to cut through Mount Mimas (in Asia Minor), but that this was the only one, among all his undertakings, which did not succeed. " So dfficult is it (lie goes on) to put force upon the divine arrangements," ra T^ela [iiuaan- ■&aL' lie wished to cut through the isthmus between Teos and Klazome- nae, so as to avoid the navigation round the cliffs of Mimas [aKorvelov VKpoEvra Mi/j.avToc — Aristophan. Nub. 274) between Chios and Erythrce. Probably this was among the projects suggested to Alexander, in the last year of his life. "We have no other information about it. ^ Herodot. iv. 44 : compare iii. 102. That Arrian had not present to h'xr memory this narrative of Herodotus, is plain from the last chapter of his
 * Arrian, v. 26, 2.