Page:Montesquieu - The spirit of laws.djvu/258

206 He opposed those who would have had him treat the Greeks as masters, and the Persians as slaves. He thought only of uniting the two nations, and of abolishing the distinctions of a conquering and a conquered people. After he had compleated his victories, he relinquished all those prejudices that had helped him to obtain them. He assumed the manners of the Persians, that he might not afflict them too much by obliging them to conform to those of the Greeks. It was this humanity which made him shew so great a respect for the wife and mother of Darius; this that made him so continent; this that caused his death to be so much lamented by the Persians. What a conqueror! he is lamented by all the nations he has subdued! What an usurper! at his death the very family he has cast from the throne, is all in tears. These were the most glorious passages in his life, and such as history cannot produce an instance in any other conqueror.

Nothing consolidates more a conquest than the union formed between the two nations by marriages. Alexander chose his wives from the nation he had subdued; he insisted on his courtiers doing the same; and the rest of the Macedonians followed the example. The Franks and Burgundians permitted those marriages ; the Visigoths forbad them in Spain and afterwards allowed them. By the Lombards they were not only allowed but encouraged. When the Romans wanted to weaken Macedonia, they ordained that there should be no intermarriages between the people of different provinces. Rh