Page:The Archko Volume (1896).djvu/199

Rh by no better motive than personal ambition. In the hands of God he was used as an instrument of lasting good to mankind. Endowed with an intellect of unusual power and comprehension, he received a thorough education from one of the greatest philosophers that ever lived. At the age of eighteen he began to mingle affairs of state with study, and became a soldier as well as a scholar. At the age of twenty, when summoned to assume the reins of empire — the sovereign, in fact, of the Greeks — he stood before the world a perfect representative of his nation. He combined their genius and learning with their valor and conduct; and entering Asia with the sword in one hand and the poems of Homer in the other, he became the armed leader of Grecian learning, art, and civilization. Wherever he went Greece went with him. His conquests were not so much those of Macedonian arms as of Grecian letters. Wherever he went, he took with him the genius of Homer, the sublime soul of Plato, and the practical wisdom of Socrates; and not only monarchies sprung up in his wake, but schools of philosophy and academies of learning.

Entering Asia with an army of thirty-five thousand men, in the space of twelve years he made himself master of the whole Persian Empire, and of many nations which had never been subjected to the Persian yoke. He carried the Grecian language and manners to the Indus, and subjected to his power nearly as large a portion of the human race as there was in existence. His first battle gave him Asia Minor.