Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/335

XI infinite capacity might have been turned into a new channel. Even as it was, they left the mark of Hellenic genius in every land to which Alexander led them; and who shall say that such a people might not have developed also a system of law and government adequate to the needs of the human race from the Indus to the Adriatic?

But the idea and the possibility of such a system perished for the time with Alexander. At the moment of his death two problems called imperatively for solution, if the project of universal empire were to be carried out; and these two problems were equally insoluble. First, the Persians had to be combined with the Macedonians; secondly, the Macedonians had to be combined with the Greeks. The hopelessness of the first of these combinations made itself felt at once. The Macedonians would not accept as king the child of Alexander by an Oriental; and as they were the real instruments of conquest, with them lay the fatal decision. The Persians were ready, not the Macedonians. No union was possible save through a personality such as Alexander's had been, for there was no idea to ground it on, or none that was sufficiently clear and comprehensible. For the union of Macedonians and Greeks there might indeed have been some faint hope. There was one striking character, a Greek of culture, ability, and feeling, the subject of one of Plutarch's most interesting biographies, who continued to represent the union of Greece and Macedon for some time after Alexander's death. But Eumenes struggled in vain against a combination of uncultured