It was of far more importance that Hellenism had a task in the West like that in the East; to save the Greeks of Italy and Sicily, to overcome the Carthaginians and the tribes of Italy, to turn the whole Mediterranean into a Greek sea, was just as urgently necessary as the conquest of Western Asia. It was the aim that Alcibiades had set himself and on which Athens had gone to wreck.
In the same years in which the Macedonian king was conquering the Persians, his brother-in-law, Alexander of Epirus, at the request of Tarentum, had devoted himself to this task. After some success at the beginning he had been overcome by the Lucanians and Bruttians and the opposition of Hellenic particularism (334-331 B.C.).
Now the Macedonian king made preparations to take up this work also and thus complete his conquest of the world. That the resources of Macedonia were inadequate for this purpose was perfectly clear to him. Since he had rejected the proposals of Darius he had employed the conquered Asiatics in the government of his empire, and above all had endeavoured to form an auxiliary force to his army out of the people that had previously ruled Asia. In his naïve overvaluation of education, due to the Socratic belief in the omnipotence of the intellect, he thought he could make Macedonians out of the young Persians. But as ruler of the world he must no longer bear the fetters which the usage of his people and the terms of the Hellenic league put upon him. He must stand above all men and peoples, his will must be law to them, like the commandment of the gods. The march to Ammon (331 B.C.), which at the time enjoyed the highest regard in the Greek world, inaugurated this departure. This elevation of the kingship to divinity was not an outgrowth of oriental views, although it resembles them, but of political necessity and of the loftiest ideas of Greek culture—of the teaching of Greek philosophy, common to all Socratic schools, of the unlimited sovereignty of the true sage, whose judgment no commandment can fetter; he is no other than the true king.
Henceforth this view is inseparable from the idea of kingship among all occidental nations down to our own times. It returns in the absolute monarchy that Cæsar wished to found at Rome and which then gradually develops out of the principate of Augustus, until Diocletian and Constantine bring it to perfection; it returns, only apparently modified by Christian views, in the absolute monarchy of modern times, in kingship by the grace of God as well as in the universal monarchy of Napoleon, and in the divine foundation of the autocracy of the Czar.
But Alexander was not able to bring his state to completion. In the midst of his plans, in the full vigour of youth, just as a boundless future seemed to lie before him, he was carried off by death at Babylon, on the thirteenth of June, 323 B.C., in the thirty-third year of his age.
With the death of Alexander his plans were buried. He left no heir who could have held the empire together; his generals fought for the spoils. The result of the mighty struggles of the period of the Diadochi, which covers almost fifty years (323-277 B.C.), is, that the Macedonian empire is divided into three great powers; the kingdom of the Lagidæ, who from the seaport of Alexandria on the extreme western border of Egypt control the eastern Mediterranean with all its coasts, and the valley of the Nile; the kingdom of the Seleucidæ, who strive in continual wars to hold Asia together; and the kingdom of the Antigonidæ, who obtained possession of Macedonia, depopulated by the conquest of the world and again by the fearful Celtic invasion (280), and who, when they wish to assert themselves as a great power, must attempt to acquire an ascendency in some form or other over Greece and the Ægean Sea.
Of these three powers the kingdom of the Lagidæ is most firmly welded together, being in full possession of all the resources that trade and sea power, money and politics, afford. To re-establish the universal monarchy was never its aim, even when circumstances seemed to tempt to it. But as long as strong rulers wear the crown it always stands on the offensive against the other two; it harasses them continually, hinders them at every step from consolidating, wrests from the Seleucidæ almost all the coast towns of Palestine and Phœnicia as far as Thrace, temporarily gains control of the islands of the Ægean, and supports every hostile movement that is made in Greece against Macedonia. The Greek mother-country is thus continually forced anew into the struggle, the play of intrigue between the court of Alexandria and the Macedonian state never gives it an opportunity to become settled. All revolts of the Greek world received the support of Alexandria; the uprising of Athens and Sparta in the war of Chremonides (264), the attempt of Aratus to give the Peloponnesus an independent organisation by means of the Achæan league (beginning in 252), and finally the uprising of Sparta under Cleomenes. The aim of giving the Greek world an independent form was never attained; finally, when at the end of the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes (221) the kingdom of the Lagidæ withdraws and lets Cleomenes fall, the peninsula comes anew under the supremacy of the Macedonians, whom Aratus the “liberator” had himself brought back to the citadel of Corinth. But neither can the Macedonian king attain the full power that Philip and Alexander had possessed a century earlier; in particular, its resources are insufficient, even in alliance with the Achæans, to overthrow the warlike, piratical Ætolian state, which is constantly increasing in power. So Greece never gets out of these hopeless conditions; on the contrary, indeed, through the emigration of the population to the Asiatic colonies, through the decay of a vigorous peasant population which began as early as in the fourth century, through the economic decline of commerce and industry caused by the shifting of the centre of gravity to the east, its situation becomes more and more wretched and the population constantly diminishes. It can never attain peace of itself, but only through an energetic and ruthlessly despotic foreign rule.
In the East, on the contrary, an active and hopeful life developed. The great kings of the Lagidæan kingdom, the first three Ptolemies, fully appreciated the importance of intellectual life to the position of their kingdom in the world. All that Greek culture offered they tried to attract to Alexandria, and they managed to win for their capital the leading position in literature and science. But in other respects the kingdom of the Lagidæ is by no means the state in which the life of the new time reaches its full development. However much, in opposition to the Greek world, in conflict with Macedonia, they coquette with the Hellenic idea of liberty, within their own jurisdiction they cannot endure the independence and the free constitution of the Greek polis, and their subjects are by no means initiated into the new world-culture, but are kept in complete subjugation, sharply distinguished from the ruling classes, the Macedonians and Greeks, to whom also no freedom of political movement whatever is granted.[1]
The development in Asia follows a very different course. Here, through the activity of the great founders of cities, Antigonus, Lysimachus, Seleucus I, and Antiochus I, one Greek city arises after another, from the Hellespont through Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Media, as far as Bactria and India; and from them grow the great centres of culture, full of independent life, by which the Asiatic population is introduced to the modern world-civilisation and becomes Hellenised. Antigonus deliberately supported the independence of the cities within the great organic body of the kingdom, thus following on the lines of the Hellenic league under Philip and Alexander. By the pressure of political necessity and the fact that they could maintain their power only by winning the attachment and fidelity of their subjects, the Seleucidæ were forced into the same ways. And side by side with the great kingdom the political struggle creates a great number of powers of the second rank, in part pure Greek communities, like Rhodes, Chios, Cyzicus, Byzantium, Heraclea, in part newly formed states of Greek origin, like the kingdom of Pergamus and later the Bactrian kingdom, in part fragments of the old Persian kingdom, like Bithynia, Pontus, Cappadocia, Armenia, Atropatene, and not much later the Parthian kingdom. Among these states the eastern retain their oriental character, while the western are forced to pass more and more into the culture of Hellenism.