company with self-assertion and boasting. But this social defect was not unknown among the purest Hellenes. All through his life he courted Greek letters, he attended Greek plays, he talked in Greek to Greek men, and we can see how deep his sympathy with Hellendom was from his cutting remark in vino veritas to two Greeks sitting at the fatal banquet where the Macedonian veteran, Clitus, broke out into indecent altercation. "Don't you feel like demi-gods among savages when you are sitting in company with these Macedonians?" It may be said that Hellendom was less fastidious in the days of Alexander than in the days of his predecessors. I need not argue that question; suffice it to say that even had he made no world-conquests he would have been recognized as a really naturalized Hellene, and fit to take his place among the purest Greeks, in opposition to the most respectable barbarians. The purest Hellene, such as the Spartan Pausanias, was liable to degradation of character from the temptations of absolute power no less than a Macedonian or a Roman.

But on the other hand, he was a king in a sense quite novel and foreign to the Greeks. They recognized one king, the king of Persia, as a legitimate sovereign, ruling in great splendor, but over barbarians. So they were ready to grant such a thing as a king over other barbarians of less importance; but a king over Greeks, in the proper sense of the word, had not existed since the days of legendary Greece. There were indeed tyrants, plenty of them, and some of them mild men and fond of culture, friends of poets, and respectable men; and there were the kings of Sparta. But the former were always regarded as arch-heretics were regarded by the Church in the Middle Ages, as men whose virtues were of no account and whose crime was unpardonable; to murder them was a heroic deed, which wiped out all the murderer's previous sins. On the other hand, the latter were only hereditary, respected generals of an oligarchy, the real rulers of which were the ephors. Neither of these cases even approached the idea of a sovereign, as the Macedonians and as the kingdoms of medieval and modern Europe have conceived it.

For this implied in the first place a legitimate succession, such as the Spartan kings indeed possessed, and with it a divine right

in the strictest sense. As the Spartan, so the Macedonian kings came directly from Zeus, through his greatest hero-sons, Herakles and Æakus. But while the Spartan kings had long lost, if they ever possessed, the rights of Menelaus, who could offer to give a friend seven inhabited towns as a gift, while they only retained the religious preeminence of their pedigree, the kings of Macedonia had preserved all their ancient privileges. Grote thinks them the best representatives of that prehistoric sovereignty which we find in the Greece of Homer. But all through his history he urges upon us the fact that there was no settled constitutional limit to the authority of the kings even in cases of life and death. On the other hand, German inquirers, who are better acquainted with absolute monarchy, see in the assembly of free Macedonians

occasionally convened, especially in cases of high treason or of a succession to the throne a check like that of the Commons in earlier England. There seem in fact to have been two powers, both supreme, which could be brought into direct collision, any day, and so might produce a deadlock only to be removed by a trial of strength. Certain it is that Macedonian kings often ordered to death, or to corporal punishment and torture, free citizens and even nobles. It is equally certain that the kings often formally appealed to an assembly of soldiers or of peers (éraîρo) to decide in cases of life and death. Such inconsistencies are not impossible where there is a recognized divine right of kings, and when the summoning of an assembly lies altogether in the king's hands. Except in time of war, when its members were together under arms, the assembly had probably no way of combining for a protest, and the low condition. of their civilization made them indulgent to acts of violence on the part of their chiefs.

Niebuhr, however (Vorträge ii, 371), suggests a very probable solution of this difficulty. He compares the case of the Frankish kings, who were only princes among their own free men, but absolute lords over lands which they conquered. Thus many individual kings came to exercise absolute power illegally by transferring their rights as conquerors to those cases where they were limited monarchs. It is very possible too that both they and the Macedonian kings would prefer as household officers nobles of the conquered land, over whom they had ab

solute control. Thus the constitutional and the absolute powers of the king might be confused, and the extent of either determined by the force of the man who occupied the throne.

That Alexander exerted his supreme authority over all his subjects is quite certain. And yet in this he differed absolutely from a tyrant, such as the Greeks knew, that he called together his peers and asked them to pass legal sentence upon a subject charged with grave offenses against the crown. No Greek tyrant ever could do this, he had around him no halo of legitimacy, and moreover, he permitted no order of nobility among his subjects.

It appears that for a long time back the relations of king and nobles had been in Macedonia much as they were in the Middle Ages in Europe. There were large landed proprietors, and many of them had sovereign rights in their own provinces. Not only did the great lords gather about the king as their natural head, but they were proud to regard themselves as his personal servants, and formed the household, which was known as the Oeрareía in Hellenistic times. Earlier kings had adopted the practice of bringing to court noble children, to be the companions of the prince, and to form an order of royal pages; so no doubt Greek language and culture had been disseminated among them, and perhaps this was at first the main object. But in Alexander's time they were a permanent part of the king's household, and were brought up in his personal service, to become his aids-de-camp and his lords-in-waiting as well as his household brigade of both horse and foot guards, and perform for him many semi-menial offices which great lords and ladies are not ashamed to perform for royalty even up to the present day.

I will add but one more point, which is a curious illustration of the position of the Macedonian kings among their people. None of them contented himself with one wife, but either kept concubines, like all the kings in Europe, and even in England till George III, or even formally married second wives, as did Philip and Alexander. These practices led to constant and bloody tragedies in the royal family. Every king of Macedon who was not murdered by his relatives was at least conspired against by them. What is here, however, of consequence, is the social position of the royal bastards. They take their place

not with the dishonored classes, but among the nobles, and are all regarded as pretenders to the throne.

I need not point out to the reader the curious analogies of medieval European history. The facts seem based on the idea that the blood of kings was superior to that of the highest noble, and that even when adulterated by an ignoble mother, it was far more sacred than that of any subject. The Macedonians had not indeed advanced to the point of declaring all marriages with subjects morganatic, but they were not very far from it; for they certainly suffered from all the evils which English history as well as other histories can show, where alliances of powerful subjects with the sovereign are permitted.

Thus Alexander the Great, the third Macedonian king of his name, stood forth really and thoroughly in the position assigned by Herodotus to his elder namesake — ȧvηp "Eλλŋy, a Greek man in pedigree, education, and culture, Makedóvwv vπα (or Baσideús), and king of the Macedonians, a position unknown and unrecognized in the Greek world since the days of that Iliad which the conqueror justly prized, as to him the best and most sympathetic of all Hellenic books. Let us add that in the text, which Aristotle revised for him, there were assertions of royalty, including the power of life and death, which are expunged from our texts. He had the sanction of divine right, but what was far more important, the practical control of life and death, regarding the nobility of his household servants, and the property of his subjects as his own, keeping court with considerable state, and in every respect expressing, as Grote says, the principle l'Etat c'est moi.

A very few words will point out what changes were made in this position by his wonderful conquests. Though brought up in considerable state, and keeping court with all the splendor which his father's increased kingdom and wealth could supply, he was struck with astonishment, we are told, at the appointments of Darius's tents, which he captured after the battle of Issus. When he went into the bath prepared for his opponent, and found all the vessels of pure gold, and smelt the whole chamber full of frankincense and myrrh, and then passed out into a lofty dining tent with splendid hangings, and with the appointments of an oriental feast, he exclaimed to his staff:

"Well, this is something like royalty." Accordingly there was no part of Persian dignity which he did not adopt. We hear that the expenses of his table - he always dined late-rose to about £400 daily, at which limit he fixed it. Nor is this surprising when we find that he dined as publicly as the kings of France in the old days, surrounded by a brilliant staff of officers and pages, with a body-guard present and a trumpeter ready to summon the household troops. All manner of delicacies were brought from the sea and from remote provinces for his table.

In other respects, in dress and manners, he drifted gradually into Persian habits also. The great Persian lords, after a gallant struggle for their old sovereign, loyally went over to his side. Both his wives were oriental princesses, and perhaps too little has been said by historians about the influence they must have had in recommending to him Persian officers and pages. The loyalty of these people, great aristocrats as they were, was quite a different thing from that of the Macedonians, who had always been privileged subjects, and who now attributed to their own prowess the king's mighty conquests. The orientals, on the other hand, accepted him as an absolute monarch, nay, as little short of a deity, to whom they readily gave the homage of adoration. It is a characteristic story that when the rude and outspoken Casander had just arrived at Babylon for the first time, on a mission from his father Antipater, the regent of Macedonia, he saw orientals approaching Alexander with their customary prostrations, and burst out laughing. Upon this Alexander was so enraged that he seized him by the hair and dashed his head against the wall, and there can be little doubt that the king's death, which followed shortly, saved Casander from a worse fate. Thus the distinction pointed out by Niebuhr would lead Alexander to prefer the orientals, whom he had conquered, and who were his absolute property, to the Macedonians, who were not only constantly grumbling but had even planned several conspiracies against him.

There was yet another feature in Alexander's court which marks a new condition of things. The keeping of a regular court journal, onμepides, wherein the events of each day were carefully registered, gave an importance to the court which it