Ab urbe condita

The aspect of Italy would have struck him as very different from the India which he traversed in drunken revelry with an intoxicated army; he would have seen in the passes of Apulia and the mountains of Lucania the traces of the recent disaster which befell his house when his uncle Alexander, King of Epirus, perished.

I am speaking of Alexander as he was before he was submerged in the flood of success, for no man was less capable of bearing prosperity than he was.

If we look at him as transformed by his new fortunes and presenting the new character, so to

speak, which he had assumed after his victories, it is evident he would have come into Italy more like Darius than Alexander, and would have brought with him an army which had forgotten its native Macedonia and was rapidly becoming Persian in character.

It is a disagreeable task in the case of so great a man to have to record his ostentatious love of dress; the prostrations which he demanded from all who approached his presence, and which the Macedonians must have felt to be humiliating, even had they been vanquished, how much more when they were victors;

the terribly cruel punishments he in- flicted; the murder of his friends at the banquet-table; the vanity which made him invent a divine pedigree for himself.

What, pray, would have happened if his love of wine had become stronger and his passionate nature more violent and fiery as he grew older? I am only stating facts about which there is no dispute. Are we to regard none of these things as serious draw- backs to his merits as a commander?

Or was there any danger of that happening which the most frivolous of the Greeks, who actually extol the Parthians at the expense of the Romans, are so constantly harping upon, namely, that the Roman people must have bowed before the greatness of Alexander's name — though I do not think they had even beard of him —and

that not one out of all the Roman chiefs would have uttered his true sentiments about him, though men dared to attack him in Athens, the very city which had been shattered by Macedonian arms and almost well in sight of the smoking ruins of `Thebes, and the speeches of his assailants are still extant to prove this? However lofty our ideas of this man's greatness, still it is the greatness of one individual, attained in a successful career of little more than ten years.

Those who extol it on the ground that though Rome has never lost a war she has lost many battle, whilst Alexander has never fought a battle unsuccess- fully, are not aware that they are comparing the actions of one individual, and he a youth, with the achievements of a people who have had 8oo years of war.