of the satraps. These were facilitated by the custom—quite contrary to the original imperial organization—which entrusted the provincial military commands to the satraps, who began to receive great masses of Greek mercenaries into their service. Under Artaxerxes I. and Darius II., these insurrections were still rare. But when the revolt of the younger Cyrus against his brother (401 B.C.) had demonstrated the surprising ease and rapidity with which a courageous army could penetrate into the heart of the empire—when the whole force of that empire had proved powerless, not only to prevent some 12,000 Greek troops, completely surrounded, cut off from their communications, and deprived through treachery of their leaders, from escaping to the coast, but even to make a serious attack on them—then, indeed, the imperial impotence became manifest. After that, revolts of the satraps in Asia Minor and Syria were of everyday occurrence, and the task of suppressing them was complicated by the foreign wars which the empire had to sustain against Greece and Egypt.
At this very period, however, the foreign policy of the empire gained a brilliant success. The collapse of the Athenian power before Syracuse (413 B.C.) induced Darius II. to order his satraps Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus, in Asia Minor, to collect the tribute overdue from the Greek cities. In alliance with Sparta (see Later Wars with the Greeks. Peace of Antalcidas. Peloponnesian War), Persia intervened in the conflict against Athens, and it was Persian gold that made it possible for Lysander to complete her overthrow (404 B.C.). True, war with Sparta followed immediately, over the division of the spoils, and the campaigns of the Spartan generals in Asia Minor (399–395) were all the more dangerous as they gave occasion to numerous rebellions. But Persia joined the Greek league against Sparta, and in 394 Pharnabazus and Conon annihilated the Lacedaemonian fleet at Cnidus. Thus the Spartan power of offence was crippled; and the upshot of the long-protracted war was that Sparta ruefully returned to the Persian alliance, and by the Peace of Antalcidas (q.v.), concluded with the king in 387 B.C., not only renounced all claims to the Asiatic possessions, but officially proclaimed the Persian suzerainty over Greece. Ninety years after Salamis and Plataea, the goal for which Xerxes had striven was actually attained, and the king's will was law in Greece. In the following decades, no Hellenic state ventured to violate the king's peace, and all the feuds that followed centred round the efforts of the combatants—Sparta, Thebes, Athens and Argos—to draw the royal powers to their side (see Greece: Ancient History).
But, for these successes, the empire had to thank the internecine strife of its Greek opponents, rather than its own strength. Its feebleness, when thrown on its own resources, is evident from the fact that, during the next years, it failed both to reconquer Egypt and to suppress completely King Evagoras of Salamis in Cyprus. The satrap revolts, moreover, assumed more and more formidable proportions, and the Greek states began once more to tamper with them. Thus the reign of Artaxerxes II. ended, in 359 B.C., with a complete dissolution of the imperial authority in the west. His successor, Artaxerxes Ochus, succeeded yet again in restoring the empire in its full extent. In 355 B.C., he spoke the fatal word, which, a second—or rather a third—time, demolished the essentially unsound power of Athens. In 343 he reduced Egypt, and his generals Mentor and Memnon, with his vizier Bagoas (q.v.), crushed once and for all the resistance in Asia Minor. At his death in 338, immediately before the final catastrophe, the empire to all appearances was more powerful and more firmly established than it had been since the days of Xerxes.
These successes, however, were won only by means of Greek armies and Greek generals. And simultaneously the Greek civilization—diffused by mercenaries, traders, artists, prostitutes and slaves,—advanced in ever greater force. In Asia Minor and Phoenicia we can clearly trace the progress of Hellenism (q.v.), especially Progress of Greek Influence. by the coinage. The stamp is cut by Greek hands and the Greek tongue predominates more and more in the inscription. We can see that the victory of Greek civilization had long been prepared on every side. But the vital point is that the absolute superiority of the Hellene was recognized as incontestable on both hands. The Persian sought to protect himself against danger, by employing Greeks in the national service and turning Greek policy to the interests of the empire. In the Greek world itself the disgrace that a people, called to universal dominion and capable of wielding it, should be dependent on the mandate of an impotent Asiatic monarchy, was keenly felt by all who were not yet absorbed in the rivalry of city with city. The spokesman of this national sentiment was Isocrates; but numerous other writers gave expression to it, notably, the historian Callisthenes of Olynthus. Union between Greeks, voluntary or compulsory, and an offensive war against Persia, was the programme they propounded.
Nor was the time for its fulfilment far distant. The new power which now rose to the first rank, created by Philip of Macedon, had no engrained tendency inimical to the Persian Empire. Its immediate programme was rather Macedonian expansion, at the expense of Thrace and Illyria, and the subjection of the Balkan Peninsula. But, Rise of Macedon. in its efforts to extend its power over the Greek states, it was bound to make use of the tendencies which aimed at the unification of Greece for the struggle against Persia: and this ideal demand it dared not reject.
Thus the conflict became inevitable. In 340, Artaxerxes III. and his satraps supported the Greek towns in Thrace—Perinthus and Byzantium—against Macedonian aggression; in 338 he concluded an alliance with Demosthenes. When Philip, after the victory of Chaeronea, had founded the league of Corinth (337) embracing the whole of Greece, he accepted the national programme, and in 336 dispatched his army to Asia Minor. That he never entertained the thought of conquering the whole Persian Empire is certain. Presumably, his ambitions would have been satisfied with the liberation of the Greek cities, and, perhaps, the subjection of Asia Minor as far as the Taurus. With this his dominion would have attained much the same compass as later under Lysimachus; farther than this the boldest hopes of Isocrates never went.
But Philip's assassination in 336 fundamentally altered the situation. In the person of his son, the throne was occupied by a soldier and statesman of genius, saturated with Greek culture and Greek thought, and intolerant of every goal but the highest. To conquer the whole world for Hellenic civilization by the aid of Macedonian spears, and to reduce the whole earth to unity, was the task that this heir of Heracles and Achilles saw before him. This idea of universal conquest was with him a conception much stronger developed than that which had inspired the Achaemenid rulers, and he entered on the project with full consciousness in the strictest sense of the phrase. In fact, if we are to understand Alexander aright, it is fatal to forget that he was overtaken by death, not at the end of his career, but at the beginning, at the age of thirty-three.
VI. The Macedonian Dominion.—How Alexander conquered Persia, and how he framed his world-empire,[1] cannot be related here. The essential fact, however, is that after the victory of Gaugamela (Oct. 1, 331 B.C.) and, still more completely, after the assassination of Darius—avenged according to the Persian laws, on the perpetrators—Alexander Alexander the Great. regarded himself as the legitimate head of the Persian Empire, and therefore adopted the dress and ceremonial of the Persian kings.
With the capture of the capitals, the Persian war was at an end, and the atonement for the expedition of Xerxes was complete—a truth symbolically expressed in the burning of the palace at Persepolis. Now began the world-conquest. For an universal empire, however, the forces of Macedonia and Greece were insufficient; the monarch of a world-empire could not be bound by the limitations imposed on the tribal king of Macedon or the general of a league of Hellenic republics. He must stand as
- ↑ See Alexander the Great; Macedonian Empire; Hellenism (for later results).
