MR. HO GARTH'S "PHILIP AND ALEXANDER." • Tars is a

brilliant and, in a large degree, original book. The essay on Philip of Macedon gives a clearer, a more consistent, and, on the whole, more satisfying, view of that King than can be found elsewhere. That on Alexander, though de- signedly made less full, in view of the large literature dealing with the subject, is such that no student of Greek history can afford to neglect it.

Mr. Hogarth holds, in opposition to some historians, that Philip's great scheme of a united Hellas led by himself to the conquest of Persia was gradually developed in his mind; that his first aim was to consolidate Macedonia, his next to unite Hellas, and that the dominant idea of his last years was to lead the united race against its hereditary enemy The question does not admit of decision. Yet we cannot forget that this idea of a great Hellenic war against the Persians was in the air even before Philip was born. It was almost a common- place with the Greek rhetoricians, from Gorgias downwards. Isocrates had sought to give it a practical shape by connecting it with some powerful personality Jason of Pheras was the- first man whose position seemed to bring the scheme within the range of practical politics, and Jason's brief period of power coincided with the late boyhood of Philip. (Philip was born in B.C. 382, and Jason was assassinated in 370.) It is difficult to suppose that the lad, who was keenly alive to all the great interests of the race to which he was so proud to belong, had not some hope, even from early days, that the great inheritance might fall to him.

But whatever the date or the origin of the scheme, it is certain that Philip worked it out from most unpromising beginnings with the most consummate skilL His first struggle was almost for existence. His brother Perdiccas had fallen in battle against the Illyrians ; "he had no money, no allies, and, for inheritance, the sins of his fathers." But he was equal to the occasion. His readiness, his fertility of resource, his courage in the field, his bonhomie in the camp (not inconsistent, however, with a rigorous dis- cipline) prevailed. "In one short campaign Philip had restored the Macedonian Monarchy to a position that it had not held since the days of Archelaus." Mr. Hogarth gives an admirable description of the means, strategic and political, which the King, delivered from the immediate

• Phslip and Alexander of Macedon. By David G. Hogarth. Loudon i John Murray.

danger, employed for the consolidation of his position. His first step was to establish a standing army. He saw the weakness and the strength of the two military systems of Greece,—the army of citizens and the army of mercenaries.

The citizens were inefficient but patriotic, the mercenaries were unmanageable but disciplined:—

" Philip's new army was to combine the merits of both the c ivic and the mercenary ; its chief constituent was to be a large force, derived from its own subjects, imbued with national spirit, and induced by rewards and prizes of war to make soldiering a profession, and remain long enough with the colours to acquire drill and discipline superior to the best mercenary armies. A professional army with a national spirit—that was the idea."

The next thing was to provide the force with an efficient organisation, serviceable tactics, and a good weapon. How this was done by Philip is described with admirable lucidity by Mr. Hogarth. On the important point of the length of -the pike (sarissa) he corrects a commonly received belief. "Twelve cubits" is the length often attributed to the weapon of Philip's infantry. Twelve cubits = 17 feet, and this is a cumbrous weapon, quite inconsistent with the mobility

which, as Mr. Hogarth says, "stands out as the most striking virtue of Alexander's phalanx." In later times, indeed, even the "twelve cubits" was far exceeded. The weapon reached the quite monstrous length of 22 ft., but this magnitude belongs to the days of decline, when "Generals, deficient in tactical ability, had reverted to solid immobile formations as more within their power to handle." Or we may compare the change to the great engineering works with which the later Empire of Rome, when its human resources began to fail, sought to defend itself against the barbarians. The phalanx was not the only, perhaps not the chief, arm of the Macedonian force. It possessed a magnificent cavalry, and what may be well called "light infantry," a term applied in our own Army to regiments which are equal to any in steadi- ness and discipline.

It is not easy to follow without interruption the course of Philip's statecraft and soldiership. Sometimes the records fail us, for there is more than one considerable period during which, so scanty are the surviving notices of him, that he almost disappears from view. And then, as Mr. Hogarth points out, a magnifying light is thrown on one side of his action by the genius of Attic oratory. Athens appears to the modern reader of Greek history to be a more important factor in Philip's policy than it really was. We sometimes fancy that if only the Athenian democracy had bestirred itself in response to the fervent appeals of Demosthenes, it might have rolled back the tide of Macedonian conquest. Such a feat was absolutely beyond its strength. it had neither men nor money, neither military strength nor military capacity, nor the wealth to purchase them. The man of Marathon had

been succeeded by a sadly degenerate type :—

" A loafer in the market-place and on the hill of Assembly, averse equally to personal service and to direct taxation for the weal of his city ; who was little better than an out-pauper with his constant cry, panem et circenses, having replaced the un- reasoned belief of his forefathers that the individual exists for the state, by a reasoned conviction that the state exists to support and amuse the individual. That his city should have a circle of tributary dependencies whose contributions would pay for mer- cenaries to fight and row in his stead, for ships to secure his corn- supply, and for free shows in his theatre and his stadium, was a consummation which he contented himself with desiring devoutly. He would neither fight nor pay for its accomplishment, and with his idle criticism, his spoiled temper, his love of litigation, and his ceaseless talk he so hampered his own executive that it could carry out no imperial policy, and the few men of action left in the city hastened to reside beyond his reach."

When this weakened and corrupted Athens came into collision, as at Chaeronea, with the new power that Philip bad organised and compacted, it was hopelessly broken.

For estimating the character and genius of Alexander there is no want of materials. Of none of the heroes of antiquity do we know more or on better authority. The difficulty, one might say, is to believe what we are told, or at least to account for it, on any accepted rules of experience or probability. An incomparable instrument, it is true, had been bequeathed to him by his father, in the army of forty thousand disciplined men which he found on his accession. But the marvel of the whole career is scarcely diminished. It is not as if he had to conquer only Asiatic hordes. The Ten Thousand had shown what could be done by Greek arms and Greek discipline against overwhelming odds. The armies which he scattered were made up largely of Greek mercenaries, who, man for man, were as skilful and as well-armed as his own Macedonians. Darius had twenty thousand Greeks at the Granicus and thirty thousand at Issue, but they were utterly broken, along with their barbarian allies, at the cost of a few score killed at the first battle and a few hundreds at the second. The strength of the mercenary force at Arbela we do not know precisely, though we are informed that Darius put his chief confidence in it. But supported as it was by the best native fighting material that the Empire contained, it was as utterly broken as it had been in the two earlier battles. How did the marvellous young man—he was a month or BO short of twenty-five when he won Arbela—do it ? We can only say that he was at once the most heroic fighter and the most consummate tactician of his time, and that he had the good fortune to hit the time when both the hero and the General were wanted on the battle-field. And the Army was almost as great a marvel as its leader. We have been lately admiring. and with good reason, the victory which our soldiers won over hostile forces of man and Nature among the mountains of Chitral. But the Macedonians did the same before us, and in the very same place, and they did it after marching, not from a base in the Indian plains, but from the coast of the Propontis nearly three thousand miles away.

But the statesman is not less marvellous than the soldier in Alexander. His great foundation of Alexandria is, per- haps, chief proof of it, though it is but one oat of many. Mr. Hogarth puts the case well :—

"Did Alexander, however, consciously found it for nation- making? He founded it, assuredly, for some special reason or other, as he had created his first Alexandria to guard the defiles north and south of the bay of Iskenderun. He selected for the second the one possible site on the Egyptian coast for a great port, as all previous and later experience has gone to prove. For the new harbour must lie outside the reach of the Nilotic silt ; therefore not on the Delta coast-line. It must be sheltered from the west, the prevailing wind in the Levant; therefore no point on the exposed shore trending north-east from Pelusium would serve. It must be, lastly, within reach of sweet Nile water; there- fore it could hardly be placed farther west than Rhacotis. The site now chosen was eminently defensible, having Lake Mareotis in the rear ; and the tradition of history has ascribed unanimously to Alexander a personal share in, and solicitude for, the inaugu- rating of this Egyptian city, of which no mention is made in connection with any other of his foundations If any further proof were needed that we have to recken already with an advanced student of statecraft in the Founder of Alexandria, it can be supplied by the organisation which he imposed in this same winter on the whole province of Egypt. We are allowed to see only its skeleton, and to detect little more than its singularity—a singularity which proves that, however he may have learned them, Alexander certainly knew those unique difficulties which Egypt presents to foreign occupa- tion. With marsh at one end and tropics at the other, eight hundred miles of deserts on its either flank, and itself nowhere more than thirty miles in breadth, the Nile valley has called always for a peculiar scheme of government. Arrian is probably right in saying that the Macedonian system, with its lack of an all-powerful supreme official, its three nationalities set one against the other, and its counteracting civil and military powers, antici- pated in some ways the Roman. For if Augustus, who indeed was a professed disciple of Alexander, had needed a model for the imperial settlement of the Nile valley, he would have looked, not to any Ptolemaic king who had ruled Egypt from within, but to the first western emperor who had held it as a foreign possession."

That there was plenty of very human clay mixed with this fine gold of genius is only too plain, but if there was weak- ness it never showed itself either in the council or in action. It is impossible not to see the difference between Alexander playing the part of Achilles in the Troad, and the half- Orientalised despot who passed away ten years later at Babylon. But if there was deterioration of character, there was no decay of power. This sounds like a paradox ; it certainly seems to contradict our universal experience. To explain it completely passes human wit ; but Mr. Hogarth has at least discussed the problem with remarkable insight

and skill.