h against the Arabians, to an indefinite extent; while his
vast projects against the western tribes in Africa and Europe, as far
as the Pillars of Hercules, were consigned in the orders and memoranda
confidentially communicated to Kraterus. Italy, Gaul, and Spain would
have been successively attacked and conquered; the enterprises
proposed to him when in Bactria by the Chorasmian prince Pharasmanes,
but postponed then until a more convenient season, would have been
next taken up, and he would have marched from the Danube northward
round the Euxine and Palus Maeotis[45] against the Scythians and the
tribes of the Caucasus. There remained, moreover, the Asiatic regions
east of the Hyphasis, which his soldiers had refused to enter upon,
but which he certainly would have invaded at a future opportunity,
were it only to efface the poignant humiliation of having been
compelled to relinquish his proclaimed purpose. Tho this sounds like
romance and hyperbole, it was nothing more than the real insatiate
aspiration of Alexander, who looked upon every new acquisition mainly
as a capital for acquiring more. "You are a man like all of us,
Alexander" (said the naked Indian to him), "except that you abandon
your home like a meddlesome destroyer, to invade the most distant
regions; enduring hardship yourself, and inflicting hardship upon
others." Now, how an empire thus boundless and heterogeneous, such as
no prince has ever yet realized, could have been administered with any
superior advantages to subjects, it would be difficult to show. The
mere task of acquiring and maintaining--of keeping satraps and
tribute-gatherers in authority as well as in subordination--of
suppressing resistances ever liable to recur in regions distant by
months of march--would occupy the whole life of a world-conqueror,
without leaving any leisure for the improvements suited to peace and
stability, if we give him credit for such purposes in theory.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 40: From Chapter LVIII of the "History of Greece." Altho
several histories of Greece have been written since Grote's, his work
"still remains in some respects the greatest," says A. D. Lindsay, his
latest editor. Grote, in a sense, stands to Greece as Gibbon to the
Roman Empire. He depended mainly on the literary sources, archaeology
in his day having done little to widen knowledge. His work is
therefore defective in its earlier parts, but from the sixth century
down, when the literary sou