THE

HE world toward which Alexander had set his face, and into which he was now preparing to enter, was the great, the old world of the Orient. From within that world people looked out upon young Greece with much the same vague understanding and disparaging sense of superiority that the Austrian nobleman or the English country squire brings to his estimate of the American States to-day.

The boundary-line between the two worlds has maintained itself with marvelous persistence throughout the entire course of human history. One who crosses the Egean to-day and enters the confines of Asia is aware that he has passed from one world into another. What constitutes the difference may not always be easy to define, but it is there. Customs, dress, crafts, homes, and faith mark the difference, but these are only on the surface. The real difference is something so all-pervasive, so profound, that no casual mint-marks serve to identify it. It inheres in the moods of men, and in their attitude to the world about them. It abides at the heart of things.

Where the boundary runs to-day, it ran in Alexander's time. Only a bare selvage of Hellenism, formed by the Greek colonies skirting the western coast of Asia Minor, interposed itself to push back the frontiers of the Orient. The Greek cities of the Asiatic coast retained in a measure their Hellenic character, and kept alive the sense of union with Greece which a common language and common institutions were likely to

enforce. But, as a rule, whatever had come within the mystic bounds of orientalism had yielded to assimilation and become absorbed in the great mass, no matter what the race or tongue.

The potency of superior culture, manifesting itself in permanence of life-conditions and of the social order, in fixed and welldetermined molds of thought, and intrenched in its ancient fortresses by the Euphrates, was too great for Phrygian, Cappadocian, Lycian, or Syrian to resist, and the mass became leavened with one spirit. The fixity of the old frontier is due, so far as history can determine, to the unique personality of the Greek and to the existence of a geographic furrow at the Bosporus and the Ægean.

The antagonisms which showed themselves at this frontier made the beginnings of European history, even where it first emerges in the form of myth. Such were the stories of the search for the golden fleece, and such were the songs about Troy and the war at its gates. The idealized valor of her heroes who first set her in antagonism to the great Eastern world outside and beyond gave Greece in her later days the inspiration to a national consciousness, and assured her of her mission as the champion of Western energy and personal freedom.

The Persian wars under Darius and Xerxes represented the reaction against the aggressions of occidentalism. The tide of orientalism swept over its sea-wall till met by the solid dikes of Marathon, Salamis, and Platea. The story of these wars becomes the material

for the first manual of history. Herodotus rejoiced, child of Homer as he was, to deal with the theme of which Homer had sung. He shaped his material in the form of a plot. The rebuke of overweening pride, the thing the Greeks called hybris, is the motif. The tale begins with the rise of the Persian power, gathering unto itself the strength of the barbarian world. It ends with Persia's failure at Salamis and Platea. Hybris meets its Nemesis.

The invasion which Alexander planned was to be the retort and the revenge. He was himself to pose as a second Achilles. The epic must have a plot. History was still a drama, and, like the Attic tragedy, it clung fast to the old motives. The very national life of Greece took to itself form in the spirit of this unrelenting antagonism between occidentalism and orientalism.

The long-delayed retort to Alexander's onset came centuries later, in the form of Islam. Turkey, as a hopelessly foreign body on European soil, is a standing witness to the reality of the antagonism, and the Eastern question of to-day abides as a monument

to the impulses which carried the young Alexander across the Hellespont.

The Hellenic spirit was characterized by a consciousness of the individual right of initiative. The Greek's jealousy of every institution and man that assumed to interfere with the free exercise of that right is responsible for his leaning toward democracy, his envy of greatness, his frequent change of political position, and his failure to create and operate elaborate political machinery for any other than local government.

Whatever his view concerning the domain of the gods, and their right to rule his world, he was in his practical philosophy a pluralist, not a monist, and the world of life was constituted out of free-moving, self-determining personalities. Only when they rose above the proper estate of men and intruded themselves within the province of the gods did the free exercise of personality amount to the hybris which merits and meets rebuke. Within the bounds of human estate the law of action is determined by the purposes and interests of the free personality, and not from without or from above. The state is that within and

through which alone the person exists and possesses his freedom. It is the very condition of existence, but it is not that which originates for the person the law of action. To the Oriental, on the other hand, the universe, as well as the state, is conceived of as a vast despotism, which holds in its keeping the source and the law of action for all. Its mysterious law, held beyond the reach of human vision, like the inscrutable will of the autocrat, is the law of fate. Personality knew no right of origination or of self-determination; it was swept like a chip on the current. It knew no privilege except to bow in resignation before the unexplained, unmotived mandate of fate. The Oriental government of the universe was transcendental, the Hellenic social.

The Hellenic gods were the chief citizens of the state, partakers with men in a bond which was made sacred by their presence. To be associated with them was a privilege. They gave dignity and solidity to society. To show them respect, to entertain them with feasts and shows and games, was seemly and decorous. To show them disrespect was treason, and treason was essentially a discourtesy and insult to the gods.

The Greek was always human-very human. His humanity was never apologized for. It was the best thing that he knew of. This sun-lit life on earth was worth living for-indeed, the only thing he knew of worth living for. Whatever was human, the body and the joys of the flesh, the delights of beauty, the triumphs of wit or of strength or of craft-all were good except in excess. Virtue lay, not in abstinence, but in selfcontrol. As in the relations to the divine, all depended here, too, upon not crossing the danger-line.

All mutilation of the body the Greek regarded with horror, and in this regard felt himself estranged from the Oriental. The Oriental looked with a species of disdain upon all that belonged to the physical universe, even including the body. He was its lord. The Greek lived in the world of nature as a part of it, and good friends with it. In it lived his gods, and through its activity his gods revealed themselves. The Greek dwelt more with the world that was without him, the Oriental more with the world that was within him. With the former, thought and fancy tended to assume the objective cast; with the latter, the subjective.

The Greek brought with him to every work the freshness and naturalness of the child of nature. He lived face to face with

nature, and allowed no barriers to be interposed; allowed himself not to be artificially withdrawn from the world of which he was a part. Asceticism, abstinence, and holiness by separation he knew nothing of. He was in the world, wholly and thoroughly; of the world, worldly; of the earth, earthly; of humanity, human.

His enthusiasms were those of an untrammeled child of nature, rejoicing in life and beauty and light. The sedate Oriental seemed the offspring of an old and ripened civilization, which had, in the generations through which it had passed, seen and experienced all the great things, and so lost the effervescent freshness of youth. The Orient was really the old world. Hope was not so high. Effort was not so well worth while.

The Greek seemed to have the world before him. He could do what he would. Conditions could be changed. The right of initiative gave the right to change. The power of initiative imposed the duty to create. Life was composed of time, and time was measured by action. Action creates, and creation is progress. Action, aggression, achievement, progress, became, therefore, the spirit of the Greek; endurance, submission, quietism, stagnation, that of the man of the East. In all this the Greek was merely the full-developed type of the European Aryan.

The Orient which Alexander confronted took its shape as a political organization from the conquest of the Persian Cyrus, beginning about 550 B. C. The Eastern world was then divided among three great empires: the Median, standing since the end of the preceding century on the ruins of the Assyrian empire of Nineveh, and having its seat at Ecbatana (modern Hamadan); the Babylonian empire, occupying Mesopotamia and Syria; and the Lydian empire of Croesus, who controlled the whole of Asia Minor and amassed from tribute and from the goldmines of Pactolus such vast stores of the precious metal as the West had never dreamed of. To the temple at Delphi alone he made presents of gold bullion amounting to 270 talents ($370,000).

The Persians were an Iranian people, a branch of the Indo-European or Aryan race, who had long occupied, in almost unbroken connection with their Scythian kinsmen to the north of the Caspian, the highlands of Bactria and Parthia. Early in the seventh century these Iranian tribes began pushing out toward the west and the south, and one of them, the Medes, had brought the Assyrian. empire to its fall. The Persians, pushing