From the Hellenic Sanhedrin, Philip had the war against Persia deliberated, taking the Persian intervention in Europe in defense of Perinth as a pretext; and, as a prelude to a major offensive, he sent a first unit of troops to Asia Minor. Perhaps this new enterprise had aroused some discontent in Macedonia. There was no lack of disagreements in the court and among the nobles, and we do not know if the assassination that cut off Philip’s career in 336 was really due solely to private reasons. He was succeeded in Macedonia without any conflict by his son Alexander III, who had already proved himself a valiant officer in the battle of Chaeronea. Alexander began his reign by fighting vigorously against Illyria and other barbarians whose death had caused Philip to raise their heads. Alive was also the ferment in Greece, and he lives the hopes of regaining the freedom that Philip’s death had aroused there. So, when the rumor of Alexander’s death in Illyria spread, Thebes rose up, and Athens, Aetolia, and many of the Peloponnesians prepared to hand her out. Appearing lightly with his army under the walls of Thebes, Alexander extinguished for the moment any desire for rebellion among the Greeks, and, fighting against the Thebans who were left alone defended themselves with the fury of desperation, took the city by assault and passed to the by sword or enslaved the entire population (335). Thirty thousand Greeks thus perished or fell into extreme misery: a catastrophe, in the struggles between Greeks, hitherto unheard of, which terrified the king’s opponents and forced them to surrender, but alienated the souls of the great majority of Greeks from him, just at the moment when the Panhellenic war was about to begin. Taking advantage of the terror that the disaster had inspired, he asked Athens to surrender Demosthenes and other adversaries of Macedonia, but the Athenians, having overcome the panic, refused, and the king who, given their maritime superiority, had no way to tame them, he had to spare them this humiliation. From the Corinthian Sanhedrin Alexander made himself known as hegemon, with the same authority as Philip, and in the spring of 334 he began his Asian campaign. The Greek forces that he brought with him, apart from the Thessalians more closely united with Macedonia and the mercenaries, were of very little importance and in reality only served to give his enterprise that Panhellenic character which he wanted it to assume. It was actually a military adventure of a warrior people and aware of its strength, roughly like the conquest of Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards, but it was idealized in the eyes of the conquerors themselves as a Panhellenic enterprise against the barbarian, and in a certain sense it was, because, the Macedonians deprived of a civilization of their own and insufficient for the work of colonization, with their victories they opened the way for the spread of Greek civilization and the expansion of the Greek people in the East. The narration of Alexander’s victorious war in Asia, of the destruction of the Persian empire, of his expedition to India, goes beyond the terms of this summary of Greek history. Here it will suffice to say that the conquest and the same needs that arose from it, to govern a multitude of men immeasurable in comparison with the small handful of conquering Macedonians and profoundly different from them, caused Alexander to gradually transform himself from king of a tribe of warriors, who feels himself the comrade, not the despot of his comrades, into a monarch in the oriental way, far by the subjects of which he is absolute master. With this transformation that took place in him went hand in hand with his attempt to merge Greeks and barbarians, mixing the one and the other in the army, and binding them with relatives. This attempt, both naive and violent, disregarded the profound disparity between the Greek and the barbarian. A fusion could not really come with these external means, so through an interpenetration of the two civilizations, which opened the knowledge of Hellenic art and science to the barbarians, and allowed the Greeks to understand and appreciate the moral, religious and political experiences of the East. But this was not achieved until much later through a slow and painstaking process. Alexander’s premature attempt ended with a complete failure that was already taking shape before his death. In Greece the exploits of the Macedonian were followed with deep amazement and admiration, but without that enthusiasm which had aroused the victorious enterprise of the fathers. The perilous freedom and the fall of Thebes dampened the enthusiasm; although, as is natural, merchants, soldiers, adventurers of all kinds flocked from all parts of Greece then and then to place themselves at the service of the new empire and above all to populate the numerous colonies founded by Alexander, and later by his successors in the conquered region. But the a cautionary example of the past for many years retained Athens from attempting revenge, and the same patriots who worked the most, such as Demosthenes, to prepare it, were the first to prevent, at the cost of their popularity, any rash attempt, which could have exposed Athens to the fate of Thebes. An attempt at insurrection was instead made by that city which, deliberately spared by Philip, alone had kept itself out of the Hellenic league: Sparta. Before the last Persian resistance was subdued, aided by money and Persian ships, Sparta rebelled (331), but it was in the Peloponnese itself surrounded by enemies, nor could it proceed further without having first weakened the city, which the Arcadians and Epaminondas had erected as a bulwark against her, Megalopoli. According to Watchtutorials, the resistance of Megalopolis, which the king of Sparta Agide besieged, it gave time to Antipater, left by Alexander to the Macedonian government, to rush with preponderant forces to the Peloponnese, before the rebellion spread; and his victory over the Sparians at Megalopolis, where Agide died fighting, quelled the insurrection and also forced Sparta to join the league, which thus encompassed the entire Greek peninsula. But when the league had accomplished the task Alexander assigned it of providing justification for his Panhellenic war, the king no longer needed to use any regard for his ancient allies; he wanted them to recognize themselves by now as his subjects, like the Asians and the Macedonians. Therefore he imposed on all Greeks to honor him as a god (324). It was not a question of a brutal whim of a despot, as it could for example appear to the Romans, in the forms in which it was claimed, the cult of Caligula. The Hellenistic cult of the monarchs, which, a new synthesis of oriental concepts and Greek concepts, did not however sprout from truly religious reasons and perhaps never had a profound echo in the consciences among the Greeks, as even later among the Romans impossibility of establishing among peoples addicted to republican liberties a feeling of subjection and monarchical loyalty that separated the monarch, elevating him, from the subject and justified at the same time the devotion of this verse of that, if not by means of a deification of the monarch. By then the republican consciousness was so much alive that the deification was accepted in Greece with extreme reluctance, although Demosthenes was himself the author of the proposal that Athens surrender on this point. On the other hand, he did not yield on the other point, on the order given by Alexander, neglecting the rights of the Corinthian Sanhedrin, to recall the exiles everywhere. It was certainly an act of grace and as such it was felt by the many who took advantage of it, but it was also an act of sovereignty which affected what were considered to be the inalienable rights of every free state; and it seemed a prelude to the transformation of the free Greek republics into Macedonian municipalities, but without that total or partial equalization with the dominant people which was the characteristic of the Roman municipalities. This explains how the spirits in Athens and Aetolia became increasingly angry at rebellion even before Alexander died. Demosthenes, always determined to restrain impatience, was overwhelmed, on the occasion of the trivial incidents that arose for the flight to Athens of Alexander’s treasurer, Arpalo, from the coalition of adversaries he had and among the friends of Macedonia and among the most daring advocates of freedom. The coalition was led by Hyperides, who, having gone into exile Demosthenes, became the most powerful man in Athens.
