of these he set three hundred exiles in charge as judges and rulers, so that, in order to cure their old grievance by their new power, they might not suffer the unhappily oppressed peoples to breathe again into the hope of liberty. Moreover, a great levy of soldiers having been held throughout all Greece in support of the royal design, he equipped two hundred thousand foot and fifteen thousand horse, apart from the army of the Macedonians and the boundless barbarism of nations, to be sent into Asia for the Persian expedition. He chose three leaders—that is, Parmenio, Amyntas, and Attalus—to be sent ahead against the Persians.
And while the aforesaid forces were being gathered from Greece, he decreed to celebrate, by joining to him his daughter Cleopatra, the nuptials of Alexander—who was the brother of his wife Olympias and was afterwards laid low by the Sabines in Lucania—whom he had appointed king of Epirus as a reward for the outrage perpetrated upon him. When this Alexander, on the day before he was killed, had been asked what end was most to be desired by a man, he is reported to have answered that that was the best which could befall, sudden and swift by unexpected steel, a brave man reigning in peace after the glories of his virtues, without conflict of body and disgrace of soul: which thing soon befell himself.
Nor could he be hindered by the angry gods—whom he had always reckoned of little account, and whose altars, temples, and images he had overthrown—from attaining the death which, as it seemed to him, was the most choice. For on the day of the nuptials, while at the magnificently appointed games he was walking between the two Alexanders, his son and his son-in-law, he was, in a narrow passage and without guards, surrounded and killed by Pausanias, a noble Macedonian youth. Let them now assert and proclaim these things with many voices, as it were the praises of brave men and their happy deeds—men by whom the most bitter calamities of others turn into sweet tales—if indeed they themselves never bewail with sadder telling the injuries by which they are sometimes vexed.
But if they truly wish those who hear of their own complaints to be affected only as much as they themselves felt in enduring them, let them first compare, not present things with past, but deeds with deeds, and judge both, as if from hearsay, as arbiters of others' affairs. Through twenty-five years the fraud, ferocity, and dominion of a single king drove on the burnings of cities, the destructions of wars, the subjugations of provinces, the slaughters of men, the plunderings of wealth, the spoilings of cattle, the sales of the dead and the captivities of the living. These deeds wrought through Philip, instilled into our memory, would suffice as an example of miseries, even if Alexander had not succeeded him in the kingdom.
Whose wars—nay, rather, the evils of the world following in order beneath whose wars—I suspend for a little, that in this place, for the suitability of the times, I may subjoin Roman affairs. In the 426th year from the founding of the City, the famous and notorious Caudine Forks rendered the Romans signally infamous. For whereas in a previous war twenty thousand Samnites had fallen, with Fabius the master of the horse joining battle, the Samnites with more circumspect care and with better-prepared equipment took their stand at the Caudine Forks; where, when they had shut in the consuls Veturius and Postumius and all the Roman forces by the narrowness of the places and by arms, Pontius their leader so abused the security of his victory that he thought he should consult his father Herennius whether he should slay the shut-in men or spare them once subjugated:
He chose to reserve them alive, nonetheless to disgrace. For it was established that the Romans could before this very often be conquered and slain, but never captured or forced to surrender. And so the Samnites, having gained the victory, ordered the whole Roman army, shamefully taken, stripped even of arms and garments—only individual, cheaper coverings being granted to cover the modesty of their bodies—to be sent under the yoke and subjected to servitude, and to lead a long line of procession. Then, six hundred Roman knights being received as hostages, they sent back the consuls, laden with ignominy but stripped of all else. Why should I labour with words to exaggerate the stain of this most foul treaty, who would rather have kept silent?
For today the Romans either would not exist at all, or would be slaves under Samnite domination, if they themselves, being subjected, had kept toward the Samnites the faith of the treaty which they do not wish to be kept toward themselves by their own subjects. In the following year the Romans broke the agreement, just confirmed with the Samnites, and forced them into a war which, with the consul Papirius pressing on, being joined, brought great slaughters upon both peoples. Since on the one side the anger of recent infamy, on the other the glory of a nearby victory goaded the combatants, the Romans at last conquered by stubbornly dying; nor did they cease alike from being slain or from slaying, until, the Samnites being conquered and their leader captured, they imposed the yoke in turn. Then the same Papirius stormed and took Satricum, the Samnite garrison being expelled from it.
This Papirius, moreover, was at that time held among the Romans to be so very warlike and vigorous that, when Alexander the Great was said to be planning, descending from the East, to gain Africa by force of arms and thence to be carried over into Italy, the Romans pondered that, among the other leaders then best in their commonwealth, this man would be the foremost who could withstand the onset of Alexander. Therefore Alexander, in the 426th year from the founding of the City, succeeded his father Philip in the kingdom; and he gave a first proof of his spirit and valour by quickly suppressing the disturbances of the Greeks, whose instigator, to make them revolt from the empire of the Macedonians, had been the orator Demosthenes, corrupted by Persian gold.
And so to the Athenians, who deprecated war, he remitted it, and moreover released them from the fear of a fine; the Thebans, the city being demolished, he destroyed, and the rest he sold under the crown; the other cities of Achaia and Thessaly he made tributary; the Illyrians too and the Thracians, the war being soon transferred thither, he subdued. Then, about to set out for the Persian war, he killed all his kinsmen and nearest relations. In his army there were thirty-two thousand foot, four thousand five hundred horse, one hundred and eighty ships. Whether it be more wonderful that with so small a band he conquered the whole circle of the lands, or that he dared to attack it, is uncertain.
In his first encounter with King Darius, six hundred thousand Persians were in the battle-line; these, overcome no less by the art of Alexander than by the valour of the Macedonians, turned their backs. Great therefore was the slaughter of the Persians. In Alexander's army a hundred and twenty horsemen and only nine foot-soldiers were lost. Then he took, besieged and stormed, Gordium, a city of Phrygia, which is now called Sardis, and gave it over to pillage. Thence, the arrival of Darius with great forces being announced to him, fearing the narrows of the places in which he was, he crossed Mount Taurus with marvellous speed and, five hundred stadia being traversed in a single day's march, came to Tarsus; and there, when sweating he had gone down into the Cydnus, a most icy river, he grew stiff, and, his sinews contracting, was very near to death.
Meanwhile Darius advances into the battle-line with three hundred thousand foot and a hundred thousand horse. This multitude of the enemy moved even Alexander, chiefly in regard of his own fewness—although already long since, six hundred thousand of the enemy having been overcome by that same fewness, he had learned not only not to fear battle but even to hope for victory. And so, when each army had taken its stand within a spear's cast, and the leaders were sharpening with various incitements the peoples running to and fro, intent upon the signal for war, the battle is joined with mighty spirits on both sides: in which both kings, both Alexander and Darius, are wounded, and so long was the contest doubtful, until Darius fled; thereupon the slaughter of the Persians ensued.
There then 80,000 foot-soldiers and 10,000 horsemen were slain, while 40,000 were taken captive. Of the Macedonians, however, there fell 130 infantry and 150 cavalry. In the camp of the Persians much gold and other riches were found. Among the captives of the camp were the mother and the wife — who was at the same time the sister — and two daughters of Darius. When Darius could not obtain their ransom even by offering half of his kingdom, he gathered for a third time all the forces of the Persians together with the auxiliaries of his allies and renewed the war.
But while Darius was occupied with these things, Alexander sent Parmenion with troops to attack the Persian fleet, and himself set out for Syria. There, when many kings came of their own accord to meet him with fillets of supplication, he allied himself with some, replaced others, and destroyed others. He overwhelmed and captured Tyre, that most ancient and most flourishing city, which resisted him trusting in the Carthaginians, who were its kinsmen. Thereupon with relentless fury he overran Cilicia, Rhodes, and Egypt. From there he proceeded to the temple of Jupiter Hammon, in order that, by a lie contrived for the occasion, he might wipe away from himself the disgrace of an uncertain father and the infamy of an adulterous mother. For he secretly instructed the priest of that very shrine, who had been summoned to him, as to what he wished to be answered to him as though he were consulting the oracle — just as their own historians relate.
Thus Alexander was assured, and he himself betrayed to us, that with gods who are dumb and deaf it lies either in the power of the priest to invent whatever he wishes, or in the will of the one consulting to hear whatever he prefers. Returning from Hammon to the third Persian war, he founded Alexandria in Egypt. Darius, however, having lost all hope of peace, set 400,000 foot and 100,000 horse against Alexander as he was returning from Egypt, opposing him in battle near Tarsus. Nor was there any delay to the fight; all rushed upon the sword with blind frenzy: the Macedonians emboldened by enemies so often vanquished by them, the Persians preferring to die unless they should conquer. Rarely in any battle was so much blood shed. But Darius, when he saw his men being beaten — though prepared to die in the war — was compelled by the urging of his own men to flee.
In this battle the strength and kingdoms of Asia fell, and the whole East passed into the power of the Macedonian empire; and so utterly was all the confidence of the Persians worn away in this war that after it none dared to rebel, and the Persians, after an empire of so many years, patiently received the yoke of servitude. For thirty-four continuous days Alexander counted over the plunder of the camp; he seized Persepolis, the capital of the Persian kingdom, most famous and most crammed with the riches of the whole world. And when he learned that Darius was being held bound in golden fetters by his own kinsmen, he resolved to pursue him.
And so, having ordered the army to follow after, he himself set out with six thousand cavalry, and found on the road that Darius had been left alone, pierced with many wounds, and breathing out the last of his life through those wounds. He commanded that this dead man, with futile pity, be carried back into the tombs of his ancestors and buried — the man whose mother and wife, indeed whose little daughters as well, he was holding in cruel captivity. In so great a multitude of evils, belief is most difficult to give to the words: in three battles and as many years one million five hundred thousand foot and horse were consumed — and these indeed from that one kingdom and those peoples, from which not many more years before one million nine hundred thousand are reported to have been already destroyed:
although, apart from these disasters, during those same three years very many cities of Asia were also overwhelmed, all Syria was laid waste, Tyre cut down, Cilicia emptied, Cappadocia subdued, Egypt made tributary, and the island of Rhodes too, terrified, of its own accord succumbed to servitude, and very many provinces lying beneath the Taurus, and Mount Taurus itself, its yoke long refused, were tamed and conquered and received it. And lest perchance anyone should then suppose that either the East alone was subdued by Alexander's forces, or that Italy alone was harried by Roman turmoil: at that very time there were also being waged the war of Agis, king of the Spartans, in Greece, of Alexander, king of Epirus, in Lucania, and of Zopyrion, the prefect, in Scythia.
Of these, Agis the Lacedaemonian, having stirred up and roused to rebellion all Greece together with himself, engaged the most valiant forces of Antipater and, amid great slaughter on both sides, himself also fell. Alexander, however, in Italy, aiming at the empire of the West and emulating Alexander the Great, after numerous and grievous wars waged there, was overcome by the Bruttians and Lucanians, and his body was sold for burial. And Zopyrion, prefect of Pontus, having mustered an army of thirty thousand and daring to make war upon the Scythians, was cut down to utter annihilation and wiped out from the foundations together with all his forces. Therefore Alexander the Great, after the death of Darius, subdued the Hyrcanians and the Mandi:
There too, while he was still intent on war, Halestris — or Minothea — a bold Amazon, roused for the sake of receiving offspring from him, came to him with three hundred women. After this he attacked the battle of the Parthians, whom, long resisting, he all but destroyed before he conquered them. Thence he subdued the Drangae, the Euergetae, the Parimae, the Parapameni, the Adaspii, and the other peoples who dwelt at the foot of the Caucasus, and there founded a city, Alexandria, upon the river Tanais. But his cruelty toward his own was no less than his fury against the enemy.
This is shown by Amyntas his cousin, slain; his stepmother and her brothers put to death; Parmenion and Philotas butchered; Attalus, Eurylochus, Pausanias, and many princes of Macedonia destroyed; Clitus too, weighed down with years and an old friend, wickedly killed: for when at a banquet, trusting in his royal friendship, against the king — who was setting his own deeds above those of his father Philip — Clitus defended the memory of the father, he was run through with a hunting-spear by the offended king (against whom his pleading was in vain) and, dying, stained the common feast with his blood. But Alexander, insatiable of human blood, whether of enemies or even of allies, ever thirsted nonetheless for fresh gore. And so, rushing into wars with relentless onslaught, he received into surrender the Chorasmi and the Dahae, an untamed people;
the philosopher Callisthenes, his fellow-pupil under Aristotle, together with very many other nobles, he put to death because he would not lay aside the custom of mere greeting and adore him as a god. After this he made for India, that he might bound his empire by the Ocean and the farthest East. He approached the city of Nysa; he stormed the Daedalous mountains and the kingdoms of queen Cleophis, who, when she had surrendered, ransomed her kingdom by sharing his bed. Having traversed and thoroughly subdued India, Alexander, when he had come to a rock of marvelous ruggedness and height, into which many peoples had fled for refuge, learned that Hercules had been prevented from storming that same rock by an earthquake. Stirred by rivalry, that he might surpass the deeds of Hercules, with the utmost toil and danger he gained possession of the rock and received into surrender all the peoples of that place.
With Porus, the most valiant king of the Indians, he waged a most bloody war: in which Alexander, having engaged Porus himself in single combat and being thrown from his slain horse, escaped the presence of death by the rush of his bodyguards; Porus, pierced with many wounds, was taken captive. When he had been restored to his kingdom as a testimony to his valor, Alexander founded there two cities, Nicaea and Bucephala — which he ordered to be so named from the name of his horse. Thence the Macedonians stormed the Adrestae, the Catthenes, the Praesidae, and the Gangaridae, after slaughtering their armies. When they had come to the Cofides, there they joined battle against two hundred thousand of the enemy's cavalry; and when, now worn out with age, sick at heart, and weary in strength, they had with difficulty conquered, they built a camp more magnificent than usual, to commemorate the deed.
Thereupon Alexander proceeded to the river Agesines; by this he was carried down into the Ocean. There he overwhelmed the Gesonae and the Sibi, whom Hercules had founded. From here he sailed against the Adri and the Subagrae: which peoples received him with eighty thousand foot and sixty thousand horse in arms. The battle being joined, the long, doubtful, and bloody fight at last gave the Macedonians a victory that was almost grievous. For when the enemy's forces were routed, Alexander led his army to the city; and when he was the first to climb the wall, thinking the city empty, he leaped down inside alone. When hostile enemies had surrounded him on every side, it is incredible to tell how neither the multitude of the enemy, nor the great force of weapons, nor the great clamor of his assailants terrified him: alone he cut down and put to flight so many thousands.
But when he perceived that he was being overwhelmed by the crowd pouring around him, he protected his rear with the barrier of the wall, and the more easily withstood his opponents up to that point, until — the walls being broken through at the peril to him and the clamor of the enemy — the whole army burst in. In that battle he was pierced by an arrow beneath the breast, and, his knee fixed to the ground, fought on until he killed the man by whom he had been wounded. Thence, having boarded ships, while he was traversing the shores of the Ocean, he came to a certain city over which king Ambira ruled. But in the storming of the city he lost a great part of his army to the enemy's arrows smeared with poison; and afterward, when an herb had been shown to him in a dream and given as a drink to the wounded, so that the rest were rescued, he stormed and captured the city.
After this, as though his goal had been rounded, leaving the Ocean and entering the river Indus, he swiftly returned to Babylon. There ambassadors from the terrified provinces of the whole world awaited him — that is, of the Carthaginians and of the cities of all Africa, and also of the Spaniards, the Gauls, of Sicily and Sardinia, and besides of very many parts of Italy. So great a fear of a leader established in the farthest East had invaded the peoples of the farthest West, that you might there behold an embassy foreign to the whole world, sent from places to which you would scarcely believe the rumor had penetrated. But Alexander, at Babylon, while still thirsting for blood with ill-checked greed, drank poison through the treachery of a servant and perished. O hard mind of men, and heart ever inhuman!
I myself, who recount these things for the sake of asserting the alternating calamity of all ages — in relating so great an evil, at which, whether by death itself or by the dread of death received, the whole world trembled — did I weep at all with my eyes? Did I at all grieve in my heart? Did I, turning these things over, make my own miseries, on account of the common condition of living, the same as the miseries of our forefathers?
And yet — if ever I report concerning myself: how I first saw barbarians unknown to me, how I turned aside from those who were hostile, how I flattered those in power, how I guarded against the faithless, how I slipped away from those who lay in ambush, and finally how, when men pursued me by sea and assailed me with rocks and darts and were already almost laying hands on me, I escaped, surrounded by a sudden mist — I would wish all who hear me to be moved to tears, and silently I grieve over those who do not grieve, reckoning to the hardness of those who do not believe what they have not endured. The Spaniard and the Moor went to Babylon to make supplication to Alexander, and of his own accord sought out a bloody master abroad lest he should receive him as an enemy, through Assyria and India, surveying the bounds of the earth, and known unhappily to both Oceans:
And yet the memory of so violent a necessity has either failed through forgetfulness or grown cheap with age. And do we suppose that what a fugitive brigand violated in one corner — while the greatest part of the world was secure — will cling to perpetual remembrance? As though, on the contrary — not to say that an Indian or an Assyrian, but even the very Spaniard who endures the enemy — were to plead for the peace of the Goths and Suebi! But indeed, if those times of Alexander are judged rather praiseworthy on account of the valor by which the whole world was held, than detestable on account of the ruin by which the whole world was overthrown: there will also be found nowadays very many who would deem these things praiseworthy, because they have conquered much and reckon the miseries of others as their own felicity. But someone may say: these are the enemies of the Roman world. The answer will be:
This is precisely how the whole East then regarded Alexander, and the Romans themselves were no different to others, when in their wars they assailed peoples unknown and at peace. But those men sought to acquire kingdoms, these to overthrow them. The destructions wrought by an enemy and the judgments of a victor are different things. Indeed, those Romans too first afflicted with wars the very peoples whom they afterward set in order under their own laws; and these men now in hostile fashion throw into confusion the very lands which — if (which God will not permit) they should subdue and hold them — they would strive to arrange after their own manner, men destined to be called great kings by posterity, who are now adjudged by us most savage enemies.
By whatever name these deeds may be reckoned — that is, whether they be called miseries or virtues — both, compared with those of earlier times, are lesser in this present age; and thus both make for us in comparison with Alexander and the Persians: if it is now to be called valor, that of the enemy is the less; if misery, that of the Romans is the less. In the year from the founding of the City 450, in the consulship of Fabius Maximus for the fifth time and Decius Mus for the fourth, four most valiant and most flourishing peoples of Italy came together into one column and one alliance. For the Etruscans, the Umbrians, the Samnites, and the Gauls, conspiring in one column, attempted to destroy the Romans. The spirits of the Romans were shaken by this war, and their confidence was undermined, nor did they dare to hope for everything from their own strength:
by stratagem they divided the enemy, thinking it safer to involve themselves in several wars than in a heavy one. And so, having sent certain of their own ahead into Umbria and Etruria to ravage the enemy's fields, and having compelled the army of the Umbrians and Etruscans to return to the defense of their own, they hastened to enter upon war with the Samnites and the Gauls. In which war, when the Romans were being pressed by the onslaught of the Gauls, the consul Decius was slain. Fabius, however, after great slaughter of Decius' division, at last conquered. In that battle forty thousand of the Samnites or Gauls are reported to have been slain, but of the Romans seven thousand — wiped out only from the part of Decius, who was killed.
Moreover, Livy relates that, apart from the Etruscans and Umbrians whom the Romans had craftily drawn off to another war, there were of the Gauls and Samnites 140,330 foot and 47,000 horse, and that a thousand chariot-fighters stood in arms against the Roman battle-line. But — as has often been said — the domestic peace of the Romans was ever interrupted by foreign wars, or their external successes were aggravated by inner plagues, so that in every way their mighty spirits were pressed from every quarter: this bloody and sorrowful victory was burdened by a pestilence of the city, and the triumphal processions were defiled by the funeral rites of the dead meeting them. Nor was there anyone to whom joy over the triumph might be urged, when the whole city either sighed over its sick or over its dead.
There follows the year in which the Romans, the war being renewed by the Samnites, were defeated and fled into their camp. But afterward the Samnites, taking on a new appearance and spirit — that is, with silvered arms and garments, and with a mind resolved to die unless they should conquer — offered themselves to battle. Against them the consul Papirius was sent with an army; and when he was forbidden to engage by the chicken-keepers and augurs who were conjecturing vain things, he mocked them and finished the war as successfully as he had undertaken it resolutely. For in this battle twelve thousand of the enemy are reported slain, three thousand taken. But this victory too — truly to be praised, which the empty soothsayers could not hinder — diseases that suddenly arose corrupted.
For so great and so intolerable a pestilence then seized the city that, in order to allay it by whatever means, they thought the Sibylline books must be consulted, and they brought over that dreadful Epidaurian serpent together with the very stone of Aesculapius: as though, forsooth, the pestilence had not either been allayed before or arisen afterward. Besides, in the second year from then, the consul Fabius Gurges fought ill against the Samnites. For, having lost his army and been beaten, he fled back into the City. And so, when the senate was deliberating about removing him from command, his father Fabius Maximus, deprecating his son's disgrace, of his own accord offered to go as a legate to his son, if the means of repelling the disgrace and of waging the war again should be granted to him.
This being granted and battle joined, when the pious old man suddenly saw his fighting son the consul hemmed in — Pontius, the leader of the Samnites, pressing upon him, and the hostile weapons of the enemy closing him in — he, borne on his horse, flung himself into the midst of the line. At this deed the Romans, stirred, there pressed forward with their whole battle-line, until, the hostile army being destroyed, they captured Pontius the leader himself, vanquished and overwhelmed. In that battle twenty thousand of the Samnites were slain, and four thousand taken captive together with their king; and at last the Samnite war, which through forty-nine years had been dragged out with much slaughter of the Romans, was ended by the surrender brought about by the capture of their leader. In the following year war was waged with the Sabines under the consul Curius, where how many thousands of men were killed and how many captured, the consul himself declared.
For when in the senate he wished to report the magnitude of the Sabine land acquired and the multitude of the people captured, he could not unfold the number. In the year from the founding of the City 463, in the consulship of Dolabella and Domitius, the Lucani, the Bruttii, and the Samnites too, having formed an alliance with the Etruscans and the Senonian Gauls, when they were contriving a revived war against the Romans, the Romans sent ambassadors to entreat the Gauls. When the Gauls had killed these, the praetor Caecilius, sent with an army to avenge the slaying of the ambassadors and to suppress the tumult of the enemy, was overwhelmed by the Etruscans and Gauls and perished. Besides, seven tribunes of the soldiers were slain in that fight, many nobles were butchered, and thirteen thousand of the Roman soldiers were laid low in that war.
And so, as often as the Gauls have blazed up, Rome has been worn down with all her resources, so that, under the present onset of the Goths, she ought rather to remember the Gauls. But now I am called back, that throughout these same times in which the Romans suffered these things, I should unroll the wars which the Macedonian leaders waged among themselves — leaders who, after the death of Alexander, having obtained various provinces by lot, consumed one another in mutual wars. Their most turbulent age I seem to myself to behold as if, gazing from the watchtower of a mountain by night upon some vast encampment, I should discern in the great space of the plain nothing but countless campfires.
Thus throughout the whole kingdom of Macedonia — that is, throughout all Asia and the greatest part of Europe and even the largest part of Libya — dreadful clusters of wars suddenly blazed forth: which, when they had above all laid waste those very places in which they flared up, threw all the rest into confusion by the terror of rumor, as if by the murk of smoke. But by no means shall I unfold the wars and destructions of so many kings and kingdoms, unless I first set forth the kingdoms themselves together with their kings. Therefore Alexander for twelve years pressed beneath himself the trembling world with the sword, while his princes for fourteen years tore it to pieces, and like greedy whelps tearing apart a rich prey laid low by a great lion, they broke one another, provoked into a brawl by rivalry over the spoil.