Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ALEXANDER THE GREAT. CHAPTER I. PARENTS AND HOME. 359-356 B.C. NO single personality, excepting the carpenter’s son of Nazareth, has done so much to make the world of civilisation we live in what it is as Alexander of Macedon. He levelled the terrace upon which European history built. Whatever lay within the range of his conquests contributed its part to form that Mediterranean civilisation which, under Rome’s administration, became the basis of European life. What lay beyond was as if on another planet. Alexander checked his eastward march at the Sutlej, and India and China were left in a world of their own, with their own mechanisms for man and society, their own theories of God and the world. Alexander’s world, to which we all belong, went on its own separate way until, in these latter days, a new greed of conquest, begotten ofcommercial ambition, promises at last to level the barriers which through the centuries have stood as monuments to the outmost stations of the Macedonian phalanx, and have divided the world of men in twain. The story of the great Macedonian’s life, inseparable as it is from history in its widest range, stands none the less in stubborn protest against that view of history which makes it a thing of thermometers and the rain-gauge, of rivers and mountains, weights and values, materials, tools, and machines. It is a history warm with the life-blood of a man. It is instinct with personality, and speaks in terms of the human will and the soul. History and biography blend. Events unfold in an order that conforms to the opening intelligence and forming will of personality, and matter is the obedient tool of spirit. The story of the times must therefore be told, if truly told, in terms of a personal experience. When and where the personal Alexander wa…
