ceeded in having their splendid genealogy accepted-an undeniable gain in those days, but their other claims were as yet hardly established. It is true they had entertained great poets at their court, and had odes and tragedies composed for the benefit of their subjects, but none of them, not even Philip, who was just dead, had yet been accepted as a really naturalized Greek. Yet Philip had come closer to it than his predecessors; he had spent his youth in the glorious Thebes of Epaminondas; he trained himself carefully in the rhetoric of Athens, and could compose speeches and letters which passed muster even with such fastidious stylists as Demosthenes. But though he could assume Greek manners and speak good Greek in his serious moments, when on his good behavior, it was known that his relaxations were of a very different kind. Then he showed the Thracian-then his Macedonian breeding came out,

Nevertheless he saw so clearly the importance of attaining this higher level that he spared no pains to educate his son, and with him his son's court, in the highest culture. We know not whether it was accident or his clear judgment of human character which made him choose Aristotle as Alexander's tutor there were many other men employed to instruct him - but we feel how foreign must have been Aristotle's conversation at the palace and among the boon companions of Philip, and hence Mieza, a quiet place away from court, was chosen for the prince's residence. There Aristotle made a Hellene of him in every real sense. It is certain, if we compare Alexander's manifesto to Darius with what is called Philip's letter, that he did not write so well as his father; but he learned to know and love the great poets, and to associate with men of culture and of sober manners. Every one testifies to the dignity and urbanity of his address, even if at late carouses with intimates he rather bored the company with self-assertion and boasting. But this social defect was not unknown among the purest Hellenes. All through his life he courted Greek letters, he attended Greek plays, he talked in Greek to Greek men, and we can see how deep his sympathy with Hellenedom was from his cutting remark-in vino veritas-to two Greeks sitting at the fatal banquet where the Macedonian veteran, Clitus, broke out into indecent altercation. "Don't you feel like demigods among savages when you are sitting in company with these Macedonians?" It may be said that Hellenedom was less fastidious in the days of Alexander than in the days of his prede

cessors. I need not argue that question; suffice it to say that even had he made no world conquests he would have been recognized as a really naturalized Hellene, and fit to take his place among the purest Greeks, in opposition to the most respectable barbarians. The purest Hellene, such as the Spartan Pausanias, was liable to degradation of character from the temptations of absolute power no less than a Macedonian or a Roman.

But on the other hand he was a king in a sense quite novel and foreign to the Greeks. They recognized one king, the King of Persia, as a legitimate sovereign, ruling in great splendor, but over barbarians. So they were ready to grant such a thing as a king over other barbarians of less importance; but a king over Greeks, in the proper sense of the word, had not existed since the days of legendary Greece. There were indeed tyrants, plenty of them, and some of them mild men and fond of culture, friends of poets, and respectable men; and there were the kings of Sparta. But the former were always regarded as arch heretics were regarded by the Church in the Middle Ages, as men whose virtues were of no account and whose crime was unpardonable; to murder them was a heroic deed, which wiped out all the murderer's previous sins. On the other hand, the latter were only hereditary, respected generals of an oligarchy, the real rulers of which were the ephors. Neither of these cases even approached the idea of a sovereign, as the Macedonians and as the kingdoms of mediæval and modern Europe have conceived it.

For this implied in the first place a legitimate succession, such as the Spartan kings indeed possessed, and with it a divine right in the strictest sense. As the Spartan, so the Macedonian kings came directly from Zeus, through his greatest hero sons, Heracles and Æacus. But while the Spartan kings had long lost, if they ever possessed, the rights of Menelaus, who could offer to give a friend seven inhabited towns as a gift, while they only retained the religious preeminence of their pedigree, the kings of Macedonia had preserved all their ancient privileges. Grote thinks them the best representatives of that prehistoric sovereignty which we find in the Greece of Homer. But all through his history he urges upon us the fact that there was no settled constitutional limit to the authority of the kings even in cases of life and death. On the other hand, German inquirers, who are better acquainted with absolute monarchy,

see in the assembly of free Macedonians-occasionally convened, especially in cases of high treason or of a succession to the throne-a check like that of the Commons in earlier England. There seem in fact to have been two powers, both supreme, which could be brought into direct collision any day, and so might produce a deadlock only to be removed by a trial of strength. Certain it is that Macedonian kings often ordered to death, or to corporal punishment and torture, free citizens and even nobles. It is equally certain that the kings often formally appealed to an assembly of soldiers or of peers to decide in cases of life and death. Such inconsistencies are not impossible where there is a recognized divine right of kings, and when the summoning of an assembly lies altogether in the king's hands. Except in time of war, when its members were together under arms, the assembly had probably no way of combining for a protest, and the low condition of their civilization made them indulgent to acts of violence on the part of their chiefs.

Niebuhr, however, suggests a very probable solution of this difficulty. He compares the case of the Frankish kings, who were only princes among their own free men, but absolute lords over lands which they conquered. Thus many individual kings came to exercise absolute power illegally by transferring their rights as conquerors to those cases where they were limited monarchs. It is very possible too that both they and the Macedonian kings would prefer as household officers nobles of the conquered lands, over whom they had absolute control. Thus the constitutional and the absolute powers of the king might be confused, and the extent of either determined by the force of the man who occupied the throne.

That Alexander exerted his supreme authority over all his subjects is quite certain. And yet in this he differed absolutely from a tyrant, such as the Greeks knew, that he called together his peers and asked them to pass legal sentence upon a subject charged with grave offenses against the crown. No Greek tyrant ever could do this, for he had around him no halo of legitimacy, and, moreover, he permitted no order of nobility among his subjects.

It appears that for a long time back the relations of king and nobles had been in Macedonia much as they were in the Middle Ages in Europe. There were large landed proprietors, and many of them had sovereign rights in their own provinces.