The Historians' History of the World 04

The imperial government, like the imperial army, was centred, head and heart, in the king. On his person everything depended. Absolute monarchy was the only possible form for the empire. The founder of this empire, who bore as many wounds on his body as anyone among his veterans, who commanded in all battles in person, who himself, by ceaseless toil, carried on the business of administration, might well regard himself as the true king whose right to rule, even his master, Aristotle, did not dispute, though he questioned the possibility of such a man’s existence. But Alexander in no way regarded himself as a sovereign because he had the power. He regarded himself as a king by the grace of God, not in the sense of a more or less dubious legitimacy, which many great and petty sovereigns are apt to advance as sole proof of their title, but in the sense in which the genuine artist and the prophet may claim to be the depositaries of the divine spirit. It was the reverse of presumption when Alexander set the divine element in himself in the foreground. During his lifetime he exhibited the most scrupulous piety, and it is contemptible to tax him with hypocrisy; he had far more faith in miracles and oracles than we are willing to ascribe to the pupil of Aristotle, though we can readily understand it in the Macedonian and the soldier. To him it was a revelation from heaven when the Libyan god greeted him as his son. Had not his ancestor, Heracles, been the son of Zeus and of Amphitryon? For him personally it was the confirmation of his faith in his own mission, and the divinity of its ruler gave his empire a religious consecration. It was consistent with this idea that the worship of Alexander took its place above the innumerable special cults of tribes and towns, of families and communities, as the religion of the empire as a whole. There are many instances of the worship of the sovereign being assigned a place in the pantheon, side by side with that of the godhead figured under a thousand different names and shapes; for the worship of defunct monarchs, the ancient and hallowed practice of ancestor-worship offers a precedent. The adoration paid to Plato and Epicurus was of a precisely similar character. Thus, the abuses of which weaklings and miscreants on the throne, and flatterers and sycophants among subjects, have been guilty, must not be allowed to neutralise the historical and spiritual authority of the institution of the worship of the sovereign, which is inseparably bound up with the institution of the monarchy of Alexander. This monarchy is the highest phase of political and social organisation attained by antiquity. For the much-lauded Roman Empire is nothing else than this kind of monarchy, imperium et libertas

. Cæsar actually grasped at the crown of the Greek king. So far as Italy and the West were concerned, Augustus certainly wished to be the first citizen and no more—the confidential agent of the sovereign people. But to the Greek half of his empire he was from the first both king and god, and he owed his victory not least to his own belief and that of others in the divinity of his adoptive father. From the time of Hadrian the Augustan theory was in the main exploded even in the West.