Then he stopped and announced
even more ambitious plans.
The newly formed Empire must be brought under the influence
of the Greek mind. The people must be taught the Greek
language--they must live in cities built after a Greek model.
The Alexandrian soldier now turned school-master. The military
camps of yesterday became the peaceful centres of the
newly imported Greek civilisation. Higher and higher did the
flood of Greek manners and Greek customs rise, when suddenly
Alexander was stricken with a fever and died in the old
palace of King Hammurabi of Babylon in the year 323.
Then the waters receded. But they left behind the fertile clay
of a higher civilisation and Alexander, with all his childish
ambitions and his silly vanities, had performed a most valuable
service. His Empire did not long survive him. A number of
ambitious generals divided the territory among themselves.
But they too remained faithful to the dream of a great world
brotherhood of Greek and Asiatic ideas and knowledge.
They maintained their independence until the Romans
added western Asia and Egypt to their other domains. The
strange inheritance of this Hellenistic civilisation (part Greek,
part Persian, part Egyptian and Babylonian) fell to the
Roman conquerors. During the following centuries, it got
such a firm hold upon the Roman world, that we feel its influence
in our own lives this very day.
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