Suddenly Alexander is again Alexander. With shame of soul he sees the ruin he has wrought and frantically strives to undo what he has done. But too late; countermands clash with commands, confusion feeds the flame, Persepolis falls. Thus culminated the triumph-banquet held in honor of Alexander’s conquest of Asia and immortally sung into song by John Dryden in one of the best odes of the English language, _Alexander’s Feast_. HELLENISM. Alexander died in a comparatively short time after the battle of Arbela and his world empire fell to pieces. What, then, was the permanent good or decisive effect of his conquests? To this question historians reply that the Hellenization of the Orient with subsequent spread of Greek culture among the Arabian Saracens, thence as vital principle re-animating the Renaissance--was the result of Alexander’s conquest of Asia. More than seventy Greek colonies were established along the route of the Conqueror. These continued to flourish long after the far seeing mind that planned them had ceased to foresee and plan. Vigorous Hellenism was easily dominant over sleepy Orientalism. And thus was bloodlessly won thro’ the slow centuries, the great victory of freedom, civilization, culture, art, science, philosophy--Hellenism. From Arbela (B. C. 331) to the sixteenth century Renaissance is a conquering span that might well delight the gaze of the young warrior who once wept because there were no more worlds for him to conquer. As Napoleon’s crucial defeat was not at Waterloo but in Moscow; as the British Revolutionary forces lost the colonies not at Yorktown but at Saratoga; as Carthage of old went down under world-conquering Rome not at Zama, but at the Metaurus; so the incipient death blow to Alexander was inflicted not in Babylon but at the banks of the Ganges. When his army refused to follow him any farther; when his brave Macedonians wept for their far away homes and begged to be taken back to their wives and children; when his best friends and admirers saw in the wide rolling Ganges and the enemy bristling the opposite bank, obstacles insuperable even to Alexander; when at last the Conqueror turned away unconquering, turned back, yielded--then came the fierce chagrin-humiliation, the mad beginning of the end. The world marks only the collapse-crash, but deeper insight sees sympathetically the fatal bend or twist or crack or break having in it inevitably the tragic collapse-crash.