In the great feast at Susa, which he celebrated on his return from India, the “marriage of Europe and Asia,” which had always formed his guiding idea, took visible shape. He had already wedded—it is said for love—the beautiful Roxana, a princess from Bactria in the Eastern (or Upper) Provinces of his new Empire[41], and now he took as a second consort Statira, the daughter of Darius, who, as the scion of the last native king of Persia, may be taken as the representative of its western centre. Nearly a hundred of his superior officers and some ten thousand of his humbler followers hastened to follow his example and to receive Asiatic brides with the rich dowries assigned them by the Conqueror[42]. Moreover the thirty thousand youthful recruits from his new conquests, whom he had ordered five years before to be trained in the Macedonian discipline and the Greek language, now arrived[43], and Alexander set to work with his usual energy to diffuse through his European army strong drafts of his Asiatic subjects in order to cement still further the alliance between the two Continents. Had he lived, it would have been a mixed army of Asiatics and Europeans that he would have led the following year to the conquest of the western world[44]. Destiny, however, is, as men would have said in those days, stronger than the immortal gods, and Alexander’s early death put an instant stop to all ideas of further conquest. It is idle, until we know the causes of things, to speculate on what might have been; but it seems probable that if Nearchus’ expedition had sailed, the Conqueror’s warlike plans would once again have proved to have been perfectly laid, that he would have crushed Carthage as easily as Thebes and Tyre, and that the Italian States would have received the same master as the Bactrians and Indians[45]. Yet so far as our immediate purpose is concerned, Alexander’s work was done once for all, and the policy typified as the marriage of Europe and Asia was perhaps as well served by his death as by his life. During Persian times, the Court of the Great King had always proved a magnet drawing to itself with irresistible force the ever-restless Greeks, and the road to Susa was trodden in turn by politicians like Alcibiades, leaders of mercenaries like Xenophon, and Greek philosophers, artists, and courtezans innumerable. The traffic in mercenaries alone must have been enormous when we find Greek troops forming the stiffening of those huge armies of Darius which Alexander overthrew at the Granicus, Issus, and Arbela[46]; while as for the other sex, Themistocles, when turning his back on his own country, could find no better or safer mode of approaching the Persian Court than in a closed litter supposed to be conveying a Greek woman to the harem of the Great King[47]. But when the century-long wars for the succession to Alexander broke out upon his death, there straightway appeared five courts where before there had been but one, and these were now ruled