it surprising that his name alone of all the conquerors of the East has endured through all changes of creed and culture, that the fierce chiefs of the Central Asian tableland still boast of him as their progenitor, and that the whole Mahommedan world still hold him the king of the believing Genii? No Caesar, Attila, or Genghiz Khan has ever thus impressed the imagination of future ages[65]. Thus Alexander’s coming gave an enormous impulse to that monarchical principle of government which from his time onward was to reign supreme for nearly two thousand years. Philosophers and sophists hastened to declare that democracy—as was indeed the fact—had proved itself incapable of governing, and that in the rule of one man was to be found the natural order of things and the only security for a well-ordered State[66]. Every one of the Diadochi or Successors of Alexander hurried in turn to assume the diadem, and Rome had no sooner contrived to crush her rival republic of Carthage than she too fell under the sway, first of dictators whose power was admittedly despotic, and then of emperors whose constitutional limitations were about the same as those of Alexander. That this was certain in time to react upon the universal conception of the Divine, followed directly from the law underlying religious phenomena which had been enunciated by Aristotle: but, before this could make way among the Greeks, thus suddenly promoted to the position of the ruling race, it was necessary that their own gods should be assimilated to those of their eastern fellow-subjects, or in other words, should be shown to be the same divinities under different names. Now, a movement with this object, even before Alexander’s coming, had been set on foot in Greece itself, and was in fact the natural outcome of the ideas as to the origin and governance of the universe brought there by the philosophers of Ionia[67]. It was all very well for the masses—then as now, much given to pragmatism or the reduction of every abstract idea to its most material and practical expression—to believe that the power of every god was limited to an area of so many square feet surrounding his image or sanctuary; but how could such a notion be held by philosophers who had sought out the causes of things, by travellers who had visited neighbouring countries in pursuit of knowledge, or by soldiers who had fought there, and had found it necessary to pay reverence to gods other than their own? It is said that in naturalistic religions like those of Greece, there is always a tendency to consider as identical divinities with the same or like characteristics—to consider for instance all gods with solar attributes as but different forms of the sun-god—and the Greeks of the fourth century B.C. had thus taken many foreign gods into their pantheon. It was, as Socrates found out to his cost, an offence to bring the worship of new gods into the city; but the difficulty was got over by the theory