A word on this strange institution and I have finished this survey of the expedients devised by the Greeks to obscure, evade, and finally to justify imperialism. The Greek method of legalizing despotism was Alexander the Great's genial adaptation to state building of an idea which his tutor, Aristotle, had developed in his _Politics_.[16] It was a means of uniting cities or provinces in an indissoluble whole while preserving, on the one hand, the superiority and freedom of action of the suzerain, be it an emperor or a republic, and, on the other hand, the self-respect of the inferior states, without which their status was politically intolerable. Deification of rulers did the impossible: it reconciled completely the antinomy between the city-state and imperialism. It resolved the antagonism into two harmonious duties; the duty of the ruler to command and of the subject to obey. To Alexander the Great governments have been in serious debt for over two thousand years. From him to Kaiser Wilhelm II runs an unbroken line. So long as the world had many gods and did not believe in the supernatural power of any of them, there was no religious difficulty in adding to its stock another such deity in the person of the living monarch. With the decadence of polytheism, however, a slight change was necessary. In Constantine's time god-kings suffered the same fate as other pagan gods; but with a difference. The heathen gods became devils or were metamorphosed into saints. The kings became men chosen for their high office by God, Most High. Crowned, usually by their predecessors, and anointed by God's priests, the patriarchs, they governed by divine right and acknowledged responsibility only to their Creator.[17] In a less ecclesiastical world, as in modern Prussia, the kings crown themselves. But with these later developments we have no concern in this book. I shall endeavor, however, in chapters III-VI, to trace the growth of deification in the world-monarchy of Alexander the Great, and to make clear the purpose it served in the empires of the Ptolemies and Seleucids. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. de Coulanges, Fustel. _La cité antique_^7 (1879). 2. Busolt, G. _Die griechischen Staats- und Rechtsaltertümer_,^2 (1892). In Müller's _Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft_, IV, 1. 3. Schömann-Lipsius. _Griechische Alterthümer_,^4 II (1892). 4. Francotte, H. _La Polis grecque_ (1907). 5. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von. _Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen_ (1910). In Hinneberg's _Die Kultur der Gegenwart_. Teil II, Abteilung IV, 1. 6. Zimmern, Alfred. _The Greek Commonwealth_ (1911). 7. Keil, Bruno. _Griechische Staatsaltertümer_ (1912). In Gercke and Norden's _Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft_, pp. 297 _ff._ FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: _A History of the Eastern Roman Empire_, pp. 319 _f._] [Footnote 2: _Atlantic Monthly_, Oct., 1912, vol. cx, pp. 517 _ff._]