Twelve months after leaving Siwah, Alexander was master of Persepolis. This was the capital of Persis, a land of some half a million inhabitants whom Cyrus and Darius had made lords of a subject population not much below that of the Roman empire. For over two hundred years forty millions of people had looked to Persis and Persepolis as the seats of the mighty. The "city of the Persians" and the palace of their kings which it contained were the manifest symbols of empire: the one Alexander gave over to his soldiers to pillage, the other he fired with his own hand, thus proclaiming to the world that the end of a dynasty had come. His own part in this catastrophe--which affected the imaginations of men in some such way as did the capture of Rome by Alaric in 410 A.D.--was taken conspicuously. Starting up from a banquet, he and his companions, among whom was the beautiful Athenian courtesan Thais, went in Dionysiac revel to the sound of flutes through the streets to the palace, and threw the torches which they had taken with them from the feast upon the cedar beams of the roof. Once the flames had shot up and the desired effect had been produced, Alexander ordered the fire to be extinguished. Early in the following year Alexander entered Ecbatana, the summer capital of the Persian empire, and Darius became a fugitive. Up to this point Alexander had been hegemon of the Hellenic league as well as king of Macedon, and, on liberating the Greek cities in Asia from Persian control, he had added them to the league. Now that the war against Persia, for which the league had been ostensibly formed, had ended, Alexander thought the time had come to relieve himself of the partnership into which, following the policy of Philip, he had entered at the opening of his reign. This he did in his usual dramatic way. He discharged all the Greek troops put under his command by the league, and made elaborate provision for their transport back to the coast and across the Mediterranean to Greece. To every Greek city which had sent him a contingent, its return was a message that Alexander was no longer bound by the treaties made when the league was formed. This did not mean, as he took pains to show, that it was freed thereby from all obligations toward him. Over the Macedonians he ceased at this point to be hegemon, but he still remained their king.[66]