The fact was that by founding cities Alexander lessened enormously his military and administrative difficulties. For every city took from his shoulders responsibility for maintaining order, collecting taxes, and dispensing justice in the territory assigned to it--necessary tasks, now that a European state was arising in Asia, which could be performed otherwise only by the creation of a bureaucratic system of officials. This, however, was a non-Hellenic institution for which Alexander had naturally no liking. In the future he saw the whole world--that of Asia which he had already conquered and that of the Far West which he meant to conquer--honeycombed, like Greece itself, with a multitude of city-states, each a separate cell with a town in its centre, each possessed of a general assembly and a council, magistrates of its own choosing and laws of its own making or adoption, each the home of free men speaking the Greek language, fostering Greek art and letters, and fighting with Greek arms and tactics. It was a grand vision, which failed of realization in Alexander's time and thereafter; but it set forth an ideal toward which future generations moved for over five centuries. It is clear that Alexander never lost faith in the absolute supremacy of Hellenic culture. Certainly the place of unlimited authority which he reserved for himself above the world of city-states and their law-bound citizens, was the one prescribed for the ideal wise man, the man of supreme political ability, by Aristotle his tutor. That Aristotle thought of a different _pambasileus_ for each city-state and Alexander of a single "absolute monarch" for all, is a non-essential difference, and it is simply in the institutions which Alexander found necessary to translate the idea of the philosopher into the world of reality that Hellenic practice and custom were violated. These outlandish institutions, however, Alexander employed as means for the better dissemination of Greek life and thought, without being conscious, perhaps, that they were destructive of the spirit which they were intended to preserve. On the other hand, it is indisputable that Alexander revised his tutor's, and his own youthful, opinion as to the worth of the Asiatics. What he came to think of Semites and Egyptians we do not know; and it may be that he continued to regard them as naturally servile and, hence, condemned them to remain forever hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Hellenic or Hellenized citizens in whose cities they were to live. But as to the Medes and Persians and the kindred Iranian stocks of the Far East, the views of their conqueror changed radically when he came really to know them, and to appreciate fully the magnitude of the task which he had undertaken.