The death of Alexander, thus suddenly cut off by a fever in the plenitude of health, vigor, and aspirations, was an event impressive as well as important, in the highest possible degree, to his contemporaries far and near. When the first report of it was brought to Athens, the orator Demades exclaimed:—“It cannot be true: if Alexander were dead, the whole habitable world would have smelt of his carcass.”[618] This coarse but emphatic comparison illustrates the immediate, powerful, and wide-reaching impression produced by the sudden extinction of the great conqueror. It was felt by each of the many remote envoys who had so recently come to propitiate this far-shooting Apollo—by every man among the nations who had sent these envoys—throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, as then known,—to affect either his actual condition or his probable future.[619] The first growth and development of Macedonia, during the twenty-two years preceding the battle of Chæroneia, from an embarrassed secondary State into the first of all known powers, had excited the astonishment of contemporaries, and admiration for Philip’s organizing genius. But the achievements of Alexander, during his twelve years of reign, throwing Philip into the shade, had been on a scale so much grander and vaster, and so completely without serious reverse or even interruption, as to transcend the measure, not only of human expectation, but almost of human belief. The Great King (as the king of Persia was called by excellence) was, and had long been, the type of worldly power and felicity, even down to the time when Alexander crossed the Hellespont. Within four years and three months from this event, by one stupendous defeat after another, Darius had lost all his Western Empire, and had become a fugitive eastward of the Caspian Gates, escaping captivity at the hands of Alexander only to perish by those of the satrap Bessus. All antecedent historical parallels—the ruin and captivity of the Lydian Crœsus, the expulsion and mean life of the Syracusan Dionysius, both of them impressive examples of the mutability of human condition,—sank into trifles compared with the overthrow of this towering Persian colossus. The orator Æschines expressed the genuine sentiment of a Grecian spectator, when he exclaimed (in a speech delivered at Athens shortly before the death of Darius):—“What is there among the list of strange and unexpected events, that has not occurred in our time? Our lives have transcended the limits of humanity; we are born to serve as a theme for incredible tales to posterity. Is not the Persian king—who dug through Athos and bridged the Hellespont,—who demanded earth and water from the Greeks,—who dared to proclaim himself, in public epistles, master of all mankind from the rising to the setting sun—is not _he_ now struggling to the last, not for dominion over others, but for the safety of his own person?”[620]