But Hellenic life was not sunshine without shadow. For all its power and brilliance Greek society was exposed to many perils and was guilty of serious mistakes. These, however, we have here no need to discuss in full. It is enough to note that, when-and-where-soever the necessity for ardent patriotism was absent or unfelt the Greek conception of life lacked adequate moral incentive, and sinister conditions which were a very black shadow in a fair world could and did arise. Much might also be said regarding the jealousies of the petty cities, whence came warfare constant, embittered, and suicidal. Nevertheless it remains absolutely true, that compared with the stagnation of Eastern civilisation, Hellenism was life and health. Judge from one token, the epitaphs just quoted. Men could not write like that in Palestine or Babylon, because they never died for such a cause. In the years between 359 and 338 B.C. the independent Greek cities were all forced to admit the suzerainty, first of Philip II., king of Macedon, and, after his assassination in 336, of his son Alexander, who was to be remembered throughout history as Alexander the Great. The humiliation was not in any way a crushing blow to the spirit of Greece. To the yoke of Philip and Alexander the city-states could submit with a good grace, for the Macedonians were of the same ancestry as the Greeks, and for years had been to all intents and purposes a part of the Greek world; and Alexander was wholly Hellenic in his upbringing and his ideas. Had he not been educated by the great philosopher, Aristotle? In 334 B.C., the young king organised an army of Macedonians and Greeks and set forth to make a grand assault upon the nations of the East: a stupendous task, but the enterprise appealed to the Greeks as a poetic requital of the awful peril one hundred and fifty years before when Xerxes of Persia at the head of a horde of Orientals had crossed to Greece and almost blotted out its rising life. If the task was colossal and the force to achieve it tiny, the results staggered the imagination of the world. The huge Persian Empire crumbled at the touch of Greek military prowess, directed by the genius of Alexander. In three years the young Macedonian had become absolute master of Western Asia Minor, of Egypt, Syria, Babylonia, and Persia. In 326 B.C. he pushed his conquests to the Punjab, and in 325 he died; but _Hellenism did not die with him_. The East had seen many conquerors rise and sweep through its lands in triumph, and had continued to dream its long dreams. But the military achievements of Alexander were only the beginning of his work. What stirred the East to its depths was the fascination of the ideas that had accompanied him and that he deliberately sought to establish among the conquered peoples; with what measure of success it now remains to consider.