half a barbarian by origin, he was an enthusiast for Hellenism, and his plan was to spread it at the point of the spear all over the civilised world. When he destroyed Thebes he spared one house--the house of Pindar. It was as a missionary of Greek culture that he marched over the burning deserts of Asia. He took poets and artists in his train. He would stop his march every now and then to exhibit Greek athletics and Greek arts to the wondering Orientals. He planted Greek cities wherever he had time to stop, from Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile to Candahar (another version of his name). He had the art which makes a successful apostle, the gift of being all things to all men. In Egypt, the land of religion and mystery, he made a solemn pilgrimage into the desert, and got himself accepted as the son of the god called by the Greeks Ammon. In Persia he recognised the merits of the Persian provincial system, and appointed his own satraps, or even retained the existing ones. He treated Persian women with the deference to which they were accustomed, and added one to his household in the manner to which they were also accustomed. His Macedonians murmured at his Oriental dress and manners, but Alexander was always a Greek at heart, the lines of Homer always rang in his ears, and he fancied himself a reincarnation of Achilles pursuing his Phrygian Hectors over the dusty plains of Troy. He was mad, no doubt, to march so far over those weary deserts into Turkestan, through those dreadful defiles of the Hindu Khush. Only the mutiny of his army turned him back when he reached the farthest of the Five Rivers of the Punjaub. And then it was frantic lunacy to lead his army home along the burning coasts of the Persian Gulf. That experience taught him, it seems, a lesson which he might well have learnt earlier, namely, the value of sea-power for conquerors and empire-builders. When he died he was projecting a naval expedition along the coasts of Africa. The disaffection of Athens had deprived him of the fleet which ought to have belonged to a Panhellenic army, and Alexander had been forced to destroy the Persian fleet by a siege of its arsenal and headquarters, the island city of Tyre. Most conquerors have a touch of insanity, no doubt. The sanest of them is Julius Cæsar, and the maddest is Charles XII. But Alexander the Great had lucid intervals of consummate statesmanship. It is in this respect that he differs from the vulgar type of adventurer and stands among civilising conquerors like William the Norman with his Domesday Book, Napoleon with his Code, and Julius Cæsar with his Julian Laws and his calendar. This intellectual suppleness was the mark of Alexander’s Greek education, though it still remains a difficulty to trace in his career the influence of Aristotle, his tutor.