His enthusiasm for absolutism was, when one considers his age and how deeply he was involved in military plans and schemes, less of a reflection on himself than a curse to his followers and successors, who kept faithful to the personal tradition of their leader and made the Hellenization of Asia untrue to so much that was best in Greek political life and thought. It was, as Ranke says, a break in their whole national history, for the Greeks to have extended over them the kind of authority which was in no way different from that against which they had contended in warfare for a century. But it must be remembered that Alexander had only just begun to rule over Asiatics; he had receded before his death from pressing his theory of amalgamation to its logical conclusion, and quick as he was to feel instinctively the meaning of new conditions, it may be fairly supposed that he would have come to recognize the value of Aristotle’s profoundly wise advice to him, that he should behave to the Greeks as a leader or president and to the barbarians or non-Greeks as a master. We may put to one side all the ingenious speculations as to what might have happened if Alexander had reached the ordinary limit of human life, a line of thought which Livy seems to have originated, when he tried to foretell for his age what would have happened if Alexander had taken up the rôle followed later by his relative, Pyrrhus. It is only necessary to say that, so far as Greek affairs were concerned, Alexander was the son of his father. His public career began when, as Philip’s son, he put the finishing touches to Philip’s program for dominating the free states of Greece. So long as Alexander lived, the lines of Macedonian supremacy, the outcome of the battle of Chæronea, remained clear and fixed. The destruction of Thebes was but the epilogue of Philip’s own career. The sentimental vein in the nature of Alexander made him patient with the somewhat childish and ineffective hostility shown him by both Athens and Sparta, venerable names as protagonists in the secular struggle with the Persians, whose mantle had now fallen on his broader shoulders.