fatal. His heated
blood furnished fuel for the raging fever which seized him, and which
carried him off in a few days, at the age of thirty-two, and after a reign
of twelve years and eight months, June, B.C. 323.

(M760) He indicated no successor. Nor could one man have governed so vast
an empire with so little machinery of government. His achievements threw
into the shade those of all previous conquerors, and he was, most
emphatically, the Great King--the type of all worldly power. "He had
mastered, in defiance of fatigue, hardship, and combat, not merely all the
eastern half of the Persian empire, but unknown Indian regions beyond.
Besides Macedon, Greece, and Thrace, he possessed all the treasures and
forces which rendered the Persian king so formidable," and he was exalted
to all this power and grandeur by conquest at an age when a citizen of
Athens was intrusted with important commands, and ten years less than the
age for a Roman consul. But he was unsatisfied, and is said to have wept
that there were no more worlds to conquer. He would, had he lived,
doubtless have encountered the Romans, and all their foes, and added Italy
and Spain and Carthage to his empire. But there is a limit to human
successes, and when his work of chastisement of the nations was done, he
died. But he left a fame never since surpassed, and "he overawes the
imagination more than any personage of antiquity." He had transcendent
merits as a general, but he was much indebted to fortunate circumstances.
He thought of new conquests, rather than of consolidating what he had
made, so that his empire must naturally be divided and subdivided at his
death. Though divided and subdivided, the effect of those conquests
remained to future generations, and had no small effect on civilization,
and yet, instead of Hellenizing Asia, he rather Asiatized Hellas. That
process, so far as it was carried out, is due to his generals--the
Diadochi--Antigonas, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Lysimachus, &c., who divided
between them the empire. But Hellenism in reality never to a great extent
passed into Asia. The old Oriental habits and sentiments and intellectual
qualities remained, and have survived all succeeding conquests. Oriental
habits and opinions rather invaded the western world with the progress of
wealth and luxury. Asia, by the insidious influences of effeminated
habits, undermined Greece, and even Rome, rather than received from Europe
new impulses or sentiments, or