began, as he grew
older, to show that he had a will of his own, and was even heard to
utter threats against his benefactor whereupon Bagoas, accustomed now to
crime, secured himself by a fresh series of murders. He caused Arses and
his infant children to be assassinated, and selected one of his friends,
Codomannus, the son of Arsanes, to fill the vacant throne. About the
same time (B.C. 336), Philip of Macedon was assassinated by the incensed
Pausanias; and the two new monarchs--Codomannus, who took the name
of Darius, and Alexander the Great--assumed their respective sceptres
almost simultaneously.

Codomannus, the last of the Persian kings, might with some reason have
complained, like Plato, that nature had brought him in the world too
late. Personally brave, as he proved himself into the Cadusian war,
tall and strikingly handsome, amiable in temper, capable of considerable
exertion, and not altogether devoid of military capacity, he would have
been a fairly good ruler in ordinary times, and might, had he fallen
upon such times, have held an honorable place among the Persian
monarchs. But he was unequal to the difficulties of such a position as
that in which he found himself. Raised to the throne after the victory
of Chaeroneia had placed Philip at the head of Greece, and when a
portion of the Macedonian forces had already passed into Asia, he was
called upon to grapple at once with a danger of the most formidable
kind, and had but little time for preparation. It is true that Philip's
death soon after his own accession gave him a short breathing-space:
but at the same time it threw him off his guard. The military talents of
Alexander were untried, and of course unknown; the perils which he had
to encounter were patent. Codomannus may be excused if for some months
after Alexander's accession he slackened his preparations for defence,
uncertain whether the new monarch would maintain himself, whether
he would overpower the combinations which were formed against him in
Greece, whether he would inherit his father's genius for war, or adopt
his ambitious projects. It would have been wiser, no doubt, as the event
proved, to have joined heart and soul with Alexander's European enemies,
and to have carried the war at once to the other side of the Egean. But
no great blame attaches to the Persian monarch for his brief inaction.
As soon as the Macedonian prince had shown by his campaigns in Thrace,
Illyria, and Boeotia that he w