having themselves experienced the bitter fruits of them, mourned and
lamented his death. Others, whose fortunes had been ruined, and whose
friends and relatives had been destroyed, in the course, or in the
sequel of his victories, rejoiced that he who had been such a scourge
and curse to others, had himself sunk, at last under the just judgment
of Heaven.

We should have expected that Sysigambis, the bereaved and widowed
mother of Darius, would have been among those who would have exulted
most highly at the conqueror's death; but history tells us that,
instead of this, she mourned over it with a protracted and
inconsolable grief. Alexander had been, in fact, though the implacable
enemy of her son, a faithful and generous friend to her. He had
treated her, at all times, with the utmost respect and consideration,
had supplied all her wants, and ministered, in every way, to her
comfort and happiness. She had gradually learned to think of him and
to love him as a son; he, in fact, always called her mother; and
when she learned that he was gone, she felt as if her last earthly
protector was gone. Her life had been one continued scene of
affliction and sorrow, and this last blow brought her to her end. She
pined away, perpetually restless and distressed. She lost all desire
for food, and refused, like others who are suffering great mental
anguish, to take the sustenance which her friends and attendants
offered and urged upon her. At length she died. They said she starved
herself to death; but it was, probably, grief and despair at being
thus left, in her declining years, so hopelessly friendless and alone,
and not hunger, that destroyed her.

In striking contrast to this mournful scene of sorrow in the palace of
Sysigambis, there was an exhibition of the most wild and tumultuous
joy in the streets, and in all the public places of resort in the city
of Athens, when the tidings of the death of the great Macedonian king
arrived there. The Athenian commonwealth, as well as all the other
states of Southern Greece, had submitted very reluctantly to the
Macedonian supremacy. They had resisted Philip, and they had resisted
Alexander. Their opposition had been at last suppressed and silenced
by Alexander's terrible vengeance upon Thebes, but it never was
really subdued. Demosthenes, the orator, who had exerted so powerful
an influence against the Macedonian kings, had been sent into
banishment, and all outward expressions of discon