Introduction

The dagger-blow which struck down Philip of Macedon at the end of the year 336, ¹ came near to shaking the power of the kingdom and making an end of the plans for war in Asia which, in the previous year, the King had caused the confederate Greeks to accept as a national conflict. ² But the youth of barely twenty, who was to be Alexander the Great, was able to take up an inheritance which might have slipped from feebler hands. On the pretext of punishing the murderers and their accomplices, he made away with suspect persons and caused his rights to be acknowledged in Thessaly, at Delphi, and at Corinth, where the representatives of the states belonging to the Confederation nominated him president of the alliance and Commander-in-Chief of the Hellenes. ³ A victorious expedition against the Barbarians, who were threatening his Northern frontier, took him to the Danube. ⁴ Meanwhile, Greece was restless; a thunderbolt of a campaign, ending with the sack of Thebes, restored obedience and peace. Alexander could then turn his forces against the Great King. In ten years, the Persian Empire was overthrown and replaced by a Graeco-Macedonian Empire, which soon split up into great monarchical states. Hellenism spread over all the East.