CHAPTER V

THE VICTORY OF THE WEST


The climax was reached in about seventy years more. When these had
passed into history, so had also the Persian Empire, and the East, as
the Greeks had conceived it thus far and we have understood it, was
subject to the European race which a century and a half before it had
tried to subdue in Europe itself. To this race (and to the historian
also) "the East," as a geographical term, standing equally for a spatial
area and for a social idea, has ceased to mean what it once meant: and
the change would be lasting. It is true that the East did not cease to
be distinguished as such; for it would gradually shake itself free
again, not only from control by the West, but from the influence of the
latter's social ideas. Nevertheless, since the Western men, when they
went back to their own land, had brought the East into the world known
to them--into a circle of lands accepted as the dwelling of civilized
man--the date of Alexander's overthrow of the Persian Empire makes an
epoch which divides universal history as hardly any other divides it.

Dramatic as the final catastrophe would be, it will not surprise us when
it comes, nor did it, as a matter of fact, surprise the generation which
witnessed it. The romantic conception of Alexander, as a little David
who dared a huge Goliath, ignores the facts of previous history, and
would have occurred to no contemporary who had read the signs of the
times. The Eastern colossus had been dwindling so fast for nearly a
century that a Macedonian king, who had already subdued the Balkan