of himself, which he appears to have enjoined increasingly on his
followers, his subjects and his allies, as time went on, was consciously
devised to meet and captivate the religiosity of the East. In Egypt he
must be Ammon, in Syria he would be Baal, in Babylon Bel. He left the
faith of his fathers behind him when he went up to the East, knowing as
well as his French historian knew in the nineteenth century, that in
Asia the "dreams of Olympus were less worth than the dreams of the Magi
and the mysteries of India, pregnant with the divine." With these last,
indeed, he showed himself deeply impressed, and his recorded attitude
towards the Brahmans of the Punjab implies the earliest acknowledgment
made publicly by a Greek, that in religion the West must learn from the
East.

Alexander, who has never been forgotten by the traditions and myths of
the East, might possibly, with longer life, have satisfied Asiatic
religiosity with an apotheosis of himself. His successors failed either
to keep his divinity alive or to secure any general acceptance of their
own godhead. That they tried to meet the demand of the East with a new
universal cult of imperial utility and that some, like Antiochus IV, the
tyrant of early Maccabaean history, tried very hard, is clear. That they
failed and that Rome failed after them is writ large in the history of
the expansion of half-a-dozen Eastern cults before the Christian era,
and of Christianity itself.

Only in the African province did Macedonian rule secure a religious
basis. What an Alexander could hardly have achieved in Asia, a Ptolemy
did easily in Egypt. There the _de facto_ ruler, of whatever race, had
been installed a god since time out of mind, and an omnipotent
priesthood, dominating a docile people, stood about the throne. The
Assyrian conquerors had stiffened their backs in Egypt to save