Ab urbe condita

The aspect of Italy would have struck him as very different from the India which he traversed in drunken revelry with an intoxicated army; he would have seen in the passes of Apulia and the mountains of Lucania the traces of the recent disaster which befell his house when his uncle Alexander, King of Epirus, perished.

I am speaking of Alexander as he was before he was submerged in the flood of success, for no man was less capable of bearing prosperity than he was.

If we look at him as transformed by his new fortunes and presenting the new character, so to

speak, which he had assumed after his victories, it is evident he would have come into Italy more like Darius than Alexander, and would have brought with him an army which had forgotten its native Macedonia and was rapidly becoming Persian in character.

It is a disagreeable task in the case of so great a man to have to record his ostentatious love of dress; the prostrations which he demanded from all who approached his presence, and which the Macedonians must have felt to be humiliating, even had they been vanquished, how much more when they were victors;

the terribly cruel punishments he in- flicted; the murder of his friends at the banquet-table; the vanity which made him invent a divine pedigree for himself.