EASTWARD HO


The point we start out from this evening is, in time, the year
220 A.D., in place, West Asia: 220, or you may call it 226,--
sixty-five years, a half-cycle, after 161 and the accession of
Marcus Aurelius; and therewith, in Rome, the beginning of the
seasons prophetic of decline. So now we are in 226; look well
around you; note your whereabouts;--for there is no resting
here. You have seen? you have noted? On again then, I beseech
you; and speedily. And, please, backwards: playing as it were
the crab in time; and not content till the whole pralaya is
skipped, and you stand on the far shore, in the sunset of an
elder day: looking now forward, into futurity, from 390, perhaps
394 B.C.; over first a half-cycle of Persian decline,--long
melancholy sands and shingle, to--there on the edge of the great
wan water,--that July in 330 when mean Satrap Bessus killed his
king, Codomannus, last of the Achaemenidae, then in flight from
Alexander;--and the House of Cyrus and Darius came to an end.
What a time it was that drifted into Limbo then! One unit of
history; one phase of the world's life-story! It had seen all
those world-shaking Tiglath-pilesers eastward; all those proud
Osirified kings by the Nile;--and now it was over; had died in
its last stronghold, Persia, and there was nowhere else for it to
be reborn; and, after a decent half-cycle of lying in state
under degenerate descendants of the great Darius, had been furied
(cataclysmal obsequies!) beneath a landslide of Hellenistic
Macedonianism. Its old civilization, senile long since, was
gone, and a new kind from the west superimposed;--Babylon was a
memory vague and splendid;--the Assyrian had gone down, and
should never re-arise:--Egypt of the Pharaohs had fallen forever
and ever;--Aryan Persia was over-run;--

"Iran indeed had gone, with all his rose,
And Jamshyd's seven-ringed cup, where no one knows:"

--And the angel that recorded their deeds and misdeed had written
_Tamam_ on the last page, sprinkled sand over the ink,--shut the
volume, and put it away on the shelf;--and with a _Thank God
that's done with!_ settled down to snooze for six hundred years
and ten.

For what had he to do with what followed? With Alexander's
wedding-feast in 324,--when upwards of ten thousand couples, the
grooms all Macedonian, the brides all Persian, were united: what
had he to do with the new race young Achilles Redivivus thus
proposed to bring into being? These were mere Macedonian doings,
to be recorded by his brother angel of Europe; as also were the
death of Alexander, and his grand schemes that came to nothing.
There was no West Asia now; only Europe: all was European and
Hellenized to the borders of India, with periodical overflowings
beyond;--just as, long afterwards, Spain was a province of West
Asia; and just as Egypt now is submerged under a European power.

Only the trouble is that the seed of something native always
remains in regions so overflowed with an alien culture; and
Alexander dreamed never of what might lie quiescent, resurrectable
in time, in the mountains of Persis, the Achaemenian land,
out of the path of the eastward march of his phalanxes;--or
indeed, in those wide deserts southward, parched Araby, that
none but a fool--and such was not Alexander--would trouble
to invade or think of conquering: something that should
in its time reassert West Asia over all Hellenedom, in Macedonia
itself, and West beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the limits of
the world. But let that be: it need trouble no one in this year
of 324 B.C.! Only remember that "that which hath been shall be
again, and there is nothing new under the sun."
 

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