Alexander' the Great and the Hellenistic Age 223 Although the Macedonians had nothing more to fear from Alexander captures the Persian royal cities the Persian arms, there still remained much for Alexander to do in order to establish his empire in Asia. On he marched through the original little kingdom of the Persian kings, whence Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, had victoriously come forth over two hundred years before (see pp. 96-97). He stopped at Susa, one of the most important of the royal Persian resi- dences, and then passed on to Persepolis, where he gave a dra- matic exhibition of his supremacy in Asia by setting fire to the Persian palace (Fig. 52) with his own hand, as the Persians had once done to Miletus and to the temples on the Athenian Acropo- lis. It was but an act symbolic of vengeance, and Alexander ordered the flames extinguished before serious damage was done. After touching Ecbatana in the north, and leaving behind the Alexander's , ^ ... . , r 1 1 campaigns trusted Parmenio m charge of the enormous treasure or gold in the Far and silver, accumulated for generations by the Persian kings, ^2?Vc')°~ Alexander again moved eastward. In the course of the next five years, while the Greek world looked on in amazement, the young Macedonian seemed to disappear in the mists on the far-off fringes of the known world. He marched his army in one vast loop after another through the heart of the Iranian plateau (see map, p. 80), northward across the Oxus and the Jaxartes rivers, southward across the Indus and the frontiers of India, into the valley of the Ganges, where at last the mur- murs of his fearless army forced him to turn back. He descended the Indus, and even sailed the waters of the Alexander Indian Ocean. Then he began his westward march again along ^^ B^^yion the shores of the Indian Ocean, accompanied by a fleet which ^^-3 R-c) ; ' ^ ■' some results he had built on the Indus. The return march through desert of his eastern ,. , 1 • 1-11 • • -1 campaigns wastes cost many lives as the thirsty and lU-provisioned troops dropped by the way. Over seven years after he had left the great city of Babylon, Alexander entered it again. He had been eleven years in Asia, and he had carried Greek civilization into the very heart of the continent. At important points along his line of march he had founded Greek cities bearing his name,
