The Greatest Story in the World, Period 1 by Horace G. Hutchinson

We have never before seen the world in the condition to which we have / brought it now, in the whole course of the story.

At first, you will remember, there were the two great empires / warring, the Nile Valley empire and the empire of the Euphrates and / Tigris. Then came the Persian. He overthrew them both. But then he / came up against a wall too strong for him to break down, in the / opposition of Greece; and he broke his own head against that wall. / After him came Alexander, the Macedonian, going through the world, as / it was then known, like a flash of lightning, getting the better of / everything that stood in his way as if it was of no account at all. / But like a flash of lightning his light went out again, and he left / the world he had conquered to be cut up into pieces and quarrelled / for by the generals that he had led to the conquest.