Daniel sought to understand the vision, and immediately there stood before him one in the semblance of a man, and he hears the distant voice of some one[553] standing between the Ulai--_i.e._, between its two banks,[554] or perhaps between its two branches, the Eulæus and the Choaspes--who called aloud to "Gabriel." The archangel Gabriel is here first mentioned in Scripture.[555] "Gabriel," cried the voice, "explain to him what he has seen." So Gabriel came and stood beside him; but he was terrified, and fell on his face. "Observe, thou son of man,"[556] said the angel to him; "for unto the time of the end is the vision." But since Daniel still lay prostrate on his face, and sank into a swoon, the angel touched him, and raised him up, and said that the great wrath was only for a fixed time, and he would tell him what would happen at the end of it.
The two-horned ram, he said, the _Baal-keranaîm_, or "lord of two horns," represents the King of Media and Persia; the shaggy goat is the Empire of Greece; and the great horn is its first king--Alexander the Great.[557]
The four horns rising out of the broken great horn are four inferior kingdoms. In one of these, sacrilege would culminate in the person of a king of bold face,[558] and skilled in cunning, who would become powerful, though not by his own strength.[559] He would prosper and destroy mighty men and the people of the holy ones,[560] and deceit would succeed by his double-dealing. He would contend against the Prince of princes,[561] and yet without a hand would he be broken in pieces.
Such is the vision and its interpretation; and though there is here and there a difficulty in the details and translation, and though there is a necessary crudeness in the emblematic imagery, the general significance of the whole is perfectly clear.
The scene of the vision is ideally placed in Shushan, because the Jews regarded it as the royal capital of the Persian dominion, and the dream begins with the overthrow of the Medo-Persian Empire.[562] The ram is a natural symbol of power and strength, as in Isa. lx. 7. The two horns represent the two divisions of the empire, of which the later--the Persian--is the loftier and the stronger. It is regarded as being already the lord of the East, but it extends its conquests by butting westward over the Tigris into Europe, and southwards to Egypt and Africa, and northwards towards Scythia, with magnificent success.
The he-goat is Greece.[563] Its one great horn represents "the great Emathian conqueror."[564] So swift was the career of Alexander's conquests, that the goat seems to speed along without so much as touching the ground.[565] With irresistible fury, in the great battles of the Granicus (B.C. 334), Issus (B.C. 333), and Arbela (B.C. 331), he stamps to pieces the power of Persia and of its king, Darius Codomannus.[566] In this short space of time Alexander conquers Syria, Phœnicia, Cyprus, Tyre, Gaza, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Media, Hyrcania, Aria, and Arachosia. In B.C. 330 Darius was murdered by Bessus, and Alexander became lord of his kingdom. In B.C. 329 the Greek King conquered Bactria, crossed the Oxus and Jaxartes, and defeated the Scythians. In B.C. 328 he conquered Sogdiana. In B.C. 327 and 326 he crossed the Indus, Hydaspes, and Akesines, subdued Northern and Western India, and--compelled by the discontent of his troops to pause in his career of victory--sailed down the Hydaspes and Indus to the Ocean. He then returned by land through Gedrosia, Karmania, Persia, and Susiana to Babylon.
There the great horn is suddenly broken without hand.[567] Alexander in B.C. 323, after a reign of twelve years and eight months, died as a fool dieth, of a fever brought on by fatigue, exposure, drunkenness, and debauchery. He was only thirty-two years old.