Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/522

Rh ALEXANDER THE GREAT Clirus, bidding him go to Philip and Parmenion. The rage of the tiger was followed by a furious remorse, in which, with considerable truth, he denounced himself as unfit to live. For three days he would neither eat nor drink ; nnd the army, alarmed at the threatened starvation of their king, voted that Clitus had been justly slain, and that his body should not receive the riies of burial. Ly reversing this vote, Alexander seemed to feel that he had gone a long way towards acquitting himself ; whatever might be yet lacking to restore his self-complacence was supplied by the prophets, who assured him that the disaster had been brought about wholly by the Thcban wine-god Dionysus, to whom he had offered no sacrifice 011 the day of the banquet. Sogdian rock, a fastness from which common care would have sent him away baffled. Having next reduced the rock of Chorienes, he returned to Bactra to celebrate his marriage vrith Eoxana, the daughter of Ozyartss, who had been 27 B.C. cmong the captives taken on the Sogdian rock. The feast was seized by Alexander as an opportunity for extracting from his Greek and Macedonian followers a public acknow- bdgment of his divinity. It was arranged that the sophist Anaxarchus (or, as some said, the Sicilian Cleon) should ruake a speech, advising all to worship at once the man whom they would certainly have to worship after his death. The speech was delivered. The silence of most of the Macedonian officers showed their disgust ; but none ventured to speak until the Olynthian Callisthenes, the nephew of Aristotle, insisted on the impiety of all attempts to confound the distinctions between gods and men. Con- coding to the conqueror the highest place amongst military leaders and the first rank amongst statesmen, he rebuked Anaxarchus for making a suggestion which ought to have come from any one rather than from himself. The applause v;hich his words drew from the Macedonians taught Alex- onder that open opposition would be useless ; but he was none the more turned from his purpose, nor was it long before he found a pretext for carrying it out. A con spiracy was discovered amongst his pages. These un fortunate men were tortured (but without extracting from them anything to implicate Callisthenes), and then stoned to death, as Alexander would have it, not by his orders, but by the loyal impulse of his army. Callisthenes he was resolved, he said, to punish himself, together with those who had sent him, an insinuation, manifestly, against his uncle Aristotle, possibly also against all other Greeks, for whom freedom of speech and action had not yet altogether lost its value. The philosopher who had extolled Alex ander as the greatest of earthly generals and statesmen was first tortured and then hanged ; and the conqueror went calmly on to subdue the regions between the Hindu- Hush and the right bank of the Indus, and to storm the impregnable rock of Aornus. 26 B.C. The next river to be crossed was the Indus. The bridge was constructed by Hephcestion and Perdiccas, probably near the present Attock. The surrender of Taxila left Alexander an open path until he reached the Hydaspes (Jhdum), where Porus was beaten only after a severe struggle. .The Indian prince was taken prisoner, and treated with the courtesy which the family of Darius had received after the battle of Issus. Here died Alexander s horse Boukephalos (Bucephalus), and the loss was com memorated by the founding of Bucephalia. The passage of the Acesines (Chenab), running with a full and impetu ous stream, was not accomplished without much danger; that of the Hydraotes (Ravee) presented less formidable difficulties, but he was encountered on the other side by ndians, who entrenched themselves in their town of Sangala. Thuir resistance ended, it is said, in the slaughter of 17,000 and the capture of 70,000. About 40 miles farther to the south-east flowed the Hyphasis (SutleJ). Alexander approached its bank, the limit of the Panjab, in the full confidence that a few days more would bring him to the mighty stream of the Ganges; but he had reached the goal of his conquests. The order for crossing the rivci called forth murmurs and protests at once from his officers and his soldiers, who expressed plainly their refusal to march they knew not whither. Alexander in vain laid before his officers his schemes of further conquest ; and when he offered the sacrifice customary before crossing a river, the signs were pronounced to be unfavourable. The die was cast. Twelve huge altars remained to show that Alexander had advanced thus far on his conquest of tho world; and, in the midst of deluges of rain, the army set out on its westward journey. The reinforcements which Nov. 3i he found on reaching the Hydaspes might, if they had Au S- 3: advanced as far as the Hyphasis, have turned the scale in R&amp;lt; favour of progress to the east ; they enabled Alexander to undertake with greater ease a voyage down the Hydaspes to its junction vrith the Indus after receiving the waters cf the Acesines, Hydraotes, and Hyphasis, and thence on wards to the Indian Ocean. From the mouth of the Indus he ordered his admiral Nearchus to take the fleet along the shores of the ocean and the Persian Gulf to the mouth of the Tigris. The army marched by land through the Geclrosian desert, suffering more from thirst and sickness than they had suffered in all their battles and forced marches. At length he reached Pasargadai, to find the tomb of Cyrus broken open and plundered, and to avenge the insult offered to the man whom he now regarded as the founder of his own dynasty. Early in the following year he entered Susa, and there, celebrating his marriage with Statira, the daughter of Darius and of Parysatis the daughter of his predecessor Ochus, he offered to pay the debts of those soldiers who would follow his example by taking to themselves Persian wives a strange mode of inviting sober and steady men who had no debts, but an effectual argu ment for the spendthrifts and ruffians of his army. His new levies of Persian youths, armed and disciplined after the Macedonian fashion, had now made him independent of his veteran soldiers; and his declared intention of send ing home the aged and wounded among them called forth the angry remonstrances of their comrades, who bade him complete his schemes of conquest with the aid of his father Ammon. Alexander rushed into the throng, seized some and had them executed, and then disbanded the whole force. For two days he shut himself up in his palace; on the third he marshalled his Persian levies (Epigoni, as he called them) into divisions bearing the Macedonian mili tary titles, under Persian officers. The spirit of the veterans was broken by this ignoring of their existence. They threw down their arms at the palace gates, and begged forgiveness with cries and tears. Alexander accepted their contrition, and the restoration of harmony was celebrated by a sumptuous sacrifice. But for Alexander past victories were only a stimulus to further exploits. Arabia still remained unsubdued, and for this conquest a large addition was needed to his fleet. Orders were sent to Phoenicia for the construction of ships, 321 B c which were to be taken to pieces and sent overland to Thapsacus on the Euphrates, while others were to be built at Babylon. His journey to Ecbatana was marked by a violent quarrel between Eumenes and Hephsestion. Their reconciliation was soon followed by the death of the latter from an attack of fever. The grief of the conqueror was as fierce as that of Achilles, if we may riot act it down as a manifest imitation of it. For two days he neither etc nor drank ; he cut his hair short, and ordered that the horses and mules in his army should have their manes
 * 2S B.C. A few weeks after this murder Alexander captured the