Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/119

 LOSS OF THE TWO ARMIES. 87 be 12G5.' If tliis be correct, the resistance of tlie Persian cav- alry, except near that point where Alexander himself and the Persian chiefs came into conflict, cannot have been either serious or long protracted. But when we add farther the contest with the infantry, the smallness of the total assigned for Macedonian killed and wounded will appear still more surprising. The total of the Persian infantry is stated at nearly 20,000, most part of them Greek mercenaries. Of these only 2000 were made pris- oners ; nearly all the rest (according to Arrian) were slain. Now the Greek mercenaries were well armed, and not likely to let themselves be slain with impunity ; moreover Plutarch ex- pressly affirms that they resisted with desperate valor, and that most of the Macedonian loss was incurred in the conflict against them. It is not easy therefore to comprehend how the total number of slain can be brought within the statement of Arrian.^ After the victory, Alexander manifested the greatest solicitude for his wounded soldiers, whom he visited and consoled in per- son. Of the twenty-five Companions slain, he caused brazen statues, by Lysippus, to be erected at Dium in Macedonia, where they were still standing in the time of Arrian. To the sui-viv- ing relatives of all the slain he also gi-anted immunity from tax- ation and from personal service. The dead bodies were honor- ably buried, those of the enemy as well as of his own soldiers. The two thousand Greeks in the Persian service who had be- come his prisoners, were put in chains, and transported to Mace- donia, there to work as slaves ; to which treatment Alexander condemned them on the ground that they had taken arms on be- half of the foreigner against Greece, in contravention of the gen eral vote passed by the synod at Corinth. At the same time, he ' Arrian, in describing another battle, considers that the proportion of twelve to one, between wounded and killed, is above what could have been expected (v. 24, 8). lliistow and Kochly (p. 273) state that in modern battles, the ordinary proportion of wounded to killed is from 8 : 1 to 10: 1. /. c.) s-aid that there were slain, among the companions of Alexander {tuv irepl rbv ^AMiavdpov) thirty-four persons, of whom nine were infantry This coincides with Arrian's statement about the twenty-five companioni of the cavalry, slain.
 * Arrian, i. 16, 8; Plutarch, Alexand. 16. Aristobulus (apud Tlutarch.