Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/236

 204 HISTORY OF GREECE. tims for the deeds of their ancestors in the fourth or fifth genera- tion before. Alexander doubtless considered himself to be exe- cuting the wrath of Apollo against an accursed race wlio had robbed the temple of the god.^ The Macedonian expedition had been proclaimed to be undertaken originally for the purpose of revenging upon the contemporary Persians the ancient wrongs done to Greece by Xerxes ; so that Alexander would follow out the same sentiment in revenging upon the contemporary Bran- chidse the acts of their ancestors — yet more guilty than Xerxes, in his belief. The massacre of this unfortunate population was in fact an example of human sacrifice on the largest scale, offered to the gods by the religious impulses of Alexander, and worthy to be compared to that of the Carthaginian general Hannibal, when he sacrificed 3000 Grecian prisoners on the field of Hime- ra, where his grandfather Hamilkar had been slain seventy years before.^ Alexander then continued his onward progress, first to Mara- kanda (Samarcand), the chief town of Sogdiana — next, to the river Jaxartes, which he and his companions, in their imperfect geographical notions, believed to be the Tanais, the boundary between Asia and Europe.^ In his march, he left garrisons in Sogdiana, nor of the destruction of the town and its inhabitants by Alex- ander, Perhaps neither Ptolemy nor Aristobulus said anything about it. Their silence is not at all difficult to explain, nor does it, in my judgment, impeach the credibility of the narrative. They do not feel under obligation to give publicity to the worst acts of their hero. ' The Delphian oracle pronounced, in explaining the subjugation and ruin of Kroesus king of Lydia, that he had thereby expiated the sin of his ancestor in the fifth generation before (Herodot. i. 91 : compare vi. 86). Immediately before the breaking out of the Peloponnesian war, the Lacedae- monians called upon the Athenians to expel the descendants of those who had taken part in the Kylonian sacrilege, 180 years before ; they addressed this injunction with a view to procure the banishment of Perikles, yet still Tolg i9fOif npiJTov TifiupovvTeg (Thucyd. i. 125-127). The idea that the sins of fathers were visited upon their de-^^cendants, even to the third and fourth generation, had great currency in the ancient world. ' Diodor. xiii. 62. See Vol. X. Oh. Ixxxi. p. 413 of this History. ^ Pliny, H. N. vi. 16. In the Meteorologica of Aristotle (i. 13, 15-18) wo read that the rivers Bahtrus, Choaspes, and Araxes flowed from the loftj mountain Parnasus (Paropamistis?) in Asia; ar.d that the Araxes bifur