Page:History of Greece Vol XII.djvu/264

 232 HISTORY OF GKLiX'E. quale to his own.^ But he entirely failed. No one indeed dared openly to contradict him. Koenus alone hazarded some worda of timid dissuasion ; the rest manifested a passive and sullen repugnance, even when he proclaimed that those -who desired might return, with the shame of having deserted their king, while he would march forward with the volunteers only. After a sus- pense of two days, passed in solitary and silent mortification — he still apparently persisted in his determination, and offered the sacrifice usual previous to the passage of a river. The victims were inauspicious ; he bowed to the will of the gods ; and gave orders for return, to the unanimous and unbounded delight of his army.- To mark the last extremity of his eastward progress, he erected twelve altars of extraordinary height and dimension on the west- ern bank of the Hyphasis, offering sacrifices of thanks to the gods, with the usual festivities, and matches of agility and force. Then, having committed all the territory west of tlie Hyphasis to the government of Porus, he marched back, repassed the Hydraotes and Akesines, and returned to the Hydaspes near the point where ' In the speech which Arrian (v. 25, 26) puts into the mouth of Alexan- der, the most curious point is, the geographical views which he promulgates. '■ We have not much farther now to march (he was standing on the west- ern bank of the Sutledge) to the river Ganges, and the great Eastern Sea which surrounds the whole earth. The Hyrkanian (Caspian) Sea joins on to this great sea on one side, the Persian Gulf on the other; after we have subdued all those nations which lie before us eastward towards the Great Sea, and northward towards the Hyrkanian Sea, we shall then sail by water first to the Persian Gulf, next round Libya to the pillars of Herakles ; from thence wo shall march back all through Libya, and add it to all Asia as parts of our empire." (I here abridge rather than translate). It is remarkable, that while Alexander made so prodigious an error in narrowing the eastern limits of Asia, the Ptolemaic geography, recognized in the time of Columbus, made an error not less in the opposite direction, stretching it too far to the East. It was upon the faith of this last mistake, that Columbus projected his voyage of circumnavigation from Western Europe, expecting to come to the eastern coast of Asia from the West, after no great length of voyage. '^ Arrian, v. 28, 7. The fact that Alexander, under all this insuperable repugnance of his soldiers, still offered the sacrifice preliminary to crossing — is curious as an illustratiin of his character, and was sp'"cially attested by Ptolemy.