Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/188

 180 ALEXANDER. extolled it with that height of admiration, as if it were no less than a miracle, and an extraordinary effect of di- vine favor, that the waves which usually come rolling in violently from the main, and hardly ever leave so much as a narrow beach under the steep, broken cliffs at any time uncovered, should on a sadden retire to afford him passage. Menander, in one of his comedies, alludes to this marvel when he says, Was Alexander ever favored more ? Each man I wish for meets me at my door, And should I ask for passage through the sea, The sea I doubt not would retire for me. But Alexander himself in his epistles mentions noth- ing unusual in this at all, but says he went from Phaselis, and passed through what they call the Ladders.* At Phaselis he stayed some time, and finding the statue of Theodectes, who was a native of this town and was now dead, erected in the market-place, after he had supped, having drunk jiretty plentifully, he went and danced about it, and crowned it with garlands, honoring not un- gracefully in his sport, the memory of a philosopher whose conversation he had formerly enjoyed, when he was Aristotle's scholar. Then he subdued the Pisidians who made head against him, and conquered the Phrygians, at whose chief city Gordium, which is said to be the seat of the ancient Mi- das, he saw the famous chariot fastened with cords made of the rind of the cornel-tree, which whosoever should untie, the inhabitants had a tradition, that for him was reserved the empire of the world. Most authors tell the story that Alexander, finding himself unable to untie the of the headland, round the foot of it, and says, Alexander found the which the narrow strip of beach of- waters nearly breasthigh.
 * Mount Climax was the name fered a passage. Strabo describes