Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/194

 186 ALEXANDER. though remarkably handsome and well proportioned, he took no further notice than to say jestingly, that Per- sian women were terrible eye-sores. And he himself, retaliating, as it were, by the display of the beauty of his own temperance and self-control, bade them be re- moved, as he would have done so many lifeless images. When Philoxenus, his lieutenant on the sea-coast, wrote to him to know if he would buy two young boys, of great beauty, whom one Theodoras, a Tarentine, had to sell, he was so offended, that he often expostulated with his friends, what baseness Philoxenus had ever observed in him, that he should presume to make him such a re- proachful offer. And he immediately wrote him a very sharp letter, telling him Theodorus and his merchandise might go with his good-will to destruction. Nor was he less severe to Hagnon, who sent him word he would buy a Corinthian youth named Crobylus, as a present for him. And hearing that Damon and Timotheus, two of Parmenio's Macedonian soldiers, had abused the wives of some strangers who were in his pay, he wrote to Parme- nio, charging him strictly, if he found them guilty, to put them to death, as wild beasts that were only made for the mischief of mankind. In the same letter he added, that he had not so much as seen or desired to see the wife of Darius, no, nor suffered anybody to speak of her beauty before him. He was wont to say, that sleep and the act of generation chiefly made him sensible that he was mortal ; as much as to say, that weariness and pleasure proceed both from the same frailty and imbecility of human nature. In his diet, also, he was most temperate, as appears, omitting many other circumstances, by what he said to Ada, whom he adopted, with the title of mother, and after- wards created queen of Caria. For when she out of kindness sent him every day many curious dishes, and