Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/234

 226 ALEXANDER. In Greece, alas! how ill things ordered are!* Upon this, at last, Alexander, snatching a spear from one of the soldiers, met Clitus as he was coming forward and was putting by the curtain that hung before the door, and ran him through the body. He fell at once with a cry and a groan. Upon which the king's anger immediately vanishing, he came perfectly to himself, and when he saw his friends about him all in a profound silence, he pulled the spear out of the dead body, and would have thrust it into his own throat, if the guards had not held his hands, and by main force earned him away into his chamber, where all that night and the next day he wept bitterly, till being quite spent with lamenting and exclaiming, he lay as it were speechless, only fetching deep sighs. His friends apprehending some harm from his silence, broke into the room, but he took no notice of what any of them said, till Aristander putting him in mind of the vision he had seen concerning Clitus, and the prodigy that fol- lowed, as if all had come to pass by an unavoidable fatal- ity, he then seemed to moderate his grief. They now brought Callisthenes, the philosopher, who was the near friend of Aristotle, and Anaxarchus of Abdera, to him. Callisthenes used moral language, and gentle and sooth- ing means, hoping to find access for words of reason, and get a hold upon the passion. But Anaxarchus, who had always taken a course of his own in philosophy, and had a name for despising and slighting his contemporaries, as When trophies rise for victories in war. Men count the praise not theirs who did the deed, But to the one commander give the meed; Who, sharing with ten thousand more the tight, For one man's service takes the general right. So in the city set with lofty air, Worthless themselves, they scorn their fellows there, Who, better far than these they serve below, Want but the will and boldness for the blow.
 * The offensiveness is in what follows : —