CHAPTER LV. THE CONQUEST OF INDIA
After the conquest of the Bactrian satrapy, there remained only one province of the Persian empire into which Alexander had not yet carried his arms. Already, indeed, before he crossed the Paropamisus, he had made himself master of a great part of the country which the Persians called India, and perhaps had very nearly reached the utmost limits within which the authority of the Great King was acknowledged in the latter years of the monarchy. But the power of the first Darius had certainly been extended much farther eastward. At the battle of Arbela the Greeks for the first time saw elephants, which they heard had been brought from the banks of the Indus. To Alexander and his companions India appeared from a distance as a new world, of indefinite extent, and abounding in wonders and riches. Even without any other inducement, he must eagerly have desired to explore and subdue it.
The king of Taxila [or Takshasila] had offered his alliance to Alexander, and sought aid from him against a powerful neighbour; and thus Alexander ascertained that the state of things in this part of India was highly favourable to his projected invasion. Through some revolutions, no record of which has been preserved, a great part of it had in Alexander’s time fallen under the dominion of three princes, Taxiles and two who were kinsmen and bore the name of Porus. The most powerful of these was the immediate neighbour of Taxiles; his territories lay to the east of the Hydaspes. It was against him that the king of Taxila sought to strengthen himself by an alliance with the Macedonian conqueror.
[327-326 B.C.]
Alexander marched into India at the head of 120,000 foot and 15,000 horse. We must suppose that at least 70,000 of these were Asiatic troops. The summer of 327 had scarcely begun, when he crossed the mountains and advanced to the banks of the Cophen, the river formed by the confluence of the Kabul river with the Panjshir, a larger stream, which meets it from the northwest. Here, in conformity to his summons, he was met by Taxiles, and by several chiefs from the country west of the Indus, bringing presents, such as were accounted the most honourable; and as he expressed a wish for elephants, they promised all they possessed, which however amounted to no more than five-and-twenty.
Alexander now divided his forces. He sent Hephæstion and Perdiccas, with a strong division, accompanied by the Indian chiefs, down the vale of the Cophen to the Indus, to prepare a bridge for the passage of the army, while he himself directed his march into the mountains north of the Cophen, and included between it and the Indus. Here lay the territories of three warlike tribes—the Aspasians or Hippasians, Guræans, and Assacenians. The operations of this campaign, which occupied the rest of the year, do not require to be related here with all the military details. He ascended the rugged vale of the Choes; and gathered a vast booty, including forty thousand captives, and between three and four hundred thousand head of cattle, from which he selected some of the finest to be sent into Macedonia. He then, with some difficulty, effected the passage of the deep and rapid Guræus, and entered the territory of the Assacenians. Alexander accepted the surrender of Massaga, the capital, on the condition that the mercenaries should join his army. But they discovered a degree of patriotism which he had not looked for. They were so averse from the thought of turning their arms against their countrymen, that, having marched out, and encamped on a hill by themselves, they meditated making their escape in the night. Alexander was apprised of their design, and, though they had not begun to execute it, with less generosity than might have been expected from him, even if mercy was out of the question, surrounded the hill with his troops, and cut them all to pieces. Then, holding the capitulation to have been broken, he stormed the defenceless city, where the chief’s mother and daughter fell into his hands.
The inhabitants of Bazira fled to a place of refuge, which was deemed impregnable, and soon became crowded with fugitives from all parts of the country. This was a hill fort on the right bank of the Indus, not far above its junction with the Cophen. Its Indian name seems to have been slightly distorted by the Greeks, according to their usual practice, into that of Aornus, which answered to its extraordinary height, as above the flight of a bird. It was precipitous on all sides, and accessible only by a single path cut in the rock, though in one direction it was connected with a range of hills. But its summit was an extensive plain of fruitful soil, partly clothed with wood, and containing copious springs. The traditions of the country concerning its insurmountable strength seem to have given occasion to the fable, which spread through the Macedonian camp, that Hercules himself had assailed it without success. Alexander did not need this inducement to excite him to the undertaking. It had been a principle, to which he owed most of his conquests, to show that he was not to be deterred by any natural difficulties; and he resolved to make the Aornus his own.
He had not long arrived at it, before he received information of a rugged and difficult track that led up to the top of a hill, separated by a hollow of no great depth, though of considerable width, from the rock. By this path he sent Ptolemy, with a body of light troops, who reached the summit before he was noticed by the garrison, and immediately, as he had been ordered, threw up an entrenchment, and by a fire-signal announced his success to the camp below. The Indians attempted in vain to dislodge him from his position: and the next day Alexander, by a hard struggle, notwithstanding their vigorous resistance, joined him there with the rest of the army. He now availed himself of his superior numbers, and began to carry a mound across the hollow. He took part in the work with his own hands, and the whole army, animated by his example and exhortations, prosecuted it with restless assiduity. But the Indians, astonished at the intrepidity with which a handful of men had seized this vantage-ground, and alarmed by the progress of the work, began to despair of resistance, and to meditate flight. But while they were stealing out of the place, Alexander scaled the deserted wall with a part of his guard, entered the fortress, and chased the fugitives with great slaughter into the plains below. The capture of the rock which had baffled the assaults of Hercules was celebrated with solemn sacrifices, and supplied a fresh theme for the eloquence of Agis and Anaxarchus.
It was in the course of the campaign in the highlands between the Cophen and the Indus, and, it seems, in the territory of the Guræans, that the Macedonians were struck with some appearances in the productions of the soil, and the manners of the natives, and probably also by the sound of some names which reminded them of the legends of Dionysus, whose fabulous conquests were now so often mentioned by Alexander’s flatterers, for the purpose of exalting the living hero, whom they proposed to deify, above the god. And so we read that Alexander came to a city called Nysa, which boasted of Dionysus as its founder, and, as evidence of the fact, showed the ivy and laurel which he had planted—a sight new to the Macedonians, since they had left their native land. Alexander, Arrian observes, was gratified by their story, and wished it to be believed that he was then treading in the steps of Dionysus; for he hoped that the Macedonians, roused by emulation, would be the more willing to bear the fatigues of the expedition in which he purposed to pass the utmost distance that had been reached by the divine conqueror. If we may depend on this observation, it would prove that he had not yet thought of any limit to his own progress, within the farthest bounds of the eastern world.
It cannot have been later than March 326 when he crossed the Indus, probably a little above its junction with the Cophen. He celebrated his arrival on the eastern bank by a solemn sacrifice, and soon after met Taxiles, who had come out, with his army and his elephants, to greet him, and conduct him to his capital, with professions of the most entire devotion. It seems to have been during his stay at Taxila, that Alexander was first enabled to gratify his curiosity concerning the doctrines and practices of the Indian ascetics. He had already witnessed something similar at Corinth, where he found Diogenes living in habits of simplicity not unworthy of the Eastern gymnosophists—as the Greeks called the sages who exposed themselves almost naked to the inclemency of the Indian sky. He is reported to have said that, had he not been Alexander, he would have been Diogenes. The independence of a man who had nothing to ask of his royal visitor but that he would not stand between him and the sun, struck him as only less desirable than the conquest of the world; and he conceived a like admiration for the Indian quietists, who manifested a kindred spirit. He was desirous of carrying away with him some of the Indian sophists as companions of Anaxarchus.
After solemn sacrifices and games, Alexander resumed his march. He was informed that Porus had collected his forces on the left bank of the Hydaspes, to defend the passage; and he therefore sent Cœnus back to the Indus, with orders to have the vessels in which the army had crossed sawed each into two or three pieces, and transported to the Hydaspes. He left all his invalids at Taxila, and strengthened his army with five thousand Indians, who were commanded by Taxiles in person. Having arrived on the right bank of the Hydaspes, he beheld the whole army of Porus, with between two hundred and three hundred elephants, drawn up on the other side.
To distract the attention of Porus, he divided his army into several columns, with which he made frequent excursions in various directions, as if uncertain where he should attempt a passage.