[12] This soothsayer was Aristander, who was attached to the retinue of the king, and accompanied him in all his campaigns.
[13] Chœrilus was a notoriously bad poet, to whom Alexander committed the task of celebrating his achievements, a curious contradiction, Horace thinks, to the discrimination which he showed in forbidding any one to paint his portrait except Apelles, or to make a statue of him except Lysippus. The joke about Chœrilus was that, having agreed to receive a gold piece for every good verse and a stripe for every bad one, the balance against him was so heavy that he was beaten to death.
[14] The oracle had declared that the first of the Greeks who should leap on shore in the expedition against Troy would be slain. Protesilaüs, a Thessalian prince, unhesitatingly took the doom upon himself, leapt from his ship and was slain by Hector.
[15] The animal was probably stupefied with drugs. Otherwise it is difficult to account for its standing still. It was considered a most disastrous omen when an ox attempted to escape, and the occurrence was probably rare. It must have happened very frequently unless some such means had been used to prevent it.
[16] There was even then a fierce dispute about the site of Homer’s Troy. Curiously enough it has been recently renewed, but the reader need not be troubled with it either in its ancient or its modern form.
[17] The phalanx was a development due to the military genius of Philip of Macedon on the tactics adopted by Epaminondas. This great Theban commander massed his troops in a heavy column which he brought to bear on one point of the enemy’s line. But the Theban column was powerless to deal with the phalanx. At Chæronea it was utterly broken by it, all the front rank soldiers falling on the ground. They were met by an impassable chevaux de frise. Polybius writes (the passage is a fragment of his twenty-ninth book): “The consul Lucius Æmilius [Paullus] had never seen a phalanx till he saw it in the army of Perseus on this occasion [the battle of Pydna]; and he often confessed to some of his friends at Rome subsequently that he had never beheld anything more alarming and terrible than the Macedonian phalanx; and yet he had been, if any one ever had, not only a spectator, but an actor in many battles.” It is interesting to note that the historian was himself one of the “friends at Rome,” to whom the great general related this experience. “It is impossible,” he writes elsewhere, “to confront a charge of the phalanx, so long as it retains its proper formation and strength.” But he goes on to show that it could not do this except when it could choose its own ground.
[18] Historians are unusually well agreed about the total of the force which Alexander carried over into Asia. The highest numbers are 43,000 infantry and 6,500 cavalry; the lowest, 30,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry.
[19] By this phrase are meant the seven nobles who conspired to slay the Magian usurper, who, after the death of Cambyses, personated the dead Smerdis, and held the Persian throne for a few months. Darius, one of the seven, became king, but to his fellow-conspirators and their descendants certain privileges, as immunity from taxes and free access to the person of the king, were accorded in perpetuity.
[20] The battle of the Granicus was fought on May 25th.
[21] Parmenio had been in command of the other wing of the army.