Alexander took Bucephalus with him on his famous expeditions into the East, and on one occasion, in Hyrcania, the horse was stolen. The king “thereupon became terrible to see, so great was his rage.” At once an edict was issued that unless the horse were returned to him without delay he would “carry fire and sword throughout the country—north and south, east and west, sparing neither men nor women, nor, if need be, even the smallest children.”
A chronicler of the period, commenting upon this, drily observes that when Alexander's determination became known, “the horse was returned in a hurry!”
“Thus,” remarks Arrian, the great historian, “the horse must have been as dear to Alexander as Alexander was terrible to the barbarians.” As he here employs the word “barbarian” in its offensive signification he evidently despised the people of Hyrcania because they had sense enough to return the stolen horse instead of waiting with their kith and kin to be slain or tortured!
In the descriptions of almost all the great victories won by Alexander the Great, allusion is made to his favourite steed. We are told by Gellius that in the battle that practically witnessed the death of Bucephalus the king had pressed forward recklessly into the thick of the fight, and apparently right into the enemy's lines, and had thus become “the mark for every spear”—a statement which, if literally true, points to an enemy made up of singularly inept marksmen.
“More than one spear,” he goes on, “was buried in the neck and flanks of the horse, but, though at the point of death, and almost drained of blood, he succeeded with a bold dash in carrying the king from the very midst of the foe, and then fell, breathing his last tranquilly now that he knew his master was safe, and as comforted by the knowledge as if he had had the feelings of a human being.”
There is something about the concluding sentence that leads to the belief that Gellius must have been either remarkably imaginative, or else of a more romantic nature than the majority of his contemporaries have given him credit for being. The last line in particular is very precious. After reading it can one feel astonished at Alexander's enthusiasm having carried him to the length of causing him to build a city to the memory of the noble steed, a city to which he gave the name Bucephala?
The handsome bronze discovered in Herculaneum is popularly supposed to represent the figures of Alexander and Bucephalus. The work probably of Lysippus—whom Alexander himself ordered to produce a scene representing a fight during the great battle of Granicus—it is extremely interesting.
A pleasing anecdote told of Alexander and Bucephalus, and more likely to be true than are the majority of the tales that are related of this horse and its owner, is to the effect that upon one occasion the king went to inspect a portrait of himself mounted on his favourite charger, that the distinguished painter, Apelles, had just completed.
Nettled at Alexander's scant praise of his work—for we are told the picture was so lifelike that even Bucephalus neighed when first he saw it—Apelles turned to the king with the rebuke:
“I fear me, your Majesty, that your horse is a better judge of painting than his noble master.”