Beat, Anaxarchus is in heav’n with Jove.
Hereafter Proserpine will rack your bones,
And say, Thus perish, you accursed beater.
III. Anaxarchus, on account of the evenness of his temper and the tranquillity of his life, was called the Happy. And he was a man to whom it was very easy to reprove men and bring them to temperance. Accordingly, he produced an alteration in Alexander who thought himself a God, for when he saw the blood flowing from some wound that he had received, he pointed to him with his finger, and said, “This is blood, and not:—
“Such stream as issues from a wounded God;
Pure emanation, uncorrupted flood,
Unlike our gross, diseas’d, terrestrial blood.”[131]
But Plutarch says that it was Alexander himself who quoted these lines to his friends.
They also tell a story that Anaxarchus once drank to him, and then showed the goblet, and said:—
Shall any mortal hand dare wound a God?