Darius, seeing that all was lost and that his chariot, wedged in among dead bodies high as the shoulders of the horses, was unable either to advance or to turn back, hastily leaped from his seat and seizing a riderless mare, he galloped as best he could over the bodies of the dying and the dead and thus escaped from the battlefield.
The break in the friendship between Alexander and his ablest general, Parmenio, began with the battle of Arbela. Was there jealousy, cruel as the grave, in the heart of the older man as he saw success after success crown the brow of the young commander? Granicus, Issus, Arbela—Europe, Asia, Africa, the world—had gone down successively under the Conqueror. Jealously is incipient hate.
“He who ascends to mountain heights will find
The loftiest peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow;
He who would conquer or subdue mankind,
Must look down on the hate of those below.”
—Byron.
Human, Too Human.
All that the literatures of the world hold treasured in amber; all that life, the primal fount of literature, holds as its human heritage—find fitting application to Alexander the Great. The color scale—from white thro’ tints to standard, and from standard thro’ shades to black—of every emotion and passion of the heart of man is fixed fadelessly upon the name and fame of Alexander.
Yet how human and dearly human it all is! We understand it today even as Callisthenes understood it, and as the age B. C. and the early age and the middle age understood it. We haven’t advanced even yet very far from the primitive. The heart that in drunken rage slew Clitus his friend, and then mourned his deed inconsolable in his tent for three days—is easily cognizable today.