The Invasion of India by Alexander the Great as described by Arrian, Q. Curtius, Diodoros, Plutarch and Justin: Being Translations of such portions of the Works of these and other Classical Authors as describe Alexander's Campaigns in Afghanistan, the Panjâb, Sindh, Gedrosia and Karmania

by John Watson McCrindle

He sailed thence up the river, and next day reached a place of anchorage not far from a salt lake,[325] the peculiar properties of which being unknown to his men, deceived those who thoughtlessly bathed in its waters. For scabs broke out over their bodies, and the disease being contagious, infected even others who had not bathed. The application of oil, however, cured the sores. Then as the country through which the army was to pass was dry and waterless, Alexander sent on Leonnatus in advance to dig wells, while he remained himself with the troops where he was, waiting for the arrival of spring. In the meantime he built a good many cities,[326] and ordered Nearchus and Onesicritus, who were experienced navigators, to sail with the stoutest ships down to the ocean, and proceeding as far as they could with safety to make themselves acquainted with the nature of the sea. Having done this, they might return to join him by sailing up either the same river or the Euphrates.[327]

The winter being now wellnigh over, he burned the useless ships, and marched homeward with his army by land. In the course of nine encampments he reached the land of the Arabites, and in nine more the land of the Cedrosii—a free people, who agreed to surrender after holding a council to consider the subject. As they surrendered voluntarily, nothing was exacted from them except a supply of provisions. On the fifth day thereafter he came to a river, which the natives called the Arabus, and beyond it he found the country barren and waterless. This he traversed, and so entered the dominions of the Oritae. Here he gave Hephaestion the great bulk of the army, and divided the rest of it, consisting of light-armed troops, between Ptolemy, Leonnatus, and himself. These three divisions plundered the Indians simultaneously, and carried off a large booty. Ptolemy devastated the maritime country, while the king himself and Leonnatus between them ravaged all the interior. Here too he built a city, which he peopled with Arachosians.[328] Thence he came to those Indians who inhabit the sea-coast, possessing a great extent of country, and holding no manner of intercourse even with their next neighbours.

This isolation from the rest of the world has brutalised their character, which even by nature is far from humane. They have long claw-like nails and long shaggy hair, for they cut the growth of neither. They live in huts constructed of shells and other offscourings of the sea. Their clothing consists of the skins of wild beasts, and they feed on fish dried in the sun, and on the flesh of sea monsters cast on the shore during stormy weather.[329] The Macedonians having by this time consumed all their provisions, suffered first from scarcity and at last from hunger, so that they were driven to search everywhere for the roots of the palm, which is the only tree that country produces. When even this kind of food failed them, they began to kill their beasts of burden, and did not spare even their horses. They were thus deprived of the means of carrying their baggage, and had to burn the rich spoils taken from their enemies, for the sake of which they had marched to the utmost extremities of the East.

A pestilence succeeded the famine, for the new juices of the unwholesome esculents on which they fed, superadded to the fatigue of marching and the strain of their mental anxiety, had spread various distempers among them, so that they were threatened with destruction whether they remained where they were or resumed their march. If they stayed famine would assail them, and if they advanced a still deadlier enemy, pestilence, would have them in its grasp. The plains were in consequence bestrewn with almost more bodies of the dying than of the dead. Even those who suffered least from the distemper could not keep pace with the main army, because every one believed that the faster he travelled he advanced the more surely to health and safety. The men, therefore, whose strength failed craved help from all and sundry, whether known to them or unknown. But there were no beasts of burden now by which they could be taken on, and the soldiers had enough to do to carry their arms, whilst at the same time the dreadful figure of the calamity impending over themselves was ever before their eyes. Being thus repeatedly appealed to, they could not so much as bear to cast back a look at their comrades, their pity for others being lost in their fears for themselves.

Those, on the other hand, who were thus forsaken, implored the king, in the name of the gods and by the rites of their common religion, to help them in their sore need, and when they found that they vainly importuned deaf ears, their despair turned to frantic rage, so that they fell to imprecations, wishing for those who refused to help them a similar death and similar friends. The king, feeling himself to be the cause of so great a calamity, was oppressed with grief and shame, and sent orders to Phrataphernes, the satrap of the Parthyaeans,[330] to forward him upon camels provisions ready cooked, and he also notified his wants to the governors of the adjacent provinces. In obedience to his orders the supplies were at once forwarded, and the army being thus rescued, from famine at least, reached eventually the frontiers of Cedrosia, a region which alone of all these parts produces everything in great abundance. Here, therefore, he halted for some time to refresh his harassed troops by an interval of repose.

Meanwhile he received a letter from Leonnatus reporting that he had defeated the Oritae, who had brought against him a force of 8000 foot and 300 horse. Word came also from Craterus that he had crushed an incipient rebellion, instigated by two Persian nobles, Ozines and Zariaspes, whom he had seized and placed under custody. On leaving this place Alexander appointed Sibyrtius to be governor of that province in succession to Memnon, who had lately been cut off by some malady, and he then marched into Carmania, which was governed by the satrap Aspastes, whom he suspected of having designed to make himself independent while he was a great distance off in India. Aspastes came to meet Alexander, who, dissembling his resentment, received him graciously, and let him remain in office till he could inquire into the charges preferred against him. Then as the different governors, in compliance with his demands, had sent him a large supply of horses and draught cattle from their respective provinces, he accommodated all his men who wanted them with horses and waggons. He restored also their arms to their former splendour, for they were now not far from Persia, which was a rich country and in the enjoyment of profound peace.

So then Alexander, whose soul aspired to more than human greatness, since he had rivalled, as we said before, the glory which Father Bacchus had achieved by his conquest of India, resolved also to match his reputation by imitating the Bacchanalian procession which that divinity first invented, whether that was a triumph or merely some kind of frolic with which his Bacchanals amused themselves. To this end he ordered the streets through which he was to pass to be strewn with flowers and chaplets, and beakers and other capacious vessels brimming with wine to be placed at all the house doors. Then he ordered waggons to be made, each capable of holding many soldiers, and these to be decorated like tents, some with white canvas and others with costly tapestry.

The king headed the procession with his friends and the members of his select body-guard, wearing on their heads chaplets made of a variety of flowers. The strains of music were to be heard in every part of the procession, here the breathings of the flute, and there the warblings of the lyre. All the army followed, feasting and carousing as they rode in the waggons, which they had decorated as gaily as they possibly could, and had hung round with their choicest and showiest weapons. The king himself and the companions of his revelry rode in a chariot, which groaned under the weight of goblets of gold and large drinking cups made of the same precious metal. The army for seven days advanced in this bacchanalian fashion, so that it might have fallen an easy prey to the vanquished if they had but had a spark of spirit to attack it when in this drunken condition. Why, a thousand men only, if with some mettle in them and sober, could have captured the whole army in the midst of its triumph, besotted as it was with its seven days’ drunken debauch.

But fortune, which assigns to every thing its fame and value in the world’s estimation, turned into glory this gross military scandal; and the contemporaries of Alexander, as well as those who came after his time, regarded it as a wonderful achievement, that his soldiers, though drunk, passed in safety through nations hardly as yet sufficiently subdued, the barbarians taking, what was in reality a piece of great temerity, to be a display of well-grounded confidence.[331] All this grand exhibition, however, had the executioner in its wake, for the satrap Aspastes, of whom we before made mention, was ordered to be put to death.[332] So true is it that cruelty is no obstacle to the indulgence of luxury, nor luxury to the indulgence of cruelty.