Philotas, the son of Parmenio, and certain others were arraigned
before the army on the charge of conspiring against the king's
life. They were condemned and put to death. Not satisfied
with procuring this, Alexander had Parmenio himself, who
had been left in command in Media, put to death by secret
orders. It is perhaps the worst crime, because the most
cold-blooded and ungenerous, which can be laid to his
charge. By the winter of 329-328 Alexander had reached the
Kabul valley at the foot of the Paropamisadae (Hindu Kush).
The ordinarily received chronology makes Alexander reach
the Kabul valley in the winter of 330-329. That to fit
the actions and distances covered by Alexander into such a
scheme, assuming that he went by Seistan and Kandahar, would
involve physical impossibilities has been pointed out by
Count Yorck v. Wartenburg and Mr D. G. Hogarth. Kaerst and
Beloch continue to give the ordinary chronology untroubled.
Invasion of Northern India.
In the spring of 328 Alexander crossed the Hindu Kush into
Bactria and followed the retreat of Bessus across the Oxus and
into Sogdiana (Bokhara). Here Bessus was at last caught and
treated with the barbaric cruelty which the rule of the old
Persian monarchy prescribed for rebels. Till the spring of
327 Alexander was moving to and fro in Bactria and Sogdiana,
beating down the recurrent rebellions and planting Greek
cities. Just as in 335 he had crossed the Danube, so he now
made one raid across the frontier river, the Jaxartes (Sir
Daria), to teach the fear of his name to the outlying peoples
of the steppe (summer 328). And meanwhile the rift between
Alexander and his European followers continued to show itself in
dark incidents--the murder of Clitus at Maracanda (Samarkand),
when Alexander struck down an old friend, both being hot
with wine; the claim that Alexander should be approached with
prostration (proskynesis), urged in the spring of 327, and
opposed boldly by the philosopher Callisthenes, Aristotle's
nephew, who had come in the king's train; the conspiracy of
the pages at Bactria, which was made an occasion for putting
Callisthenes to death. It was now that Alexander completed
the conquest of the provinces north of the Hindu Kush by
the reduction of the last mountain strongholds of the native
princes. In one of them he captured Roxana, the daughter
of Oxyartes, whom he made his wife. Before the summer of
327 he had once more crossed the Hindu Kush on his way to
India (for the campaigns in the N.E. see F. von Schwarz,
Alex. d. Grossen Feldzuge in Turkestan, 1893, v.).
Whilst the heavier troops moved down the Kabul valley to
Pencelaotis (Charsadda) under Perdiccas and Hephaestion,
Alexander with a body of lighter-armed troops and cavalry pushed
up the valleys which join the Kabul from the north--through
the regions now known as Bajour, Swat and Buner, inhabited
by Indian hill peoples, as fierce then against the western
intruder as their Pathan successors are against the British
columns. The books give a number of their ``cities''
reduced by Alexander--walled mountain villages which can
in some cases be identified more or less certainly with
places where the clans are established to-day. The crowning
exploit was the reduction of Aornus,5 a stronghold perched
on a precipitous summit above the Indus, which it was said
that Heracles had failed to take. How much of the story of
Alexander's discovery of the sacred mountain of the Nysa and
the traces of Dionysus is due to the invention of Aristobulus
and Clitarchus (Arrian did not find it in Ptolemy) we cannot
say. Meantime Perdiccas and Hephaestion had built a bridge
over the Indus, and by this in the spring of 326 Alexander
passed into the Punjab (at Ohind, 16 m. above Attock, according
to Foucher, Notes sur la geogr. anc. du Gandhara,
1902). The country into which he came was dominated by three
principalities, that of Ambhi (Gr. Omphis, Curt. viii. 12.
6) between the Indus and the Hydaspes (Jhelum, Jehlam),
centred in the great city of Takkasila (Gr. Taxila), that
of the Paurara rajah (Gr. Porus) between the Hydaspes and
Acesines (Chenab), and that of Abhisara (Gr. Abisares)
between the same two rivers higher up, on the confines of
Kashmir (Stein, Rajatarangini, transl. bk. i. 180, v.
217). The kings of Taxila and Porus were at enmity, and for
this cause the invader could reckon upon Omphis as a firm
ally. Porus was prepared to contest the passage of the
Hydaspes with all his strength. Abisares preferred to play
a double game and wait upon events. Alexander reached the
Hydaspes just as the rains broke, when the river was already
swollen. Porus held the opposite bank with a powerful army,
including 200 elephants. Alexander succeeded in taking
a part of his forces across the river higher up during a
night of torrential rain, and then he fought the fourth
and last of his pitched battles in Asia, the one which put
to proof more shrewdly than any of the others the quality
of the Macedonian army as an instrument of war, and yet
again emerged victorious. Porus fell sorely wounded into
his hands.6 Porus had saved his honour, and now Alexander
tried, and not in vain, to gain him as a friend. When he
continued his progress eastwards across the Acesines, Porus
was an active ally. Alexander moved along close under the
hills. After crossing the Hydraotes (Ravi) he once
more came into contact with hostile tribes, and the work of
storming petty towns began again. Then the Hyphasis (Beas)
was reached, and here the Macedonian army refused to go any
farther. It was a bitter mortification to Alexander, before
whose imagination new vistas had just opened out eastwards,
where there beckoned the unknown world of the Ganges and
its splendid kings. For three days the will of king and
people were locked in antagonism; then Alexander gave way;
the long eastward movement was ended; the return began.
The return.
Alexander left the conquered portion of India east of the
Indus to be governed under Porus, Omphis of Taxila, and
Abisares, the country west of the Indus under Macedonian
governors, and set out to explore the great river to its mouth
(for the organization of the Indian provinces, see especially
Niese, vol. i. pp. 500 f.). The fleet prepared on the
Hydaspes sailed in October, while a land army moved along the
bank. The confluence of the Hydaspes and Acesines passed,
the Macedonians were once more in a region of hostile tribes
with towns to be stormed. It was at one of these, a town
of the Malli, that a memorable incident occurred, such as
characterized the personality of Alexander for all succeeding
time. He leapt from the wall with only three companions
into the hostile town, and, before the army behind him
could effect an entrance, lay wounded almost to death.7
He recovered and beat down the resistance of the tribes,
leaving them annexed to the Macedonian satrapy west of the
Indus. Below the confluence of the Punjab rivers into the
single stream of the Indus the territory of loose tribes
was succeeded by another group of regular principalities,
under the rajahs called by the Greeks Musicanus, Oxycanus and
Sambus. These opposed a national resistance to the Macedonians,
the fires of which were fanned by the Brahmins, but still
the strong arm of the western people prevailed. The rajah of
Patala at the apex of the Indus delta abandoned his country and
fled. It was the high summer of 325 when Alexander reached
Patala. From here he explored both arms of the delta
to the ocean, now seen by the Macedonians for the first
time. He had determined that the Indus fleet should be
used to explore this new world and try to find a waterway
between the Indus and the Persian Gulf. A great part of the
land-forces had been already sent off under Craterus in the
earlier summer to return west by Kandahar and Seistan; the
fleet was to sail under the Greek Nearchus from the Indus
mouth with the winter monsoon; Alexander himself with the rest
of the land-forces set out in October to go by the coast of
Baluchistan, through the appalling sand-wastes of the Mekran.8
He would seem to have kept down to the coast until the
headland of Ras Malan was reached, scattering before him
the bands of Arabitae and Oritae who were the inhabitants
of this well-provisioned tract. For the 150 miles between
Ras Malan and Pasni Alexander was compelled by the natural
barriers to march inland, and it was here that his troops
sank under the horrors of heat and thirst and sand. The coast
once regained, the way was easy; no such desert had to be
traversed, when Alexander again struck inland for the chief
city of the Gedrosians (Pura), and thence made his way into
Carmania. Here the spent troops rested; here the army
of Craterus joined them, and Nearchus came to announce
his safe arrival at the entrance of the Persian Gulf.9
The machine of empire had not functioned altogether smoothly
while the king had been absent, and on Alexander's re-appearance
many incapables and rogues in high office had to be replaced
by better men. In Carmania, in Persis, complaints from the
provinces continued to reach him, as well as the news of
disorders in Macedonia and Greece. New orders and appointments
served to bring the empire into hand again, and at Susa in
the spring of 324 Alexander rested, the task of conquering and
compassing the Achaemenian realm achieved. The task of its
internal reorganization now began to occupy him--changes, for
instance, in the military system which tended to assimilate
Macedonians and Orientals. The same policy of fusion was
furthered by the great marriage festival at Susa, when
Alexander took two more wives from the Persian royal house,
married a number of his generals to Oriental princesses, and
even induced as many as he could of the rank-and-file to take
Asiatic wives. This policy did not allay the discontent of
the Macedonian army, and when Alexander in the summer of 324
moved to the cooler region of Media, an actual mutiny of the
Macedonians broke out on the way at Opis on the Tigris. It
was occasioned by the discharge of the Macedonian veterans,
and only the personal magnetism of Alexander and his threat to
entrust himself altogether to the Orientals availed to quell
it. At Ecbatana the death of Hephaestion for a time plunged
Alexander into a passion of mourning. But by the winter
(324-323) he was again active, bringing the hill- tribes on
the S.W. border of Media, the Cossaei, into subjection. In
the spring of 323 he moved down to Babylon, receiving on the
way embassies from lands as far as the confines of the known
world, for the eyes of all nations were now turned with fear
or wonder to the figure which had appeared with so superhuman
an effect upon the world's stage. The embassy from Rome,
however, is almost certainly a later, and an inevitable,
invention. The exploration of the waterways round about the
empire was Alexander's immediate concern, the discovery of
the presumed connexion of the Caspian with the Northern Ocean,
the opening of a maritime route from Babylon to Egypt round
Arabia. The latter enterprise Alexander designed to conduct
in person; under his supervision was prepared in Babylon an
immense fleet, a great basin dug out to contain 1000 ships,
and the water- communications of Babylonia taken in hand.
Innovations were carried out in the tactical system of the
army which were to modify considerably the methods of future
battle-fields. At last all was ready; the 20th of the month
Daesius (? June 5) was fixed for the king's setting forth.
