Alexander

While Alexander’s cavalry were making such a dangerous and furious fight, the Macedonian phalanx crossed the river and the infantry forces on both sides engaged. The enemy, however, did not resist vigorously, nor for a long time, but fled in a rout, all except the Greek mercenaries. These made a stand at a certain eminence, and asked that Alexander should promise them quarter.

But he, influenced by anger more than by reason, charged foremost upon them and lost his horse, which was smitten through the ribs with a sword (it was not Bucephalas, but another); and most of the Macedonians who were slain or wounded fought or fell there, since they came to close quarters with men who knew how to fight and were desperate. Of the Barbarians, we are told, twenty thousand footmen fell, and twenty-five hundred horsemen.[*](Diodorus (xvii. 21, 6) says that more than ten thousand Persian footmen fell, and not less than two thousand horsemen; while over twenty thousand were taken prisoners.) But on Alexander’s side, Aristobulus says there were thirty-four dead in all, of whom nine were footmen.

Of these, then, Alexander ordered statues to be set up in bronze, and Lysippus wrought them.[*](According to Arrian (Anab. i. 16, 4), about twenty-five of Alexander’s companions, a select corps, fell at the first onset, and it was of these that Alexander ordered statues to be made by Lysippus.) Moreover, desiring to make the Greeks partners in his victory, he sent to the Athenians in particular three hundred of the captured shields, and upon the rest of the spoils in general he ordered a most ambitious inscription to be wrought: Alexander the son of Philip and all the Greeks except the Lacedaemonians from the Barbarians who dwell in Asia. But the drinking vessels and the purple robes and whatever things of this nature he took from the Persians, all these, except a few, he sent to his mother.

This contest at once made a great change in the situation to Alexander’s advantage, so that he received the submission even of Sardis, the bulwark of the barbarian dominion on the sea-coast, and added the rest of the country to his conquests. Halicarnassus alone withstood him, and Miletus, which cities he took by storm[*](The siege and capture of these cities occupied Alexander till the late autumn of 334 B.C.) and subdued all the territories about them. Then he was in doubt as to his future course.

Many times he was eager to encounter Dareius and put the whole issue to hazard, and many times he would make up his mind to practice himself first, as it were, and strengthen himself by acquiring the regions along the sea with their resources, and then to go up against that monarch. Now, there is in Lycia, near the city of Xanthus, a spring, which at this time, as we are told, was of its own motion upheaved from its depths, and overflowed, and cast forth a bronze tablet bearing the prints of ancient letters, in which it was made known that the empire of the Persians would one day be destroyed by the Greeks and come to an end.