No More Learning

5 So Tomaschek interprets their Greek name 'AS palcal. 8. v. 'Adraistai' in
Pauly-Wissowa.
6 In most English books, we are told that the Cathaei (Kshatriyas) were allied
with the Malli and Oxydracae. (This is assumed by Dr Vincent Smith, The autonomous
tribes conquered by Alerānder, in the J. R. A. S. for 1903, p. 685 f. ). As a matter of
fact the phrase in Arrian V, 22, 2, και τονται κατα τα αντα Οξνδραkαι κτλ. does not
mean. The Cathae were allied with the Oxydracae etc. ,' but (as Mr. M'Crindle
correctly translates) 'The Catheans enjoyed the highest reputation for courage. . . and
the same war-like spirit characterised the Oxydracae etc. ' There is no evidence for
a confederation.
7 The site is uncertain. Anspach conjectures Jandiāla.


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Xv]
RĀJA SAUBHŪTI
333
found that the invaders drew the siege tight around it in deadly fashion.
But it was eventually not foreigners only whom they saw from their
walls. Their old Paurava enemy arrived in the Macedonian camp with a
force of elephants and five thousand Indian soldiers. He arrived in
time to see the Macedonian storm the city. Seventeen thousand of
the defenders, we are told, fell by the sword, whilst the captives surpassed
the enormous figure of 70,000. The inhabitants of other towns of the
Kshatriyas fed in a mass, althovgh Alexander sent his clever Greek
secretary, Eumenes of Cardia, to assure them of his clemency if they
submitted. Many succeeded in getting out of the country, but some
500 were overtaken by the Europeans and killed. Sangala was razed to
the ground, and the country made over to the Paurava.
Somewhere near the Kshatriya country, it would seem, lay the
principality, of the rāja Saubhūti, worthy to be set beside the Paurava, as
he is described to us, for goodliness of person and stature and for the
vigour of his administration'. In later days he struck coins with his name
in Greek as Sophytes? . It was now apparently that he first saw the
Yavanas as the invaders of his territory and had the prudence to make
friends with them. He entertained the Macedonian king with a splendour;
the strength and tenacity of his great hunting dogs, of which he gave
an exhibition, was what impressed the Europeans more than anything
else.
Still eastwards the European host marched and came to the fifth
river, the Hyphasis (modern Beās). The Sutlej remained (some 80 miles by
the road from Gurdāspur to Rūpar) as the only considerable river of the
Indus system after that to cross ; and then another river-system would be
reached, that which empties itself through the Ganges into the Eastern Sea.
Already the ears of Alexander were filled with accounts of the great
kingdom of Magadha on the Ganges, of its populousness and splendour and
power. His chief informant apparently was a rāja of the neighbourhood,
Bhagala, who had submitted to the invadert. Was it an enterprise which a
man in his senses could undertake, to attempt the subjugation of such
a country with an army already nearly three thousand miles from its home?
Some modern historians maintain that Alexander had too sound a sense of
1 The site of the domain of Saubhùti cannot be determined more precisely from
the contradictory statements of the Greek authorities. Dr. Vincent Smith uses the
statement of Strabo as to the mountain of salt (Strabo XV, C. 700) to fix the principality
to the Salt Range between the. Jhelum and the Indus. Against this identification is
the difficuty that the contradictory statements in sources all agree at any rate
in placing the principality east of the Jhelum. Even in Arrian VI, 2, 2 the royal
seat of Sopeithes is on the left bank of the river. The salt mines of Mandi, on the othe:
hand, to which Droysen refers, lie, one would think, much too far to the east.
2 V. inf. p. 348 and Pl. I, 17.
3 Diod. XVII, 91, 92.
4 Phegelis in MSS. of Curtius IX, 2, 2 ; Phegeus in Diod. XVII, 93. See Sylvain
Levi, Journ. Asiat. Sme ser, vol. XV (1890), p. 239.
our


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334
[сн.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
possibilities to have thought of it. But the ancient historians affirm
that he saw himself in anticipation arriving victorious at the utmost
bound of the earth on the Eastern Sea. We may believe that his astounding
success had indeed made nothing seem impossible to him, that his
judgment of things was no longer completely sane : we may also believe
that, although he knew some great and powerful nations stiil remained to
be subdued, before he could round off his conquest of the eastern world, he
did not know the full extent of the East - that further India, for instance,
and China lay together outside his knowledged. It is not unlikely that he
may seriously have thought it practicable to make himself king of the whole
inhabited earth. But on the banks of the Hyphasis (Beās), somewhere near
the modern Gurdāspur, an imperious check awaited him. The army,
which had followed him thus far, suddenly struck : all the personal
magnetism, all the stirring and indignant appeals of the king could
not induce the stout Macedonian countrymen to go a step further. For
three days he shut himself in his tent, and the battle of wills remained
in grim deadlock. At last the king recognised the bitter necessity of giving
up his ambitions half-fulfilled. To save his face probably, he offered
sacrifice again to the Greek gods, as preliminary to crossing the river
and then discovered that the omens were unfavourable. After that he
gave the word for the retreat. But first, in his romantic imaginative
vein, he made the army build twelve gigantic altars, like towers, upon the
banks of the Hyphasis, to show to future times how far into the East
Alexander had come. One account says that later on the Mauryan kings
used to offer sacrifice in the Yavana manner upon those altars. All trace
of them has long since disappeared.
So India, about the end of July 326 B c. ), saw the wave of European
invasion, which had washed thus far, begin to ebb, back to the Hydraõtes,
back to the Acesines, where a certain number of the Greek veterans were
ordered to fix themselves for good in the city which Hephaestion had been
building, back to the Hydaspes. The thoughts of Alexander were now
turning in another direction. If the most easterly waters of the Indus river-
system were for the time being to bound his empire, he would at any rate
pass along his frontier, pursue the course of the Indus to the Ocean and
return by the sea-board to Babylon. He had to organise the conquered
1 How hazy Alexander's geographical notions were at this time is shown by the
statement of Nearchus (who was in a position to know) that Alexander, on first
coming to the Acesines and seeing Egyptian beans there, supposed that this was the
same river which ultimately turned into the Nile. Strabo XV, C. 696.
2 Plut. Alex. 62. It is doubtful whether these altars were on the right or left
bank of the river. Pliny, VI, $ 62, puts them on the eastern bank, but the historians
say nothing of Alexander's crossing the Hyphasis. Plutarch's phrase about the
Mauryan kings, daßalvoutes(not daß UTES) ospouta: is ambiguous.
3 Anspach, note 269.


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Xv ]
THE RETURN
335
portion of India on a basis that would endure when the European army had
departed. And he forecast a different Punjab from the one he had found.
Instead of a multiplicity of rival princes and independent tribes, all the
country from the Hydaspes to the Hyphasis was to form one kingdom
under the Paurava. Another large principality was created for Āmbhi west
of the Hydaspes. Similarly in Kashmir, the rāja of Abhisāra, whose
embassies and presents had at last convinced Alexander of his loyalty, was
given extended authority, and his neighbouring rāja of Uraçā (Hazāra),
called by the Greeks Arsaces, was ordered to regard him as overlord. But
if the free tribes, as independent powers, were suppressed, Alexander would
leave a new element in the country, which might to some extent counter-
poise the power of the kings—the new cities of European men, or
Europeans and Indians mingled, plants of Hellenism in a strange soil. The
rudimentary walls of Bucephala and Nicaea on the Hydaspes Alexander
found on his return damaged by the rains, and the army had to build them
stronger before it moved in the new direction down the river.
The autumn at the new cities was spent in preparing a fleet? to trans-
port a part of the army and the horses by water. The conduct of this was
entrusted to the Cretun Nearchus. The rest of the army, now swelled by
reinforcements from the West? , was to accompany them on either bank.
Philip, the satrap of the province between the Hydaspes and the Hindu
Kush, was ordered to follow three days' journey behind with the force
under his command. The scene at setting out is described to us in some
detail. It was probably a day in November 326 B. C. At day break the king,
standing in the sight of all on the prow of his vessel, poured from a golden
bowl libations to the Rivers – the Hydaspes, the Acesines, and the Indus-
to Heracles his ancestor, to the Egyptain god Amun, and the deities, Greek
or foreign, whom he was wont to invoke. Then a trumpet sounded for the
start. The fleet presented a picture of impressive order, the grouping and
intervals being precisely regulated. But the extraordinary mixture of nation-
alities and garb must have satisfied the eye with variety and colour, while to
the ear the noise of the rowing and the shouts in a hundred different
tongues made a bewildering volume of sound. Amongst the crews of the
boats the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, and the Cypriots were prominent.
Besides the Macedonian and greek troops, the Indians ran in crowds along
the banks, speeding the fleet with songs, 'in their barbaric way,' says the
Greek author. 'No nation,' he explains, ‘is fonder of singing and dancing
than the Indian3. '
This novel armada glided down the Hydaspes, past jungles and
villages, and in ten days from the start reached the confluence of the
1 On the varying statements as to the numbers of ships, see Anspach, note 278.
Anspach supposes that about a thousand is the most probable estimate.
2 Diod. XVII, 95, 4, Curt. IX, 3, 21. 3 Arr. VI, 3, 5,


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336
[CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Hydaspes and the Acesines. Two divisions under Hephaestion and Craterus
respectively marched along the two banks, and the satrap Philip, whc had
overtaken the fleet at its first balting, had been sent across to the Acesines
to march down this river to the confluence. Some of the peoples along the
banks - such as the Sibae, whose garb of shaggy skins and clubs made the
Europeans take them for descendants of the companions of their own
Heracles - offered submission. The resistance of others was easily
suppressed. But further down stream a strong confederation of free
tribes was awaiting the Europeans with a high courage. These were a
tribe, called Mālavas (in Greek Malloi)', between the lower Hydraõtes
and the Acesines, and the Kshudrakas (in Greek Oxydrakai) higher up the
Hydraõtes, between that river and the Hyphasis. The rapids at the
meeting of the Hydaspas and the Acesines gave some trouble to the fleet,
and two boats foundered. On the frontiers of the Mālavas the whole
European force - the fleet and the three divisions of Craterus, Hephaestion,
and Philip re-assembled. The fleet was now sent on under Nearchus three
days in advance with orders to wait for the land-force at the next
confluence, that of the Acesines and the Hydraõtes. The land-force was
broken up anew into different divisions for the attack on the Mālavas.
With a suddenness which disconcerted their plans the Indian tribesmen
found Alexander in their midst. The first of their cities to be attacked
was on the edge of a tract of sandy desert, from which one morning early
a force of mounted Macedonians, with the king as its head, broke
upon it, having ridden all night across the waste. And here first was
enacted what was repeated in city after city of the confederacy-the
attack, the capture, the massacre. Many of the inhabitants of these places
escaped to the jungles or across the Hydraõtes : many were captured by
the Macedonians in their flight and slaughtered. It was at the storming of
one of these towns that the king exposed his person in a way which
nearly cost his life. We may probably infer that the morale of the
European army, fighting across the interminable spaces of this strange
land, had begur ') decline, that such desperate expedients on the part
of the great leader were necessary. Alexander, reaching the top of the
1 The Mālavas of the Punjab and the Kshudrakas are associated in Sanskrit
literature.
2 Anspaca, note 316.
3 The place of the confluence in 326 B. C. has not been ascertained; see Vincent
Smith, pp. 92, 93. It would seem that so far geographical researches such as those of
Major G. H. Raverty (J. A. S. B. for 1892, pt. i) have a mainly negative value in showing
the rashness of the older identifications rather than a positive value in establishing new
ones. If either the statements in our texts had been loss vague or the river beds less
changeable the case would not have been so hopeless.
4 Being in the country of the Mālavas, north of the confluence of the Acesines
and Hydraūtes, the town cannot have been Multān, which lies south of the confluence.


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XV
SUBMISSION OF MĀLAVAS
337
)
citadel wall among the first, stood there for one moment in his shining
armour, a mark for the defenders' darts, and then leapt down almost alone
on the inner side. There he stood with his back to the wall, beating off the
crowd of his assailants, while the Macedonian nubleman Peucestes held
over bim the sacred shield which had been taken from the temple of
Athena at Ilium and was believed to have been carried in the Trojan War.
By the time that his army, frantic, had broken into the citadel, Alexander
was lying with a severe wound in his breast. The Macedonians believed
that their king was killed and gave way to a fury of blood-lust, sparing
neither woman nor child in the city. But Alexander recovered, and, as
soon as he could be moved, was carried by boat down the Hydraõtes, near
which river the town stood, to main camp at the confluence of the Hydraõtes
and the Acesires.
The terror of the European host had now broken the spirits of
the Mālavas, and their surviving headmen, as well as the headmen of
the Kshudrakas, came to the camp, tendering their submission. According
to the Greek historian, they urged that their c:ime was after all the love of
freedom, but that, Alexander being apparently more than man, they
were ready to obey any governor he might appoint and pay tribute.
They sent a thousand of their best men as hostages. When the armament
continued its progress down stream, Alexander left the Mālavas and
Kshudrakas attached to the satrapy of Philip; but the thousand hostages
he sent back to their homes.
Still down the unending stream the Europeans floated or marched,
through the territories of other tribes whose names our books record
in the form the Greek tongue gave them - Abastanes, Xathri, Ossadii -- who
submitted in prudence or by compulsion. At length they came to the
last confluence, where the Acesines, carrying in it the waters of the other
three rivers, united in those days with the Indus and a single vast stream
rolled down towards the ocean. Here again the armament halted, some
time in the cold season at the beginning of 325 B. C. The great shifting of
the river beds in the region makes it impossible to know the site to-day.
The point seemed one for planting another Hellenistic city. Alexander
foresaw it in the age to come a great place of traffic, rich and splendid.
This point too seemed to be a fit southern limit for the satrapy of Philip,
reaching nothwards as it did to the foothills of the Himālayas above
Takshaçilā. A change was also made in the governorship of the province
of the Hindu Kush (Paropanisadae). Tyriespes was replaced by another
great Irānián lord, Alexander's father-in-law, Oxyartes, who arrived in camp
about this time? .
1 The coupling of Oxyartes with Pithon as satrap of Sind is almost certainly a
textual corruption. See Vincent Smith, p. 99, note ). It is strange that Nieee (i, p. 503)
still accepts it without a no of suspicion,


## p. 338 (#376) ############################################

338
[ch.
MUSICANUS
The country along the Indus below the confluence presented the
Europeans with some conditions they had not met with in the parts
of India hitherto traversed. The Brāhmans here had more effective
ascendancy. The Greek observer saw men eating together in great com-
panies, and thought of the public meals of the Spartans'. In its political
organisation this region was unlike the country of free tribes, through
which the Europeans had been passing. Here once mɔre they found
principalities ruled by rājas, whose mutual enmity gave the foreigners
an opening. Alexander first sailed down the river to the 'Royal seat
(basileion) of the Sogdi, and here founded another Alexandria, marking out
docks again for the commerce which he fores uw under Greek initiative in
the new age. The site is unidentified and the name Sogdi furnishes a basis
for nothing more than unverifiable guessing. Already, it would appear,
Alexander designated Sind from the Indus confluence to the ocean as
a satrapy of the Enpire, and appointed a certain Pithon, son of Agenor,
to be its governor.
The greatest prince of the country between the confluence and the
delta was one whom the Greeks called Musicanus (Mousik anos) possibly a
title denoting the chief of the Mūshikas? .
' As in the case of the Paurava
and his fellow chiefs, the dread of the foreigner was apt to be less than
the dread of the strong neighbour. A native chief whom our texts call
Sambus or Sabus (Cambhu ? ), at feud with Musicanus, hastened to make
friends with the invaders and was nominated by Alexander satrap of some
hill district lying back from the river. Musicians seems to have con-
templated resistance ; he sent no envoys to the European king. But he
was not prepared for the rapidity of Alexander's movements, who was
again upon his enemies before they were aware. Submission seemed
the only way; the Europeans were admitted to the goodly city, which was
the rāja's capital', and a European garrison was put in its citadel. Subject
however to the supremacy of Alexander, Musicanus was left his former
state and authority, as the Paurava had been, and Ambhi and the rāja of
Abhisāra. Another chief of the district, Oxycanus' or 'Porticanus,'
attempted resistance, but found that the walls in which he trusted were frail
defence against the battering engines of the European. The people of
the land, our Greek author says, were paralysed by the belief in Alexander's
super-human power.
But still, as before, it proved difficult to extend friendship to one of
these jealous rājas without alienating his old rivals. Musicanus left upon
his throne made it seem to Sambus that he had given himself to the
foreigner for nothing. He now therefore renounced his allegiance. His
1 Strabo XV, C. 701,
2 This is extremely doubtful. The Mūshikaş who are mentioned in Sanskrit
literature belong to Southern India.
3 Not improbably Alor.
A


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Xv]
PATTALA
339
capital Sindimana (site unidentified) opened its gates Lowever at Alex-
ander's approach, and the little revolt was crushed.
But the Europeans in this region had more implacable enemies than
the native princes. The power behind the throne was the Brāhman com-
munity, and here for the first time we come upon an opposition inspired
by the conception of a national religion, the only germ to be found in
ancient times of the idea of Indian natio nality. It was the 'philosophers'
(i. e. the Brāhmans) who denounced the princes, if they submitted to
the foreigner, and goaded the free tribes into revolt". A ‘city of Brāhmans’2
had to be stormed, whilst the operations against Sambus were going on.
Musicanus now was induced to throw off allegiance. But it was the day
of the Yavana's power. The newly appointed governor of Sind, Pithon,
swept down upon him, and brought him a prisoner to the king. He was
treated as rebels were treated by the custom of the old Persian kings,
on whose seat Alexander sat. His body was hanged on a gibbet in
his own land. The Europeans knew, however, who were their worst
enemies, and their hand fell heavily upon the Brāhmans. They were put
to death wholesale ; their bodies too were hung up for the kites and
vultures by the roads to the unspeakable horror, we may believe, of the
people of the land.
On the lower Indus the coming of the Europeans was anticipated
with terror. At the point where the Indus in those days divided into its
two branches was situate the great city of Pattala. The author followed by
Diodorus (XVII, 104) stated that it wasruled, like Sparta, by two kings and
a council of elders. If that is so, it must have been one of these kings who
journeyed up stream to pay homage to Alexander, presumably the same
person whom one authority calls Moeris. But it was only to gain time.
As soon as he came back to Pattala, he and a large part of the population
abandoned the place and fled.
Before Alexander came to Pattala, the great European host which had
invaded India had begun to break up. From the country of Musicanus
about a third of the infantry, portions of the other arms, and all the
elephants which had been acquired in India, were put under Craterus,
to march home by way of Kandahār and Seistān. With the remainder
Alexander continued his course down stream. It was about the middle of
July 325, when the Europeans reached Pattala. They found everything
deserted. The fugitive population however was overtaken by Alexander's
emissaries and persuaded for the most part to return. Pattala, commanding
1 Plutarch, Alex. 59.
2 Diod. XVII, 103, 1.
3 Arr. VI, 16, 5.
4 Near Bahmanābād according to Vincent Smith ; about 30 miles S. E. of Hyder.
ābād, according to Holdich.
5 Curt. IX, 8, 28.
611 epi Kuvos emitol, Strabo XV, C, 692 ; cf. Anspach, note 414,
a
3


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340
[CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
ocean.
the two outlets of the Indus to the ocean, was another place for which
Alexander forecast a great commercial future, and new walls were soon
rising round its citadel under Hephaestion's direction. Pithon the satrap
had been left higher up stream to draft the European soldiers who were to
form the nucleus of the population in the new cities of his province, and to
stamp out any embers of revolt which might be still smouldering. Alex-
ander himself with the handiest ships set off to explore the western
arm of the river. It was only after some more or less unfortunate
attempts at navigation on their own account that the Europeans discovered
some natives of the deserted country, who steered the vessels down to the
It was probably at a point near the medieval Dēball that this
branch of the river then reached it. There the tide was
a new and
alarming phenomenon to men who knew only the Mediterranean. On two
little islands, one in the mouth of the river and one lying outside in
the Indian Ocean, the Yavana king made offerings to the gods who had
been prescribed to him by the Egyptian oracle of Amun in the African
desert. Then he sailed a little way into the open sea, and shed into the
Indian Ocean the blood of bulls sacrificed to the Greek god Poseidon.
Alexander returned to Pattala, to find Pithon arrived there, his task
accomplished ; and Hephaestion now set about the construction of quays
and docks against the city's future greatness. The king explored the
eastern branch of the river which ran out probably near the modern
Lakhpat? . Everywhere his quick eye seized the point subservient to the
realisation of that image which fired his imagination - the Indus a great
a
highway of the world's traffic with a chain of flourishing semi-Greek
mercantile cities. On the shores of a lake through which he passed (the
Rann of Cutch ? ) he designed more quays and docks ; on the coast,
he mapped out places for wells. Then he again returned to Pattala and
sent bodies of men down the river to begin the work.
The plan which Alexander had formed for his return to the West
involved his own marching through the sands of Makrān, the scathern
border of the Empire, and the passage of the fleet along the coast from the
mouth of the Indus to the Persian Gulf. The latter enterprise was to be
directed by the Cretan Nearchus, who had been responsible for the
navigation of the river.
Some time apparently in September 325' India saw the Yavana
columns move out of Pattala on the homeward road. It was some three
1 Debal itself has now disappeared : its site was near the existing shrine of Pir
Patho, see Vincent Smith, p. 104, and Tomaschek, p. 9.
2 Tomaschek, Topographischo Erlauterung, p. 6.
3 General Haig says (Indus Delta Country, p. 22) that the ideas of wells in this
region is an absurdity. The shifting of the coast-line makes it a problem, to vzhat
region exactly the statement of o ancient author applies.
4 About Sept. 1, Anspach.


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xv]
THE RETURN THROUGH GEDROSIA
341
years and a half since the brilliant figure of the warrior king had issued
from the highlands of Kandahār to enter the confines of the Indian world:
for the last year and a half he had flashed, a more than human wonder,
before the eyes of the peoples of the Punjab and Sind ; now his meteoric
appearance in India was coming to its end, and obscurity falls once more
on Indian history. Alexander started with the land force, except such
troops as were left with the satraps in the Indian provinces, for the river
Hab? . The naval armament remained at Pattala with Nearchus till the
latter part of October, when the monsoon would change. Alexander
again, when he approached the Hab, found the country empty ; the
tribesmen, a people of Dravidian stock, Arava, whom the Greeks called
Arabitae, had deserted their villages in terror. The Europeans crossed the
river (now the frontier of India and Baluchistān) into the country of
the Oritae, who still, being Dravidians, belonged ethnologically to India”.
Here some opposition, ineffectual enough, was made to the passage of the
foreigners. One of the large villages of the Oritae, Rhambacia? , was
occupied and destined for another Greek Alexandria'. Its new population
was compounded largely of people from the Pashtu country (Arachosians).
When Alexander passed on into the country of the Gedrcsians
(crossing from the basin of the Purali, into that of the Phur) he left a
European satrap, Apollophanes, to rule the territory of the Oritae, and one
of his chief captains Leonnatus remained temporarily with a force in
the district to drive home upon the Oritae that they were now the subjects
of a great Empire, and to carry out the scheme of Greek colonisation.
Leonnatus had some stiff fighting - one battle in which the loss on the
native side is said to have been 6000 killed, whilst on the European side the
loss, though numerically insignificant, included the satrap Apollophanes.
Alexander, having crossed into Gedrosia, kept down as near the coast
as possible, in order to dig wells and establish depots for food which might
serve the feet. It was a burning and arid land, rich only in aromatic
shrubs, and the barrier of the Malan range seems to have forced the
European army into a still more appalling region inland. They would have
reached it by way of the Hingol valley, in which the Hinglāj shrine is now
the last great place of Hindu pilgrimage towards the West.
In entering that waterless inferno, from which he emerged, sixty days
after leaving the country of the Oritae, with decimated forces, Alexander
passes
out of the field of Indian history. And yet there is one scene which
1 Tomaschek, Topographische Erläuterung, p. 16.
: Tomaschek connects their name with the Tamil ur 'village,' 'place', Tojo.
graphische Erlanterung, p. 19.
3 Sonmiāni, according to Tomaschek.
4 This is identifying Rhambacia with the Alexandria of Diodorus XVII, 104, 8.
5 Curtius, IX, 10, 7.
>


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342
[CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
took place that year in Persia of interest to the Indian historian. The
ascetic from Takshaçilā, whom the Greeks called Kalanos, continued to be
a notable figure amongst the men of war and philosophers surrounding the
king. Suddenly in Persia he announced his resolution to live no longer.
Nothing that Alexander could say availed to move him. Then by the
king's command a pyre was erected for the sage and he was conducted to
it with pomp. He was borne on a litter, garlanded in the Indian way and
chanting in a tongue which the Yavanas could not understand. He was
chanting hymns, some Indians explained, in praise of the gods. In sight of
all the army he ascended the pyre and adopted the due posture. The
pyre had been covered with gold and silver vessels and precious stuffs, and
these the Indian first distributed to his friends. Then, as the torch was
applied, the Yavana trumpets sounded all together, and the army shouted
as they were wout to shout going into battle, and the Indian elephants
uttered their peculiar cry. As the flames mounted and wrapped the figure
of the sage, the onlookers saw it still motionless. This was the way in
which Kalanos chose to take leave of the Yavanas? .
Nearchus, according to Alexander's original plan, was to have taken
station at the eastern mouth of the Indus and set sail at the end of October
(325) when the monsoon changed. But before Alexander left, it may have
appeared that such a station would be exposed to an attack from the mass
of Indian fugitives who had taken refuge in the jungles east of Sind.
Alexander at any rate transferred the fleet to the western mouth, to wait
for the favourable wind. But even here, as soon as Alexander was gone,
revolts broke out, making the position of the Europeans untenable, and
Nearchus was obliged to start, sooner than had been intended, during the
last few days of September? .
The account which Nearchus left of his voyage lay before Strabo and
Arrian, as well as the subsidiary, more anecdotal, account of Onescritus,
who acted as pilot. Through later writers we still possess an abstract of
the book of Nearchus. To fit the names in it to modern sites is, of course,
an interesting geographical puzzle, which will never perhaps be made out
with certainty. The place from which the fleet started, “Wooden Town'
(Xyline Polis) the changes in the coast line bave made indiscoverable. The
haven to which the Greeks came after some days' sail, and which they
named ‘Alexander's Haven,' perhaps corresponded in position with Karāchi.
Here the Greeks waited twenty-five days for the wind to change. They
built a stone wall round their camp on shore to protect it from the Arava
tribesmen, and spent their enforced leisure in fishing up oysters and mussels
from the sea.
At the mouth of the Hab river (Arabis) they again came to
a good harbour (Pliny's statement that Nearchus built a town there
1 Arr. VII, 3 ; Strabo XV, C, 717.
2 Strabo XV, C. 721.
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Xv]
THE GREEK SATRAPIES
343
is probably a misunderstanding). Beyond the Hab river they coasted
along the country of the Oritae, where Leonnatus either just before or soon
after fought his decisive battle with the tribesmen. Nearchus does not
seem to have detected the mouth of the Purali, where Hephaestion had just
traced the walls of an Alexandria, but at Cocala, probably somewhere near,
fresh stores had been deposited for the fleet by Alexander's order, and
there was an exchange of men between Nearchus and Leonnatus. At the
mouth of the river Tomerus (Hingol) the Greeks found some 600 half-naked
inhabitants ‘living in stuffy huts' who made show of hostility, but were
easily put to flight by the mail-clad Europeans. Here they remained five
days to repair the ships, and then sailed on past the promontory of Malana
(modern Rās Malan) the limit of the Oritae and of India'.
Alexander had come and gone. Was the European irruption a violent
episode which left India unchanged ? And, if so, was that due to an
essential unchangeableness in India under impact from without ? One may
notice first that nothing was farther from Alexander's own thought than
that his invasion of India was a mere raid. He left the Punjab and Sind
solidly attached, he believed, to his world-empire. Let us glance once more
at the conditions there in the year 324 B. C. The country fell into these
divisions. There was first the satrapy of Philip the son of Machatas. It is
impossible to make out with certainty what its confines were. Philip first
appears (unless he is identical with the commandant of the garrison in
Pushkalāvatī”) as satrap in Takshaçilā', and we gather that there was then
combined under his authority the principality of Āmbhi and what had been
the satrapy of Nicanor in the lower Kābul Valley', as far as the passes over
the Hindu Kush into Bacteria”. He accompanies Alexander's expedition
down the Hydaspes (Jhelum) and is made satrap of a province extending as
far south as the confluence of the Indus and Acesines (Chenāb). We do
not however know whether this new appointment was in addition to, or in
lieu of, his previous satrapy. If the former, his extensive satrapy continued
to embrace the principality of Āmbhi, and we do not know how the double
rule of Macedonian satrap and native prince was adjusted. A second
division was the satrapy of Pithon the son of Agenor, covering Sind from
the Indus confluence to the ocean and extending westward to the Hab. A
third was the large principality of the Paurava prince, extending from the
Hydaspes (Jhelum) to the Hyphasis (Beās). Here there was no division of
authority between prince and satrap, but the Indian acted in both capacities
1 Sir Thomas Holdich's book The Gates of India, reconstructs the voyage of
Nearchus on the old hypothesis that the Arabis is the Purali. The important work of
Tomaschek Sir Thomas does not seem to know.
2 Arr. IV, 28, 6.
3 Arr. V, 8, 3,
4 Arr. IV, 28, 6.
5 Arr. VI, 2, 3 ; Anspach deletes ws et! Bak glov Yns, note 200.
6 Arr. VI, 15, 2.


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344
[CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
himself. : A fourth satrapy lay outside India, but within the river system of
the Indus - that of the Paropanisidae (the Hindu Kush) with Alexandria-
under-the-Caucasus for its capital. This was the satrapy held by Oxyartes,
Alexander's father-in-law. There was finally a fifth district in somewhat
looser connexion with the Empire, Abhisāra in Kashmir, whose ruler, as we
' have seen, had been enabled by Macedonian influence to establish his
authority over the smaller rājas in his neighbourhood.
The European rule was supported by an army of occupation. Its
numbers are not told us, but it included Macedonians and Greek mercen-
aries. Besides these Philip had at his disposal a considerable body of
Thracians. The commander of this corps was a Macedonian destined to
play a conspicuous part in the near future, Eudamus the son of Crateuas,
a native of the region south of the Ostrovo Lake, and brother of one of the
Seven who constituted the king's special body-guarda.
The army of occupation was, no doubt, in large part distributed
through the new cities, which were intended in Alexander's design, not only
to give the European root in the country, but to quicken India through
Greek intelligence and enterprise to new developments of commercial
activity and material splendour. There these little bodies of Europeans
remained, when Alexander was gone, enclosed within their fresh-built walls,
subject, it would seem, to Macedonian satraps but not to the native
princes', urged by the king's command to build docks and quays and
reproduce the life of Greek cities upon the rivers of India.
We know, of course, that Alexander's dream came to nothing. The
European in India faded away. But it is a mistake when we judge the
dream by its actual result. For the experiment was never really tried ; it
was frustrated at its inception by an event which no one could have
foreseen, - Alexander's premature death, without an adequate heir, less than
two years after he quitted India. The realisation of the dream all depended
upon the Empire's holding together for a century or two. Flad Alexander
lived to a normal age, there is no reason why it should not have done so.
As it was, the rapidly constructed fabric, its cement still soft, fell quickly
to pieces. If a military occupation of eight years or so left no permanent
trace upon the north-west of India, we can hardly infer from that the
essential unreceptiveness of India for Hellenism. Had the occupation been
prolonged for a series of generations, the result might have been very
different. The idea, ineradicable from modern journalism, that 'the East'
(whatever that vague term may denote) is by its nature impervious to the
1 Plut. Alex. 60.
2 Arr.