East of the
Hydaspes
(Jhelum) the Paurava king had been watching
the immense peril come near.
the immense peril come near.
Cambridge History of India - v1
Strabo XV, C.
691.
## p. 316 (#352) ############################################
316
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
[ch.
of the invasion? . The fighting seems to have been of exceptional ferocity.
At one place, where Alexander was wounded, the whole population was
put to the sword. At another place we hear of a huge massacre, and 40,000
men taken captive. At a third place a body of Indians from the Punjab
had come to help the local chieftain for bire. When the town capitulated, it
was agreed that these mercenaries should transfer their services to Alexan-
der. They encamped on a little hill apart. There, as they talked together,
it seemed to them a horrible thing that they should march with the Yara-
nas against their own people. They determined to slip away, when night
fell, and make across the hills for home. But when night fell, they found
the hill beset on all sides with the soldiers of Alexander ; for some one had
betrayed their design. The Macedonians suffered none of them to live till
morning?
The town with which this incident is connected the Greeks call
Massaga. We know only that it was situated east of the Guraeus river and
apparently not far from the stream. The resistance which the eastern-most
branch of the h. ll-people, those called by the Greeks Assakēnoi, offered
to the invader seems to have been concentrated at this place. All
these tribes, as far as the Indus, recognised as overlord a chief whom the
Greeks call Assakēnos. His organisation for defence included an alliance with
the king of the Abhisāra country beyond the Indus, who sent contingents
to his support3. Assakēnos had himself taken command at Massaga, and
fell there, struck by a missile from one of the European siegemachines'.
His mother and daughter were left in the enemies' hands• ; but it was not
among Alexander's faults to fail in chivalry to the women whom war put
at his mercy.
1 In the Greek accounts a people called Aspasioi are found in Choes (either the
Alishang or Kūnar) Valley and a people called Assakenoi in the Swāt Valley. Both
names are supposed to represent the same Indian name Açvaka, connected with
açia
horse. If so, the two Greek names may be due to local varieties of pronunciation, and
it may be noted that the form Aspasioi would then approximate to Irānian speech, in
which aspa is the equivalent of aqua. Strabo, according to the MSS. (XV, C. 691,
C. 698), calls the Aspasioi Hypasioi ; this is often amended in modern texts to Hippasioi,
on the supposition that the Greeks knew their hippos to be the etymological equivalent
of aspa and attempted a translation. This is extremely unlike the Greek way in these
matters. The confusion is made worse by another people called Astakenoi appearing
in the Pushkalāvati region, whose name is supposed not to be connected etymologically
with that of their neighbours, the Assakenoi.
2 Arr. IV 27 ; Diod. XVII, 84 ; Plut. Alex. 69 ; Polyaen. Strateg. IV, 3, 20.
3 Arr. IV, 27, 7.
4 Arr. IV, 27, 2.
5 Arr. IV, 27, 4.
6 A strange story is given by Justin, XII, 7, 10, that it was the wife of Assakenos
who fell into Alexander's hands and that he had a son by her, who afterwards became
king of the Indians (! ) (cf. Curtius, VIII, 10, 35). It may be that the story was connec-
ted in later times in the interests of some petty king of this region, who wished to esta-
blish a claim to be descended from Alexander. That is a claim which is still common
in the Indian frontier hills.
## p. 317 (#353) ############################################
Xv]
TRIBES BEYOND THE N. W. FRONTIER
317
and we
are told
The loot in cattle in these regions was enormous,
that a herd of the finest animals was actually given by Alexander into the
charge of drovers who were to drive them all the way from the Hindu
Kush to Macedonia. A town called by the Greeks Arigaeon, which
apparently commanded the road between the Kūnar and the Panjkora
Valleys, was selected for recolonisation - a number of war-worn Europeans
and a number of the native people were to form the population, as in
similar cases before.
One curious incident relieves the story of blood shed. Somewhere
among these hills: -- probably on the lower spurs of the three-peaked
Koh-i-Mor-dwelt a people who told the Yavanas, or so the invaders under-
stood them, that they were descendants of the western people who had
come into those parts with their god Dionysus ; for Dionysus, the Greeks
believed, had gone conquering across Asia, at the head of his revellers, in
the old heroic days. The Greeks always experienced a keen joy of recog.
nition, when they could connect foreign things with the figures of their
own legends, and they were delighted with the suggestion. The assonance
of names lent itself immediately to confirm the theory as usefully as it
does to confirm the adventurous speculations of modern archaeologists. In
the legend the name Nysa was specially connected with Dionysus—it was
the name of his nurse or of the place where he was born or of his holy
hill, and the name of this little town in the Hindu Kush, as it was pro-
nounced to Alexander, had a similar sound. Again the legend said
.
that Dionysus had been born from the thigh (mēros) of Zeus, and a neigh-
bouring summit, the Greeks discovered, was called Meru. What could be
clearer ? And when they saw the sacred plants of the god, the vine and ivy,
running wild over the mountain, as they knew them at home’, no doubt
could be left. Modern travellers have come upon certain fair Kāfir tribes
in this region, whose religious processions with music and dancing have
a Bacchanalian look, and the Nysaeans discovered by Alexander, they
suggest, may have been the ancestors of these Kāfirs; their processions
may have led the Greeks to connect them with Dionysus. This is possible,
but in the Greek books we hear nothing of the Nysaeans going in proces-
sion. It is the Macedonian soldiers themselves, who wreathe their heads
with ivy and range the bills in ecstasy, calling on the god by his sacred
names, as their people had done from old time on the woody spurs of the
Balkans. Hostilities, at any rate, with these interesting kinsmen could not
1 Holdich in discussing the site of Nysa (Gates of India, p. 122) gives a mistrans-
lation of Arrian. Arrian does not say that Alexander "then entered that part of the
country, but that somewhere in the country which Alexander had already traversed
there was a place called Nysa.
2 Holdich, Gates of India, p. 133.
>
## p. 318 (#354) ############################################
318
[ch.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
be thought of, and the 'Nysaeans were themselves prepared to act in
character ; three hundred of them on their mountain horses joined the
army of the Yavana king and followed him to battle in the plains of the
Punjab.
Whilst Alexander was fighting in the valleys to the north of the
Kābul, the other division of the Macedonian army under Hephaestion and
Perdiccas, accompanied by the rāja of Takshaçilā, made its way along the
Kābu] to the Indus. It may have been through the Khyber Pass that,
one day in the cold weather season at the end of 327 or beginning of 326
B. C. , the glitter of strange spears, long lines of mailed men, were seen
emerging into the plain about Peshāwar- the advance guard of the Euro-
pean invasion of India. A few days' march farther, and they came to the
Indus. Arrived there, the Europeans set about collecting material for the
bridge which was to transport their fellows into the interior of the land.
But their hold on the country west of the Indus was not yet secure. The
region in which the division of Hephaestion and Perdiccas was
now encamped formed part of the realm of a rāja, named by the Greeks
Astes', whose capital was the town of Pushkalāvati (Chārsadda) to the
north of the the Kābul river. The rāja at this moment declared himself an
enemy of the foreigners. He was not strong enough to hold the open field
against Hephaestion and Perdiccas, and shut himself desperately in some
walled town. For a month he held it against the besiegers, and then the
greater strength of the Europeans beat him down, and destroyed him. The
principality was given to one who had been his enemy and become a
hanger-on of the rāja of Takshaçilā, a certain Sangaya. He was a man
upon whose loyalty the Yavanas could count.
In the hills to the north, after a few months' fighting, the tribe
generally had submitted to Alexander and the strong places were in his
possession. He constituted the lower Kābul Valley and the recently
conquered hills a special satrapy, distinct from the satrapy of the
Paropanisadae, which Tyriespes ruled from Alexandria-under-the-Caucasus.
The new satrapy, whose official name we do not know, but which can be
most conveniently described as India-west-of-the-Indus, got for its governor
a Nicanor, probably the same man who had been left a few months before
to superintend the building of Alexandria. The king himself came down to
Pushkalāvati at the lower end of the Guraeus (now usually called the Swāt)
valley, which was not in a position, after the defeat of its rāja, to offer any
resistance. He set a Macedonian garrison in the town under an officer
named Philip
But the effective occupation of the lower Kābul valley by the Yavanas
required still more to be done. The division of Hephaestion had meantime
1 One gue:s is that this represents the Sanskrit proper name Hasti ; a more
prohable one is that it is short for Ashțakarāja, king of the Ashtakas.
## p. 319 (#355) ############################################
Xv]
THE CROSSING OF THE INDUS
319
fortified and garrisoned a place the Greeks call Orobatis, and Alexander,
accompanied by two Indian chieftains, 'Cophaeus' and 'Assagets'l, moved
about to take possession of various small towns between Pushkalāvati and
the Indus. But one great labour remained. The reduction of a certain
mountain citadel, which crowned Alexander's work during that winter,
always seemed to the Greeks the great glory of the campaign. The Greek
books described the siege and storming at greater length than any other
episode in this region. The story was started that Heracles had attempted
to storm that very rock and failed. Unfortunately, it has so far been
impossible to fit the Greek description of Aornus to any rocky height
noted in the country to-daya.
Aornus, we are told, was not far from the modern Amb
;
it was a
great isolated mass of rock, 6670 feet high, flat on the top with precipitous
sides, which on the south went down straight to the river Indus. On the
summit were woods and watersprings and fields whose cultivation could
keep a thousand men employed. It seems plain that an object of this kind
can hardly have escaped modern geographers in search of it. The inference
is that some particulars in the Greek account are due to imagination. But
when once we begin to trim it so as to suit the actual topography, it
depends on a more or less arbitrary selection which particulars we elimi.
nate and which we retain. There is at any rate no reason to doubt that
the final conquest of this mountain region did involve the reduction of
some exceptionally strong rock-citadel, in which fugitives of the defeated
tribes made a last stand. The citadel, when taken, was held for Alexander
by a garrison under the Indian Çaçigupta. The capture of Aornus had to
be followed by another short expedition further up into the hills, in pur-
suit of the flying defenders of the fortress. They were led by the brother of
the Assakenian chief killed in Massaga3 and had with them a herd of
fifteen war-elephants. To the Greeks the idea of getting hold of these ani-
mals, so strange and wonderful to them, of whose value in battle they had
probably formed an even exaggerated notion, made their pursuit the more
eager. The hills were deserted before them, and Alexander pushed on as
far as a town which the Greek books call Dyrta. It was found empty of
inhabitants. Alexander learnt that the fugitive prince was dead by the
evidence of his severed head, brought by some hillmen one day into
camp. He had fallen a victim to some hostile tribe or to his own
followers. Two bodies of light troops were detached to scour the hills yet
further, and Alexander himself turned back with the rest of his division
1 Anspach suggests, p.
65, note 200 that Cophaeus=rāja of the region about
Pushkala near the Cophen, and Assagetes=the rāja of the Assakenoi (successor of the
rāja killed in Massaga).
2 See the note in Vincent Smith, pp. 56, 57.
3 Arr. IV, 30, 5 ; Diod. XVII, 86 ; Curt. VIII, 12, 1. His name is variously given
as Aphrikes, Aphices, Erices in different texts.
## p. 320 (#356) ############################################
320
[cu.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
to the Indus. Some natives of the region were caught by the Macedonians
on their way. They reported that the fugitives from Aornus and the
people of the hills had escaped into the country of Abhisāra, whose rāja
was watching the progress of the Yavanas with a doubtful mind. As
for the elephants, they had turned them loose in the country bordering
the Indus, more swampy in those days than it is now! An elephant
hunt accordingly followed ; Alexander had already, with his quick interest
in new things and his Macedonian sporting propensities, collected about
him Indians whose special business was elephant-hunting, and by their
means the scattered herd was driven in, and attached to the Macedonian
army”. The point at which Alexander's division struck the Indus on its
descent from the hills was some way above the point where Hephaestion
and Perdiccas had by this time constructed the bridge. Between the two,
the right bank of the river was largely overgrown with forest, which, if in
one way it impeded the advance of Alexander's division, in another way
helped the transport by furnishing timber for boats. Part of Alexander's
force floated down the river, and when he arrived at Hephaestion's bridge
the number of new boats was swelled by those brought down from up-
stream, The two divisions of the Yavana host now re-united for passage
into the heart of India. The place at which the bridge had been made has
been fixed by the most recent opinion at Ohind, about 16 miles above
Attock. The Greeks felt that they were crossing the threshold of a new
world. Sacrifices to the Greek gods, games and horse-races in their honour
on the river bank at Ohind marked their sense that they were about to
begin a new enterprise of formidable magnitude. Alexander was approach-
ing the bourne of the old Persian Empire, and it was evident that he meant
to press still onward towards the sunrise. The Greek diviners announced
that the omens were favourable. In the early dawn one day in the spring of
326 B. C. 3, the host began to defile over the bridge, the mingled line of many
races streaming all day into the Indian world. And the composition of the
army became now more singularly mixed by the contingents of native
Indian troops sent by the rāja of Takshaçilā, squadrons of Indian horse and
thirty elephants, endless trains moreover of oxen and sheep for sacrifice
and food, and silver brought in masses from his treasuries.
The rāja of Takshaçilā was now none other than Āmbhi himself ; for
the old rāja had not lived to see the Yavanas enter his city. The first act of
the new rāja had been to send a message of homage to Alexander ; he
would not assume his ancestral kingdom except pending the Great King's
pleasure. He would take his kingdom only from Alexander's hand.
As Alexander moved on Takshaçilā from the bridge, Āmbhi went out
1 Holdich, Gates of India, p. 122.
2 Cf. Diod. XVII, 86.
3 Strabo XV, C. 691. Cf. Vincent Smith, p. 61, note 1.
## p. 321 (#357) ############################################
Xv]
RECEPTION AT TAKSHAÇILĀ
321
to meet him in state at the head of the forces of his principality. For
a moment, when the Greeks saw an Indian army deployed across their
path, they suspected treachery. The rāja saw that there was trouble in
the ranks and galloped forward with a few attendants. He assured
Alexander through an interpreter that everything he had was his overlord's.
Alexander on his part ratified his assumption of the princedom'.
The gates of Takshaçilā were thrown open to the Europeans and the
Indian crowd watched, no doubt with a crowd's curiosity, the strange figures
and dresses which thronged their streets. But in one quarter the Greeks met
with an indifference which took them aback. At Takshaçilā, so far as we
know, the Greeks first noticed Indian ascetics. The report reached
Alexander himself of a strange set of men who were to be seen naked some.
where near the city, 'practising endurance', men commanding a great rever-
ence among the people. It was no use his sending for them, since
they would certainly refuse to come : those who wished to learn their secret
must go to them. Alexander, however, on his side, felt he could not go to
them consistently with his dignity; so he chose an envoy, a Greek officer
named Onesicritus, who had been a disciple of the Cynic philosopher
Diogenes, a figure obviously akin to the Indian ascetics. Onesicritus, in the
book he afterwards wrote, gave an account of his interesting mission, and
we may still read it in Strabo's version”. He found fifteen ascetics some ten
miles from the city, sitting naked and motionless in a sun so burning
that one could not even walk over the stones with bare feet. Onesicritus
could only communicate with them through a series of three interpreters, but
he made them understand that the Yavana king would like to learn their
wisdom. The ascetic to whom he first addressed himself answered bluntly
that no one coming in the bravery of European clothes-cavalry cloak and
broad-bripimed hat and top boots, such as the Macedonians wore - could
learn their wisdom. To do that, he must strip naked and learn to sit on the
hot stones beside them. Another answered more mildly that it was really
very creditable for such a man as Alexander to desire to know something of
the deeper wisdom, but one must remember that to attempt to convey their
teaching through three interpreters, common men incapable of under-
standing more than the mere words, would be like trying to make water
flow clear through mud. They seem however to have made an attempt,
and then they asked Oaesicritus whether among the Yavanas there was
any teaching of this kind, and he told them about Pythagoras and
Socrates and his old master Diogenes. The ascetics seemed pleased, but
expressed regret that the wise men of the Greeks had clung to such
superfluities as clothes? . One of these ascetics was ultimately persuaded
by the rāja of Takshaçilā to accompany Alexander and return to clothes
1 Diod. XVII, 86 ; Curt. VIII, 12.
2 XV, C. 715.
3 Strabo xv, C. 714 f.
## p. 322 (#358) ############################################
322
[CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
and a worldly life. His companions considered it an apostasy, and followed
him with reproaches. The name of this Indian, who remained a notable
figure in Alexander's entourage, was one which Plutarch reproduces as
'Sphines,' but the Greeks, catching among the Indian words of greeting
which he exchanged with his fellow-countrymen, the word kalyāna, lucky,
came to call him Kalanos.
At Takshaçilā Alexander held what would be called in modern India
a durbar. There were more Greek sacrifices and games.
Āmbhi and
a crowd of smaller chiefs from the country already dominated by the
Macedonian arms brought presents, and were granted extensions of territory
at the expense of such of their neighbours as had not submitted to the
European King of Kings. And Alexander bestowed presents also with
a large hand. In the train of the European army, wagons had come over
the mountains bringing from the storehouses of the old Persian kings vessels
of gold and silver, Babylonian and Persian embroideries, and many of
these now found a home in the palace of Takshaçilā. The Macedonian
captains were inclined to grumble at the munificence with which Alexander
treated his Indian vassal kings. But Alexander had come to feel himself,
one gathers, a man raised above distinctions of race, an Emperor of the
world, beneath whom all mankind was to be levelled and made one.
East of the Hydaspes (Jhelum) the Paurava king had been watching
the immense peril come near. He learnt of the alliance between his old
enemy of Takshaçilā and the Yavana conqueror. He learnt that other
princes of the land were tendering submission to the new power-his
own kinsman, for instance, another Paurava, whose territory lay still
further to the east, beyond the Acesines (Chenāb)? In that moment of
fear, the spirit of the great Paurava rose unshaken in the resolve to settle
his relations with the invader by the arbitrament of arms. It would be
a mistake to regard him as one who fought in the nationalist cause. The
Paurava does not seem to have been moved by any thought of
Indian solidarity against the European any more than the rāja of Takshaçilā.
It was not India that he was going to fight for ; it was his own honour
and his own kingdom His honour would not allow him to surrender
anything without a fair fight, and all his old ambitions of constructing
a great kingdom at the expense of neighbouring chiefs and the free tribes
would vanish into air, if he gave way to a power which had made
agreement with his rivals. And yet, if the Paurava was not a champion of
nationalism, India may well reckon the proud and brave prince among
her national heroes. Unhappily India has long forgotten his name.
We know of him only through the Greek books which call him Porus. It
would have seemed a strange fate to him, had any astrologer been able to
1 Arr, vii, 2, 4 ; Plut. Alex. 65 ; Strabo xv,
ç.
2 Arr. v, 21, 3.
714 f.
## p. 323 (#359) ############################################
xv]
THE ADVANCE TO THE HYDASPES
323
predict it -- to pass quickly out of the memory of his own people, and to be a
familiar name for centuries in lands of which he had no conception, away
to the West !
To meet the Europeans, the Paurava could draw upon the resources
of his own principality lying between the Hydaspes and the Acesines, full of
populous villages! . And if his immediate neighbours to east and west were
hostile, the rāja of Abhisāra was inclined to make common cause with him.
The prince had already, as we have seen, given shelter to the fugitives
from the Swāt Valley, and now messengers went to and fro between
him and the Paurava. He thought it politic however to play a double
game, and sent his brother to the durbar at Takshaçilā to convey presents
to Alexander and the announcement of his submission. And meanwhile
he prepared to send forces to join the Indian army mustering on the
Hydaspes
It was probably some wind of these intrigues which accelerated
Alexander's attack? . The Paurava for his part, had sent the Yavana con-
queror an open defiance. To the envoys who summoned him to meet
Alexander at Takshaçilā he had answered that he would meet Alexander
on his own frontiers, in arms. He soon learnt that in spite of the heats
of summer which now lay on the land, in spite of the near approach of
the rains, the European army had broken up from Takshaçilā and was in
full march for the passage of the Hydaspes. Alexander had left a
Macedonian garrison in Takshaçilā, and a Macedonian satrap, Philip the
son of Machatas, in the realm of Āmbhi'. Probably somewhere near the
place where is now the town of Jhelum the army of the Paurava gathered
on the banks of the Hydaspes in the spring of 326. Its numbers are
variously en®. They were perhaps not very far, more or less from
those of Alexander's army, though all our accounts agree in one point
-- that Alexander had a numerical superiority in cavalry.
The first body of Yavanas to appear on the river was, one gathers, the
advance guard sent on by Alexander, bringing in sections the boats which
1 Strabo XV, C. 698.
2 Diod. XVII, 87.
3 Curt. VIII, 13, 2.
4 This may have been the same Philip whom we heard of as commandant of the
garrison in Pushkalāvati. Anspach thinks it was not, note 200.
5 Dr Vincent Smith in an appendix (p. 78) defends the Jhelum site against the
Jalālpur site, preferred by Cunningham. A point in favcur of Jhelum is that it is
higher up and Alexander seems to have kept close to the hills. One does not see how.
ever that it can ever be possible to decide the question with our defective documents.
Most of the argument on the subject takes it for granted that the place where Alex.
ander crossed was above the camp of Porus. But our sources do not tell us whether it
was above or below. Gruf Yorck von Wartenburg and Delbrück prefer the hypothesis
that it was below. With this point uncertain, as it must remain, it seems idle to try
to be precise.
6 The numbers in the final battle, according to Arrian V. 15, 4, were 30,000 foot
O‘all that was any good, that is to say’), 4000 horse, 300 chariots, and 200 elephants.
See Delbrück, p. 184.
## p. 324 (#360) ############################################
324
[CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
had been used on the Indus. These were fitted together again on the
Hydaspes, and a little fleet could soon be described in moorings across the
river. The king with the main army was on the road. The Paurava seems
to have thrown one body of troops into the country opposite under his
nephew 'Spitaces,' to contest Alexander's advance in some narrow place
of the hills, through which the road from Takshaçilā runs. It was, of
course, a mere preliminary skirmish, and a manoeuvre of the Macedonian
horse threw back the Indians in some confusion? . Presently the great host
of the Yavanas was seen drawn up on the other side. The eyes watching
from the left bank could make out the royal tent and the uniform of the
body-guards and even the figure of the marvellous man himself moving
to and fro among his captains. They could see too a body of 5000 Indians,
their countrymen, sent by Āmbhi to fight by the side of the Macedonians.
Nothing divided the Indian army from the conquerors of the world but
the breadth of the Hydaspes. That however was a serious obstacle. The
river at this seasonwas rising as the snows began to melt in the
Himālayas. Along the left bank the Paurava kept a sharp watch on all
possible landing-places. His elephants especially would deter the Europeans,
by their terror as well as by their solid bulk, from landing. To land in
the face of such opposition might well seem an impossibility, even for
Yavanas. But for the Paurava it meant the necessity of unremitting
vigilance ; it meant the continuous minute scrutiny of every movement
on the opposite bank. He was now to show whether he had the general's
genius for divining the purposes of the enemy from chance indications.
The difficulty was that movement in the opposite camp seemed perpe-
tual. Over and over again there were concentrations at this point or that,
as if an immediate attack were to be made, and then, when the nerves of the
defenders were strung up to the highest pitch of expectancy, nothing hap-
pened. Was the dreadful foe really brought to a standstill by an obstacle such
as he had never yet encountered ? Or were these abortive movements pur-
posed feints to throw the defenders off their guard ? For the foreigners at
any rate it must make things worse when rain storms came on? - tropical de.
luges such as they could never have experienced before, with only such shel-
ter as a camp allows—and the swollen river swelled yet higher. Some indi-
1 The exact route of Alexander from Takshaçilā to the Hydaspes is unknown.
See Vincent Smith, p. 63, note.
2 Polyaen IV, 3, 21.
3 Dr Vincent Smith's disquisition on the date of the battle (p. 85 f. ) suffers from
one important datum having been left out-Strabo's statement, on the authority of
Nearchus, that the Macedonian army was on the Acesines at the time of the summer
solstice (XV, C. 692). This would support Arrian's statement that the battle was in
the month of Munychion, i. e. probably about the middle of May, not in July as Dr.
Vincent Smith computes. (See Anspach, note 124. )
4 According to Mr. Pearson (see Bibliography) the regular rain do not begin in
this part till July.
## p. 325 (#361) ############################################
xv]
THE CROSSING OF THE HYDASPES
325
cations seemed to show that this state of suspense might be protracted for
months, that the Yavanas had given up the thought of attempting to cross
in the present state of the river, and were going to wait for the winter
when it would become fordable. It was certain from the reports of spies
that great stores of provisions were being brought up, as if for a long halt? .
Then alarms at night began. In the intervals of the rain the noise of
cavalry mustering could be heard on the further bank, the shoutings of
words of command, the songs which the Yavanas sang in battle to their
own gods ; and at the sound of it, on the left bank the great elephants
would swing through the darkness to their stations, and the lines of Indians
stand ready with sword and bow. And still nothing happened. The night
alarm became almost a piece of routine.
One daybreak, after a night of storm and violent rain, outposts came
galloping in with the tiding that boats crowded with horses and armed
men had been sighted rounding the end of a wooded island some twenty
miles away from the Indian camp. A body of Yavanas had succeeded
in reaching an undefended part of the left bank! The first outposts who
reported sighting the boats were soon followed by others who had seen
the enemy getting firm foot upon the land.
From the Greek books we know more than the Paurava could know
of the movements which had taken place in the European army on that
terrific night. While the rain poured in torrents and the lightnings struck
men down here and there in the European columns, the king with a strong
division? - Macedonian horse and foot, horsemen from Balkh and Bukhāra,
light-armed Balkan mountaineers and archers-moved to a point about
seventeen miles from the European camp, where the fleet of river- boats
was in readiness. As it drew near day, the storm abated, and in the first
light the laden boats pushed off. In any cirsumstances, to embark upon
an unknown river, swollen in flood, would have been sufficiently venture-
some. A single bark carried the king and several of his great captains,
.
men who in after days were destined themselves to rule great tracts of the
earth and to plot against each other's lives Perdiccas, the future Regent,
Ptolemy, one day to be king of Egypt, Lysimachus, to be king of Thrace
and
carry the Macedonian arms into what is now Roumania, Seleucus, who
would inherit Alexander's Asiatic empire. With so much history was one
boat big, which in the early light of that gray morning swayed upon
1 Schubert points out that if Alexander was trying to keep the Indians in expec.
tation of an immediate attack he can hardly have tried at the same time to persuade
them that he was going to remain stationary for a long time. If they got this impres.
sion from the arrival of provisions, it was not therefore due to design on his part.
2 Some 31,000 men, if Arrian's figure are accepted, Of course, if Delbrück's
estimate of 30,000 for the whole of Alexander's army is right, Arrian's number must be
very much exaggerated.
## p. 326 (#362) ############################################
326
(CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
the blind eddies of an Indian river. It was one of the moments when
Alexander threw himself upon luck, as represented by the chance play of
natural forces. The point from which the boats put out hod the
advantage- it was chosen for that reason- of being hidden from the
watchers on the opposite bank by a wooded island in mid stream. It was not
till the boats approached land that they came in sight, an'l sent the outposts
galloping back to the Paurava. It was instantly clear that everything was
a question of time : could the Indians reach the place where the Europeans
had landed before the Europeans were ready to receive them? And here
the luck of natural accidents came in. The Europeans soon discovered
that the recent rain had cut off the place where they were from the proper
shore by a swollen channel ; they had landed on what was now fractically
an island. All depended on whether the channel was fordable. If it was
not, the Europeans were caught in a trap. The question remained doubt-
ful, as at point after point attempts were made, and the water proved too
deep. Then a point was found where it was just possible for a man to
cross, going into the strong current above his breast, and there men and
horses struggled through. Onesicritus recorded words, which, he said,
burst from the king in the stress of that moment. They show a curious
point of contact between the European then and the European now. For
to-day India sees in the European some one living and moving and acting
in its midst, whilst the public opinion which governs him, for which he
really cares, is the opinion of a society thousands of miles away. At that
moment, Onesicritus said, Alexander suddenly exclaimed, as the thought
struck him that he was going through all this for the sake of a fame, which
meant that people would talk and write about him at Athens !
When the Paurava received tidings of the landing of the Yavanas, he
could not yet tell from which direction the main attack would come. For
the enemy's camp could be described as usual just opposite - the royal tent,
bodies of European soldiery, of horsemen from the Kandahār highlands and
the Hindu Kush, and the Indian troops of the hostile rājas. The Paurava
must not relax his guard on the adjacent landing-places, whatever
force he might detach to deal with the body of Yavanas who had got across.
As a matter of fact, Alexander had left a force including two Macedonian
phalanxes, in the camp under Craterus, with orders to attempt the passage
as soon as they should see the Indians thrown into confusion by his own
attack, and another body of troops with Meleager at a point half way
between the camp and the place of embarkation”. The division which
1 Plutarch, Alex. 60.
2 If Arrian's figures are right, the force left in ramp would have numbered about
17,000 foot and 1800 horse, and the division with Meleager about 30,000 foot and 2000
horse. Delbrück considers that the number given for Alexander's division, 11,000, is
correct åld makes it the basis of his calculation.
## p. 327 (#363) ############################################
Xv]
THE BATTLE OF THE HYDASPES
327
crossed the river with Alexander numbered about 11,000 men. The
Paurava remained stationary with the bulk of his army, but in order to
meet with all possible speed the Europeans who had landed, he detached a
force of 2000 mounted men and 120 chariots under the command of his
son. The young prince found a body of Europeans already drawn up on
the shore. As he came nearer, detachments of horse broke from the enemy's
lines and swept towards him. But instead of the shock of the encounter,
a hail of arrows descended upon the Indian cavalry ; for the men who
came against them carried bows and could shoot in full career. They were
not Yavanas, but the men from the steppes of Central Asia, who by custom
fought in this elusive fashion. Behind them, however, Alexander was keep-
ing his European squadrons in reserve, till he knew whether he had the
main force of the Paurava before him or only a detachment. Then the
Indians received the charge of the Macedonian horse, squadron after squa-
dron, and at their head flashed the person of the terrible king. The Indian
horsemen were overpowered, and could only throw their lives away in the
unequal battle. Four hundred are said to have fallen ; the young prince
was among the slain. All the 120 chariots, running headlong into the mud,
were captured!
The return of the shattered squadrons to camp told the Paurava that
no river separated Alexander and himself any more, that the hour of
supreme crisis was come. He determined to move practically the whole of
his force against the division with the king. Only a small body of troops
(four or five hundred foot soldiers and thirty-five elephants) were left to hold
the river-bank against the division with Craterus. The Indian army arrived
in time to draw up in battle order before the Europeans engaged them.
Some of the pictorial features of the battle which followed we can
gather from our Greek texts. But their account is too confused, in part
perhaps through the mistakes of copyists, to allow us to reconstruct it as a
military operation. Not knowing whether it was above or below the Indian
camp that Alexander had landed, we do not know whether the right or the
left of the Indian line rested upon the river ; and yet that would be an
essential point in understanding what happened. We know at any rate that
the strength of the Indians was in the two hundred elephants -an
to which the Europeans had no parallel and which was apt to terrify the
foreign borses – whilst the superiority of the Europeans was in cavalry.
A picture of the Indian line of battle is given us. The elephants were
drawn up along the front like bastions in a wall. They enemy would be
1 Anspach supposes that the son of Porus was already near the spot with 60
chariots and 1000 horse when Alexander landed, and that, finding a larger body had
crossed than he could cope with, he sent for help to his cousin Spitaces, who was hold.
ing a post lower down opposite Meleager ; Spitaces brought up 60 more chariots and
another 1000 horse.
arm
## p. 328 (#364) ############################################
328
(CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
obliged, either to attack the unfamiliar monsters directly, or go in between
them to get at the masses of Indian foot behind. The line of foot projected
on each side beyond the elephants, and, beyond the foot cavalry was
stationed to guard either flank, with chariots in front of them. An image
of some god, Krishna or Indra, was held aloft before the ranks! In the
midst of his army the Indian prince had his seat upon an elephant of
exceptional size, his own magnificent frame encased in a hauberk of cunning
workmanship, which left nothing but his right shoulder bare - visible to
all and surveying all. The Indian army waited, a great stationary mass,
whilst the monotonous yet exciting rhythm of the drums and the trumpet-
ing of the elephants filled the air, to see how the more mobile European
force opposed to it would develop the attack. As in the former fight
that morning, it was a cloud of 1000 mounted archers from Central Asia,
which first rolled out upon the Indian left and covered the cavalry there
with flights of arrows. Their arrows might bave been answered more
effectually from the Indian ranks, were it not that the rain. rotten slush
underfoot made it impossible for the Indian archers to get a firm rest for
their long bows. To repel this attack the Indian cavalry on the left wing
began to execute some wheeling movement, but while it was still incomplete
the Macedonian horse-guards, led by Alexander himself bore down upon
them. The battle, so much we can say, was decided by the cavalry.
Alexander's onset was supported by another body of European horse under
the Macedonian Coenus. What exactly the manoeuvre of Coenus was is
obscure ; the phrases in our authorities are of doubtful interpretation, and
what is offered in printed texts is sometimes the conjectural emendation of
a modern editor". The Indian cavalry was unable to hold its own against
the Macedonian horse, practised in a hundred fights over half Asia. The
irretrievable defeat of the Indian cavalry threw the infantry into confusion,
and the crush in the centre made the elephants a terror to their own side.
When the European infantry came into action, all resistance had become
hopeless, and what followed was not fighting, but butchery. Between the
broken squadrons of horse plunging amongst them and the rushes of the
maddened elephants, the Indian army was reduced to a bewildered mob3.
1 Curt. VIII, 14, 11.
2 E. g. in the Teubner text of Curtius by Hedicke 'Ccenus ingenti vi in laevum
cornu invehitur,' VIII, 14, 17, is emended into ‘a laevo cornu invehitur.
3 For the battle see especially Schubert, Die Porus-Schlacht in Rhein. Mus. , Neue
Folge, LVI (1901), p. 543 f. He attempts to disentangle the parts of Ptolemy and
- Aristobulus in Arrian's account. One critical question bearing on a reconstruction of
the battle is the value to be attached to the 'Letter of Alexander'cited by Plutarch.
Schubert holds it to be a later fabrication based on Clitarchus Delbrück (Gesch. der
Kriegskunst, 1, p. 189) maintains that although not the work Alexander himself, it
was an official bulletin given out in his name. G. Veith in Klio, VIII (1908), pp.
## p. 316 (#352) ############################################
316
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
[ch.
of the invasion? . The fighting seems to have been of exceptional ferocity.
At one place, where Alexander was wounded, the whole population was
put to the sword. At another place we hear of a huge massacre, and 40,000
men taken captive. At a third place a body of Indians from the Punjab
had come to help the local chieftain for bire. When the town capitulated, it
was agreed that these mercenaries should transfer their services to Alexan-
der. They encamped on a little hill apart. There, as they talked together,
it seemed to them a horrible thing that they should march with the Yara-
nas against their own people. They determined to slip away, when night
fell, and make across the hills for home. But when night fell, they found
the hill beset on all sides with the soldiers of Alexander ; for some one had
betrayed their design. The Macedonians suffered none of them to live till
morning?
The town with which this incident is connected the Greeks call
Massaga. We know only that it was situated east of the Guraeus river and
apparently not far from the stream. The resistance which the eastern-most
branch of the h. ll-people, those called by the Greeks Assakēnoi, offered
to the invader seems to have been concentrated at this place. All
these tribes, as far as the Indus, recognised as overlord a chief whom the
Greeks call Assakēnos. His organisation for defence included an alliance with
the king of the Abhisāra country beyond the Indus, who sent contingents
to his support3. Assakēnos had himself taken command at Massaga, and
fell there, struck by a missile from one of the European siegemachines'.
His mother and daughter were left in the enemies' hands• ; but it was not
among Alexander's faults to fail in chivalry to the women whom war put
at his mercy.
1 In the Greek accounts a people called Aspasioi are found in Choes (either the
Alishang or Kūnar) Valley and a people called Assakenoi in the Swāt Valley. Both
names are supposed to represent the same Indian name Açvaka, connected with
açia
horse. If so, the two Greek names may be due to local varieties of pronunciation, and
it may be noted that the form Aspasioi would then approximate to Irānian speech, in
which aspa is the equivalent of aqua. Strabo, according to the MSS. (XV, C. 691,
C. 698), calls the Aspasioi Hypasioi ; this is often amended in modern texts to Hippasioi,
on the supposition that the Greeks knew their hippos to be the etymological equivalent
of aspa and attempted a translation. This is extremely unlike the Greek way in these
matters. The confusion is made worse by another people called Astakenoi appearing
in the Pushkalāvati region, whose name is supposed not to be connected etymologically
with that of their neighbours, the Assakenoi.
2 Arr. IV 27 ; Diod. XVII, 84 ; Plut. Alex. 69 ; Polyaen. Strateg. IV, 3, 20.
3 Arr. IV, 27, 7.
4 Arr. IV, 27, 2.
5 Arr. IV, 27, 4.
6 A strange story is given by Justin, XII, 7, 10, that it was the wife of Assakenos
who fell into Alexander's hands and that he had a son by her, who afterwards became
king of the Indians (! ) (cf. Curtius, VIII, 10, 35). It may be that the story was connec-
ted in later times in the interests of some petty king of this region, who wished to esta-
blish a claim to be descended from Alexander. That is a claim which is still common
in the Indian frontier hills.
## p. 317 (#353) ############################################
Xv]
TRIBES BEYOND THE N. W. FRONTIER
317
and we
are told
The loot in cattle in these regions was enormous,
that a herd of the finest animals was actually given by Alexander into the
charge of drovers who were to drive them all the way from the Hindu
Kush to Macedonia. A town called by the Greeks Arigaeon, which
apparently commanded the road between the Kūnar and the Panjkora
Valleys, was selected for recolonisation - a number of war-worn Europeans
and a number of the native people were to form the population, as in
similar cases before.
One curious incident relieves the story of blood shed. Somewhere
among these hills: -- probably on the lower spurs of the three-peaked
Koh-i-Mor-dwelt a people who told the Yavanas, or so the invaders under-
stood them, that they were descendants of the western people who had
come into those parts with their god Dionysus ; for Dionysus, the Greeks
believed, had gone conquering across Asia, at the head of his revellers, in
the old heroic days. The Greeks always experienced a keen joy of recog.
nition, when they could connect foreign things with the figures of their
own legends, and they were delighted with the suggestion. The assonance
of names lent itself immediately to confirm the theory as usefully as it
does to confirm the adventurous speculations of modern archaeologists. In
the legend the name Nysa was specially connected with Dionysus—it was
the name of his nurse or of the place where he was born or of his holy
hill, and the name of this little town in the Hindu Kush, as it was pro-
nounced to Alexander, had a similar sound. Again the legend said
.
that Dionysus had been born from the thigh (mēros) of Zeus, and a neigh-
bouring summit, the Greeks discovered, was called Meru. What could be
clearer ? And when they saw the sacred plants of the god, the vine and ivy,
running wild over the mountain, as they knew them at home’, no doubt
could be left. Modern travellers have come upon certain fair Kāfir tribes
in this region, whose religious processions with music and dancing have
a Bacchanalian look, and the Nysaeans discovered by Alexander, they
suggest, may have been the ancestors of these Kāfirs; their processions
may have led the Greeks to connect them with Dionysus. This is possible,
but in the Greek books we hear nothing of the Nysaeans going in proces-
sion. It is the Macedonian soldiers themselves, who wreathe their heads
with ivy and range the bills in ecstasy, calling on the god by his sacred
names, as their people had done from old time on the woody spurs of the
Balkans. Hostilities, at any rate, with these interesting kinsmen could not
1 Holdich in discussing the site of Nysa (Gates of India, p. 122) gives a mistrans-
lation of Arrian. Arrian does not say that Alexander "then entered that part of the
country, but that somewhere in the country which Alexander had already traversed
there was a place called Nysa.
2 Holdich, Gates of India, p. 133.
>
## p. 318 (#354) ############################################
318
[ch.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
be thought of, and the 'Nysaeans were themselves prepared to act in
character ; three hundred of them on their mountain horses joined the
army of the Yavana king and followed him to battle in the plains of the
Punjab.
Whilst Alexander was fighting in the valleys to the north of the
Kābul, the other division of the Macedonian army under Hephaestion and
Perdiccas, accompanied by the rāja of Takshaçilā, made its way along the
Kābu] to the Indus. It may have been through the Khyber Pass that,
one day in the cold weather season at the end of 327 or beginning of 326
B. C. , the glitter of strange spears, long lines of mailed men, were seen
emerging into the plain about Peshāwar- the advance guard of the Euro-
pean invasion of India. A few days' march farther, and they came to the
Indus. Arrived there, the Europeans set about collecting material for the
bridge which was to transport their fellows into the interior of the land.
But their hold on the country west of the Indus was not yet secure. The
region in which the division of Hephaestion and Perdiccas was
now encamped formed part of the realm of a rāja, named by the Greeks
Astes', whose capital was the town of Pushkalāvati (Chārsadda) to the
north of the the Kābul river. The rāja at this moment declared himself an
enemy of the foreigners. He was not strong enough to hold the open field
against Hephaestion and Perdiccas, and shut himself desperately in some
walled town. For a month he held it against the besiegers, and then the
greater strength of the Europeans beat him down, and destroyed him. The
principality was given to one who had been his enemy and become a
hanger-on of the rāja of Takshaçilā, a certain Sangaya. He was a man
upon whose loyalty the Yavanas could count.
In the hills to the north, after a few months' fighting, the tribe
generally had submitted to Alexander and the strong places were in his
possession. He constituted the lower Kābul Valley and the recently
conquered hills a special satrapy, distinct from the satrapy of the
Paropanisadae, which Tyriespes ruled from Alexandria-under-the-Caucasus.
The new satrapy, whose official name we do not know, but which can be
most conveniently described as India-west-of-the-Indus, got for its governor
a Nicanor, probably the same man who had been left a few months before
to superintend the building of Alexandria. The king himself came down to
Pushkalāvati at the lower end of the Guraeus (now usually called the Swāt)
valley, which was not in a position, after the defeat of its rāja, to offer any
resistance. He set a Macedonian garrison in the town under an officer
named Philip
But the effective occupation of the lower Kābul valley by the Yavanas
required still more to be done. The division of Hephaestion had meantime
1 One gue:s is that this represents the Sanskrit proper name Hasti ; a more
prohable one is that it is short for Ashțakarāja, king of the Ashtakas.
## p. 319 (#355) ############################################
Xv]
THE CROSSING OF THE INDUS
319
fortified and garrisoned a place the Greeks call Orobatis, and Alexander,
accompanied by two Indian chieftains, 'Cophaeus' and 'Assagets'l, moved
about to take possession of various small towns between Pushkalāvati and
the Indus. But one great labour remained. The reduction of a certain
mountain citadel, which crowned Alexander's work during that winter,
always seemed to the Greeks the great glory of the campaign. The Greek
books described the siege and storming at greater length than any other
episode in this region. The story was started that Heracles had attempted
to storm that very rock and failed. Unfortunately, it has so far been
impossible to fit the Greek description of Aornus to any rocky height
noted in the country to-daya.
Aornus, we are told, was not far from the modern Amb
;
it was a
great isolated mass of rock, 6670 feet high, flat on the top with precipitous
sides, which on the south went down straight to the river Indus. On the
summit were woods and watersprings and fields whose cultivation could
keep a thousand men employed. It seems plain that an object of this kind
can hardly have escaped modern geographers in search of it. The inference
is that some particulars in the Greek account are due to imagination. But
when once we begin to trim it so as to suit the actual topography, it
depends on a more or less arbitrary selection which particulars we elimi.
nate and which we retain. There is at any rate no reason to doubt that
the final conquest of this mountain region did involve the reduction of
some exceptionally strong rock-citadel, in which fugitives of the defeated
tribes made a last stand. The citadel, when taken, was held for Alexander
by a garrison under the Indian Çaçigupta. The capture of Aornus had to
be followed by another short expedition further up into the hills, in pur-
suit of the flying defenders of the fortress. They were led by the brother of
the Assakenian chief killed in Massaga3 and had with them a herd of
fifteen war-elephants. To the Greeks the idea of getting hold of these ani-
mals, so strange and wonderful to them, of whose value in battle they had
probably formed an even exaggerated notion, made their pursuit the more
eager. The hills were deserted before them, and Alexander pushed on as
far as a town which the Greek books call Dyrta. It was found empty of
inhabitants. Alexander learnt that the fugitive prince was dead by the
evidence of his severed head, brought by some hillmen one day into
camp. He had fallen a victim to some hostile tribe or to his own
followers. Two bodies of light troops were detached to scour the hills yet
further, and Alexander himself turned back with the rest of his division
1 Anspach suggests, p.
65, note 200 that Cophaeus=rāja of the region about
Pushkala near the Cophen, and Assagetes=the rāja of the Assakenoi (successor of the
rāja killed in Massaga).
2 See the note in Vincent Smith, pp. 56, 57.
3 Arr. IV, 30, 5 ; Diod. XVII, 86 ; Curt. VIII, 12, 1. His name is variously given
as Aphrikes, Aphices, Erices in different texts.
## p. 320 (#356) ############################################
320
[cu.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
to the Indus. Some natives of the region were caught by the Macedonians
on their way. They reported that the fugitives from Aornus and the
people of the hills had escaped into the country of Abhisāra, whose rāja
was watching the progress of the Yavanas with a doubtful mind. As
for the elephants, they had turned them loose in the country bordering
the Indus, more swampy in those days than it is now! An elephant
hunt accordingly followed ; Alexander had already, with his quick interest
in new things and his Macedonian sporting propensities, collected about
him Indians whose special business was elephant-hunting, and by their
means the scattered herd was driven in, and attached to the Macedonian
army”. The point at which Alexander's division struck the Indus on its
descent from the hills was some way above the point where Hephaestion
and Perdiccas had by this time constructed the bridge. Between the two,
the right bank of the river was largely overgrown with forest, which, if in
one way it impeded the advance of Alexander's division, in another way
helped the transport by furnishing timber for boats. Part of Alexander's
force floated down the river, and when he arrived at Hephaestion's bridge
the number of new boats was swelled by those brought down from up-
stream, The two divisions of the Yavana host now re-united for passage
into the heart of India. The place at which the bridge had been made has
been fixed by the most recent opinion at Ohind, about 16 miles above
Attock. The Greeks felt that they were crossing the threshold of a new
world. Sacrifices to the Greek gods, games and horse-races in their honour
on the river bank at Ohind marked their sense that they were about to
begin a new enterprise of formidable magnitude. Alexander was approach-
ing the bourne of the old Persian Empire, and it was evident that he meant
to press still onward towards the sunrise. The Greek diviners announced
that the omens were favourable. In the early dawn one day in the spring of
326 B. C. 3, the host began to defile over the bridge, the mingled line of many
races streaming all day into the Indian world. And the composition of the
army became now more singularly mixed by the contingents of native
Indian troops sent by the rāja of Takshaçilā, squadrons of Indian horse and
thirty elephants, endless trains moreover of oxen and sheep for sacrifice
and food, and silver brought in masses from his treasuries.
The rāja of Takshaçilā was now none other than Āmbhi himself ; for
the old rāja had not lived to see the Yavanas enter his city. The first act of
the new rāja had been to send a message of homage to Alexander ; he
would not assume his ancestral kingdom except pending the Great King's
pleasure. He would take his kingdom only from Alexander's hand.
As Alexander moved on Takshaçilā from the bridge, Āmbhi went out
1 Holdich, Gates of India, p. 122.
2 Cf. Diod. XVII, 86.
3 Strabo XV, C. 691. Cf. Vincent Smith, p. 61, note 1.
## p. 321 (#357) ############################################
Xv]
RECEPTION AT TAKSHAÇILĀ
321
to meet him in state at the head of the forces of his principality. For
a moment, when the Greeks saw an Indian army deployed across their
path, they suspected treachery. The rāja saw that there was trouble in
the ranks and galloped forward with a few attendants. He assured
Alexander through an interpreter that everything he had was his overlord's.
Alexander on his part ratified his assumption of the princedom'.
The gates of Takshaçilā were thrown open to the Europeans and the
Indian crowd watched, no doubt with a crowd's curiosity, the strange figures
and dresses which thronged their streets. But in one quarter the Greeks met
with an indifference which took them aback. At Takshaçilā, so far as we
know, the Greeks first noticed Indian ascetics. The report reached
Alexander himself of a strange set of men who were to be seen naked some.
where near the city, 'practising endurance', men commanding a great rever-
ence among the people. It was no use his sending for them, since
they would certainly refuse to come : those who wished to learn their secret
must go to them. Alexander, however, on his side, felt he could not go to
them consistently with his dignity; so he chose an envoy, a Greek officer
named Onesicritus, who had been a disciple of the Cynic philosopher
Diogenes, a figure obviously akin to the Indian ascetics. Onesicritus, in the
book he afterwards wrote, gave an account of his interesting mission, and
we may still read it in Strabo's version”. He found fifteen ascetics some ten
miles from the city, sitting naked and motionless in a sun so burning
that one could not even walk over the stones with bare feet. Onesicritus
could only communicate with them through a series of three interpreters, but
he made them understand that the Yavana king would like to learn their
wisdom. The ascetic to whom he first addressed himself answered bluntly
that no one coming in the bravery of European clothes-cavalry cloak and
broad-bripimed hat and top boots, such as the Macedonians wore - could
learn their wisdom. To do that, he must strip naked and learn to sit on the
hot stones beside them. Another answered more mildly that it was really
very creditable for such a man as Alexander to desire to know something of
the deeper wisdom, but one must remember that to attempt to convey their
teaching through three interpreters, common men incapable of under-
standing more than the mere words, would be like trying to make water
flow clear through mud. They seem however to have made an attempt,
and then they asked Oaesicritus whether among the Yavanas there was
any teaching of this kind, and he told them about Pythagoras and
Socrates and his old master Diogenes. The ascetics seemed pleased, but
expressed regret that the wise men of the Greeks had clung to such
superfluities as clothes? . One of these ascetics was ultimately persuaded
by the rāja of Takshaçilā to accompany Alexander and return to clothes
1 Diod. XVII, 86 ; Curt. VIII, 12.
2 XV, C. 715.
3 Strabo xv, C. 714 f.
## p. 322 (#358) ############################################
322
[CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
and a worldly life. His companions considered it an apostasy, and followed
him with reproaches. The name of this Indian, who remained a notable
figure in Alexander's entourage, was one which Plutarch reproduces as
'Sphines,' but the Greeks, catching among the Indian words of greeting
which he exchanged with his fellow-countrymen, the word kalyāna, lucky,
came to call him Kalanos.
At Takshaçilā Alexander held what would be called in modern India
a durbar. There were more Greek sacrifices and games.
Āmbhi and
a crowd of smaller chiefs from the country already dominated by the
Macedonian arms brought presents, and were granted extensions of territory
at the expense of such of their neighbours as had not submitted to the
European King of Kings. And Alexander bestowed presents also with
a large hand. In the train of the European army, wagons had come over
the mountains bringing from the storehouses of the old Persian kings vessels
of gold and silver, Babylonian and Persian embroideries, and many of
these now found a home in the palace of Takshaçilā. The Macedonian
captains were inclined to grumble at the munificence with which Alexander
treated his Indian vassal kings. But Alexander had come to feel himself,
one gathers, a man raised above distinctions of race, an Emperor of the
world, beneath whom all mankind was to be levelled and made one.
East of the Hydaspes (Jhelum) the Paurava king had been watching
the immense peril come near. He learnt of the alliance between his old
enemy of Takshaçilā and the Yavana conqueror. He learnt that other
princes of the land were tendering submission to the new power-his
own kinsman, for instance, another Paurava, whose territory lay still
further to the east, beyond the Acesines (Chenāb)? In that moment of
fear, the spirit of the great Paurava rose unshaken in the resolve to settle
his relations with the invader by the arbitrament of arms. It would be
a mistake to regard him as one who fought in the nationalist cause. The
Paurava does not seem to have been moved by any thought of
Indian solidarity against the European any more than the rāja of Takshaçilā.
It was not India that he was going to fight for ; it was his own honour
and his own kingdom His honour would not allow him to surrender
anything without a fair fight, and all his old ambitions of constructing
a great kingdom at the expense of neighbouring chiefs and the free tribes
would vanish into air, if he gave way to a power which had made
agreement with his rivals. And yet, if the Paurava was not a champion of
nationalism, India may well reckon the proud and brave prince among
her national heroes. Unhappily India has long forgotten his name.
We know of him only through the Greek books which call him Porus. It
would have seemed a strange fate to him, had any astrologer been able to
1 Arr, vii, 2, 4 ; Plut. Alex. 65 ; Strabo xv,
ç.
2 Arr. v, 21, 3.
714 f.
## p. 323 (#359) ############################################
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THE ADVANCE TO THE HYDASPES
323
predict it -- to pass quickly out of the memory of his own people, and to be a
familiar name for centuries in lands of which he had no conception, away
to the West !
To meet the Europeans, the Paurava could draw upon the resources
of his own principality lying between the Hydaspes and the Acesines, full of
populous villages! . And if his immediate neighbours to east and west were
hostile, the rāja of Abhisāra was inclined to make common cause with him.
The prince had already, as we have seen, given shelter to the fugitives
from the Swāt Valley, and now messengers went to and fro between
him and the Paurava. He thought it politic however to play a double
game, and sent his brother to the durbar at Takshaçilā to convey presents
to Alexander and the announcement of his submission. And meanwhile
he prepared to send forces to join the Indian army mustering on the
Hydaspes
It was probably some wind of these intrigues which accelerated
Alexander's attack? . The Paurava for his part, had sent the Yavana con-
queror an open defiance. To the envoys who summoned him to meet
Alexander at Takshaçilā he had answered that he would meet Alexander
on his own frontiers, in arms. He soon learnt that in spite of the heats
of summer which now lay on the land, in spite of the near approach of
the rains, the European army had broken up from Takshaçilā and was in
full march for the passage of the Hydaspes. Alexander had left a
Macedonian garrison in Takshaçilā, and a Macedonian satrap, Philip the
son of Machatas, in the realm of Āmbhi'. Probably somewhere near the
place where is now the town of Jhelum the army of the Paurava gathered
on the banks of the Hydaspes in the spring of 326. Its numbers are
variously en®. They were perhaps not very far, more or less from
those of Alexander's army, though all our accounts agree in one point
-- that Alexander had a numerical superiority in cavalry.
The first body of Yavanas to appear on the river was, one gathers, the
advance guard sent on by Alexander, bringing in sections the boats which
1 Strabo XV, C. 698.
2 Diod. XVII, 87.
3 Curt. VIII, 13, 2.
4 This may have been the same Philip whom we heard of as commandant of the
garrison in Pushkalāvati. Anspach thinks it was not, note 200.
5 Dr Vincent Smith in an appendix (p. 78) defends the Jhelum site against the
Jalālpur site, preferred by Cunningham. A point in favcur of Jhelum is that it is
higher up and Alexander seems to have kept close to the hills. One does not see how.
ever that it can ever be possible to decide the question with our defective documents.
Most of the argument on the subject takes it for granted that the place where Alex.
ander crossed was above the camp of Porus. But our sources do not tell us whether it
was above or below. Gruf Yorck von Wartenburg and Delbrück prefer the hypothesis
that it was below. With this point uncertain, as it must remain, it seems idle to try
to be precise.
6 The numbers in the final battle, according to Arrian V. 15, 4, were 30,000 foot
O‘all that was any good, that is to say’), 4000 horse, 300 chariots, and 200 elephants.
See Delbrück, p. 184.
## p. 324 (#360) ############################################
324
[CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
had been used on the Indus. These were fitted together again on the
Hydaspes, and a little fleet could soon be described in moorings across the
river. The king with the main army was on the road. The Paurava seems
to have thrown one body of troops into the country opposite under his
nephew 'Spitaces,' to contest Alexander's advance in some narrow place
of the hills, through which the road from Takshaçilā runs. It was, of
course, a mere preliminary skirmish, and a manoeuvre of the Macedonian
horse threw back the Indians in some confusion? . Presently the great host
of the Yavanas was seen drawn up on the other side. The eyes watching
from the left bank could make out the royal tent and the uniform of the
body-guards and even the figure of the marvellous man himself moving
to and fro among his captains. They could see too a body of 5000 Indians,
their countrymen, sent by Āmbhi to fight by the side of the Macedonians.
Nothing divided the Indian army from the conquerors of the world but
the breadth of the Hydaspes. That however was a serious obstacle. The
river at this seasonwas rising as the snows began to melt in the
Himālayas. Along the left bank the Paurava kept a sharp watch on all
possible landing-places. His elephants especially would deter the Europeans,
by their terror as well as by their solid bulk, from landing. To land in
the face of such opposition might well seem an impossibility, even for
Yavanas. But for the Paurava it meant the necessity of unremitting
vigilance ; it meant the continuous minute scrutiny of every movement
on the opposite bank. He was now to show whether he had the general's
genius for divining the purposes of the enemy from chance indications.
The difficulty was that movement in the opposite camp seemed perpe-
tual. Over and over again there were concentrations at this point or that,
as if an immediate attack were to be made, and then, when the nerves of the
defenders were strung up to the highest pitch of expectancy, nothing hap-
pened. Was the dreadful foe really brought to a standstill by an obstacle such
as he had never yet encountered ? Or were these abortive movements pur-
posed feints to throw the defenders off their guard ? For the foreigners at
any rate it must make things worse when rain storms came on? - tropical de.
luges such as they could never have experienced before, with only such shel-
ter as a camp allows—and the swollen river swelled yet higher. Some indi-
1 The exact route of Alexander from Takshaçilā to the Hydaspes is unknown.
See Vincent Smith, p. 63, note.
2 Polyaen IV, 3, 21.
3 Dr Vincent Smith's disquisition on the date of the battle (p. 85 f. ) suffers from
one important datum having been left out-Strabo's statement, on the authority of
Nearchus, that the Macedonian army was on the Acesines at the time of the summer
solstice (XV, C. 692). This would support Arrian's statement that the battle was in
the month of Munychion, i. e. probably about the middle of May, not in July as Dr.
Vincent Smith computes. (See Anspach, note 124. )
4 According to Mr. Pearson (see Bibliography) the regular rain do not begin in
this part till July.
## p. 325 (#361) ############################################
xv]
THE CROSSING OF THE HYDASPES
325
cations seemed to show that this state of suspense might be protracted for
months, that the Yavanas had given up the thought of attempting to cross
in the present state of the river, and were going to wait for the winter
when it would become fordable. It was certain from the reports of spies
that great stores of provisions were being brought up, as if for a long halt? .
Then alarms at night began. In the intervals of the rain the noise of
cavalry mustering could be heard on the further bank, the shoutings of
words of command, the songs which the Yavanas sang in battle to their
own gods ; and at the sound of it, on the left bank the great elephants
would swing through the darkness to their stations, and the lines of Indians
stand ready with sword and bow. And still nothing happened. The night
alarm became almost a piece of routine.
One daybreak, after a night of storm and violent rain, outposts came
galloping in with the tiding that boats crowded with horses and armed
men had been sighted rounding the end of a wooded island some twenty
miles away from the Indian camp. A body of Yavanas had succeeded
in reaching an undefended part of the left bank! The first outposts who
reported sighting the boats were soon followed by others who had seen
the enemy getting firm foot upon the land.
From the Greek books we know more than the Paurava could know
of the movements which had taken place in the European army on that
terrific night. While the rain poured in torrents and the lightnings struck
men down here and there in the European columns, the king with a strong
division? - Macedonian horse and foot, horsemen from Balkh and Bukhāra,
light-armed Balkan mountaineers and archers-moved to a point about
seventeen miles from the European camp, where the fleet of river- boats
was in readiness. As it drew near day, the storm abated, and in the first
light the laden boats pushed off. In any cirsumstances, to embark upon
an unknown river, swollen in flood, would have been sufficiently venture-
some. A single bark carried the king and several of his great captains,
.
men who in after days were destined themselves to rule great tracts of the
earth and to plot against each other's lives Perdiccas, the future Regent,
Ptolemy, one day to be king of Egypt, Lysimachus, to be king of Thrace
and
carry the Macedonian arms into what is now Roumania, Seleucus, who
would inherit Alexander's Asiatic empire. With so much history was one
boat big, which in the early light of that gray morning swayed upon
1 Schubert points out that if Alexander was trying to keep the Indians in expec.
tation of an immediate attack he can hardly have tried at the same time to persuade
them that he was going to remain stationary for a long time. If they got this impres.
sion from the arrival of provisions, it was not therefore due to design on his part.
2 Some 31,000 men, if Arrian's figure are accepted, Of course, if Delbrück's
estimate of 30,000 for the whole of Alexander's army is right, Arrian's number must be
very much exaggerated.
## p. 326 (#362) ############################################
326
(CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
the blind eddies of an Indian river. It was one of the moments when
Alexander threw himself upon luck, as represented by the chance play of
natural forces. The point from which the boats put out hod the
advantage- it was chosen for that reason- of being hidden from the
watchers on the opposite bank by a wooded island in mid stream. It was not
till the boats approached land that they came in sight, an'l sent the outposts
galloping back to the Paurava. It was instantly clear that everything was
a question of time : could the Indians reach the place where the Europeans
had landed before the Europeans were ready to receive them? And here
the luck of natural accidents came in. The Europeans soon discovered
that the recent rain had cut off the place where they were from the proper
shore by a swollen channel ; they had landed on what was now fractically
an island. All depended on whether the channel was fordable. If it was
not, the Europeans were caught in a trap. The question remained doubt-
ful, as at point after point attempts were made, and the water proved too
deep. Then a point was found where it was just possible for a man to
cross, going into the strong current above his breast, and there men and
horses struggled through. Onesicritus recorded words, which, he said,
burst from the king in the stress of that moment. They show a curious
point of contact between the European then and the European now. For
to-day India sees in the European some one living and moving and acting
in its midst, whilst the public opinion which governs him, for which he
really cares, is the opinion of a society thousands of miles away. At that
moment, Onesicritus said, Alexander suddenly exclaimed, as the thought
struck him that he was going through all this for the sake of a fame, which
meant that people would talk and write about him at Athens !
When the Paurava received tidings of the landing of the Yavanas, he
could not yet tell from which direction the main attack would come. For
the enemy's camp could be described as usual just opposite - the royal tent,
bodies of European soldiery, of horsemen from the Kandahār highlands and
the Hindu Kush, and the Indian troops of the hostile rājas. The Paurava
must not relax his guard on the adjacent landing-places, whatever
force he might detach to deal with the body of Yavanas who had got across.
As a matter of fact, Alexander had left a force including two Macedonian
phalanxes, in the camp under Craterus, with orders to attempt the passage
as soon as they should see the Indians thrown into confusion by his own
attack, and another body of troops with Meleager at a point half way
between the camp and the place of embarkation”. The division which
1 Plutarch, Alex. 60.
2 If Arrian's figures are right, the force left in ramp would have numbered about
17,000 foot and 1800 horse, and the division with Meleager about 30,000 foot and 2000
horse. Delbrück considers that the number given for Alexander's division, 11,000, is
correct åld makes it the basis of his calculation.
## p. 327 (#363) ############################################
Xv]
THE BATTLE OF THE HYDASPES
327
crossed the river with Alexander numbered about 11,000 men. The
Paurava remained stationary with the bulk of his army, but in order to
meet with all possible speed the Europeans who had landed, he detached a
force of 2000 mounted men and 120 chariots under the command of his
son. The young prince found a body of Europeans already drawn up on
the shore. As he came nearer, detachments of horse broke from the enemy's
lines and swept towards him. But instead of the shock of the encounter,
a hail of arrows descended upon the Indian cavalry ; for the men who
came against them carried bows and could shoot in full career. They were
not Yavanas, but the men from the steppes of Central Asia, who by custom
fought in this elusive fashion. Behind them, however, Alexander was keep-
ing his European squadrons in reserve, till he knew whether he had the
main force of the Paurava before him or only a detachment. Then the
Indians received the charge of the Macedonian horse, squadron after squa-
dron, and at their head flashed the person of the terrible king. The Indian
horsemen were overpowered, and could only throw their lives away in the
unequal battle. Four hundred are said to have fallen ; the young prince
was among the slain. All the 120 chariots, running headlong into the mud,
were captured!
The return of the shattered squadrons to camp told the Paurava that
no river separated Alexander and himself any more, that the hour of
supreme crisis was come. He determined to move practically the whole of
his force against the division with the king. Only a small body of troops
(four or five hundred foot soldiers and thirty-five elephants) were left to hold
the river-bank against the division with Craterus. The Indian army arrived
in time to draw up in battle order before the Europeans engaged them.
Some of the pictorial features of the battle which followed we can
gather from our Greek texts. But their account is too confused, in part
perhaps through the mistakes of copyists, to allow us to reconstruct it as a
military operation. Not knowing whether it was above or below the Indian
camp that Alexander had landed, we do not know whether the right or the
left of the Indian line rested upon the river ; and yet that would be an
essential point in understanding what happened. We know at any rate that
the strength of the Indians was in the two hundred elephants -an
to which the Europeans had no parallel and which was apt to terrify the
foreign borses – whilst the superiority of the Europeans was in cavalry.
A picture of the Indian line of battle is given us. The elephants were
drawn up along the front like bastions in a wall. They enemy would be
1 Anspach supposes that the son of Porus was already near the spot with 60
chariots and 1000 horse when Alexander landed, and that, finding a larger body had
crossed than he could cope with, he sent for help to his cousin Spitaces, who was hold.
ing a post lower down opposite Meleager ; Spitaces brought up 60 more chariots and
another 1000 horse.
arm
## p. 328 (#364) ############################################
328
(CH.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
obliged, either to attack the unfamiliar monsters directly, or go in between
them to get at the masses of Indian foot behind. The line of foot projected
on each side beyond the elephants, and, beyond the foot cavalry was
stationed to guard either flank, with chariots in front of them. An image
of some god, Krishna or Indra, was held aloft before the ranks! In the
midst of his army the Indian prince had his seat upon an elephant of
exceptional size, his own magnificent frame encased in a hauberk of cunning
workmanship, which left nothing but his right shoulder bare - visible to
all and surveying all. The Indian army waited, a great stationary mass,
whilst the monotonous yet exciting rhythm of the drums and the trumpet-
ing of the elephants filled the air, to see how the more mobile European
force opposed to it would develop the attack. As in the former fight
that morning, it was a cloud of 1000 mounted archers from Central Asia,
which first rolled out upon the Indian left and covered the cavalry there
with flights of arrows. Their arrows might bave been answered more
effectually from the Indian ranks, were it not that the rain. rotten slush
underfoot made it impossible for the Indian archers to get a firm rest for
their long bows. To repel this attack the Indian cavalry on the left wing
began to execute some wheeling movement, but while it was still incomplete
the Macedonian horse-guards, led by Alexander himself bore down upon
them. The battle, so much we can say, was decided by the cavalry.
Alexander's onset was supported by another body of European horse under
the Macedonian Coenus. What exactly the manoeuvre of Coenus was is
obscure ; the phrases in our authorities are of doubtful interpretation, and
what is offered in printed texts is sometimes the conjectural emendation of
a modern editor". The Indian cavalry was unable to hold its own against
the Macedonian horse, practised in a hundred fights over half Asia. The
irretrievable defeat of the Indian cavalry threw the infantry into confusion,
and the crush in the centre made the elephants a terror to their own side.
When the European infantry came into action, all resistance had become
hopeless, and what followed was not fighting, but butchery. Between the
broken squadrons of horse plunging amongst them and the rushes of the
maddened elephants, the Indian army was reduced to a bewildered mob3.
1 Curt. VIII, 14, 11.
2 E. g. in the Teubner text of Curtius by Hedicke 'Ccenus ingenti vi in laevum
cornu invehitur,' VIII, 14, 17, is emended into ‘a laevo cornu invehitur.
3 For the battle see especially Schubert, Die Porus-Schlacht in Rhein. Mus. , Neue
Folge, LVI (1901), p. 543 f. He attempts to disentangle the parts of Ptolemy and
- Aristobulus in Arrian's account. One critical question bearing on a reconstruction of
the battle is the value to be attached to the 'Letter of Alexander'cited by Plutarch.
Schubert holds it to be a later fabrication based on Clitarchus Delbrück (Gesch. der
Kriegskunst, 1, p. 189) maintains that although not the work Alexander himself, it
was an official bulletin given out in his name. G. Veith in Klio, VIII (1908), pp.
