But what greatness did Alexander acquire beyond his just merits, what without sweat, what without blood, what without a price, what without labour? He drank rivers fouled with blood, crossed streams bridged by dead bodies, through hunger ate the first grass that he saw, dug through nations buried in deep snow1 and cities built beneath the earth, sailed over a battling sea2; and as he traversed the parching strands of Gedrosia and Arachosia,3 it was in the sea, not on the land, that first he saw a living plant. If to Fortune, as to a human being, one might present Frankness in Alexander's behalf, would she not say, “When and where did you ever vouchsafe a way for the exploits of Alexander? What fortress did he ever capture by your help without the shedding of blood? What city unguarded or what regiment unarmed did you deliver into his hands? What king was found to be indolent, or what general negligent, or what watchman asleep at the gate? But no river was easy to cross, no storm was moderate, no summer's heat was without torment. Betake yourself to Antiochus, the son of Seleucus, or to Artaxerxes, the brother of Cyrus ; depart to Ptolemy Philadelphus ! Their fathers, while yet alive, proclaimed [p. 465] them kings ; they won battles that did not cost a tear ; they made merry all their lives in processions and theatres; and every one of them, because of good fortune, grew old upon the throne. “But in the case of Alexander, though I were to mention nothing else, behold his body gashed with wounds4 from tip to toe, bruised all over, smitten at the hands of his enemies
Now with the spear, now the sword, now with mighty masses of boulders.5On the banks of the Granicus6 his helmet was cleft through to his scalp by a sword ; at Gaza his shoulder was wounded by a missile ; at Maracanda his shin was so torn by an arrow that by the force of the blow the larger bone was broken and extruded. Somewhere in Hyrcania his neck was smitten by a stone, whereby his sight was dimmed, and for many days he was haunted by the fear of blindness. Among the Assacenians his ankle was wounded by an Indian arrow ; that was the time when he smilingly said to his flatterers, ‘this that you see is blood, not
Ichor, that which flows from the wounds of the blessed immortals.’7At Issus he was wounded in the thigh with a sword, as Chares8 states, by Darius the king, who had come into hand-to-hand conflict with him. Alexander himself wrote of this simply, and with complete truth, in a letter to Antipater : ‘I myself happened,’ he writes, ‘to be wounded in the thigh by a dagger. But nothing untoward resulted from the blow either [p. 467] immediately or later.’ Among the Mallians he was wounded in the breast by an arrow three feet long, which penetrated his breastplate, and someone rode up under him, arid struck him in the neck, as Aristobulus relates. When he had crossed the Taiiais against the Scythians and had routed them, he pursued them on horseback an hundred and fifty stades, though he was grievously distressed with diarrhoea.9