Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander 8.10.13

8.10.13

Rex situ montis cognito ex incolis cum toto exercitu praemissis commeatibus verticem eius ascendit Multa hedera vitisque toto gignitur monte, multae perennes aquae manant.

Their city, so they asserted, was founded by Father Bacchus, and this was in fact its origin. It was situated at the foot of a mountain which the inhabitants call Meros, whence the Greeks took the license of coining the fable that Father Bacchus had been concealed in the thigh of Jupiter. The king learned from the inhabitants where the mountain lay, and sending provisions on before, climbed to its summit with his whole army. There they saw the ivy-plant and the vine growing in great luxuriance all over the mountain, and perennial waters gushing from its slopes. The juices of the fruits were various and wholesome since the soil favoured the growth of chance-sown seeds, and even the crags were frequently overhung with thickets of laurel and spikenard. I attribute it not to any divine impulse, but to wanton folly, that they wreathed their brows with chaplets of gathered ivy and vine-leaves, and roved at large through the woods like bacchanals ; so that, when the folly initiated by a few had, as usually happens, suddenly infected the whole multitude, the slopes and peaks of the mountain rang with the shouts of thousands paying their homage to the guardian divinity of the grove. Nay, they even flung themselves down full length on the greensward, or on heaps of leaves as if peace reigned all around.