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The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c25: Chapter XV. Alexander the Great

The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c25

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Chapter XV. Alexander the Great

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In the fourth century B.C. there is a sudden rift in the mists which envelop the ancient history of India. The regions disclosed are the Kābul Valley, the foothills through which the Five Rivers come down into the plains of the Punjab, the plains themselves, and the lower course of the Indus. The country, as we see it, is held partly by a number of independent tribes, governed by their own headmen and owning the authority of no king. But this primitive aristocratic type of community is holding its own with difficulty against another type of government, the monarchic. In parts of the country principalities have been formed under despotic rājas, and between the different elements a struggle with varying vicissitudes is going on. The rājas are fighting to extend their authority over the free tribes and the free tribes are fighting to repel the rājas. The rājas are also fighting amongst themselves, and mutual jealousies lead to politic alliances according to the necessities of the moment; we divine in this little world a conflict and shifting of antagonistic groups such as we can follow on a larger scale in the history of Europe. It is into this world that the Western invader plunges in 326 B.C.

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About ten miles north-west from where Rāwalpindi now stands stood, in the fourth century B.C., the city of Takshaçilā (Taxila), long eminent among the cities of India as a great seat of learning. In the year 327 it was the capital of a rāja, whose principality lay between the Indus and its tributary the Jhelum (the ancient Vitastā, the Hydaspes of the Greeks)¹. Like Rāwalpindi to-day,

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¹ Although the courses of the great rivers of the Punjab have greatly changed in historical times and are still changing, their names may be traced with certainty from the Age of the Rigveda down to the present day. Those which are chiefly important in the history of Alexander's Indian campaign are:

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| *Ancient Indian.* | *Greek and Latin.* | *Modern.* |
| Sindhu. | Ἰνδός, Indus. | Indus. |
| Kubhā. | Κωφήν, Cophēn. | Kābul. |
| Suvāstu. | Σόαστος, Soastus. | Swāt. |
| Vitastā. | Ὑδάσπης, Hydaspes. | Jhelum. |
| Asiknī, later Chandrabhāgā. | Ἀκεσίνης, Acesines. | Chenāb. |
| Parushṇī, later Irāvatī. | Ὑδραώτης, Hydraōtes. | Rāvī. |
| Vipāç, later Vipāçā. | Ὕφασις, Hyphasis. | Beās. |
| Çutudrī. | Ζαράδρος, Zaradrus, Hesydrus. | Sutlej. |

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Takshaçilā guarded the chief gate of India from the north-west: it was the first great Indian city at which merchants who had come down the Kābul Valley and crossed the Indus about Attock arrived, three days’ journey beyond the river. Its ruler was the first among the kings of the Punjab to hear any tidings which might come down from the highlands of Afghānistān of events happening behind those tremendous mountain walls. For many generations now the Punjab must have had some knowledge of what went on in the dominions of the King of Kings. For the Persian Empire founded two centuries before by Cyrus had been a huger realm than had ever, so far as we know, existed in the world under the hand of one man, and the power and glory of the man who ruled it, the splendour of Ecbatana and Persepolis, must have been carried by fame over the neighbouring lands.

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The rājas of Takshaçilā must therefore have long lent an ear to the rumbling of wars and rebellions which came across the western mountains. They may indeed have known next to nothing of what went on at the further extremities of the Persian Empire; for the same realm which at its utmost extension eastward touched the Indus reached at its other end the Aegean and Black Seas; and the great monarchic Empires of the east are conglomerations too loosely organised for the troubles of one province to be necessarily felt in the more distant ones. The Indian princes may therefore have been ignorant of the fact that the Persian king at the other end of his realm had come into contact with a singular people settled in a quantity of little republics over the southern part of the Balkan Peninsula, along the coasts of Asia Minor, and in the intermediate islands, the people whom the Persians called collectively Yavanas (Ionians). We do not know whether it even produced any considerable shock on the banks of the Indus, when a century and a half before 334 B.C. the Persian king had led his armies to disaster in the land of the Yavanas, although those armies included Indian tribesmen torn by Persian officers from the frontier hills, whose bones were destined to find their last resting-place on the field of Plataea thousands of miles away. Of the long struggle which went on for generations after that between the Yavana republics, especially the one called Athens, and the western satraps of the Great King perhaps no rumour was brought down the Kābul valley to Takshaçilā.

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But in 334 B.C. and the following years the struggle between Persia and the Yavanas took a turn which must have made talk even in the palaces and bazaars of the Punjab. The Indian princes learnt that a Yavana king had arisen in the utmost West strong enough to drive the Great King from his throne. It may be that the western provinces, Asia Minor and Egypt, were torn away in 334, 333 and 332 b.c. by the invader without yet bringing the Indian princes to realise that so huge a fact in the world as the Persian Empire was about to vanish. But there can have been no mistaking the magnitude of the catastrophe, when Darius III was flying northward for his life, when Alexander had occupied the central seats of government and set Persepolis on fire (330 b.c.). If this man from the West was going to claim the whole heritage of the Achaemenian kings, that would make him the neighbour of the princes of India. It must have been a concern to the rāja of Takshaçilā and his fellow-kings to learn in what direction the victorious Yavana host would move next. And in fact the tidings came before long that it was moving nearer. When the winter of 330 fell, it was encamped in Seistān, and with the spring moved to the uplands which to-day constitute the southern part of Afghānistān. Here the awe-struck inhabitants, Pashtus probably, ancestors of the modern Afghāns, saw the European strangers set about a work which indicated a resolve to make themselves at home for all time in these lands won by their spear. They saw them begin to construct a city after the manner of the Yavanas at a point commanding the roads; and when the rest of the host had gone onward, there a body of Europeans remained, established behind the fresh-built walls. If we may judge by analogies, some thousands of the native people were induced by force or persuasion to settle side by side with them in the new city. It was only one of the chain of cities which marked the track of conquering Hellenism. Like many of the others, this too was given the name of the conqueror. In the speech of the Greeks it was known as Alexandria-among-the-Arachosians. To-day we call it Kandahār.

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A mountain barrier still separated the Yavana host at Kandahār in the summer of 329 from the Kābul valley, that is to say, from the river system of the Indus. And it would seem that, when the passes filled with the first winter snows, the Yavanas had not yet crossed it. But the army led by Alexander was one which defied ordinary obstacles. In winter¹, under circumstances that made regular provisioning impossible, by extraordinary endurance² it pushed through the hills and descended into the Kābul valley. The princes of the Punjab might feel that the outlandish host stood indeed at the door.

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¹ Ὑπὸ Πλειάδος δύσιν, Strabo, xv, C. 725.

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² Diod. xvii, 82; Curt. vii, 3, 12.

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But Alexander, having reached the Kābul valley in the winter of 329–8, did not make an immediate advance upon India. Beyond the mountain range which forms the northern side of the valley, the Hindu Kush, lay the extreme provinces of the old Persian Empire towards the north-east—Bactria (whose name still survives in the city of Balkh) and the country now called Bukhāra. Not only were these provinces still unsubdued, but the Persian cause was upheld there by a prince of the old blood royal. Alexander must beat down that opposition, before he could think of invading India. He waited therefore for the rest of the winter in the Kābul valley, till the spring should unblock the passes of the Hindu Kush. And again here the inhabitants saw the Europeans make preparations for permanent settlement. At the foot of the Hindu Kush, whence three roads to Bactria radiate¹, on the site probably of the still existing village of Chārīkār, rose another Alexandria, Alexandria-under-the-Caucasus. In support of the Yavana colony to be left in this town, other little settlements were established at points a day’s journey off in what were henceforth to be Greek towns; Cartana, noted for the rectangular precision with which its walls were traced out (modern Begrām, according to Cunningham) and Cadrusi (Koratas?) are names given us. In this case we have an express statement that 7000 of the people of the land were to be incorporated as citizens of the new towns with those of Alexander’s mercenaries who cared to settle in this region 2800 miles away from their old home². Another new city, or old city transformed with a new Greek name, Nicaea, occupied apparently some site between Alexandria and the Kābul river³.

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¹ Cunningham, *Ancient Geography*, p. 24.

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² Diod. XVII, 83; Curt. VII, 3, 23, according to the MSS. has ‘vii millibus seniorum Macedonum.’ Hedicke in the Teubner text amends this, perhaps too boldly, as ‘vii millibus subactarum nationum.’

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³ The discussions of Dr Vincent Smith and of Sir Thomas Holdich as to the site of Nicaea—the former puts it at Jalālābād and the latter at Kābul—are invalidated by the fact that Nicaea, if we follow Arrian, was not on the river Kābul at all. Alexander from Nicaea advances towards the Kābul; ἀφικόμενος ἐς Νίκαιαν…προὐχώρει ὡς ἐπὶ τὸν Κωφῆνα, IV, 22, 6. Mr M‘Crindle curiously omits the words in his translation. Not Nicaea, but some place on the way to the river Kābul, was where the army was divided.

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As soon as the snow was melted enough to make the Khawak Pass practicable, the Yavana army trailed up the Panjshir valley⁴, leaving little bodies of Europeans behind it to hold the Kābul valley under a Persian satrap and a Macedonian *episkopos*. The main body of the army once more contended with the hardships of a passage over the high ridges and disappeared to the northwards. During the following twelve months (May 328 to May 327) such news of it as reached India showed that the Yavana king still prevailed against all enemies. As far as the Syr Daria (Jaxartes) the peoples of Eastern Īrān were broken before him. In the early spring of 327 he was again moving to the south.

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⁴ Holdich, *Gates of India*, p. 88.

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The rāja of Takshaçilā must have realised at this juncture that a momentous choice lay before him. It may be that the idea of a common Indian nationality, in whose cause he and his brother kings might stand together against the stranger, did not even occur to him: India was too large and too disunited for the mind to embrace it as a unity. But he might well tremble for his own power, if this new resistless deluge came bursting into the land. On the other hand it might perhaps be turned to his account. His policy was largely governed by his antagonism to the rival prince of the Paurava¹ house (Porus), who ruled on the other side of the Hydaspes (Jhelum). The Paurava was indeed a neighbour to be dreaded. He is described to us as a man of gigantic and powerful build, a warrior-chief, such as in an unsettled world extends his power by aggressive ambition and proud courage. He had conceived the idea of building up for himself a great kingdom, and he was the man to realise it. He had already made an attempt to crush the free tribes to the east, pushing his advance even beyond the Hydraōtes (Rāvi), in alliance with the rāja of the Abhisāra country (corresponding roughly with the Pūnch and Naoshera districts in Kashmīr) and with many of the free tribes whom he had drawn into vassalage swelling his army, although the resistance he there encountered from the Kshatriyas² had made him temporarily give back³. His hand had perhaps also reached westward across the Hydaspes into the country which the rāja of Takshaçilā considered his own⁴. It might well seem to the rāja of Takshaçilā that, threatened on the one side by the Paurava and on the other side by the European invader, his safest course lay in allying himself with the European, riding on the crest of the wave that would sweep his rival to destruction.

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¹ Paurava is a title denoting the chief of the Pūrus, a tribe known in Vedic times (*v. sup.* Chapter IV, pp. 82 f.).

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² In Greek Kathaioi, see Lassen, vol. II, p. 167. The general designation of the warrior caste seems to be applied in this case to a particular people.

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³ Arrian V, 22.

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⁴ See Anspach, note 125.

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And yet the European host which had emerged out of the unknown West to shatter the Persian Empire may have appeared too unfamiliar and incalculable a power to make the decision easy.

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But, if the rāja hesitated, his son Āmbhi (Omphis)¹ had a clear opinion as to what the situation required. He pressed his father to place his principality at the Yavana king’s disposal. While Alexander was still in Bukhāra, Āmbhi began to negotiate on his own account. Envoys from Takshaçilā made their way over the ridges of the Hindu Kush. They were charged with the message that Āmbhi was ready to march by Alexander’s side against any Indians who might refuse to submit. Thus the European, at his first arrival at the Gates of India, found India divided against itself. It was the hand of an Indian prince, which unbarred the door to the invader.

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¹ See Sylvain Lévi in *Journal Asiatique*, 8^{me} Série xv (1890), p. 234 f.

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The summer of 327 B.C. was almost come² before the hillmen of the Hindu Kush saw the Yavana army re-appear on the ridges, cross probably by the Kushan Pass³, and stream down to the new Alexandria. The satrap who had been left here was found to have done badly, and Alexander appointed another in his place, Tyriespes, a Persian like his predecessor. The population of the city was enlarged by drawing in more of the people of the land and settling down there more war-worn European veterans. The work of making a city of Greek type had really only been begun, and a Macedonian of high rank, Nicanor⁴, was now appointed to see it carried through.

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² Ἐξήκοντος ἤδη τοῦ ἦρος, *Arr.* IV, 22, 3.

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³ Strabo XV, C. 697; Cunningham, *Ancient Geography*, p. 25.

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⁴ Dr Vincent Smith (*Early History of India*, 3rd edition, p. 49) seems to be in error in identifying this Nicanor with the son of Parmenio.

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The army moved on from Alexandria to Nicaea, where Alexander sacrificed to the Greek goddess Athena. From Nicaea he sent on a herald to the rāja of Takshaçilā and the native princes west of the Indus to meet him in the Kābul Valley. We know of one Indian chief, Çaçigupta (Sisikottos), already in the conqueror’s train. His had been probably some little hill-state on the slopes of the Hindu Kush, whence he had gone two years since, to help the Irānians in Bactria against Alexander. When their cause was lost, he had gone over to the European. Messengers now summoned the other chieftains of the lower Kābul Valley to meet their overlord. At Takshaçilā too messengers appeared with the summons. And the rāja, acting on the policy which his son had espoused so decisively, rose up to obey.

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Encamped in the Kābul Valley at some place not named the rāja of Takshaçilā saw the host destined for the invasion of his mother-land. It numbered, at the lowest estimate, from twentyfive to thirty thousand men¹—a strangely compounded army, which can only be called European with qualification. Its strength indeed consisted in the Macedonian regiments, stout yeomen and peasants carrying the long spear of the heavy-armed foot-soldier, and troops of splendidly disciplined cavalry drawn from the aristocracy of the country, the 'Companions' of the national King. European too were the thousands of soldiers from the Greek cities, serving as mercenaries, on foot or mounted, and the contingents of semi-barbarous hillmen from the Balkans, Agrianes and Thracians, serving as light troops—slingers, javelineers, and bowmen—invaluable for mountain warfare. But mingled with the Europeans were men of many nations. Here were troops of horsemen, representing the chivalry of Irān, which had followed Alexander from Bactria and beyond², Pashtus and men of the Hindu Kush with their highland-bred horses³, Central-Asiatics who could ride and shoot at the same time⁴; and among the camp-followers one could find groups representing the older civilisations of the world, Phoenicians inheriting an immemorial tradition of ship-craft and trade, bronzed Egyptians able to confront the Indians with an antiquity still longer than their own.

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¹ The numbers in the ancient texts are often untrustworthy. The estimate in the text is Delbrück's, *Geschichte der Kriegskunst* (1900), vol. I, p. 184. Anspach (note 20), combining Arrian, *Ind.* 19, 5 with Diod. XVII, 95, reckons the army in the Kābul Valley at about 85,000. Delbrück denies that so large an army with the necessary camp-followers could have got across the Hindu Kush. This is a point for practical strategists. Whether Plutarch's number (*Alex.* 56) is correct or not, he does not say, as Dr Vincent Smith, p. 49, inadvertently quotes him, that Alexander *entered* India with 120,000 foot and 15,000 horse, but that Alexander *left* India with that number. Reinforcements had been arriving from the West in the meantime.

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² Arr. IV, 17, 3.

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³ *Ib.* V, 11, 3.

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⁴ *Ib.* IV, 24, 1.

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There was nothing to arrest this army between the point they had now reached and the Indus. The local chieftains had indicated their submission. All along the north side of the Kābul however lay the hills, whose inhabitants in their rock citadels, in the valleys of the Kūnar, the Panjkora, and the Swāt, were unschooled to recognise an overlord, and as prepared to give trouble to anyone who tried to incorporate them in an imperial system as their Pathān successors of a later day. But it was not Alexander's way to leave unsubdued regions beside his road. His army therefore broke up into two divisions. One, commanded by Hephaestion, the king's friend, and Perdiccas, the proudest of the Macedonian nobles, moved to the Indus by the most direct route. This would probably mean a route along the south bank of the Kābul, whether through the actual Khyber Pass or not¹; the other, led by the king himself, turned up into the hills. The two divisions were to rejoin each other upon the Indus; Hephaestion and Perdiccas, arriving there first, it was calculated, would have made all preparations for the passage of the great river.

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¹ Dr Vincent Smith says that he did not go by the Khyber and cites Sir Thomas Holdich in support of the assertion. Sir Thomas in his more recent book, *Gates of India* (p. 94), says that he 'undoubtedly followed the main route which...is sufficiently well indicated in these days as the "Khaibar".'

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The Europeans who had followed Alexander so far into Asia now entered the region in which the armies of the English operate to-day. At that season of the year² the hill-country must have been bitterly cold, and probably to some extent under snow. It was the same hill-country whose contours and tracks and points of vantage are studied now by British commanders; the tough highlander of the Balkans or of Crete climbed and skirmished with bow and javelin in 327 B.C. where the Scottish highlander was to climb and skirmish with rifle and bayonet two thousand two hundred years later. And yet it is impossible to follow the track of Alexander over these hills with any precision. We hear of little mountain towns stormed, of others abandoned by their inhabitants. But their sites cannot be identified. One must however note that at this point Alexander, in an ethnographical sense, entered India; for these hills, whose population at the present day is either Afghān or Kāfir, seem then to have been possessed by Indian tribes. The Açvakas, as their name apparently was in their native speech, were the first Indian people to receive the brunt of the invasion³. 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 hire. When the town capitulated, it was agreed that these mercenaries should transfer their services to Alexander. 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 Yavanas 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 morning¹.

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² Μετὰ δυσμὰς Πλειάδων, Aristobulus ap. Strabo xv, C. 691.

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³ In the Greek accounts a people called Aspasioi are found in the Choes (either the Alishang or Kūnar) Valley and a people called Assakēnoi in the Swāt Valley. Both names are supposed to represent the same Indian name Açvaka, connected with *açva* '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 *açva*. Strabo, according to the MSS. (xv, C. 691, C. 698), calls the Aspasioi Hypasioi; this is often emended 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 Astakēnoi appearing in the Pushkalāvatī region, whose name is supposed not to be connected etymologically with that of their neighbours, the Assakēnoi.

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¹ Arr. IV, 27; Diod. XVII, 84; Plut. *Alex.* 59; Polyaen. *Strateg.* IV, 3, 20.

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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 easternmost branch of the hill-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 support². Assakēnos had himself taken command at Massaga, and fell there, struck by a missile from one of the European siege-machines³. His mother and daughter were left in the enemies’ hands⁴; but it was not among Alexander’s faults to fail in chivalry to the women whom war put at his mercy⁵.

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² Arr. IV, 27, 7.

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³ Arr. IV, 27, 2.

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⁴ Arr. IV, 27, 4.

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⁵ A strange story is given by Justin, XII, 7, 10, that it was the *wife* of Assakēnos 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 concocted in later times in the interests of some petty king of this region, who wished to establish a claim to be descended from Alexander. That is a claim which is still common in the Indian frontier hills.

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The loot in cattle in these regions was enormous, and we are told 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.

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One curious incident relieves the story of blood-shed. Somewhere among these hills⁶—probably on the lower spurs of the three-peaked Koh-i-Mor—dwelt a people who told the Yavanas, or so the invaders understood 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 recognition, 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 pronounced to Alexander, had a similar sound. Again the legend said that Dionysus had been born from the thigh (*mēros*) of Zeus, and a neighbouring 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 home¹, 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 procession. It is the Macedonian soldiers themselves, who wreathe their heads with ivy and range the hills 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 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.

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⁶ Holdich in discussing the site of Nysa (*Gates of India*, p. 122) gives a mistranslation 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.

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¹ Holdich, *Gates of India*, p. 133.

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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 Kābul 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 European 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 Astes¹, whose capital was the town of Pushkalāvatī (Chārsadda) to the north of 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.

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¹ One guess is that this represents the Sanskrit proper name Hasti; a more probable one is that it is short for Ashṭakarāja, king of the Ashṭakas.

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In the hills to the north, after a few months' fighting, the tribes 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 Pushkalāvatī 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.

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But the effective occupation of the lower Kābul valley by the Yavanas required still more to be done. The division of Hephaestion had meantime fortified and garrisoned a place the Greeks call Orobatis, and Alexander, accompanied by two Indian chieftains, 'Cophaeus' and 'Assagetes'², moved about to take possession of various small towns between Pushkalāvatī 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-day¹.

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² Anspach suggests, p. 65, note 200, that Cophaeus=rāja of the region about Pushkala near the Cophen, and Assagetes=the rāja of the Assakēnoi (successor of the rāja killed in Massaga).

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¹ See the note in Vincent Smith, pp. 56, 57.

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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 eliminate 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 pursuit of the flying defenders of the fortress. They were led by the brother of the Assakenian chief killed in Massaga² and had with them a herd of fifteen war-elephants. To the Greeks the idea of getting hold of these animals, 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.

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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 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 now¹. 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 army². 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.

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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 approaching 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.

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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.

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² Arr. IV, 30, 5; Diod. XVII, 86; Curt. VIII, 12, 1. His name is variously given as Aphrikes, Aphices, Erices in different texts.

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¹ Holdich, *Gates of India*, p. 122.

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² Cf. Diod. xvii, 86.

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³ Strabo xv, C. 691. Cf. Vincent Smith, p. 61, note 1.

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The rāja of Takshaçilā was now none other than Āmbhi himself;

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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 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 princedom¹.

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¹ Diod. XVII, 86; Curt. VIII, 12.

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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 somewhere near the city, 'practising endurance,' men commanding a great reverence 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 version². 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-brimmed 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 understanding 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 Onesicritus 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 clothes¹. One of these ascetics was ultimately persuaded by the rāja of Takshaçilā to accompany Alexander and return to clothes 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 *kalyāṇa*, ‘lucky,’ came to call him Kalanos².

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² XV, C. 715.

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¹ Strabo xv, C. 714 f.

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² Arr. VII, 2, 4; Plut. *Alex.* 65; Strabo xv, C. 714 f.

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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, waggons 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.

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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)³. 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 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!

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³ Arr. v, 21, 3.

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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 villages¹. And if his immediate neighbours to east and west were hostile, the rāja of Abhisāra was inclined to make common cause with him. That 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.

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¹ Strabo xv, C. 698.

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It was probably some wind of these intrigues which accelerated Alexander's attack². The Paurava, for his part, had sent the Yavana conqueror 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 arms³. 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 Āmbhi¹. Probably somewhere near the place where is now the town of Jhelum² the army of the Paurava gathered on the banks of the Hydaspes in the spring of 326. Its numbers are variously given³. 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.

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² Diod. XVII, 87.

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³ Curt. VIII, 13, 2.

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¹ This may have been the same Philip whom we heard of as commandant of the garrison in Pushkalāvatī. Anspach thinks it was not, note 200.

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² Dr Vincent Smith in an appendix (p. 78) defends the Jhelum site against the Jalālpur site, preferred by Cunningham. A point in favour of Jhelum is that it is higher up and Alexander seems to have kept close to the hills. One does not see however 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 Alexander crossed was *above* the camp of Porus. But our sources do not tell us whether it was above or below. Graf 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.

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³ The numbers in the final battle, according to Arrian v, 15, 4, were 30,000 foot (‘all that was any good, that is to say’), 4000 horses, 300 chariots, and 200 elephants. See Delbrück, p. 184.

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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 had been used on the Indus. These were fitted together again on the Hydaspes, and a little fleet could soon be descried 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 hills⁴, through which the road from Takshaçilā runs. It was, of course, a mere preliminary skirmish, and a manœuvre of the Macedonian horse threw back the Indians in some confusion⁵. 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 season⁶ was 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.

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⁴ The exact route of Alexander from Takshaçilā to the Hydaspes is unknown. See Vincent Smith, p. 63, note.

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⁵ Polyaen. IV, 3, 21.

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⁶ 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.)

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The difficulty was that movement in the opposite camp seemed perpetual. 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 happened. Was the dreadful foe really brought to a standstill by an obstacle such as he had never yet encountered? Or were these abortive movements purposed feints to throw the defenders off their guard? For the foreigners at any rate it must make things worse when rain storms came on¹—tropical deluges such as they could never have experienced before, with only such shelter as a camp allows—and the swollen river swelled yet higher. Some indications 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 halt². 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.

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¹ According to Mr Pearson (see Bibliography) the regular rains do not begin in this part till July.

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² Schubert points out that if Alexander was trying to keep the Indians in expectation 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 impression from the arrival of provisions, it was not therefore due to design on his part.

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One daybreak, after a night of storm and violent rain, outposts came galloping in with the tidings 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.

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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 division¹—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 circumstances, to embark upon an unknown river, swollen in flood, would have been sufficiently venturesome. 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 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 had 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, and 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 practically an island. All depended on whether the channel was fordable. If it was not, the Europeans were caught in a trap. The question remained doubtful, 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 Athens¹!

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