The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c25.125

v1.c25.125

Still eastwards the European host marched and came to the fifth river, the Hyphasis (modern Beās). The Sutlej remained (some 80 miles by the road from Gurdāspur to Rūpar) as the only considerable river of the Indus system after that to cross; and then another river-system would be reached, that which empties itself through the Ganges into the Eastern Sea. Already the ears of Alexander were filled with accounts of the great kingdom of Magadha on the Ganges, of its populousness and splendour and power. His chief informant apparently was a rāja of the neighbourhood, Bhagala, who had submitted to the invader³. Was it an enterprise which a man in his senses could undertake, to attempt the subjugation of such a country with an army already nearly three thousand miles from its home? Some modern historians maintain that Alexander had too sound a sense of possibilities to have thought of it. But the ancient historians affirm that he saw himself in anticipation arriving victorious at the utmost bound of the earth on the Eastern Sea. We may believe that his astounding success had indeed made nothing seem impossible to him, that his judgment of things was no longer completely sane: we may also believe that, although he knew some great and powerful nations still remained to be subdued, before he could round off his conquest of the eastern world, he did not know the full extent of the East—that Further India, for instance, and China lay altogether outside his knowledge⁴. It is not unlikely that he may seriously have thought it practicable to make himself king of the whole inhabited earth. But on the banks of the Hyphasis (Beās), somewhere near the modern Gurdāspur, an imperious check awaited him. The army, which had followed him thus far, suddenly struck: all the personal magnetism, all the stirring and indignant appeals of the king could not induce the stout Macedonian countrymen to go a step further. For three days he shut himself in his tent, and the battle of wills remained in grim deadlock. At last the king recognised the bitter necessity of giving up his ambitions half-fulfilled. To save his face probably, he offered sacrifice again to the Greek gods, as preliminary to crossing the river and then discovered that the omens were unfavourable. After that he gave the word for the retreat. But first, in his romantic imaginative vein, he made the army build twelve gigantic altars, like towers, upon the banks of the Hyphasis, to show to future times how far into the East Alexander had come. One account says that later on the Mauryan kings used to offer sacrifice in the Yavana manner upon those altars¹. All trace of them has long since disappeared.