But the officers had taken a stand and they were not to be shamed into surrender. They refused, and it was time for the King's last threat: Alexander retired in anger to his tent and refused to see his Companions for the whole of the next two days in the hope that his brooding would make them think again.

A profound silence fell on the camp. The men were annoyed with their king's loss of temper but they were not to be shifted from their ground. The hours passed, until they could even feel brave enough to despise him and boo if he kept up his anger any longer. Such stubbornness proved decisive, for Alexander realized that he was a beaten man. Like his hero Achilles, he could not stand the shame of a public humiliation: he sent for the priests and seers and told them he meant to offer sacrifice to see if he should cross the Beas or not. Animals were brought, 'but when he sacrificed, the offerings did not go in his favour'. Now that he could plead the gods' disapproval, he set aside his shame, and summoned his closest friends and elderly Companions to tell them that all seemed to point to a retreat. It was only three years since he had flouted the omens and crossed the Oxus in defiance of gods and prophets.

When the news was announced, a roar of relief went up from the ranks and many burst into tears that their wishes had come true. Amid such jubilation, respect for the gods was the one remaining solace for Alexander's sense of pride. The army was divided into twelve sections, each of which was ordered to build an altar for the twelve Greek gods of Olympus 'as thanks to those who had brought them victoriously so far and as a memorial of all they had been through together'. The altars were to be enormous, 'as high as the tallest towers and broader even than towers would be': Alexander did not wish to be remembered as the king whom the river Beas had humbled. Others said that he traced out a camp three times larger than the one he had used and surrounded it with a ditch fifty feet wide and forty feet deep. Inside, huts were to be built with beds nearly eight feet long and mangers twice the normal size; huge suits of armour and impossibly large bits and bridles were scattered on the ground 'to leave the native evidence that his men were big men, showing excessive physical strength'. Romance later claimed that the altars were inscribed to father Amnion, brother Apollo, the Sun and the Kabeiroi, wild gods who were favoured by his mother Olympias.

Only archaeology will ever settle how far these rumours are true and though several have searched, nobody has been lucky enough to find what could be one of the strangest memorials of the classical past. There is no doubting the altars, but until it is proved on the ground the megalomania 370 of the camp need only be posthumous gossip. What is certain is that Alexander had known his first defeat and that when he reached the Jhelum by the way he had come, he would find little joy in the sudden relaxation of the early autumn rain. Across to Amritsar, back to the river Ravi, and so to the river Chenab, less swollen than before: there, the retreat was briefly halted by a sudden loss in the high command. Coenus the Hipparch 'died of sickness and Alexander buried him as magnificently as circumstances allowed'. It was only a few weeks since his bold complaint had turned the army homewards.

'How often before, the Führer had removed an inconvenient associate not by dismissal, but by an allegation of illness, merely to preserve the German people's faith in the internal unity of the top leadership; even now, when all was almost over, he remained true to this habit of observing public decorum.' Parallels between Hitler and Alexander have been fashionable, but there is nothing to prove that they are valid. If Coenus had been a sick man, then his plea to return was all the more intelligible; it could have been dysentery, it might have been snakebite, but the man who had publicly thwarted a son of Zeus never lived to enjoy the results of his counsel.

The retreat he inspired has always seemed sympathetic. Alexander's eastern plans have not been well received by historians: many have argued that they never existed and some have maintained that all mentions of the Ganges, are best discarded as legend. Apart from the facts, these arguments assume that no sane man could have wished to go on; there are two sides to such a judgement, and only one finds its evidence in Greek accounts of the campaign. The kingdom of Magadha was powerful, certainly, but reports of its strength were no less fantastic than those of the legendary armies of Indian epic heroes, and however plentiful its elephants, it was passing through a painful old age. In native Jain tradition, Dhana Nanda, last of its kings, was long remembered as son of a common woman, born, therefore, outside the ruling caste and detested by many of his courtiers. In the epic book of Ceylon, he is said to have extorted heaps of gold from his subjects and hidden them, meanly, in the waters of the Ganges. Alexander, most remarkably, knew this perfectly well from his informants: Ksandrames, said Porus, was 'merely the son of a barber', and not only is a barber's son a common Indian idiom for a feeble and low-born king, but it is exactly echoed in later Indian histories as a judgement on Dhana Nanda himself. The last of the Nanda dynasty had no firm hold on himself or on Magadha's loyalties; like Cortes, Alexander had stood on the brink of an old civilization, rich but torn by internal discontent. The journey from the Beas to the Eastern Ocean would have lasted another three months down a royal road, and his officers knew it as clearly as he did. And yet they turned it down.

Only the future can prove what they missed. Within three years of Alexander's death, a pretender arose in northern India, Chandragupta the Mauryan, who marshalled an army and made Magadha his own. Dhana Nanda was deposed, and ten years later Chandragupta was even pressing on the Punjab frontier, perhaps drawing help from its seditious highland tribesmen. In return for five hundred elephants, Alexander's Asian successor Seleucus was forced to concede him the Indian provinces; Chandragupta returned to Palimbothra, where he heeded his minister Kautilya and ruled in state for another twenty years. Behind the wooden palisading of the palace he kept open court to Greek envoys, who would come by the royal road from Amritsar, admire his harem and stroll in gardens which seemed to have been his for a hundred years. When asked how he had done it, said the Greeks, Chandragupta would reply: 'I watched Alexander when I was still a young man; Alexander,' he explained, 'had been within an ace of seizing India, because its king was so hated and despised, both for his character and his low birth.'

If an Indian imitator could do it, so too could his master ten years before: Dhana Nanda's kingdom could have been set against itself and Alexander might yet have walked among Palimbothra's peacocks, improved its fencing and enjoyed the fish-ponds on which the Indian princes had always learnt to sail. But not far from its gates the Ganges spreads into an estuary and glides beneath palm-trees through the banks of the silt-brown fields: it asks to be followed, and Alexander need only have done so for another six hundred miles, until he saw the sea-shore opening before him and would have concluded, wrongly but poignandy, that at last he was near the edge of his world. The Eastern ocean was three months away, and the soldiers had refused it. The conquerer's dream of the past few years was gone, when he knew too well that it could have come true.

FOUR

Pyrrho of Elis began as an unknown and impecunious painter; he then joined Alexander and followed him everywhere. He met the magi and talked with Indian gurus and as a result his outlook changed. He founded scepticism, the most noble sort of philosophy, insisting that judgement should be suspended and that nothing could be said to be known. There is no one thing, he would say, which is fine or shocking, just or unjust; nothing really exists except for man's habits and conventions and diese govern the way he behaves.