He lived out his life by these principles. He would avoid nothing and take no precautions against danger, whether from roads, cliffs or dogs; he ignored them all because he never trusted the evidence of his senses. He survived, but, men say, this was only due to his friends who walked and watched, always beside him.

diogenes laertius, Liv es of the Philosophers,9.61

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The retreat from the Beas was a disappointment, not a danger. The men were not so much embittered as exhausted; as for the officers, none of them plotted to take advantage of their king's defeat. For defeat it was, and the disgrace would far outweigh the negligible fears in Alexander's mind. He would not easily live with such a rebuff to his sense of glory, the heart of his Homeric values. He reached the Jhelum, only to find that Bucephala had been washed away by the rains; worse, news came from the ladies' quarters that Roxane's first baby had miscarried.

Only Porus benefited from the new despair. The 'seven nations and two thousand towns' between the Jhelum and the Beas were added to his kingdom; they had lost their interest now that the march to the east had been cancelled. There was only one direction left which promised Alexander his required adventure. It would be ignominious to retrace his steps through the Hindu Kush; now, therefore, was the moment to put the ship timber to use and explore southwards down the Jhelum to the river Indus. It was not the safest route home, but as a link between the conquests in east and west, this waterway might prove invaluable. Though Alexander had at last discovered from the natives that the Indus would not bring him round into the Nile and Upper Egypt he may well have preferred to keep up this hope among his weary troopers.

Back on the Jhelum more than 35,000 fresh soldiers from the west were waiting, raising the army's strength to 120,000, a massive force by classical standards; they had also brought medical supplies and smart new suits of gold- and silver-plated armour. More important, they would raise morale. Eight hundred ships of various shapes and sizes were needed for the voyage down the Indus, but such was the energy of the newly equipped army that two months later the fleet was ready to be manned by the expert crews of Cypriots, Egyptians, Ionian Greeks and Phoenicians who had been following Alexander, as before they had followed the fortunes of the Persian kings. The journey downstream to the outer ocean could begin.

It is a commonplace of sermons and histories that powerful men are corrupted and pay for their licence by loneliness and growing insecurity. But in life, the wicked have a way of flourishing and not every despot ends

more miserably than he began: power may turn a man's head, but only the virtuous or the uninvolved insist that it must always cost him his soul. Inevitably, with Alexander this moral problem begins to be raised: thwarted, did he lose his judgement and turn on the methods of a textbook tyrant in his isolation? Failure will often show in a general's style of leadership: he may no longer delegate his work, while refusing to take the blame for its consequences: he may be too exhausted to take a firm decision, too unsure to resist the meanest suspicions. It is only a legend that when Alexander heard from his philosopher Anaxarchus of the infinite number of possible worlds, he wept, reflected that he had not even conquered the one he knew. The need to justify a lost ambition can cause a man to over-reach; moralists, at least, might expect that Alexander's first rebuff from his army would mark the loosening of his grip on reality.

History does not confirm that this was so. As no officer describes the mood of the king in council, it is impossible, as always, to divide the credit for the army's actions between Alexander and his staff. Events, however, do not suggest autocracy or nervous indecision. Within two months, the entire fleet had been built from the felled timber, a tribute to the energy of officers and carpenters, and Alexander declared the enterprise open in characteristic style. After athletic games and musical competitions, he ordered animals for sacrifice to be given free to each platoon, and then going on board, he stood at the bows and poured a libation into the river from a golden bowl, calling upon Poseidon and the sea-nymphs, the Chenab, the Jhelum and the Indus, and the Ocean into which they ran. Then, he poured a libation to his ancestor Heracles and to Ammon and to the other gods to whom he usually paid honour, Poseidon, Amphitrite and the sea-nymphs, and he ordered the trumpeter to sound the advance.

The sailors responded, cheered by the taste of free sacrificial meat and by the pomp and variety of their expedition. There were flat-bottomed boats for the horses, thirty-oared craft for the officers, three-banked triremes, circular tubs, and eighty huge grain-lighters for supplies. These, the famous zohruks still used on the river Indus, were now built for the first time to serve Greeks; each able to hold more than two hundred tons of grain, they were one of Alexander's most valuable borrowings from the East, and their shallow draught and huge single sail would soon prove themselves in strong currents against the usual Greek trireme.

hi the hot sun, the men rowed naked. No ornament had been spared for their boats; for the first time, a Greek fleet's sails had been dyed deep purple, each officer competing with his rivals until even the banks looked on in amazement as the wind filled out their multi-coloured emblems'. Amid this luxury, their lines had been meticulously ordered: baggage-vessels, horse transports and warships were all to keep apart at the prescribed intervals and no ship was to break the line.

The splash of the oars was unprecedented, as was the shout of the coxes who gave orders for the rowers to take each stroke: the banks of the river were higher than the ships and enclosed the noise in a narrow space, so that it was magnified and re-echoed from one side to the other ... deserted clumps of trees on each bank helped to increase the effect.

There were also the celebrated songs of Sinde whose rhythms no traveller then or now can leave behind him. The shipment of the horses so surprised the native onlookers, that many of them ran after the fleet, while others were attracted by the echoes and careered along the bank, singing wild songs of their own. The Indians are as fond of singing and dancing as any people on earth.

Alexander had been at pains to involve his officers in the enterprise. With a typical respect for the methods of Athenian government, he appointed thirty-two trierarchs, nineteen being Macedonians, ten Greeks, two Cypriots, and one being Bagoas his Persian favourite, who would take charge of individual warships, finance them and doubtless compete for efficiency of maintenance. Most of the baggage train would follow under escort by land. Its size can only be guessed by comparisons. By now, Alexander was said to be employing some 15,000 cavalry; in the same area in the nineteenth century, British armies would have allowed 400 camels to carry a single day's grain supply for his horses alone. Nearchus the sea captain gave the size of the expedition as 120,000 men and it is not very likely that this is wild exaggeration or flattery. When their families, concubines and traders are added for a probable nine months' journey, the scale of the quartermasters' duties begins to come to life. 'We need,' wrote a British colonel, at a time when only gunpowder, heavy boots and stirrups had increased a soldier's requirements,

an extraordinary assemblage of men, women and children, ponies, mules, asses and bullocks and carts laden with all sorts and kinds of conceivable and inconceivable things: grain, salt, cloth, sweetmeats, shawls, slippers, tools for the turners, the carpenters and blacksmiths, goods for the tailors and cobblers, the perfumers, armourers, milk-girls and grass-cutters: moochecs must work the leather, puckulias carry our water, while nagurchees will supervise the travelling canteen. What a sea of camels! What guttural gurgling groanings in the long throats of salacious and pugnacious males! What resounding of sticks, as some throw away their loads and run away, tired servants often getting slain or miserably losing the column, thousands of camels dying, not only from fatigue but from ill-usage and being always overloaded. Such is the picture of the baggage of an army in India; Smithfield market alone can rival it.