The last and only certain word went, fittingly, to Anaxarchus the contented. 'Much learning', he wrote, 'either helps a man greatly or harms him greatly: it helps the shrewd but harms the easy talker, who says whatever he pleases wherever he is. One must know the proper and appropriate measure of all things: that is the definition of wisdom.' The distrust of the academic had long been a feature of Greek thought and it is tempting to see it here as a topical allusion. Callisthenes, his rival, had been the clever man who could argue about earthquakes, derive place names from known Greek words and work out a date for the Fall of Troy; he died in the end for his indiscretion, opposing a policy which he thought to be barbaric, because he was stopped, like other Aristotelians, by a narrowly Greek outlook from seeing what was appropriate. His tale is a strange one: the flatterer who wrote up a crusade of Greek revenge in the most glowing terms, hailed its leader as the son of a god, slandered the Parmenion whom his patron had killed, and finally changed his mind when the Crusader became a king. It is for their early years that he and Alexander should be remembered, as king and Aristotelian scholar had made their way through Asia Minor, the king in rivalry with his beloved Achilles, the scholar improving his text of Homer and pointing out sites linked with Homer's poems. But patronage, as often, soured. 'Alexander and Alexander's actions', Callisthenes is said to have remarked, 'depend on me and my history: I have come not to win esteem from Alexander but to make him glorious in the sight of men.' When the historian died, not even those who knew the truth agreed on the manner of his death.

According to Ptolemy, Callisthenes was tortured and hanged, as a guilty conspirator deserved; according to Aristobulus, who involved Alexander less directly, Callisthenes was bound in fetters and taken round with the army until he eventually died, not on Alexander's orders but from disease. Chares the court Chamberlain disagreed: Callisthenes was 'kept in fetters for seven months so that he could be tried by the allied council in Greece in the presence of Aristotle', a careful retort, no doubt, to associates of Aristotle who were already complaining that Callisthenes had been murdered without a fair trial. Theophrastus, pupil of Aristotle, even wrote a pamphlet called Callisthen es, or On Mourning , in which he complained that Alexander was a 'man of the highest power and fortune, but did not know how to use his assets'. Not a bit of it, Chares the Chamberlain maintained: Callisthenes became 'excessively fat and ridden with lice', being flabby and lousy anyway, and died more than a year after his disgrace, before he could be tried in public. Apologetic tales of a lingering sickness were soon reversed: Callisthenes, said some, was mauled limb by limb: his ears, nose and lips were cut off: he was shut in a pit, or a cage, with a dog, or a lion, and only rescued by the high-minded Lysimachus, a future king in Europe, who slipped him a dose of poison.

When witnesses could make up such elaborate stories, the impact among Greek schoolmen of Callisthenes's death was neither short-lived nor insignificant; hence neither Ptolemy nor Aristobulus recorded his refusals of proskyne sis in order to deny him the glamour of a hero. He had flourished in flattery, died in controversy, and there are few plainer insights into the hazards of a search for Alexander than that his own historian was said by informed contemporaries to have died in five different ways.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The court disturbances near Balkh did not set the Macedonians against their king: the soldiery remained contented, the officers were not reshuffled, and despite the rigours of the past two years Alexander felt safe enough to retrace his tracks for the grand adventure of his lifetime. He would cross the Hindu Kush and march east into India, a kingdom whose traders and spice plants had already been seen on the Oxus but whose way of life was known to the Greeks only through the fabulous tales of early romancers.

So far, Alexander's ambitions had been easily understood. He had first conquered Darius, then claimed his empire, marching out to its north-cast frontier but going no farther. West Pakistan, which the ancients called India, had also been a part of the Persian empire, but the frontier which had once stretched into the Punjab had been lost for a hundred years, and if Alexander knew this fact of Persian history it is doubtful whether it influenced his Indian plans. In India he would soon go beyond the Persians' boundaries where there was no longer an empire to be reclaimed. His motives need a little imagination; they will never be certain, as historians can read a man's documents but never read his mind. Throughout history, armies have been drawn from Kabul into India as if by a continuing tide, and Alexander was anticipating Mongols and Moghuls, Bactrian Greeks, Kushans, White Huns and the others who have spilled into India for conquest from the Hindu Kush; he did not invade for a cause or an idea, but no successful invader ever has, and the slogans are only ambition's cloak before the simpleminded. 'You, Zeus, hold Olympus,' ran the verse on one of his official statues, ‘I set the earth beneath me.' 'The truth', wrote an admiring officer, 'was that Alexander was always straining after more.' Except for Amnion's alleged assurance that he would conquer the world, which was surely the posthumous guess of his soldiers, there is no other evidence that Alexander had dreamt of world domination or was fighting to realize such a vague ideal. It is more to the point that he restored the rajahs whom he conquered; he did not inflict his own superiority on his subjects or work off a lasting sense of frustration at the expense of the vast majority of those who surrendered. Patriots and rebels were killed and enslaved by the thousand as always, but

there is more of the explorer than the tyrant in the history of the campaign. For boredom is the force in life which histories always omit; Alexander was twenty-nine, invincible and on the edge of an unknown continent; to turn back would have been impossibly tame, for life in Asia could promise little more than hunting and the tedious tidying of rebellions and provincial decrees. Only in a speech to his troops is mention made of a march to the Eastern Ocean, edge of the world as the Greeks conceived it; though the speech is certainly not true to life it is tempting, not only because it is romantic, to believe that this detail is founded on fact. If the edge of the world was Alexander's ambition, it was a goal which appealed as much to his curiosity as to a longing for power.

To a curious mind this strange new world was irresistible, and of Alexander's curiosity there can be no doubt. 'His troops', said a contemporary, well placed to know, 'took a very hasty view of India, but Alexander himself was keen to be more exact and therefore arranged for the land to be described by those who knew it.' The Greek tales of India were part of any prince's education; his staff had heard the rumours of India's gold, said to be dug by gigantic ants or guarded by vigilant griffins: they would be keen to see the truth of the Sciapods, men who lay on their backs and shaded themselves from the sun with their one large foot. In India, men were said to live for two hundred years, making love in public, living according to caste and weaving their clothes from wool-bearing trees: there had been tales of falconry, fine purple, scents and silver: unicorns with red heads and blue eyes, pygmies and a sort of steel which could avert a storm. Like the first Christian missionaries to visit India, who explained the Hindus as descendants of St Thomas, the Greeks went east with their own myths and history and related what they saw to what they knew already. Nothing prepared them more than their own Herodotus; the flooding of the rivers, the Indians' dress and their wild plants were described in Herodotus's terms and as for his gold-digging ants, 'I did not see any myself, wrote Nearchus, Alexander's officer, 'but many of their pelts were brought into the Macedonian camp.' It took more than a personal visit to kill off the creatures of Greek fable; 'In a valley of the Himalayas', wrote one of Alexander's surveyors on his return, 'live a tribe whose feet are turned back to front. They run very fast, but because they cannot breathe in any other climate none of them could be brought to Alexander.' So begins the history of the Abominable Snowman.