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was told of it, he said his mother had made the best choice, for the Macedonians would not endure to be ruled by a woman. Upon this he despatched Nearchus again to his fleet, to carry the war into all the maritime provinces, and as he marched that way himself, he punished those commanders who had behaved ill, particularly Oxyartes*, one of the sons of Abuletes, whom he killed with his own hand, thrusting him through the body with his spear. And when Abuletes, instead of the necessary provisions which he ought to have furnished, brought him three thousand talents in coined money, he ordered it to be thrown to his horses, and when they would not touch it, "What good," he said, "will this provision do us?" and sent him away to prison.

When he came into Persia, he distributed money among the women, as their own kings had been wont to do, who as often as they came thither, gave every one of them a piece of gold; on account of which custom some of them, it is said, had come but seldom, and Ochus was so sordid, that to avoid the expense, he never visited his native country once in all his reign. Then finding Cyrus's sepulchre opened and rifled, he put Polymachus, who did it, to death, though he was a man of some distinction, a born Macedonian of Pella. And after he had read the inscription, he caused it to be cut again below the old one in Greek characters; the words being these: "O man, whosoever thou art, and from whencesoever thou comest (for I know thou wilt come), I

*Or Oxathres.

At Pasargadæ, not far from Persepolis. Persia is, as before, Persis, or Persia proper.

am Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire; do not grudge me this little earth which covers my body." The reading of this extremely touched Alexander, filling his mind with the thought of the uncertainty and mu

tability of affairs.

Here also Calanus, having been a little while troubled with a disease in the bowels, requested that he might have a funeral pile erected, to

continued so the following day. The Macedonians, therefore, supposing he was dead, came with great clamours to the gates, and menaced his friends, so that they were forced to admit them; the doors were opened, and they all passed through unarmed along by his bedside. The same day Python and Seleucus were despatched to the temple of Serapis to inquire if they should bring Alexander thither, and were answered by the god, that they should not remove him. On the twenty-eighth in the evening, he died. 77 This account is most of it word for word as it is written in the diary. At the time, nobody had any suspicion of his being poisoned, but upon some information given six years after they say Olympias put many to death, and scattered the ashes of Iollas, then dead, as if he had given it him. There are some who affirm that Aristotle counselled Antipater to do it, and that by his means the poison was brought, adducing one Hagnothemis as their authority, who, they say, heard king Antigonus speak of it, and telling us that the poison was water, deadly cold as ice, distilling from a rock in the district of Nonacris, which they gathered like a thin dew, and kept in an ass's hoof; for it was so very cold and penetrating that no other vessel would hold it. But most are of opinion that it is all a mere made-up story, no slight evidence of which is, that during the dissensions among the commanders, which lasted several days, the body continued clear and fresh, without any sign of such taint or corruption, though it lay neglected in a close, sultry place. Roxana, who was now with child, and upon that account much honoured by the Macedonians, being jealous of Statira,

induced her by a counterfeit letter, to come; and when she had her in her power, killed her and her sister, and threw their bodies into a well, which they filled up with earth, not without the privity and assistance of Perdiccas. For he, in the time immediately following the king's death, under cover of the name of Arrhidæus, whom he carried about him as a sort of guard to his person, exercised the chief authority. Arrhidæus, who was Philip's son by an obscure woman of the name of Philinna, was himself of weak intellect; not that he had been originally deficient either in body or mind; on the contrary, in his childhood, he had showed a happy and promising character enough. But a diseased habit of body, caused by drugs which Olympias gave him, had ruined not only his health, but his understanding.