agree in regard to Leonnatus or Abreas, the soldier in receipt of double pay for his distinguished services. Some say that Alexander, having received a blow on the head with a piece of wood, fell down in a fit of dizziness; and that having risen again he was wounded with a dart through the corselet in the chest. But Ptolemy, son of Lagus, says that he received only this wound in the chest. However, in my opinion, the greatest error made by those who have written the history of Alexander is the following. There are some who have recorded[1] that Ptolemy, son of Lagus, in company with Peucestas, mounted the ladder with Alexander; that Ptolemy held his shield over him when he lay wounded, and that he was called Soter (the preserver) on that account.[2] And yet Ptolemy himself has recorded that he was not even present at this engagement, but was fighting battles against other barbarians at the head of another army. Let me mention these facts as a digression from the main narrative, so that the correct account of such great deeds and calamities may not be a matter of indifference to men of the future.[3]
CHAPTER XII.
Anxiety of the Soldiers about Alexander.
While Alexander was remaining in this place until his wound was cured, the first news which reached the camp from which he had set out to attack the Mallians was
- ↑ We learn from Curtius (ix. 21) that the authors who stated that Ptolemy was present in this battle were Clitarchus and Timagenes. From the history of the former, who was a contemporary of Alexander, Curtius mainly drew the materials for his history of Alexander.
- ↑ Ptolemy received this appellation from the Rhodians whom he relieved from the assaults of Demetrius. The grateful Rhodians paid him divine honours as their preserver, and he was henceforward known as Ptolemy Soter. B.C. 304. See Pausanias, i. 8, 6.
- ↑ The word αταλαιπωρος is used in a similar way by Thucydides, i. 20, 4.
