The Anabasis of Alexander/Book V/Chapter XIII

by Arrian

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CHAPTER XIII.

Passage of the Hydaspes.

Alexander himself embarked in a thirty-oared galley and went over, accompanied by Perdiccas, Lysimachus, the confidential body-guards, Seleucus, one of the Companions, who was afterwards king,^[1] and half of the shield-bearing guards; the rest of these troops being conveyed in other galleys of the same size. When the soldiers got beyond the island, they openly directed their course to the bank; and when the sentinels perceived that they had started, they at once rode off to Porus as fast as each man's horse could gallop. Alexander himself was the first to land, and he at once took the cavalry as they kept on landing from his own and the other thirty-oared galleys, and drew them up in proper order. For the cavalry had received orders to land first; and at the head of these in regular array he advanced. But through ignorance of the locality he had effected a landing on ground which was not a part of the mainland, but an island, a large one indeed and where from the fact that it was an island, he more easily escaped notice. It was cut off from the rest of the land by a part of the river where the water was shallow. However, the furious storm of rain, which lasted the greater part of the night, had swelled the water so much that his cavalry could not find out the ford; and he was afraid that he would have to undergo another labour in crossing as great as the first. But when at last the ford was found, he led his men through it with much difficulty; for where the water was deepest, it reached higher than the breasts of the infantry; and of the horses only the heads rose above the river.^[2] When he had also crossed this piece of water, he selected the choice guard of cavalry, and the best men from the other cavalry regiments, and brought them up from column into line on the right wing.^[3] In front of all the cavalry he posted the horse-archers, and placed next to the cavalry in front of the other infantry the royal shield-bearing guards under the command of Seleucus. Near these he placed the royal foot-guard, and next to these the other shield-bearing guards, as each happened at the time to have the right of precedence. On each side, at the extremities of the phalanx, his archers, Agrianians and javelin-throwers were posted.

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1. Seleucus Nicator, the most powerful of Alexander's successors, became king of Syria and founder of the dynasty of the Σeleucidae, which came to an end in B.C. 79.
2. For this use of όσον, cf. Homer (Iliad, ix. 354); Herodotus, iv. 45; Plato (Gorgias, 485A; Euthydemus, 273A).
3. Compare the passage of the Rhone by Hannibal., (See Livy, xxi. 26-28; Polybius, iii. 45, 46.)