previous next
[4] Accordingly he allowed them to ravage the enemy's country, which was full of every good thing.1 During these days when the army was busy foraging, he called together the wives of the soldiers and their children; to the wives he undertook to give a monthly ration, to the children he distributed a service bonus in proportion to the military records of their fathers.2

1 It is not clear what this country can have been. The kingdom of Phegeus was friendly. The reading of one manuscript (παραποταμίαν for πολεμίανwould avoid this logical difficulty, but it is hard to think that Alexander allowed his soldiers to plunder Phegeus's cities. Similar instances of plunder for the sake of loot occur below, chaps. 102.6 and 104.5-7. It was certainly only too often what generals did to please their soldiers.

2 This is only one possible translation. The meaning of ἐπιφορὰς ταγματικάς and συλλογισμούς in this connection is quite unknown. Justin 12.4.2-11 alone, of the other Alexander historians, mentions this proposal to provide for the dependants of soldiers. Plut. Alexander 71.5, tells the same story in a later connection, after the mutiny at Opis. Cp. also Arrian. 7.12.1-2.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: