previous next

He wasted no time in summoning his forces from all directions and ordered them to muster in Babylon. He canvassed his Friends and Relatives and selected those who were suitable, giving to some commands suited to their abilities and ordering others to fight at his side as his personal staff. [2] When the time set for the march had come, they had all arrived in Babylon. The number of the soldiers was over four hundred thousand1 infantry and not less than one hundred thousand cavalry.

This was the force with which Dareius marched out of Babylon in the direction of Cilicia; he had with him his wife and children—a son and two daughters—and his mother. [3] As to Alexander, he had been watching how, prior to his death, Memnon had won over Chios and the cities in Lesbos and had taken Mitylene by storm. He learned that Memnon planned to carry the war into Macedonia with three hundred ships of war and a land army also, while the greater part of the Greeks were ready to revolt. [4] This caused him no little anxiety, but when persons came with the news of Memnon's death, he was relieved of this fear; but shortly thereafter he became seriously ill,2 and, afflicted by severe pain, sent for his physicians. [5] All the rest were hesitant to treat him, but Philip the Arcarnanian offered to employ risky but quick-acting remedies and by the use of drugs to break the hold of the disease. [6] This proposal the king accepted gladly, for he had heard that Dareius had already left Babylon with his army. The physician gave him a drug to drink and, aided by the natural strength of the sufferer as well as by Fortune, promptly relieved Alexander of the trouble. Making an astonishing recovery, the king honoured the physician with magnificent gifts and assigned him to the most loyal category of Friends.3

1 Justin 11.9.1 also gives 400,000. The unknown writer of the Alexander History P. Oxyrhynchus 1798 (Frag. 44, col. 2.2/3) and Arrian. 2.8.8 give the Persian strength as 600,000.

2 Either from fatigue, as Aristobulus, or from swimming in the cold river Cydnus (Arrian. 2.4.7).

3 Other writers add that Alexander was warned against the physician by Parmenion, but that Alexander showed the letter to Philip only as he drank the medicine (Curtius 3.5-6; Justin 11.8.3-9; Plut. Alexander 19; Arrian. 2.4.7-11; P. Oxyrhynchus 1798, Frag. 44, col. 1).

Diodorus Siculus. Diodorus of Sicily in Twelve Volumes with an English Translation by C. H. Oldfather. Vol. 4-8. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1989.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

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 Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1798 AD (2)
hide References (6 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (2):
  • Cross-references in notes from this page (4):
    • Plutarch, Alexander, 19
    • Arrian, Anabasis, 2.4.7
    • Arrian, Anabasis, 2.8.8
    • Curtius, Historiarum Alexandri Magni, 3.5
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: