so much interest in their accounts of their voyage,
that he wished to sail down the Euphrates himself with a great fleet,
and then to coast round Arabia and Libya, and so enter the
Mediterranean sea through the pillars of Herakles.[427] He even began
to build many ships at Thapsakus, and to collect sailors and pilots
from all parts of the world, but the severe campaigns which he had
just completed in India, the wound which he had received among the
Malli, and the great losses which his army had sustained in crossing
the desert, had made many of his subjects doubt whether he was ever
likely to return alive, and had encouraged them to revolt, while his
absence had led many of his satraps and viceroys to act in an
extremely arbitrary and despotic manner, so that his whole empire was
in a most critical condition, and full of conspiracies and seditious
risings. Olympias and Kleopatra[428] had attacked and driven out
Antipater, and had divided the kingdom between themselves, Olympias
taking Epirus, and Kleopatra Macedonia. When Alexander heard this, he
said that his mother had proved herself the wiser of the two; for the
Macedonians never would endure to be ruled by a woman. He now sent
Nearchus back to the sea, determining to make war all along the coast,
and coming down in person to punish the most guilty of his officers.
He killed Oxyartes, one of the sons of Abouletes (the satrap of
Susiana) with his own hands, with a sarissa or Macedonian pike.
Abouletes had made no preparations to receive Alexander, but offered
him three thousand talents of silver. Alexander ordered the money to
be thrown down for the horses; and as they could not eat it, he said
"What is the use of your having prepared this for me?" and ordered
Abouletes to be cast into prison.

LXIX. While Alexander was in Persis[429] he first renewed the old
custom that whenever the king came there he should give every woman a
gold piece. On account of this custom we are told that many of the
Persian kings came but seldom to Persis, and that Ochus never came at
all, but exiled himself from his native country through his
niggardliness. Shortly afterwards Alexander discovered that the
sepulchre of Cyrus had been broken into, and put the criminal to
death, although he was a citizen of Pella[430] of some distinction,
named Polemarchus. When he had read the inscription upon the tomb, he
ordered it to be cut in Greek letters also. The inscription ran as
follows: "O man, w