friends. Above all he feared Antipater and his
sons, one of whom, Iolas, was his chief cup-bearer, while the other,
Kassander, had but recently arrived from Greece, and as he had been
trained in the Greek fashion, and had never seen any Oriental customs
before, he burst into a loud, insolent laugh, when he saw some of the
natives doing homage to Alexander. Alexander was very angry, and
seizing him by the hair with both hands, beat his head against the
wall. Another time he stopped Kassander, when he was about to say
something to some men who were accusing his father, Antipater. "Do you
imagine" said he, "that these men would have journeyed so far merely
in order to accuse a man falsely, if they had not been wronged by
him?" When Kassander answered, that it looked very like a false
accusation for a man to journey far from the place where his proofs
lay, Alexander said with a laugh, "This is how Aristotle teaches his
disciples to argue on either side of the question; but if any of you
be proved to have wronged these men ever so little, you shall smart
for it." It is related that after this, terror of Alexander became so
rooted in the mind of Kassander, that many years afterwards, when
Kassander was king of Macedonia, and lord of all Greece, he was
walking about in Delphi looking at the statues, and that when he saw
that of Alexander he was seized with a violent shuddering; his hair
stood upright on his head, and his body quaked with fear, so that it
was long before he regained his composure.

LXXV. After Alexander had once lost his confidence and become
suspicious and easily alarmed, there was no circumstance so trivial
that he did not make an omen of it, and the palace was full of
sacrifices, lustrations, and soothsayers. So terrible a thing is
disbelief in the gods and contempt for them on the one hand, while
superstition and excessive reverence for them presses on men's guilty
consciences like a torrent of water[434] poured upon them. Thus was
Alexander's mind filled with base and cowardly alarms. However when
the oracular responses of the gods about Hephaestion were reported to
him, he laid aside his grief somewhat, and again indulged in feasts
and drinking bouts. He entertained Nearchus and his friends
magnificently, after which he took a bath, and then, just as he was
going to sleep, Medius invited him to a revel at his house. He drank
there the whole of the following day, when he began to feel feverish:
though he