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Let him sprinkle with his tears, let him hallow with his remembrance, let him consecrate with his finest sensibilities, the urns of Socrates, of Phocion; of Archimedes; of Anaxarchus; let him wash out the stain that their punishment has made on the human species; let him expiate by his regret the Athenian ingratitude, the savage barbarity of Nicocreon; let him learn by their example to dread superstitious fanaticism; to hold political intolerance in abhorrence; let him fear to harrass merit; let him be cautious how he insults virtue, in persecuting those who may happen to differ from him in his prejudices.
This piece of raillery irritated Anaxarchus and the other pretenders to learning, and the crowd of flatterers in general could not endure to see Callisthenes so much admired and followed by the youth, and no less esteemed by the older men for his orderly life, and his gravity, and for being contented with his condition; all confirming what he had professed about the object he had in his journey to Alexander, that it was only to get his countrymen recalled from banishment, and to rebuild and repeople his native town.
That the lesser should survive the greater; that the case of Anaxarchus should continue and Anaxarchus' proud self become nonexistent, were to leave matter without law and wreck the universe, for law itself presupposes prescience.
Know you not," asked he "that Law and Justice sit beside the throne of Zeus, and make everything which is done by those in power to be lawful and right?" By such discourse as this Anaxarchus assuaged Alexander's sorrow, but encouraged his savage and lawless disposition.
It is in this spirit that the story is recorded of Anaxarchus, who, we are told, was ordered by Nicocreon, tyrant of Salamis, to be pounded in a mortar, and who, in contempt of his mortal sufferings, exclaimed, "Beat on, tyrant! thou dost but strike upon the case of Anaxarchus; thou canst not touch the man himself."
There are as many hells as Anaxarchus conceited worlds: there was more than one hell in Magdalen, when there were seven devils, for every devil is an hell unto himself; he holds enough of torture in his own ubi, and needs not the misery of circumference to afflict him; and thus a distracted conscience here is a shadow or introduction unto hell hereafter.
You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent country-practitioner? Then you don't know the history of medicine, and that is not my fault. But don't expose yourself in any outbreak of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded!
when Anaxarchus, by command of Nicocreon the tyrant of Cyprus, was put into a stone mortar, and laid upon with mauls of iron, ceases not to say, "Strike, batter, break; 'tis not Anaxarchus, 'tis but his sheath that you pound and bray so"; when we hear our martyrs cry out to the tyrant from the middle of the flame, "This side is roasted enough, fall to and eat, it is enough done; fall to work with the other;" when we hear the child in Josephus' torn piece-meal with pincers, defying Antiochus, and crying out with a constant and assured voice: "Tyrant, thou losest thy labour, I am still at ease; where is the pain, where are the torments with which thou didst so threaten me?
And another time, when it thundered so much that everybody was afraid, and Anaxarchus, the sophist, asked him if he who was Jupiter's son could do anything like this, "Nay," said Alexander, laughing, "I have no desire to be formidable to my friends, as you would have me, who despised my table for being furnished with fish, and not with the heads of governors of provinces."
Kallisthenes endeavoured to soothe his grief, by kind and gentle consolation, but Anaxarchus, a man who had always pursued an original method of his own in philosophical speculations, and who was thought to be overbearing and harsh-tempered by his friends, as soon as he entered the room exclaimed, "This is that Great Alexander, upon whom the eyes of the world are fixed: there he lies like a slave, fearing what men will say of him, although he ought rather to dictate to them what they should think right, as becomes the master of the world, and not to be influenced by their foolish opinions.
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