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Updated: May 2, 2025
That one may sooner believe Hesiod, and Homer, and the Tragick Poets speaking of their Hero's, than Ctesias and Herodotus and Hellanicus and such like. All who have wrote of India for the most part, are fabulous, but in the highest degree Daimachus; then Megasthenes, Onesicritus, and Nearchus, and such like. The Satyrist therefore had reason to say, Satyr.
'Ah, Onesicritus, said he, 'how I should like to come to life again for a little while, and see how your stuff strikes people by that time; at present they have good enough reason to praise and welcome it; that is their way of angling for a share of my favour. On the same principle some people actually accept Homer's history of Achilles, full of exaggerations as it is; the one great guarantee which they recognize of his truth is the fact that his subject was not living; that leaves him no motive for lying.
Some little time after the battle with Porus, Bucephalas died, as most of the authorities state, under cure of his wounds, or as Onesicritus says, of fatigue and age, being thirty years old. Alexander was no less concerned at his death, than if he had lost an old companion or an intimate friend, and built a city, which he named Bucephalia, in memory of him, on the bank of the river Hydaspes.
Onesicritus affirms that India is a full third part of the world; and Nearchus says that it is four months journey in a straight line from west to east.
He was naturally a great lover of all kinds of learning and reading; and Onesicritus informs us, that he constantly laid Homer's Iliads, according to the copy corrected by Aristotle, called "The casket copy," with his dagger under his pillow, declaring that he esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge.
Those officers who had served as guards of Alexander's person received crowns of gold; and the same present was made to Nearchus as admiral, and to Onesicritus as navigator of the fleet. We have already mentioned that Alexander projected the circumnavigation of Arabia to the Red Sea, in order to complete the communication between India and Egypt, and through Egypt with Europe.
To another government, three times as large as this, he appointed Philip, one of his friends. Some little time after the battle with Porus, Bucephalas died, as most of the authorities state, under cure of his wounds, or as Onesicritus says, of fatigue and age, being thirty years old.
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