eunuchs; saw nothing about him but gold and purple; was encumbered
with the trappings of his state, and should be called his prey, rather
than his antagonist; whom therefore he vanquished without loss of
blood and had no other merit, on the occasion, than that of showing a
proper spirit in despising empty show. The aspect of Italy would have
appeared to him of a quite different nature from that of India, which
he traversed in the guise of a traveller, at the head of a crew of
drunkards, if he had seen the forests of Apulia, and the mountains of
Lucania, with the vestiges of the disasters of his house, and where
his uncle Alexander, king of Epirus, had been lately cut off.

18. We are now speaking of Alexander not yet intoxicated by
prosperity, the seductions of which no man was less capable of
withstanding. But, if he is to be judged from the tenor of his conduct
in the new state of his fortune, and from the new disposition, as I
may say, which he put on after his successes, he would have entered
Italy more like Darius than Alexander; and would have brought thither
an army that had forgotten Macedonia, and were degenerating into the
manners of the Persians. It is painful, in speaking of so great a
king, to recite his ostentatious change of dress; of requiring that
people should address him with adulation, prostrating themselves on
the ground, a practice insupportable to the Macedonians, had they even
been conquered, much more so when they were victorious; the shocking
cruelty of his punishments; his murdering his friends in the midst of
feasting and wine; with the folly of his fiction respecting his birth.
What must have been the consequence, if his love of wine had daily
become more intense? if his fierce and uncontrollable anger? And as I
mention not any one circumstance of which there is a doubt among
writers, do we consider these as no disparagements to the
qualifications of a commander? But then, as is frequently repeated by