its founder, Romulus, to an accidental meeting of the god Mars
with the virgin Rhea Sylvia, as she went with her pitcher for
water to the spring. The Egyptian disciples of Plato would have
looked with anger on those who rejected the legend that
Perictione, the mother of that great philosopher, a pure virgin,
had suffered an immaculate conception through the influences of
Apollo, and that the god had declared to Ariston, to whom she was
betrothed, the parentage of the child. When Alexander issued his
letters, orders, and decrees, styling himself "King Alexander,
the son of Jupiter Ammon," they came to the inhabitants of Egypt
and Syria with an authority that now can hardly be realized. The
free- thinking Greeks, however, put on such a supernatural
pedigree its proper value. Olympias, who, of course, better than
all others knew the facts of the case, used jestingly to say,
that "she wished Alexander would cease from incessantly
embroiling her with Jupiter's wife." Arrian, the historian of the
Macedonian expedition, observes, "I cannot condemn him for
endeavoring to draw his subjects into the belief of his divine
origin, nor can I be induced to think it any great crime, for it
is very reasonable to imagine that he intended no more by it than
merely to procure the greater authority among his soldiers."

GREEK CONQUEST OF PERSIA. All things being thus secured in his
rear, Alexander, having returned into Syria, directed the march
of his army, now consisting of fifty thousand veterans, eastward.
After crossing the Euphrates, he kept close to the Masian hills,
to avoid the intense heat of the more southerly Mesopotamian
plains; more abundant forage could also thus be procured for the
cavalry. On the left bank of the Tigris, near Arbela, he
encountered the great army of eleven hundred thousand men brought