142 GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 



keeping with the other features of the narrative. It was no other 

 than the water of the river Styx, which fell from a rock near the town 

 of Nonacris in Arcadia, and which, according to a local superstition 

 which is not extinct to this day, 1 possessed not only the property of 

 destroying animal life by its cold and petrifying qualities (^v^pov KCU 

 Trayfrw^ec), but also that of dissolving the hardest metals, and even 

 precious stones. One substance alone was proof against its destructive 

 influences the hoof of a Scythian ass ! In a vessel made out of this, 

 a small portion of the fluid was conveyed by Cassander, lolaus's elder 

 brother, into Asia, and, on the occasion of the debauch at which Alex- 

 ander was taken ill, administered to him by the latter. lolaus was 

 stimulated to the act by the desire of revenging an outrage upon him- 

 self committed by the king, and attachment to him induced Medius, a 

 Thessalian, at whose palace the debauch took place, to be an accom- 

 plice in the treason. The assassin, according to the author of the 

 * Lives of the Ten Orators,' falsely attributed to Plutarch, 2 was re- 

 warded by a proposition of the demagogue Hyperides at Athens, to 

 confer public honours upon him as a tyrannicide, and the horn cup in 

 which the fatal draught had been conveyed from Greece deposited in 

 the temple of Delphi. 3 



its refutation The absurdity of this account is glaringly manifest to readers of the 

 present day, of whom nine out of every ten are probably better ac- 

 quainted with the nature and operation of petrifying springs than the 

 best informed of the Greek naturalists were. The ancients were not 

 in possession of the touchstone for the discovery of falsehood which 

 modern science affords ; but even they were long before they attached 

 any credence to the calumny. " The greater part of the writers on 

 the subject," says Plutarch, 4 " consider the whole matter of the alleged 

 poisoning a mere fiction ; and in confirmation of this view they quote 

 the fact, that although the royal remains lay for several days unem- 

 balmed in consequence of the disputes of the generals and that too 

 in a hot and close place they exhibited no marks of corruption, but 

 remained fresh and unchanged." Arrian 5 too, who, as well as Plu- 

 tarch, derives his account of the king's illness and death from the court 

 gazettes (i^psplhg), and confirms the statements of these by the 



1 See Col. Leake's Travels in the Morea, vol. iii. pp. 165-9. The natives say 

 that the water, which they call ra Mavpa-vepia (the black waters), and ra Apaico- 

 vepia (the terrible waters), is unwholesome, and also that no vessel will hold it. 

 It is a slender perennial stream falling over a very high precipice, and entering the 

 rock at the bottom, which is said to be inaccessible, from the nature of the ground. 

 Col. Leake quotes the phrases of Homer, Karfi^^vov 'Srvybs vScap, and ^rvybs 

 vSaros a'ura peeQpa, as exact descriptions of it. See also Herod, vi. 74 ; Hesiod, 

 Theog. 785, 805. 



2 P. 849. The same is stated by Photius, Biblioth. p. 496. 



3 Epigr. ap. -(Elian, De Nat. Animal, x. 40. That it should have been deposited 

 there, as the Epigram states, by Alexander himself, is a circumstance which will 

 not add much, in the opinion of modern critics, to the incredibility of the story. 



4 Vit. Alex. ult. 5 vii. 27. 



