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troops heavily encumbered with their baggage and the rich spoils 

 they had taken in Asia, to which they seemed more cordially at- 

 tached than to his favourite project of the Indian war, ordered all 

 the royal property of that species, to an immense amount, to be 

 brought into a large plain, and then set fire to the pile with his 

 own hands. Afterwards he commanded the baggage and spoils of 

 the whole army to be brought into the same plain, and, promising 

 to compensate their loss after the Indian campaign, ordered each 

 individual to set fire to his own, which, however reluctantly, was 

 obeyed ; since the king himself had submitted to share the lot of 

 the meanest soldier. Curtius has asserted, probably from the same 

 sources with Plutarch, a similar relation, only with the difference of 

 referring the fact to a prior period, that is, during the ardour of the 

 pursuit of Bessus*. 



Thus anxiously impatient the general, and thus happily free from 

 every incumbrance the army which he commanded, the march 

 commenced for India with the first dawn of the infant year. Before Christ, 

 Leaving Bactria, Alexander returned to the Paropamisus by the 

 same route which he had taken in his pursuit of Bessus, and again 

 crossing that mountain, in ten days reached Alexandria, which 

 he had with so much judgement erected as a grand dep6t of arms, 

 and for the purpose of facilitating his intended expedition. Its 

 situation, also, on the confines of India, Persia, and Bactria, might 

 have recommended it as a proper place for an emporium of that 

 extended commerce which was an object ever uppermost in his 

 mind. Having displaced the governor for misconduct, and appointed 

 another on whom he could place the firmest confidence, he ad- 

 vanced by a north-east route to the Cophenes, a river that formed 

 the boundary of the province to which Paropamisus gave its name, 



* Plutarch in Vita Alexand. Curtius, lib. vi. cap. 0. 



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