Egypt in his possession he felt no solicitude about Greece.  The siege of Tyre cost him more than half a year.  In revenge for this delay, he crucified, it is said, two thousand of his prisoners.  Jerusalem voluntarily surrendered, and therefore was treated leniently:  but the passage of the Macedonian army into Egypt being obstructed at Gaza, the Persian governor of which, Betis, made a most obstinate defense, that place, after a siege of two months, was carried by assault, ten thousand of its men were massacred, and the rest, with their wives and children, sold into slavery.  Betis himself was dragged alive round the city at the chariot-wheels of the conqueror.  There was now no further obstacle.  The Egyptians, who detested the Persian rule, received their invader with open arms.  He organized the country in his own interest, intrusting all its military commands to Macedonian officers, and leaving the civil government in the hands of native Egyptians.

Conquest of Egypt.  While preparations for the final campaign were being made, he undertook a journey to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, which was situated in an oasis of the Libyan Desert, at a distance of two hundred miles.  The oracle declared him to be a son of that god who, under the form of a serpent, had beguiled Olympias, his mother.  Immaculate conceptions and celestial descents were so currently received in those days, that whoever had greatly distinguished himself in the affairs of men was thought to be of supernatural lineage.  Even in Rome, centuries later, no one could with safety have denied that the city owed 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.”