except Barsine.  This lady, after the death of her husband Memnon, remained at Damascus.  She had received a Greek education, was naturally attractive, and was of royal descent, as her father was Artabazus, who married one of the king’s daughters; which, added to the solicitations of Parmenio, as we are told by Aristobulus, made Alexander the more willing to attach himself to so beautiful and well-born a lady.  When Alexander saw the beauty of the other captives, he said in jest, that the Persian ladies make men’s eyes sore to behold them.  Yet, in spite of their attractions, he was determined that his self-restraint should be as much admired as their beauty, and passed by them as if they had been images cut out of stone.

XXII.  Indeed, when Philoxenus, the commander of his fleet, wrote to inform him that a slave merchant of Tarentum, named Theodorus, had two beautiful slaves for sale, and desired to know whether he would buy them, Alexander was greatly incensed, and angrily demanded of his friends what signs of baseness Philoxenus could have observed in him that he should venture to make such disgraceful proposals to him.  He sent a severe reprimand to Philoxenus, and ordered him to send Theodorus and his merchandise to the devil.  He also severely rebuked a young man named Hagnon for a similar offence.

On another occasion, when he heard that two Macedonians of Parmenio’s regiment, named Damon and Timotheus, had violently outraged the wives of some of the mercenary soldiers, he wrote to Parmenio, ordering him, if the charge were proved, to put them to death like mere brute beasts that prey upon mankind.  And in that letter he wrote thus of himself.  “I have never seen, or desired to see the wife of Darius, and have not even allowed her beauty to be spoken of in my presence.”

He was wont to say that he was chiefly reminded that he was mortal by these two weaknesses, sleep and lust; thinking weariness and sensuality alike to be bodily weaknesses.  He was also most temperate in eating, as was signally proved by his answer to the princess Ada, whom he adopted as his mother, and made Queen of Karia.  She, in order to show her fondness for him, sent him every day many dainty dishes and sweetmeats, and at last presented him with her best cooks.  He answered her that he needed them not, since he had been provided with much better relishes for his food by his tutor Leonidas, who had taught him to earn his breakfast by a night-march, and to obtain an appetite for his dinner by eating sparingly at breakfast.  “My tutor,” he said, “would often look into my chests of clothes, and of bedding, to make sure that my mother had not hidden any delicacies for me in them.”