During this march, one of Alexander’s friends told him as a joke, that the camp-followers had divided themselves into two bodies in sport, each of which was led by a general, the one called Alexander, and the other Darius; and that after beginning to skirmish with one another by throwing clods of earth, they had come to blows of the fist, and had at length become so excited that they fought with sticks and stones, and that it was hard to part them.  On hearing this, Alexander ordered the two leaders to fight in single combat:  and he himself armed the one called Alexander, while Philotas armed the representative of Darius.  The whole army looked on, thinking that the result would be ominous of their own success or failure.  After a severe fight, the one called Alexander conquered, and was rewarded with twelve villages and the right of wearing the Persian garb.  This we are told by Eratosthenes the historian.

The decisive battle with Darius was fought at Gaugamela, not at Arbela, as most writers tell us.  It is said that this word signifies “the house of the camel,” and that one of the ancient Kings of Persia, whose life had been saved by the swiftness with which a camel bore him away from his enemies, lodged the animal there for the rest of its life, and assigned to it the revenues of several villages for its maintenance.

During the month Boedromion, at the beginning of the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries, there was an eclipse, of the moon:  and on the eleventh day after the eclipse the two armies came within sight of one another.  Darius kept his troops under arms, and inspected their ranks by torch-light, while Alexander allowed the Macedonians to take their rest, but himself with the soothsayer Aristander performed some mystical ceremonies in front of his tent, and offered sacrifice to Phoebus.

When Parmenio and the elder officers of Alexander saw the entire plain between Mount Niphates and the confines of Gordyene covered with the watch fires of the Persians, and heard the vague, confused murmur of their army like the distant roar of the sea, they were astonished, and said to one another that it would indeed be a prodigious effort to fight such a mass of enemies by daylight in a pitched battle.

As soon as Alexander had finished his sacrifice they went to him, and tried to persuade him to fall upon the Persians by night, as the darkness would prevent his troops from seeing the overwhelming numbers of the enemy.  It was then that he made that memorable answer, “I will not steal a victory,” which some thought to show an over-boastful spirit, which could jest in the presence of such fearful danger; while others thought that it showed a steady confidence and true knowledge of what would happen on the morrow, and meant that he did not intend to give Darius, when vanquished, the consolation of attributing his defeat to the confusion of a night attack; for Darius had already explained his defeat at Issus to have been owing to the confined nature of the ground, and to his forces having been penned up between the mountains and the sea.  It was not any want of men or of arms which would make Darius yield, when he had so vast a country and such great resources at his disposal:  it was necessary to make pride and hope alike die within him, by inflicting upon him a crushing defeat in a fair field and in open daylight.