attendants to procure them an audience of their king.”  When Kleitus spoke his mind thus boldly, Alexander’s intimate friends answered with bitter reproaches, but the older men endeavoured to pacify them.  Alexander now turning to Xenodochus of Kardia and Astenius of Kolophon, asked, “Do not the Greeks seem to you to treat the Macedonians as if they were beasts, and they themselves were more than mortal men?  “Kleitus, however, would not hold his peace, but went on to say that if Alexander could not bear to hear men speak their mind, he had better not invite free-born people to his table, and ought to confine himself to the society of barbarians and slaves who would pay respect to his Persian girdle and striped[418] tunic.  At this speech Alexander could no longer restrain his passion, but seized an apple from the table, hurled it at Kleitus, and began to feel for his dagger.  Aristophanes, one of his body-guard, had already secreted it, and the rest now pressed round him imploring him to be quiet.  He however leaped to his feet, and, as if in a great emergency, ehouted in the Macedonian tongue to the foot-guards to turn out.  He bade the trumpeter sound an alarm, and as the man hesitated and refused, struck him with his fist.  This man afterwards gained great credit for his conduct, as it was thought that by it he had saved the whole camp from being thrown into an uproar.  As Kleitus would not retract what he had said, his friends seized him and forced him out of the room.  But he re-entered by another door, and in an offensive and insolent tone began to recite the passage from the Andromache of Euripides, which begins,

     “Ah me! in Greece an evil custom reigns,” &c.

Upon this Alexander snatched a lance from one of his guards, and ran Kleitus through the body with it, just as he was drawing aside the curtain and preparing to enter the room.  Kleitus fell with a loud groan, and died on the spot.  Alexander, when he came to himself, and saw his friends all standing round in mute reproach, snatched the spear out of the corpse, and would have thrust it into his own neck, but was forcibly witheld by his guards, who laid hold of him and carried him into his bed-chamber.

LII.  Alexander spent the whole night in tears, and on the next day was so exhausted by his agony of grief as to be speechless, and only able to sigh heavily.  At length his friends, alarmed at his silence, broke into the room.  He took no notice of any of their attempts at consolation, except that he seemed to make signs of assent when Aristander the soothsayer told him that all this had been preordained to take place, and reminded him of his dream about Kleitus.  His friends now brought to him Kallisthenes the philosopher, who was a nephew of Aristotle, and Anaxarchus of Abdera.  Kallisthenes endeavoured to soothe his grief, by kind and gentle consolation, but Anaxarchus, a man who had always pursued an original method of his own in philosophical speculations, and