the soothsayer, who had conducted the sacrifice, to know if this were true.  The soothsayer admitted that it was, on which Alexander inquired what signs he had observed in the sacrifice.  Pythagoras answered that the victim’s liver wanted one lobe.  “Indeed!” exclaimed Alexander, “that is a terrible omen.”  He did Pythagoras no hurt, but regretted that he had not listened to the warning of Nearchus, and spent most of his time in his camp outside the walls of Babylon, or in boats on the river Euphrates.  Many unfavourable omens now depressed his spirit.  A tame ass attacked and kicked to death the finest and largest lion that he kept; and one day, as he stripped to play at tennis, the young man with whom he played, when it was time to dress again, saw a man sitting on the king’s throne, wearing his diadem and royal robe.  For a long time this man refused to speak, but at length said that he was a citizen of Messene, named Dionysius, who had been brought to Babylon and imprisoned on some charge or other, and that now the god Serapis had appeared to him, loosed his chains, and had brought him thither, where he had bidden him to put on the king’s diadem and robe, seat himself on his throne, and remain silent.

LXXIV.  When Alexander heard this, he caused the man to be put to death, according to the advice of his soothsayers; but he himself was much cast down, and feared that the gods had forsaken him:  he also grew suspicious of his friends.  Above all he feared Antipater and his sons, one of whom, Iolas, was his chief cup-bearer, while the other, Kassander, had but recently arrived from Greece, and as he had been trained in the Greek fashion, and had never seen any Oriental customs before, he burst into a loud, insolent laugh, when he saw some of the natives doing homage to Alexander.  Alexander was very angry, and seizing him by the hair with both hands, beat his head against the wall.  Another time he stopped Kassander, when he was about to say something to some men who were accusing his father, Antipater.  “Do you imagine” said he, “that these men would have journeyed so far merely in order to accuse a man falsely, if they had not been wronged by him?” When Kassander answered, that it looked very like a false accusation for a man to journey far from the place where his proofs lay, Alexander said with a laugh, “This is how Aristotle teaches his disciples to argue on either side of the question; but if any of you be proved to have wronged these men ever so little, you shall smart for it.”  It is related that after this, terror of Alexander became so rooted in the mind of Kassander, that many years afterwards, when Kassander was king of Macedonia, and lord of all Greece, he was walking about in Delphi looking at the statues, and that when he saw that of Alexander he was seized with a violent shuddering; his hair stood upright on his head, and his body quaked with fear, so that it was long before he regained his composure.