has decreed for you misery in this life, and pain hereafter. Your deeds are a woe to you.
After the letters are ended, Alexander erects a pillar of marble to mark the furthest spot which he had succeeded in reaching. His men then begin their homeward journey; and the fragment ends.
§ 15. It thus appears that the poem is principally concerned with the correspondence that passed between Alexander and the king of the Brahmans. This correspondence really has nothing to do with the story of Alexander's adventures, but is a mere execrescence. It is easy to see that it originated with an ecclesiastic, and was introduced with a moral purpose. There are two leading ideas in it, both of them theological. The former is, the common and favourite contrast between the Active Life and the Contemplative Life, which so often meets us in medieaval literature; and the latter, the contrast betweeen the Christian life and that of the heathen worship of idols. The arguments are so managed that the bias of one counteracts the bias of the other. We are led, on the one hand, to favour the Active Life as being more Useful than the Contemplative; but, lest the scale should preponderate in its favour, it is linked with Heathenism as opposed to Christianity. The life of Dindimus, in as far as it is assimilated to that of a Christian, is preferabe to that of Alexander. The life of Alexander, in its Active aspect, enlists our sympathies rather than that of Dindimus. The author of this ingenious arrangement strove rather for oratorical effect than sought to inculcate a lesson. To regard the various arguments in this light is to regard them rightly. It is merely a question of seeing what can be said on both sides. There is nothing else to be learnt from the story of it.
On the name "Dindimus"
§ 16. Though the poem deals with India, and attempts an account of the Brahmans, there is little that is eastern about it. Bisse has pointed out the references to the Gymnosophists that occur in Strabo, lib. 15; in Plutarch's Life of Alexander; in Arrian, De Expedit. Alexandri, lib. 7; in Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, lib. 3; in Porphyrius, De Abstinentia, lib. 4; in Philostratus, Vita Apollonii lib. 3, capp. 4 and 5; and in other authors. The chief point of interest
