being sold.[1] Alexander then offered sacrifice to Heracles, and conducted a procession in honour of that deity with all his soldiers fully armed. The ships also took part in this religious procession in honour of Heracles. He moreover held a gymnastic contest in the temple, and celebrated a torch race. The military engine, also, with which the wall had been battered down, was brought into the temple and dedicated as a thank-offering; and the Tyrian ship sacred to Heracles, which had been captured in the naval attack, was likewise dedicated to the god. An inscription was placed on it, either composed by Alexander himself or by some one else; but as it is not worthy of recollection, I have not deemed it worth while to describe it. Thus then was Tyre captured in the month Hecatombaion, when Anicetus was archon at Athens.[2]
CHAPTER XXV.
The Offers of Darius Rejected.—Batis, Governor of Gaza, Refuses to Submit.
While Alexander was still occupied by the siege of Tyre, ambassadors came to him from Darius, announcing that he would give him ten thousand talents[3] in exchange for his mother, wife, and children; that all the territory west of the river Euphrates, as far as the Grecian Sea, should be Alexander's; and proposing that he should marry the daughter of Darius, and become his friend and
- ↑ Diodorus (xvii. 46) and Curtius (iv. 19) state that 2,000 Tyrians who had escaped the massacre were hanged on the sea-shore by Alexander's order.
- ↑ The end o£ July and beginning of August B.C. 332. Diodorus (xvii. 46) tells us that the siege lasted seven months. See also Curtius (iv. 20) and Plutarch (Life of Alexander, 24). We find from Strabo (xvi. 2) that Tyre again became a flourishing city.
- ↑ About £2,440,000.
