Everywhere might be
heard the sound of flutes and pipes, and women singing and dancing;
while with all this dissolute march the soldiers mingled rough jokes,
as if the god Dionysus himself were amongst them and attended on their
merry procession. At the capital of Gedrosia, Alexander again halted
his army, and refreshed them with feasting and revelry. It is said
that he himself, after having drunk hard, was watching a contest
between several choruses, and that his favourite Bagoas won the prize,
and then came across the theatre and seated himself beside him,
dressed as he was and wearing his crown as victor. The Macedonians,
when they saw this, applauded vehemently, and cried out to Alexander
to kiss him, until at length he threw his arms round him and kissed
him.
LXVIII. He was now much pleased at being joined by Nearchus and his
officers, and took so much interest in their accounts of their voyage,
that he wished to sail down the Euphrates himself with a great fleet,
and then to coast round Arabia and Libya, and so enter the
Mediterranean sea through the pillars of Herakles.[427] He even began
to build many ships at Thapsakus, and to collect sailors and pilots
from all parts of the world, but the severe campaigns which he had
just completed in India, the wound which he had received among the
Malli, and the great losses which his army had sustained in crossing
the desert, had made many of his subjects doubt whether he was ever
likely to return alive, and had encouraged them to revolt, while his
absence had led many of his satraps and viceroys to act in an
extremely arbitrary and despotic manner, so that his whole empire was
in a most critical condition, and full of conspiracies and seditious
risings.
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