By These Means, United To The Reports Of Those Whom He Employed
To Survey His Conquests, "All The Native Commodities
Which to this day form
the staple of the East Indian commerce, were fully known to the
Macedonians." The principal
Castes in India, the principles of the Bramins,
the devotion of widows to the flames, the description of the banyan-tree,
and a great variety of other particulars, sufficiently prove that the
Macedonians were actuated by a thirst after knowledge, as well as a spirit
of conquest; and illustrate as well as justify the observation made to
Alexander by the Bramin mandarin, "You are the only man whom I ever found
curious in the investigation of philosophy at the head of an army."
When Alexander invaded India, he found commerce flourishing greatly in many
parts of it, particularly in what are supposed to be the present Multan,
Attock, and the Panjob. He every where took advantage of this commerce, not
by plundering and thus destroying it for the purpose of filling his
coffers, but by nourishing and increasing it, and thus at once benefitting
himself and the inhabitants who wore engaged in it. By means of the
commerce in which the natives of the Panjob were engaged on the Indus,
Alexander procured the fleet with which he sailed down that river. This
fleet is supposed to have consisted of eight hundred vessels, only thirty
of which were ships of war, the remainder being such as were usually
employed in the commerce of the Indus.
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