Now when the Macedonians saw that it was done even as they had said, the scales of jealous anger dropped from their eyes and they were deeply repentant. So laying aside their arms, and dressed only in short undergarments they sought suppliantly the tent of Alexander. But it opened not to their importunities. For three days they stayed there neither eating nor drinking, but sorely longing for the light of the countenance of Alexander, for every man loved him. And at last the tent door opened and Alexander came forth, and going affectionately among them he sat down and wept; and they wept. Then Alexander, thinking it wiser that the maimed should embark in the waiting vessels, spoke to them most kindly, praising their valor and declaring that their deeds should be known throughout the world: saying also that he would write concerning them to his mother Olympias and to the Governor of Macedonia, giving orders that the first seats in the theatres should be reserved for them and that they should therein be crowned with chaplets of flowers. Moreover every soldier’s pay should continue to him, and the pay due to the fallen should be regularly sent to their wives and children. And thus was reconciliation between Alexander and his Macedonians happily effected. How childish it all is--that jealous hate and the hasty reaction; the humiliating importunities of barbaric love; the Conqueror conquered and--in tears; the generous re-fusion of the old warm feelings; the magnanimity of the Great; the joyous departure of the honored veterans, their sitting in the seats of honor crowned with a chaplet of flowers: childish? well, yes, but we older children can understand and even dimly--remember. A DEITY. Did Alexander believe himself descended from Jupiter Ammon? No. On one occasion being wounded he said “This, my friends, is real blood flowing not Ichor,” “Such as immortal gods are wont to shed.” Yet if the reply of the gymnosophist be admitted as true, Alexander was not a mortal. The Gymnosophists, or wise men of India, were entertained at the court of Alexander, and among the questions proposed to them by the young lord of the world was, how a man might become a god: to this the sage replied “By doing that which was impossible for men to do.” The deeds done by Alexander in his brief thirty-two years seem beyond the merely human: and it is certain that he was honored as a deity in the latter years of his life. He had his friend and biographer, Callisthenes, tortured and put to death because he had derisively laughed while the servile court prostrated before the “present Deity”, and had refused to follow their example.