After the victory, Alexander manifested the greatest solicitude for his wounded soldiers, whom he visited and consoled in person. Of the twenty-five Companions slain, he caused brazen statues, by Lysippus, to be erected at Dium in Macedonia, where they were still standing in the time of Arrian. To the surviving relatives of all the slain he also granted immunity from taxation and from personal service. The dead bodies were honorably buried, those of the enemy as well as of his own soldiers. The two thousand Greeks in the Persian service who had become his prisoners, were put in chains, and transported to Macedonia, there to work as slaves; to which treatment Alexander condemned them on the ground that they had taken arms on behalf of the foreigner against Greece, in contravention of the general vote passed by the synod at Corinth. At the same time, he sent to Athens three hundred panoplies selected from the spoil, to be dedicated to Athênê in the acropolis with this inscription—“Alexander son of Philip, and the Greeks, except the Lacedæmonians (_present these offerings_), out of the spoils of the foreigners inhabiting Asia.”[202] Though the vote to which Alexander appealed represented no existing Grecian aspiration, and granted only a sanction which could not be safely refused, yet he found satisfaction in clothing his own self-aggrandizing impulse under the name of a supposed Pan-hellenic purpose: which was at the same time useful, as strengthening his hold upon the Greeks, who were the only persons competent, either as officers or soldiers, to uphold the Persian empire against him. His conquests were the extinction of genuine Hellenism, though they diffused an exterior varnish of it, and especially the Greek language, over much of the Oriental world. True Grecian interests lay more on the side of Darius than of Alexander. [202] Arrian, i. 16, 10, 11. The battle of the Granikus, brought on by Arsites and the other satraps contrary to the advice of Memnon, was moreover so unskilfully fought by them, that the gallantry of their infantry, the most formidable corps of Greeks that had ever been in the Persian service, was rendered of little use. The battle, properly speaking, was fought only by the Persian cavalry;[203] the infantry was left to be surrounded and destroyed afterwards. [203] Arrian usually calls the battle of the Granikus an ἱππομαχία (i. 17, 10 and elsewhere). The battle was fought in the Attic month Thargelion: probably the beginning of May (Plutarch, Camillus, 19).