Court conspiracies and assassinations of the prince, however were not unknown either among the Achæmenidæ or the Arsakidæ. [443] This account of the remarkable incidents immediately preceding the death of Darius, is taken mainly from Arrian (iii. 21), and seems one of the most authentic chapters of his work. He is very sparing in telling what passed in the Persian camp; he mentions indeed only the communications made by the Persian deserters to Alexander. Curtius (v. 27-34) gives the narrative far more vaguely and loosely than Arrian, but with ample details of what was going on in the Persian camp. We should have been glad to know from whom these details were borrowed. In the main they do not contradict the narrative of Arrian, but rather amplify and dilute it. Diodorus (xvii. 73), Plutarch (Alexand. 42, 43), and Justin (xi. 15) give no new information. Alexander had made the prodigious and indefatigable marches of the last four days, not without destruction to many men and horses, for the express purpose of taking Darius alive. It would have been a gratification to his vanity to exhibit the Great King as a helpless captive, rescued from his own servants by the sword of his enemy, and spared to occupy some subordinate command as a token of ostentatious indulgence. Moreover, apart from such feelings, it would have been a point of real advantage to seize the person of Darius, by means of whose name Alexander would have been enabled to stifle all farther resistance in the extensive and imperfectly known regions eastward of the Caspian Gates. The satraps of these regions had now gone thither with their hands free, to kindle as much Asiatic sentiment and levy as large a force as they could, against the Macedonian conqueror; who was obliged to follow them, if he wished to complete the subjugation of the empire. We can understand therefore that Alexander was deeply mortified in deriving no result from this ruinously fatiguing march, and can the better explain that savage wrath which we shall hereafter find him manifesting against the satrap Bessus.