No sooner was the deed perpetrated, than the feelings of Alexander underwent an entire revolution. The spectacle of Kleitus, a bleeding corpse on the floor,—the marks of stupefaction and horror evident in all the spectators, and the reaction from a furious impulse instantaneously satiated—plunged him at once into the opposite extreme of remorse and self-condemnation. Hastening out of the hall, and retiring to bed, he passed three days in an agony of distress, without food or drink. He burst into tears and multiplied exclamations on his own mad act; he dwelt upon the name of Kleitus and Lanikê with the debt of gratitude which he owed to each, and denounced himself as unworthy to live after having requited such services with a foul murder.[504] His friends at length prevailed on him to take food, and return to activity. All joined in trying to restore his self-satisfaction. The Macedonian army passed a public vote that Kleitus had been justly slain, and that his body should remain unburied; which afforded opportunity to Alexander to reverse the vote, and to direct that it should be buried by his own order.[505] The prophets comforted him by the assurance that his murderous impulse had arisen, not from his own natural mind, but from a maddening perversion intentionally brought on by the god Dionysus, to avenge the omission of a sacrifice due to him on the day of the banquet, but withheld.[506] Lastly, the Greek sophist or philosopher, Anaxarchus of Abdera, revived Alexander’s spirits by well-timed flattery, treating his sensibility as nothing better than generous weakness; reminding him that in his exalted position of conqueror and Great King, he was entitled to prescribe what was right and just, instead of submitting himself to laws dictated from without.[507] Kallisthenes the philosopher was also summoned, along with Anaxarchus, to the king’s presence, for the same purpose of offering consolatory reflections. But he is said to have adopted a tone of discourse altogether different, and to have given offence rather than satisfaction to Alexander. [504] Arrian, iv. 9, 4; Curtius, viii. 2, 2. [505] Curtius, viii. 2, 12. “Quoque minus cædis puderet, jure interfectum Clitum Macedones decernunt; sepulturâ quoque prohibituri, ni rex humari jussisset.” In explanation of this monstrous verdict of the soldiers, we must recollect that the safety of the whole army (now at Samarcand, almost beyond the boundary of inhabited regions, ἔξω τῆς οἰκουμένης) was felt to depend on the life of Alexander. Compare Justin, xii. 6, 15. [506] Arrian, iv. 9, 6. Alexander imagined himself to have incurred the displeasure of Dionysus by having sacked and destroyed the city of Thebes, the supposed birth-place and favorite locality of that god (Plutarch, Alex. 13).