Arrian vainly endeavors to transfer from Alexander to the minor Bœotian towns the odium of this cruel destruction—unparalleled in Grecian history (as he himself says), when we look to the magnitude of the city; yet surpassed in the aggregate by the subversion, under the arms of Philip, of no less than thirty-two free Chalkidic cities, thirteen years before. The known antipathy of these Bœotians was invoked by Alexander to color an infliction which satisfied at once his sentiment, by destroying an enemy who defied him—and his policy, by serving as a terrific example to keep down other Greeks.[99] But though such were the views which governed him at the moment, he came afterwards to look back upon the proceeding with shame and sorrow. The shock to Hellenic feeling, when a city was subverted, arose not merely from the violent extinction of life, property, liberty, and social or political institutions—but also from the obliteration of legends and the suppression of religious observances, thus wronging and provoking the local gods and heroes. We shall presently find Alexander himself sacrificing at Ilium,[100] in order to appease the wrath of Priam, still subsisting and efficacious, against himself and his race, as being descended from Neoptolemus the slayer of Priam. By his harsh treatment of Thebes, he incurred the displeasure of Dionysus, the god of wine, said to have been born in that city, and one of the principal figures in Theban legend. It was to inspirations of the offended Dionysus that Alexander believed himself to owe that ungovernable drunken passion under which he afterwards killed Kleitus, as well as the refusal of his Macedonian soldiers to follow him farther into India.[101] If Alexander in after days thus repented of his own act, we may be sure that the like repugnance was felt still more strongly by others; and we can understand the sentiment under which, a few years after his decease, the Macedonian Kassander, son of Antipater, restored the destroyed city. [99] Plutarch, Alex. 11. ἡ μὲν πόλις ἥλω καὶ διαρπασθεῖσα κατεσκάφη, τὸ μὲν ὅλον προσδοκήσαντος αὐτοῦ τοὺς Ἕλληνας πάθει τηλικούτῳ ἐκπλαγέντας καὶ πτήξαντας ἀτρεμήσειν, ἄλλως δὲ καὶ καλλωπισαμένου χαρίζεσθαι τοῖς τῶν συμμάχων ἐγκλήμασιν. [100] Arrian, i. 11, 13. To illustrate farther the feeling of the Greeks, respecting the wrath of the gods arising from the discontinuance of worship where it had been long continued—I transcribe a passage from Colonel Sleeman’s work respecting the Hindoos, whose religious feelings are on so many points analogous to those of the Hellênes:—