Alexander   

birth, and bade him behave himself with courage suitable to his divine
extraction. Others again affirm that she wholly disclaimed any
pretensions of the kind, and was wont to say, "When will Alexander
leave off slandering me to Juno?"
Alexander was born the sixth of Hecatombaeon, which month the
Macedonians call Lous, the same day that the temple of Diana at
Ephesus was burnt; which Hegesias of Magnesia makes the occasion of
a conceit, frigid enough to have stopped the conflagration. The
temple, he says, took fire and was burnt while its mistress was
absent, assisting at the birth of Alexander. And all the Eastern
soothsayers who happened to be then at Ephesus, looking upon the
ruin of this temple to be the forerunner of some other calamity, ran
about the town, beating their faces, and crying that this day had
brought forth something that would prove fatal and destructive to
all Asia.
Just after Philip had taken Potidaea, he received these three
messages at one time, that Parmenio had overthrown the Illyrians in
a great battle, that his race-horse had won the course at the
Olympic games, and that his wife had given birth to Alexander; with
which being naturally well pleased, as an addition to his
satisfaction, he was assured by the diviners that a son, whose birth
was accompanied with three such successes, could not fail of being
invincible.
The statues that gave the best representation of Alexander's
person were those of Lysippus (by whom alone he would suffer his image
to be made), those peculiarities which many of his successors
afterwards and his friends used to affect to imitate, the
inclination of his head a little on one side towards his left
shoulder, and his melting eye, having been expressed by this artist
with great exactness. But Apelles, who drew him with thunderbolts in
his hand, made his complexion browner and darker than it was
naturally; for he was fair and of a light colour, passing into
ruddiness in his face and upon his breast. Aristoxenus in his
Memoirs tells us that a most agreeable odour exhaled from his skin,
and that his breath and body all over was so fragrant as to perfume
the clothes which he wore next him; the cause of which might
probably be the hot and adust temperament of his body. For sweet
smells, Theophrastus conceives, are produced by the concoction of
moist humours by heat, which is the reason that those parts of the
world which are driest and most burnt up afford spices of the best
kind and in the greatest quantity; for the heat of the sun exhausts
all the superfluous moisture which lies in the surface of bodies,
ready to generate putrefaction. And this hot constitution, it may
be, rendered Alexander so addicted to drinking, and so choleric. His
temperance, as to the pleasures of the body, was apparent in him in
his very childhood, as he was with much difficulty incited to them,
and always used them with great moderation; though in other things
be was extremely eager and vehement, and in his love of glory, and the
pursuit of it, he showed a solidity of high spirit and magnanimity far
above his age. For he neither sought nor valued it upon every
occasion, as his father Philip did (who affected to show his eloquence
almost to a degree of pedantry, and took care to have the victories of
his racing chariots at the Olympic games engraven on his coin), but
when he was asked by some about him, whether he would run a race in
the Olympic games, as he was very swift-footed, he answered, he would,
if he might have kings to run with him. Indeed, he seems in general to
have looked with indifference, if not with dislike, upon the professed
athletes. He often appointed prizes, for which not only tragedians and
musicians, pipers and harpers, but rhapsodists also, strove to
outvie one another; and delighted in all manner of hunting and
cudgel-playing, but never gave any encouragement to contests either of
boxing or of the pancratium.
While he was yet very young, he entertained the ambassadors from the
King of Persia, in the absence of his father, and entering much into