January 20, 2010 • 22 mins
As Alexander the Great pushed across the globe on his quest for world domination, he met with an unexpected obstacle: King Porus of the Punjab region. Listen in as Katie and Sarah explore the historical Battle of the Hydaspes in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowie. And you know
how much we love talking about things like queens and
(00:20):
writers and the mysteries of history. But you can't have
history without some battles. And we were saying in our
own history classes, it's funny, but the curriculum didn't strongly
emphasized battles. I even took a class on the Revolutionary War,
and it was much more focused on the events leading
up to the war than the actual battles. I have
(00:41):
one exception, but that's because I grew up for a
time in Manassas, Virginia, and I feel like all we
ever talked about were the battles of Manassas. But this
battle was when we hadn't even heard of until we
started researching, and that is the battle between King Porus
and Alexander the Great, the Battle of the Hydaskis. So
who is King Porus? You might not have heard of him.
(01:03):
He's also known as Raja Parava, but we're going to
go with the Greek names throughout this podcast because most
of the information we have about this battle was written
by a Greek historian named arian So. King Poris was
a great ruler in the Punjab region, specifically the region
between the Hydaspes which today is Jalen and the Assassainse
(01:23):
today chinab Rivers, and the capital may have been Lahore,
which today is in Pakistan. So King Poris fought Alexander
the Great in the Battle of the Hydaspes, which was
the fourth and last battle fought by Alexander during his
campaign of Asian conquest. And Poris is outmatched in this
battle by Alexander's cavalry, archers and maneuvering, but his skill
(01:45):
and bravery so impress Alexander that even though he loses
the battle, the final outcome is a little bit more unexpected.
And it's also a turning point for Alexander. This battle
is after his conquest of the Persian Empire and for
the army starts heading home from Macedonia, so it's the
end of that onward press to reach the ends of
(02:06):
the world in the outer Sea, and it's a real
um final point for Alexander because Alexander has been on
a conquest role for a while now, He's torn through Syria, Egypt, Babylonia,
and Persia and thinks he's pretty much invincible. Yeah, he
started wearing Persian royal clothes, and he likes the Persian
(02:28):
custom of prostration um, which is not okay with the
Greeks and Macedonians. They think that's for a god only,
not for their ruler. And he's literally gotten away with murder.
He killed a trusted commander in a drunken brawl and
got away with it by having him charged with postumus treason,
so convenient. Yeah, Alexander is really on a roll going
(02:51):
into into this time, and he's only about twenty nine
years old, and it's with this mindset that he ventures
into the unknown India. In the early summer of three
seven BC, Alexander leaves Bactria, which today is Afghanistan, to
Jikistan and Uzbekistan with a reinforced army under a reorganized command,
(03:12):
and he's heading to India and he's cut down the
army he led through Persia because India is a different
climate in terrain, and his first order of business is
to burn all the extra Persian booty that has been
slowing them down. And the second is to dismiss a
lot of his soldiers and add several thousand Persian cavalrymen,
(03:33):
who it turns out Persian cavalrymen are really good when
you're fighting elephants. So they recrossed the Hindu Kush and
by spring of three twenty six they've crossed the Indus
River and entered Taxila, which is in the Punjab region,
and Alexander and his troops are welcomed there. The ruler
Taxiles even gives him elephants and troops and decides to
(03:54):
accompany him into battle. Yeah, but he finds out that
not all of the rulers in the Punjab region are
going to be so friendly. And he gets when that
Porous who is Texila's enemy, is on the other side
of the Hydaspes River, preventing him from passing or fighting
him if he does try to pass. And this is
kind of a big deal because the Hydaspes runs really
(04:16):
heavily in the late spring, which is this is around
May at this point, and that's because all of the
heavy rains from the monsoons and the melting snow from
the mountains really fills it up. During the winter, it's
fordable in lots of places, but during the summer you
would have to if you're being blocked at one of
the places where you can get across, that's too bad. Okay,
(04:38):
So there's going to be a fight at the river.
It's going down and they'll need to cross by boat.
So Alexander sends some of his men back to the
Indus to pick up their boats, disassemble them, carry them
across land, and bring them back to the hydaspes where
they can be reassembled, because that's the only way they
can get across. Alexander's army and camps on the banks
(04:59):
of the high gasps and porous lines his men and
a large line of elephants up on the other side.
So you have to picture these two armies on opposite
sides of a bank, staring each other down, and think
of some of Alexander's men. They've probably never seen elephants
at all before, which I imagine would be somewhat intimidating.
So Porus is watching the passage, but he's also sending
(05:22):
out guards to other spots on the river that could
be forded, and Alexander is doing pretty much the same thing. Yeah,
So Alexander has two main tactics, right from the start,
and one is to create a sense of permanency. He
tries to make it obvious to Poris that they're in
this for the long haul. They set up a very
permanent looking camp, and he's hoping Porus will just think
(05:44):
that he's not going to fight him at all. He's
gonna wait there through all the summer, through all the fall,
and finally crossing the winter when the river is low
and Porus couldn't stop him. He even sends out reports
about this um and he's also trying to confu fuse Porus,
sending his army in lots of different directions and um.
(06:04):
They're getting a good sense for the land while they're
doing this. But Alexander's real motive here is to stage
an ambush. He's not going to wait until the winter,
and he knows that he can't cross directly towards Porus's
army because the men would be assaulted coming out of
the water. Poruss guys are right on the other side,
and also with the elephants there, they might frighten Alexander's horses,
(06:26):
so they would be they wouldn't even get out of
the water. They'd be afraid to climb the banks, so
he's going to have to find a way to cross unopposed,
which means it's going to have to be done in secret.
So what he does is pretty tricky. He trains Porous
to ignore noises at night that sound like preparation for battle,
(06:47):
so his men start to leave the cavalry across the
bank at various points. They make a lot of clatter.
They're doing battle cries, and Porous at first thinks they're
attempting across and follows them every single time. But after
several nights this he realizes the noise doesn't mean anything
and stops paying attention. And Alexander by this point has
(07:08):
found a projecting point where the river makes a bend
and near it as a wooden island, and he realizes
that this is his spot. This is where he's going
to cross, because if he can get to the island undercover,
he's almost to the other bank. It gives him a
headstart and it gives him that secrecy, which is crucial
(07:29):
to his ambush. So he's going to be commanding a
fast light group of men who will lead the assault
at the island crossing, and their advantage is going to
have to be speed and surprise, but he leaves a
large part of his army at his camp directly across
from Porus, and he tells his main guy, his name
(07:49):
is Crater, is not to cross the river before Porus
moves off with his forces, the key point being there
that he would take the elephants with him, so Craters
don't cross the river until the elephants are gone, because
otherwise those horses are not going to get off, and
this also prevents Porus's suspicions from being raised. But with
the main part of Alexander's army directly across from him,
(08:11):
he's not going to realize that a sneaky, smaller group
is is missing. Um. Alexander also posts sentries along the
bank and they're noisy like every night, and he posts
smaller groups between the main camp and the island staggered,
giving them instructions to cross and detachment so as his
first island group goes, they can gradually follow to accompany
(08:34):
himself and some other forces. Alexander picks an elite bodyguard
called the Companions, and he leads a secret march far
away from the banks of the Hydaspes toward the island
and the point so Poris can't see what he's doing.
And that night there's a huge thunderstorm, so all the
noise from the rain and the thunder drowns out the
(08:55):
the noise of battle preparation, which Porus is actually used
to and ways, but they're they're further protected by the noise,
and Alexander's boats and oars are already there waiting for
him at the point. They've been disassembled and brought ahead
and hidden in the bush. So Alexander and his men
make the cross. They go from the point to the island,
(09:17):
and they're almost to the opposite bank before Porus's sentries
see them and give word. But there's a little hitch
in this plan, which is that Alexander has actually landed
on a big island and not the mainland, so they
have some fording to do, but they quickly overcome a
small obstacle and make it to the mainland. All right.
So we've got Alexander's light fast army, and their whole
(09:39):
goal being there is to surprise Porous, to draw him
in and then force him into retreat. But there's some
action almost as soon as they ford the smaller river,
and as Porus's men arrive, Alexander engages them a lot
of porus as men are on chariots which don't operate
(10:00):
very well in the mud from the rain the night before,
and and just because they're on a river bank, and
the son of Porous falls in this in this struggle.
But some of the Indian horsemen escape from this little
skirmish and tell Poris that Alexander has crossed the river
himself with the strongest part of his army, and also
that his own son is dead. And Poris can't decide
(10:21):
what to do because he's hearing this noise that Alexander
and a strong part of his army are already here,
which is unexpected that Alexander would be with this smaller group, right,
and then he's looking at the larger group right across
the river led by Craters on the other side. So
where is he supposed to go? And Poris finally decides
to march himself against Alexander. They'll go king to king,
(10:44):
but he leaves a few elephants with a small army
by the bank to frighten Craters from coming over and crossing. Yeah,
so Poris takes all his cavalry, all his chariots, two
hundred elephants and thirty thousand infantry men, and he arranges
his forces by lining the elephants up in front, because
(11:05):
hopefully no one is going to try to push through
a line of elephants, right, but just in case they do,
they're packed with infantry men immediately behind them, and then
in small groups that can jut out between the spaces
and the elephants, so that if you were bold enough
to try to sneak through two elephants, you're met with
(11:26):
infantry men's shoulders shoulder. And Alexander, in the meantime, decides
to let his own infantry rest, and he also decides
that he's not going to advance against the center of
this scary line of elephants, because clearly that's just the
strongest point and not the best way of going about it.
So he takes his bigger cavalry and goes and marches
against the left wing of Porus. And meanwhile he sent
(11:49):
his general Senus with the rest of the cavalry to
march against Porus's right flank, and they create a sense
of disorder among the Indian forces and shower them with arrows,
and seeing Us even manages to work his way behind
Poris as men, and suddenly Poris's cavalry is faced with
(12:09):
two fronts and they have to turn and face Alexander
on one side and seeing us on the other. And
while they're swiveling, you can just imagine what disorder it
would be if suddenly you have you're being attacked from
two sides. But as they're swiveling, Alexander just plunges at
them and there is mass chaos as Alexander's phalanx attacks
(12:32):
the elephants and the writers so imagine this whole herd
of elephants amid this shower of arrows just starting to
jackle everyone and javelins can't forget the devil and not
just an Olympic event. So eventually the elephants get hedged
in and cooped up and they're trampling on everyone. Um.
But the difference here, the Macedonians are in sort of
(12:56):
a more open space and they're able to dodge the
elephants better, and a lot of the elephants by this
point are riderless and there some of them are even
injured themselves, and they're frightened and they're out of control.
But the Macedonians are better able to dodge them. And
also they're the ones who are trying to injure the elephants,
while the Indians, obviously not trying to hurt their own elephants,
(13:17):
are trying to shelter among them and get protection from them.
They're really just getting tramped on. But eventually the elephants
get tired and again many of them are injured and
they start to retreat, which is the point where Alexander
signals his men to bunch together and advance. So in
the meantime, while all this is going on, we have
(13:37):
Craters back on the opposite bank at the main camp,
and he sees Alexander's winning, it's time to advance. His
men are fresh, and they enact much slaughter on Paurus.
Twenty thousand Indian infantrymen are killed, three thousand cavalrymen, two
sons of Porous die, all of the elephants are killed
(13:57):
or captured. So we are talking a bloody battle here. Yeah,
Alexander's losses are fairly high. Some people put it around
a thousand of three D is the low, but that's
fairly unlikely. Uh that's a lot for a victor, right,
you would think that, especially with the element of surprise
that he would just be able to keep from losing
many men, but that's not how it panned out. Yeah,
(14:18):
the elephants actually do inflict a fair amount of damage,
but so Poris is presiding over all this, and he
sees that it's over, he's lost, but he doesn't flee
the battlefield. He keeps on fighting as long as their
other men on the field, and at last he's wounded
in his right shoulder, which is the only part of
his body that was left unprotected by his armor, and
(14:42):
at that point he turns his elephant around and begins
to retire from the field. And Alexander has been so
impressed by Poris at this point that he wants to
save his life, so he sends tax Sillies after him
to give him a message. But Poris has been enemies
with tax Sillies for forever, so it's Textili's walks up.
Boris is about to jab him with a javelin, so
(15:04):
tex Sili's scoots away just in time, just dodges it,
and Alexander decides to send someone else, someone who's said
he has ate an old friendly friendly with Boris, and
by this point Boris um is dismounted from his elephant.
He's taking a drink of water, and he agrees, okay,
take me to Alexander. So Alexander hears that Poris is
(15:25):
on his way and he goes to the front line
with the companions. Alexander is admiring of Poris, and not
just because of his bravery, but because of his physical presence.
He's described as being five cubits tall, and there's some
discrepancy on that. If you go by certain measurements of
what a cubit is, that's like more than seven feet tall,
(15:48):
so it's unlikely, I think, um. But another measurement puts
it more at about six feet, which is still quite
tall compared to the diminutive Alexander, which I didn't know
until you told me actually. But Alexander is surprised by
how brave Porus looks in the face of defeat, because
not all of his conquests have gone this way. Some
(16:09):
rulers have simply turned around and fled, like Darius the Third.
Pretty bad reputation for that. So Alexander asks Poris what
kind of treatment he would like to receive, and Porus says,
treat me, Oh, Alexander like a king, and Alexander responds,
for my own sake, thou shalt be thus treated. But
for thy own sake, do thou demand what is pleasing
(16:30):
to me? And Porus says back, everything is included in
that request, And we talked a little bit about what
that might mean, and we were thinking it's um, everything
that Porus would want, whether that is power or respect
or money, is all wrapped up in this idea. Yeah. Um.
(16:52):
Alexander really likes this response so much so that he
gives Porus rule over his own people um as a
as a supporter of Alexander obviously um, and even gives
him more territory to rule other conquered territories. So after
the battle, Porus holds the position of a ruler, but
(17:13):
he subordinate to Alexander, and he's assassinated after Alexander's death
by Eudemus, one of Alexander's generals. So we're gonna catch
up to with what Alexander does immediately after this great
Battle of the Hydaspes. He founds two cities there. One
is Alexandria Nicia, which means victory, and the other was Bucephala,
(17:37):
which was named for his horse Bucephalus who died there,
and Um this horse was very dear to Alexander. He
had ridden on it in all his battles, and um
was very devoted, put out a ransom for it once
when it was stolen, and um it finally falls at
the Battle of Hydaspes. After this battle, Alexander there is
(18:00):
very anxious to press on, but his army mutinies. They're
tired of dealing with the tropical rain. They're extremely tired.
The battle was really hard, and they are adamant about
going home, and Alexander says, Okay, we'll go back, but
not before we erect twelve altars to the twelve Olympians
and also build a fleet of eight hundred to one
(18:21):
thousand ships, which I don't think I, as a member
of a mutinying army, would take as a condition. Yeah,
but on the other hand, you probably do want to
stick with Alexander on his side. So they leave Porous
and they proceed down the river into the Indus, and
it's a really this is a hard trip home. You
(18:42):
would maybe expect that they'd go back the way they came,
where they had already conquered everything. You would be wrong, Um,
it's a tough march, and they kill a lot of people.
They have a lot of skirmishes, Alexander's seriously hurt, and
even during the trip they take a few breaks, though
Alexander's seeks Indian philosophers and debates them on philosophical matters,
(19:03):
which sounds like a bizarre story until you consider that
Alexander's tutor was Aristotle, So maybe not. That's strange after all,
And they had to deal with their own disasters. On
the way out of India. They were still dealing with
monsoons and hiking through the deserts. Again, it was really tough,
but they reached the mouth of the Indus in July
(19:25):
and turned westward from home. So why is the story
of a defeat, however honorable and noble. It is such
an important part of this history. One reason is Alexander
has gone up against a lot of rulers who didn't
behave so honorably, who were, you know, understandably frightened of Alexander.
So Poris's record there really stands out. But another is
(19:49):
that it is such a turning point for Alexander and
for his campaign of conquest across not only Asia, but
his entire campaign. It's the point where they decided to
go back, and a lot of that does have to
do with, as you mentioned earlier, the tropical rain. And
the man are just tired by this point and they
want to go home. But Porus and his army have
(20:11):
given them a good fight. It hasn't been easy winning
Battle of the Hydaspes, and they don't want any more
of that. They're ready to stop fighting, even though they
had these skirmishes on the Indus, and go back to Macedonia.
Alexander himself doesn't live long past this battle, and historians
(20:31):
have long wondered what would have happened if he hadn't
died at such a young age, and how much further
he would have gone. So I think that about wraps
it up for Alexander the Great and King Porus or
Rajah poor rava um. But onto listener mail and our
(20:51):
podcast on the Birth of Frankenstein. Sarah and I had
made a joke about Vermicelli and oh, isn't that a noodle?
But a lot of people didn't seem to understand it.
That was a joke. So I promise we know that
Mary Shelley wasn't just talking about posta noodles coming to life.
We got one email from Anita and Fort Myers who
was talking a little bit more about those experiments with
(21:14):
spontaneous generation and saying that you know, scientists would try to, say,
put a piece of meat under the glass, looking to
see if the meat would generate more of itself, but
because they didn't understand things about, say handwashing, they would
touch the food with their dirty hands and maybe transfer
fly larva to it, and then maggots would come and
(21:35):
then they'd say, hey, look, spontaneous generation. So thank you
for that Anita insight into science in the old days.
And we got another email from David of Fresno who
said that first of all, he lived for our podcasts
um which we did enjoy, and we entertained him on
the treadmill apparently, and he also talked a little bit
(21:55):
more about those experiments, talking about the work of Luigi
Galvani and Volta. Galvani for example, had quote unquote animated
a dead frogs legs with an electric jolt, which led
some people to think that electricity was in fact the
force of life that gives us all life. Well, if
you have something to share with us about King, Poris Alexander,
(22:17):
or any of the podcasts. You can email us at
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stuff you missed in the History Class blog on the
how stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowie. And you know
how much we love talking about things like queens and
(00:20):
writers and the mysteries of history. But you can't have
history without some battles. And we were saying in our
own history classes, it's funny, but the curriculum didn't strongly
emphasized battles. I even took a class on the Revolutionary War,
and it was much more focused on the events leading
up to the war than the actual battles. I have
(00:41):
one exception, but that's because I grew up for a
time in Manassas, Virginia, and I feel like all we
ever talked about were the battles of Manassas. But this
battle was when we hadn't even heard of until we
started researching, and that is the battle between King Porus
and Alexander the Great, the Battle of the Hydaskis. So
who is King Porus? You might not have heard of him.
(01:03):
He's also known as Raja Parava, but we're going to
go with the Greek names throughout this podcast because most
of the information we have about this battle was written
by a Greek historian named arian So. King Poris was
a great ruler in the Punjab region, specifically the region
between the Hydaspes which today is Jalen and the Assassainse
(01:23):
today chinab Rivers, and the capital may have been Lahore,
which today is in Pakistan. So King Poris fought Alexander
the Great in the Battle of the Hydaspes, which was
the fourth and last battle fought by Alexander during his
campaign of Asian conquest. And Poris is outmatched in this
battle by Alexander's cavalry, archers and maneuvering, but his skill
(01:45):
and bravery so impress Alexander that even though he loses
the battle, the final outcome is a little bit more unexpected.
And it's also a turning point for Alexander. This battle
is after his conquest of the Persian Empire and for
the army starts heading home from Macedonia, so it's the
end of that onward press to reach the ends of
(02:06):
the world in the outer Sea, and it's a real
um final point for Alexander because Alexander has been on
a conquest role for a while now, He's torn through Syria, Egypt, Babylonia,
and Persia and thinks he's pretty much invincible. Yeah, he
started wearing Persian royal clothes, and he likes the Persian
(02:28):
custom of prostration um, which is not okay with the
Greeks and Macedonians. They think that's for a god only,
not for their ruler. And he's literally gotten away with murder.
He killed a trusted commander in a drunken brawl and
got away with it by having him charged with postumus treason,
so convenient. Yeah, Alexander is really on a roll going
(02:51):
into into this time, and he's only about twenty nine
years old, and it's with this mindset that he ventures
into the unknown India. In the early summer of three
seven BC, Alexander leaves Bactria, which today is Afghanistan, to
Jikistan and Uzbekistan with a reinforced army under a reorganized command,
(03:12):
and he's heading to India and he's cut down the
army he led through Persia because India is a different
climate in terrain, and his first order of business is
to burn all the extra Persian booty that has been
slowing them down. And the second is to dismiss a
lot of his soldiers and add several thousand Persian cavalrymen,
(03:33):
who it turns out Persian cavalrymen are really good when
you're fighting elephants. So they recrossed the Hindu Kush and
by spring of three twenty six they've crossed the Indus
River and entered Taxila, which is in the Punjab region,
and Alexander and his troops are welcomed there. The ruler
Taxiles even gives him elephants and troops and decides to
(03:54):
accompany him into battle. Yeah, but he finds out that
not all of the rulers in the Punjab region are
going to be so friendly. And he gets when that
Porous who is Texila's enemy, is on the other side
of the Hydaspes River, preventing him from passing or fighting
him if he does try to pass. And this is
kind of a big deal because the Hydaspes runs really
(04:16):
heavily in the late spring, which is this is around
May at this point, and that's because all of the
heavy rains from the monsoons and the melting snow from
the mountains really fills it up. During the winter, it's
fordable in lots of places, but during the summer you
would have to if you're being blocked at one of
the places where you can get across, that's too bad. Okay,
(04:38):
So there's going to be a fight at the river.
It's going down and they'll need to cross by boat.
So Alexander sends some of his men back to the
Indus to pick up their boats, disassemble them, carry them
across land, and bring them back to the hydaspes where
they can be reassembled, because that's the only way they
can get across. Alexander's army and camps on the banks
(04:59):
of the high gasps and porous lines his men and
a large line of elephants up on the other side.
So you have to picture these two armies on opposite
sides of a bank, staring each other down, and think
of some of Alexander's men. They've probably never seen elephants
at all before, which I imagine would be somewhat intimidating.
So Porus is watching the passage, but he's also sending
(05:22):
out guards to other spots on the river that could
be forded, and Alexander is doing pretty much the same thing. Yeah,
So Alexander has two main tactics, right from the start,
and one is to create a sense of permanency. He
tries to make it obvious to Poris that they're in
this for the long haul. They set up a very
permanent looking camp, and he's hoping Porus will just think
(05:44):
that he's not going to fight him at all. He's
gonna wait there through all the summer, through all the fall,
and finally crossing the winter when the river is low
and Porus couldn't stop him. He even sends out reports
about this um and he's also trying to confu fuse Porus,
sending his army in lots of different directions and um.
(06:04):
They're getting a good sense for the land while they're
doing this. But Alexander's real motive here is to stage
an ambush. He's not going to wait until the winter,
and he knows that he can't cross directly towards Porus's
army because the men would be assaulted coming out of
the water. Poruss guys are right on the other side,
and also with the elephants there, they might frighten Alexander's horses,
(06:26):
so they would be they wouldn't even get out of
the water. They'd be afraid to climb the banks, so
he's going to have to find a way to cross unopposed,
which means it's going to have to be done in secret.
So what he does is pretty tricky. He trains Porous
to ignore noises at night that sound like preparation for battle,
(06:47):
so his men start to leave the cavalry across the
bank at various points. They make a lot of clatter.
They're doing battle cries, and Porous at first thinks they're
attempting across and follows them every single time. But after
several nights this he realizes the noise doesn't mean anything
and stops paying attention. And Alexander by this point has
(07:08):
found a projecting point where the river makes a bend
and near it as a wooden island, and he realizes
that this is his spot. This is where he's going
to cross, because if he can get to the island undercover,
he's almost to the other bank. It gives him a
headstart and it gives him that secrecy, which is crucial
(07:29):
to his ambush. So he's going to be commanding a
fast light group of men who will lead the assault
at the island crossing, and their advantage is going to
have to be speed and surprise, but he leaves a
large part of his army at his camp directly across
from Porus, and he tells his main guy, his name
(07:49):
is Crater, is not to cross the river before Porus
moves off with his forces, the key point being there
that he would take the elephants with him, so Craters
don't cross the river until the elephants are gone, because
otherwise those horses are not going to get off, and
this also prevents Porus's suspicions from being raised. But with
the main part of Alexander's army directly across from him,
(08:11):
he's not going to realize that a sneaky, smaller group
is is missing. Um. Alexander also posts sentries along the
bank and they're noisy like every night, and he posts
smaller groups between the main camp and the island staggered,
giving them instructions to cross and detachment so as his
first island group goes, they can gradually follow to accompany
(08:34):
himself and some other forces. Alexander picks an elite bodyguard
called the Companions, and he leads a secret march far
away from the banks of the Hydaspes toward the island
and the point so Poris can't see what he's doing.
And that night there's a huge thunderstorm, so all the
noise from the rain and the thunder drowns out the
(08:55):
the noise of battle preparation, which Porus is actually used
to and ways, but they're they're further protected by the noise,
and Alexander's boats and oars are already there waiting for
him at the point. They've been disassembled and brought ahead
and hidden in the bush. So Alexander and his men
make the cross. They go from the point to the island,
(09:17):
and they're almost to the opposite bank before Porus's sentries
see them and give word. But there's a little hitch
in this plan, which is that Alexander has actually landed
on a big island and not the mainland, so they
have some fording to do, but they quickly overcome a
small obstacle and make it to the mainland. All right.
So we've got Alexander's light fast army, and their whole
(09:39):
goal being there is to surprise Porous, to draw him
in and then force him into retreat. But there's some
action almost as soon as they ford the smaller river,
and as Porus's men arrive, Alexander engages them a lot
of porus as men are on chariots which don't operate
(10:00):
very well in the mud from the rain the night before,
and and just because they're on a river bank, and
the son of Porous falls in this in this struggle.
But some of the Indian horsemen escape from this little
skirmish and tell Poris that Alexander has crossed the river
himself with the strongest part of his army, and also
that his own son is dead. And Poris can't decide
(10:21):
what to do because he's hearing this noise that Alexander
and a strong part of his army are already here,
which is unexpected that Alexander would be with this smaller group, right,
and then he's looking at the larger group right across
the river led by Craters on the other side. So
where is he supposed to go? And Poris finally decides
to march himself against Alexander. They'll go king to king,
(10:44):
but he leaves a few elephants with a small army
by the bank to frighten Craters from coming over and crossing. Yeah,
so Poris takes all his cavalry, all his chariots, two
hundred elephants and thirty thousand infantry men, and he arranges
his forces by lining the elephants up in front, because
(11:05):
hopefully no one is going to try to push through
a line of elephants, right, but just in case they do,
they're packed with infantry men immediately behind them, and then
in small groups that can jut out between the spaces
and the elephants, so that if you were bold enough
to try to sneak through two elephants, you're met with
(11:26):
infantry men's shoulders shoulder. And Alexander, in the meantime, decides
to let his own infantry rest, and he also decides
that he's not going to advance against the center of
this scary line of elephants, because clearly that's just the
strongest point and not the best way of going about it.
So he takes his bigger cavalry and goes and marches
against the left wing of Porus. And meanwhile he sent
(11:49):
his general Senus with the rest of the cavalry to
march against Porus's right flank, and they create a sense
of disorder among the Indian forces and shower them with arrows,
and seeing Us even manages to work his way behind
Poris as men, and suddenly Poris's cavalry is faced with
(12:09):
two fronts and they have to turn and face Alexander
on one side and seeing us on the other. And
while they're swiveling, you can just imagine what disorder it
would be if suddenly you have you're being attacked from
two sides. But as they're swiveling, Alexander just plunges at
them and there is mass chaos as Alexander's phalanx attacks
(12:32):
the elephants and the writers so imagine this whole herd
of elephants amid this shower of arrows just starting to
jackle everyone and javelins can't forget the devil and not
just an Olympic event. So eventually the elephants get hedged
in and cooped up and they're trampling on everyone. Um.
But the difference here, the Macedonians are in sort of
(12:56):
a more open space and they're able to dodge the
elephants better, and a lot of the elephants by this
point are riderless and there some of them are even
injured themselves, and they're frightened and they're out of control.
But the Macedonians are better able to dodge them. And
also they're the ones who are trying to injure the elephants,
while the Indians, obviously not trying to hurt their own elephants,
(13:17):
are trying to shelter among them and get protection from them.
They're really just getting tramped on. But eventually the elephants
get tired and again many of them are injured and
they start to retreat, which is the point where Alexander
signals his men to bunch together and advance. So in
the meantime, while all this is going on, we have
(13:37):
Craters back on the opposite bank at the main camp,
and he sees Alexander's winning, it's time to advance. His
men are fresh, and they enact much slaughter on Paurus.
Twenty thousand Indian infantrymen are killed, three thousand cavalrymen, two
sons of Porous die, all of the elephants are killed
(13:57):
or captured. So we are talking a bloody battle here. Yeah,
Alexander's losses are fairly high. Some people put it around
a thousand of three D is the low, but that's
fairly unlikely. Uh that's a lot for a victor, right,
you would think that, especially with the element of surprise
that he would just be able to keep from losing
many men, but that's not how it panned out. Yeah,
(14:18):
the elephants actually do inflict a fair amount of damage,
but so Poris is presiding over all this, and he
sees that it's over, he's lost, but he doesn't flee
the battlefield. He keeps on fighting as long as their
other men on the field, and at last he's wounded
in his right shoulder, which is the only part of
his body that was left unprotected by his armor, and
(14:42):
at that point he turns his elephant around and begins
to retire from the field. And Alexander has been so
impressed by Poris at this point that he wants to
save his life, so he sends tax Sillies after him
to give him a message. But Poris has been enemies
with tax Sillies for forever, so it's Textili's walks up.
Boris is about to jab him with a javelin, so
(15:04):
tex Sili's scoots away just in time, just dodges it,
and Alexander decides to send someone else, someone who's said
he has ate an old friendly friendly with Boris, and
by this point Boris um is dismounted from his elephant.
He's taking a drink of water, and he agrees, okay,
take me to Alexander. So Alexander hears that Poris is
(15:25):
on his way and he goes to the front line
with the companions. Alexander is admiring of Poris, and not
just because of his bravery, but because of his physical presence.
He's described as being five cubits tall, and there's some
discrepancy on that. If you go by certain measurements of
what a cubit is, that's like more than seven feet tall,
(15:48):
so it's unlikely, I think, um. But another measurement puts
it more at about six feet, which is still quite
tall compared to the diminutive Alexander, which I didn't know
until you told me actually. But Alexander is surprised by
how brave Porus looks in the face of defeat, because
not all of his conquests have gone this way. Some
(16:09):
rulers have simply turned around and fled, like Darius the Third.
Pretty bad reputation for that. So Alexander asks Poris what
kind of treatment he would like to receive, and Porus says,
treat me, Oh, Alexander like a king, and Alexander responds,
for my own sake, thou shalt be thus treated. But
for thy own sake, do thou demand what is pleasing
(16:30):
to me? And Porus says back, everything is included in
that request, And we talked a little bit about what
that might mean, and we were thinking it's um, everything
that Porus would want, whether that is power or respect
or money, is all wrapped up in this idea. Yeah. Um.
(16:52):
Alexander really likes this response so much so that he
gives Porus rule over his own people um as a
as a supporter of Alexander obviously um, and even gives
him more territory to rule other conquered territories. So after
the battle, Porus holds the position of a ruler, but
(17:13):
he subordinate to Alexander, and he's assassinated after Alexander's death
by Eudemus, one of Alexander's generals. So we're gonna catch
up to with what Alexander does immediately after this great
Battle of the Hydaspes. He founds two cities there. One
is Alexandria Nicia, which means victory, and the other was Bucephala,
(17:37):
which was named for his horse Bucephalus who died there,
and Um this horse was very dear to Alexander. He
had ridden on it in all his battles, and um
was very devoted, put out a ransom for it once
when it was stolen, and um it finally falls at
the Battle of Hydaspes. After this battle, Alexander there is
(18:00):
very anxious to press on, but his army mutinies. They're
tired of dealing with the tropical rain. They're extremely tired.
The battle was really hard, and they are adamant about
going home, and Alexander says, Okay, we'll go back, but
not before we erect twelve altars to the twelve Olympians
and also build a fleet of eight hundred to one
(18:21):
thousand ships, which I don't think I, as a member
of a mutinying army, would take as a condition. Yeah,
but on the other hand, you probably do want to
stick with Alexander on his side. So they leave Porous
and they proceed down the river into the Indus, and
it's a really this is a hard trip home. You
(18:42):
would maybe expect that they'd go back the way they came,
where they had already conquered everything. You would be wrong, Um,
it's a tough march, and they kill a lot of people.
They have a lot of skirmishes, Alexander's seriously hurt, and
even during the trip they take a few breaks, though
Alexander's seeks Indian philosophers and debates them on philosophical matters,
(19:03):
which sounds like a bizarre story until you consider that
Alexander's tutor was Aristotle, So maybe not. That's strange after all,
And they had to deal with their own disasters. On
the way out of India. They were still dealing with
monsoons and hiking through the deserts. Again, it was really tough,
but they reached the mouth of the Indus in July
(19:25):
and turned westward from home. So why is the story
of a defeat, however honorable and noble. It is such
an important part of this history. One reason is Alexander
has gone up against a lot of rulers who didn't
behave so honorably, who were, you know, understandably frightened of Alexander.
So Poris's record there really stands out. But another is
(19:49):
that it is such a turning point for Alexander and
for his campaign of conquest across not only Asia, but
his entire campaign. It's the point where they decided to
go back, and a lot of that does have to
do with, as you mentioned earlier, the tropical rain. And
the man are just tired by this point and they
want to go home. But Porus and his army have
(20:11):
given them a good fight. It hasn't been easy winning
Battle of the Hydaspes, and they don't want any more
of that. They're ready to stop fighting, even though they
had these skirmishes on the Indus, and go back to Macedonia.
Alexander himself doesn't live long past this battle, and historians
(20:31):
have long wondered what would have happened if he hadn't
died at such a young age, and how much further
he would have gone. So I think that about wraps
it up for Alexander the Great and King Porus or
Rajah poor rava um. But onto listener mail and our
(20:51):
podcast on the Birth of Frankenstein. Sarah and I had
made a joke about Vermicelli and oh, isn't that a noodle?
But a lot of people didn't seem to understand it.
That was a joke. So I promise we know that
Mary Shelley wasn't just talking about posta noodles coming to life.
We got one email from Anita and Fort Myers who
was talking a little bit more about those experiments with
(21:14):
spontaneous generation and saying that you know, scientists would try to, say,
put a piece of meat under the glass, looking to
see if the meat would generate more of itself, but
because they didn't understand things about, say handwashing, they would
touch the food with their dirty hands and maybe transfer
fly larva to it, and then maggots would come and
(21:35):
then they'd say, hey, look, spontaneous generation. So thank you
for that Anita insight into science in the old days.
And we got another email from David of Fresno who
said that first of all, he lived for our podcasts
um which we did enjoy, and we entertained him on
the treadmill apparently, and he also talked a little bit
(21:55):
more about those experiments, talking about the work of Luigi
Galvani and Volta. Galvani for example, had quote unquote animated
a dead frogs legs with an electric jolt, which led
some people to think that electricity was in fact the
force of life that gives us all life. Well, if
you have something to share with us about King, Poris Alexander,
(22:17):
or any of the podcasts. You can email us at
History Podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com and be sure to check out the
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