Porus and Alexander: The Night Crossing, the Elephants and the King Who Would Not Bow

Night, on the west bank of the Jhelum, early in the summer of 326 BC. The river is in flood, brown and fast, wider than an arrow’s flight. Rain is coming down in sheets. Lightning shows, for a second at a time, men in a wood stuffing leather hides with hay and sewing them shut.

They are Macedonians, Greeks, Persians and Central Asian horsemen, thousands of kilometres from home. Their king is Alexander of Macedon, 29 or 30 years old, who has already beaten the Persian empire. The hides are rafts. The plan is to cross before dawn, under cover of the storm, and land behind the army waiting on the far bank.

On that far bank sleeps the army of a Punjabi king the Greeks called Poros. We know him as Porus. He has elephants, and Alexander’s horses will not face them.

By the next evening the two men would be face to face, and one of the most famous conversations in the ancient world would take place. Or so the story goes. Because here is the first thing to know about this story: almost every word of it was written down by the invaders’ side, and centuries later.

No book written in India at the time mentions Alexander. None mentions Porus. Not a Sanskrit text, not a Buddhist one, not an inscription. For India’s own records, the most famous invasion in its ancient history might as well not have happened.

Everything we know comes from Greek and Roman writers, and none of them was there. The men who were (Alexander’s general Ptolemy, the engineer Aristobulus, the admiral Nearchus, the helmsman Onesicritus) wrote memoirs. All are lost. What survives are later books that used them:

• Diodorus of Sicily, writing in Greek about 290 years after the battle.
• Quintus Curtius Rufus, a Roman, in Latin, perhaps 350 to 400 years after.
• Plutarch, the Greek biographer, around 100 AD, some 425 years after.
• Arrian, a Greek officer of the Roman empire, about 460 years after. He is usually trusted most, because he says which eyewitness he follows, and when they disagree.
• Justin, a Roman who cut down an older history into a short one, later still.

A word on names. ‘Porus’ is a Greek ear’s version of an Indian name. Many historians think it means the king of the Pauravas, the descendants of the ancient Puru clan of the Rigveda; the scholar Michael Witzel is one. The king of Taxila was called ‘Taxiles’, the man of Taxila; Curtius calls him Omphis and Diodorus Mophis, which Indian writers render as Ambhi. Our sources say Ambhi and Porus were old enemies.

In the spring of 326 BC Alexander’s army crossed the Indus on a bridge of boats near Hund, upstream of Attock. Waiting for it, Arrian says, were gifts from the king of Taxila: 200 talents of silver, 3,000 oxen, more than 10,000 sheep for sacrifice and 30 elephants, along with 700 horsemen and an offer to hand over his city.

Taxila, near today’s Rawalpindi, was the biggest city between the Indus and the Jhelum, a trading town at the crossroads of roads from Central Asia. Its new king had made his choice before the invader even arrived.

Plutarch tells the meeting as a scene. The king of Taxila asks Alexander why the two of them should fight, when Alexander has not come to take their water or their food. If I am richer than you, he says, I am ready to share; if poorer, I will happily take your favours.

Why must we war and fight with one another, AlexanderThe king of Taxila, as Plutarch tells it

Alexander loved it. Gifts went back and forth, each trying to outdo the other, and, Plutarch says, Alexander ended by giving the king a thousand talents in coin. His own officers grumbled. Taxila’s king kept his throne, added land, and gave Alexander 5,000 soldiers for the march on Porus.

Was Ambhi a traitor? That is how many Indian textbooks and speeches remember him: the man who opened Punjab’s door. There was no India to betray in 326 BC, his defenders reply, only small kingdoms that fought each other all the time, and Taxila had seen what happened to cities that resisted.

It had. A few months earlier, at Massaga in the Swat valley, Indian mercenaries had surrendered on terms to save their lives. Arrian says that when they tried to slip away by night, Alexander surrounded their hill and cut them down. Plutarch and Diodorus say he simply broke his word.

And this act adheres like a stain to his military career.Plutarch, Life of Alexander 59, on Massaga

Porus ruled the rich land between the Jhelum and the Chenab, the doab that today holds Gujrat, Mandi Bahauddin and Sargodha. The geographer Strabo later wrote that it held almost 300 cities.

He refused to come and bow. When Alexander’s envoys summoned him, Curtius says, he answered that he would meet Alexander, but at his border and under arms. Then he brought his army to the Jhelum and lined the eastern bank.

The Greek writers make him huge. Arrian gives his height as a little over five cubits, which would be over two metres. Plutarch, more modestly, says four cubits and a span, about six foot three. Either way, sitting on his tallest elephant in a coat of mail, he was meant to be seen.

How big was his army? The sources cannot agree, which tells you something about all the numbers in this story.

Alexander had brought perhaps 40,000 or more to the river, by modern estimates. But he faced a problem no amount of men could solve. The Jhelum was in flood.

Arrian explains why. It was the season, he says, when the sun turns towards the summer solstice: heavy rain fell all over India, and the snows melted in the mountains. In winter the river could be waded. In summer it could not.

So Alexander played games. He had the boats he had used on the Indus cut into sections and dragged overland on carts, two pieces for a small boat and three for a galley, then put back together on the Jhelum. He piled up grain in his camp, so that Porus’s spies would report that the Macedonians meant to wait for winter.

Night after night his cavalry rode up and down the bank, shouting and lighting fires, as if about to cross. Porus marched his elephants along to meet them, until he stopped bothering. That was the point.

When was the battle? Arrian dates it to the Athenian month Munychion, roughly late April to May 326 BC. But his own description of a swollen river and monsoon rain fits June or July better, and many modern historians put it there. The exact spot is lost too. The river has moved over 2,300 years; Arrian’s translator E.J. Chinnock thought the victory town of Nicaea might be Mong and Bucephala Jalalpur, and others prefer sites near Jhelum city.

The real crossing was to be at a wooded headland and island about 150 stadia, some 27 km, upstream of the main camp. Alexander left his general Craterus in the camp with a large force and clear orders: do not cross unless Porus takes his elephants away. The elephants, Arrian has him say, are the only thing that stops the horses landing.

Then came the storm. Rain and thunder drowned the noise of armour and orders. At first light, the hides and boats pushed off. Porus’s sentries saw them only when they were past the island.

Then a mistake. What they had landed on was not the far bank but another island, cut off by a channel. They found a ford, with the water up to the men’s chests and the horses’ necks, and struggled across. Alexander had about 5,000 horsemen and 6,000 foot soldiers with him, Arrian says.

Porus sent his son to stop them. Here even the eyewitnesses disagreed, and Arrian, to his credit, tells us so. Aristobulus said the son came with only about 60 chariots while Alexander was still crossing, and rode past instead of attacking the men struggling out of the water. Ptolemy, whom Arrian follows, said 2,000 horsemen and 120 chariots. Others said the son wounded Alexander himself and killed his horse, Bucephalus. Arrian does not believe them.

All agree on the end. The chariots bogged down in the rain-soaked clay, Alexander’s cavalry cut the force to pieces, and Porus’s son was killed. About 400 of the Indian horsemen died with him.

Porus now had a terrible choice. Across the river, Craterus was making ready to cross. Downstream, Alexander had landed. He left a few elephants to frighten Craterus’s horses and marched with the rest of his army to meet the king.

He found firm, sandy ground and drew up a line that was meant to be unbreakable. The elephants went in front, a plethron (about 30 metres) apart, like towers on a wall. Behind them stood the infantry, ready to push into the gaps. Cavalry and chariots guarded the wings.

Alexander looked at the elephants and refused to attack them head on. He struck at Porus’s left wing with his cavalry, and sent a second force round behind. The Indian horsemen, attacked from both sides, fell back on their own elephants.

Then the elephants charged. Arrian, who usually writes like an accountant, says this battle was unlike any Alexander had fought. Wherever the animals could turn, they tore into the Macedonian phalanx, dense as it was. Soldiers stabbed at the beasts and threw javelins at their drivers. With their drivers dead and their bodies wounded, the elephants began to panic, trampling their own side as much as the enemy.

At last, worn out, they backed away from the fight still facing the enemy, Arrian says, like ships rowing backwards, and making a shrill piping sound. Alexander closed the ring. Plutarch, quoting Alexander’s own letters, says the Indians held out until the eighth hour of the day.

How many died? Arrian says nearly 20,000 Indian infantry and 3,000 cavalry, against about 80 Macedonian foot soldiers, 10 horse archers, 20 Companion cavalry and 200 other horsemen. Diodorus says more than 12,000 Indians killed and 9,000 captured, and about 1,000 dead on Alexander’s side. Two of Porus’s sons died, Arrian says, and almost all his commanders.

Modern historians treat Arrian’s figure of under 400 dead for the winners with deep suspicion. The British historian A.B. Bosworth warned against reading the Greek accounts uncritically. Elephants that broke a phalanx do not leave 80 dead.

Porus did not run. Arrian contrasts him with the Persian king Darius, who fled the battlefield twice. As long as any body of his men still stood, Porus fought on. Only when an arrow or a javelin struck his right shoulder, the one place his mail did not cover, did he turn his elephant away.

Alexander wanted him alive. He sent a messenger to stop him, and chose, of all people, the king of Taxila. When Porus saw his old enemy riding up, Arrian says, he turned his elephant and hurled a javelin at him. Taxiles galloped off just in time.

Alexander sent more messengers. The last was an Indian named Meroes, an old friend of Porus. Porus listened to him. He was faint with thirst. He climbed down from his elephant, drank some water, and told Meroes to take him to Alexander.

Alexander rode out to meet him, and, Arrian says, admired his height and his looks, and that he did not seem broken. He asked Porus how he wished to be treated.

Treat me, O Alexander, in a kingly way!Porus, in Arrian’s Anabasis 5.19 (E.J. Chinnock’s translation)

Alexander, pleased, said that would happen for his own sake, but what did Porus want for himself? Everything, Porus answered, was included in that. Plutarch tells it in two words: ‘Like a king.’

Notice how Arrian introduces it: ‘The report goes.’ Even he was not sure the exchange was more than a good story. It is exactly the kind of line that grew in the telling over 450 years. But what came next is not in doubt. Porus kept his kingdom, and got more land on top.

Alexander’s horse Bucephalus died after the battle. Arrian says of old age and exhaustion, at about 30; others said of wounds. Alexander founded two towns on the river: Nicaea, ‘Victory’, on the battlefield, and Bucephala, for the horse. Neither has been found for certain.

In India today, this question starts arguments. Online and in some popular books you will read that Porus won and the Greeks covered it up. Here is each side’s case.

Alexander did not stop to argue. He marched east, across the Chenab and the Ravi, deeper into Punjab. Some peoples submitted. Others fought. At Sangala, a town of the Kathaioi whose site is now lost, Arrian says 17,000 Indians were killed and more than 70,000 captured. Porus came to the siege with 5,000 Indians and his remaining elephants, now fighting for Alexander. When it was over Alexander razed the town.

By the time the army reached the Beas, the Greeks’ Hyphasis, somewhere upstream of where it now meets the Sutlej, it had been on the march for eight years. Diodorus says rain had fallen for 70 days, with continuous thunder and lightning. The men’s Greek clothes had rotted away and they wore Indian cloth. Their horses’ hooves were worn down.

And there were rumours. Beyond the river, they heard, lay the Ganga, and beyond it the Nanda kings of Magadha. Diodorus gives their king 200,000 infantry, 20,000 cavalry, 2,000 chariots and 4,000 elephants; Plutarch makes it 6,000 elephants. Porus himself, Diodorus says, told Alexander the king was a barber’s son, hated by his people.

Alexander called his officers together and asked them to go on. Nobody spoke. Finally an old general, Coenus, who had fought beside him from the start, stood up and said what the army felt: they had done enough, they wanted to see their families, and the king should lead a new, fresh army another time. The officers wept and applauded.

Alexander was furious. He said he would go on with whoever would follow, and shut himself in his tent for three days, waiting for the army to change its mind. It did not. The camp sat in silence. Then the sacrifices for crossing the river came out bad, and Alexander announced the army would turn back.

The soldiers wept for joy and blessed him, Arrian says, because he had let himself be beaten by them alone. On the bank of the Beas they built twelve altars, each as tall as a tower, to mark the end of the world’s greatest conquest. Not one has been found. Coenus fell ill and died soon after.

The way home lay south, down the Jhelum and the Indus to the sea. Before the fleet left, Alexander made Porus king of all the conquered land between the Jhelum and the Beas: seven nations, Arrian says, with more than 2,000 towns.

Downriver lived the Malli, who refused to submit. In the winter of 326 to 325 BC Alexander stormed their towns one after another. At one, often said to be near today’s Multan though nobody knows for sure, his men were too slow with the ladders. Alexander grabbed one, climbed it under his shield and stood alone on top of the wall.

The ladders behind him broke under the weight of his guards. Arrows came from every side. So he jumped, down into the citadel, among the enemy. Only three men followed him: Peucestas, carrying a sacred shield taken from Troy, the bodyguard Leonnatus, and a veteran named Abreas.

Abreas was shot in the forehead and killed. Then an arrow went through Alexander’s breastplate into his chest. Ptolemy, Arrian says, wrote that air hissed out of the wound with the blood. Alexander fought on until he fainted and fell on his shield, with Peucestas standing over him.

When his soldiers finally broke in and saw him lying there, they went mad. Arrian is blunt: they killed everyone in the town, not sparing even a woman or a child. Alexander survived, after the arrowhead was cut out, but he was never fully well again.

Alexander’s grip on Punjab barely outlived his march out of it. Philip, the governor he left in the north, was murdered by his own mercenaries, and Alexander put Taxila’s king and a Greek officer, Eudemus, in charge. In June 323 BC, in Babylon, Alexander died of a fever. He was 32.

Porus did not live long either. Diodorus says Eudemus treacherously killed him, probably between 321 and 315 BC, and marched west with 120 of his elephants to fight in the wars between Alexander’s generals. It is a grim end for the king who was treated as a king.

Into the gap stepped a young man the Greeks called Sandrocottus. In 1793 the British scholar William Jones worked out who he was: Chandragupta Maurya. Plutarch says that as a youth he saw Alexander, and later said Alexander could easily have taken the Ganga plains, because their king was hated and low-born.

There is an old story that Chandragupta met Alexander and offended him. It comes from a misreading: the best manuscripts of Justin say he offended ‘Nandrum’, the Nanda king, not ‘Alexandrum’. Justin does say that after Alexander’s death Chandragupta led a rising against the Greek governors in India. By around 317 to 312 BC Punjab was part of his growing empire.

In about 305 to 303 BC Alexander’s general Seleucus came back across the Indus to take the east back. He failed. The peace gave Chandragupta land west of the Indus, and Seleucus 500 war elephants. Seleucus sent an ambassador, Megasthenes, to the Maurya capital at Pataliputra. (Our long read on the Mauryas tells what came next.) Some writers have tried to match Porus with Parvataka, a northern king who is Chandragupta’s ally in the much later Sanskrit play Mudrarakshasa; nothing proves it.

Twenty-three centuries later, Porus and Alexander are still in politics. In November 2021 Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said history called Alexander great, though he had been defeated by Chandragupta Maurya. In October 2013, at a rally in Patna, Narendra Modi, then the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, put Taxila in Bihar and spoke of Alexander being beaten there; Bihar’s chief minister Nitish Kumar pointed out that Taxila is in Pakistan. Here are the commonest claims, checked.

* Arrian says the Athenian month Munychion (April–May); many historians prefer June or July.

Strip away the speeches and the slogans, and the record still holds an extraordinary story. A Punjabi king, warned that the most feared army on earth was coming, refused to bow, held the line of his river through a monsoon, and fought on after his son was killed and his elephants ran mad. His enemy admired him enough to give him back his kingdom.

Alexander won the battle. Every source we have says so, and he struck coins to prove it. But Porus won something too, and the men who wrote the story, all on Alexander’s side, could not hide it. Their pages are full of his courage.

The deeper lesson is about evidence. We know this story only through the conqueror’s writers, centuries later. India’s silence left a hole that slogans now rush to fill. The honest answer is the one that respects both men: the invader won the field, the defender won his enemy’s respect, and within twenty years the Greeks had gone from Punjab, pushed out by an Indian empire.