Alexander and the Sadhus of Takshashila

On Sphines, known to the Greeks as Kalanos.

I came across the character of Kalanos, which blew my mind.

TL;DR: Kalanos was a Sadhu from Takshashila who impressed Alexander when he was recouping in the aftermath of the war with Porus. He ordered Kalanos to join him as his adviser on his campaign. The journey is harsh, and in Persia, Kalanos decides after a bad bout of stomach flu that it’s time for him to go. He sets up a funeral pyre and jumps in it, and tells those around to go celebrate, and says “Tell Alexander we will meet in Babylon not long from now”. Alexander had no plans of going to Babylon then. But not too long after, Alexander goes to Babylon, and there he catches a fever, and dies.

This sounds wild, so I wanted to read what the primary sources said.

A painting titled La Mort de Calamus (Kalanos on his funeral pyre) by Jacques-Antoine Beaufort. It was destroyed in WW2.

Plutarch and Philo

So Alexander’s India campaign happened in 327-325 BCE, and Alexander died in 323 BCE.

Plutarch lived almost 400 years later, possibly 40s CE - 120s CE. He was a Greek philosopher in the Roman Empire, and he is best known for his work “Parallel Lives,” which is biographies of well-known Greeks and Romans in pairs to illustrate their *drumroll* Parallel Lives.

He writes about Alexander as a parallel to Julius Caesar. He isn’t very concerned about history or historicity, he is more concerned about the character of the people he writes about and how that ends up affecting their lives.

With Alexander, the facts he discusses are corroborated by other contemporary accounts, so I’m going to consider it authoritative enough. He paints the most vivid picture of Kalanos.

Philo of Alexandria is a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria from 20 BCE to 50 CE. He talks about Kalanos too and mentions a letter written by him to Alexander. Philo brings up Kalanos and Indian “naked wise men” to talk about different philosophical traditions among “barbarians”. He considers the Judean Essenes, a Jewish sect, as part of the ‘barbarians’ too, somehow.

So, let’s see what they say.

A brief idea of Alexander in India

I know there is some controversy about matching Greek accounts to Indian ones and dating them accordingly, and I haven’t paid too much attention to this era of history yet. But based on my brief perusal, it seems like Alexander came to India around 327 CE after successful campaigns along the Nile and Persia. It seems like the ruler of Takshashila, who Plutarch calls Taxiles, collaborated with Alexander along with some other local rulers. Other rulers, including Porus, opposed Alexander, and Alexander had a two-year-long campaign where he was stopped by kingdom after kingdom.

Plutarch says several Indian philosophers opposed the princes joining the Greeks and solicited other kingdoms to oppose the Greeks. Alexander had several of them put to death, as a result. We must remember here that Chanakya was a professor in Takshashila at this point. We can see what must have led him to realize the downsides of having several independent warring Mahajanapadas, and what motivated him to mentor Chandragupta Maurya into uniting as much of the subcontinent as he could to keep the Greeks out.

Plutarch says Alexander won all the battles, but his men got exhausted and began to mutiny. Several of the princes who collaborated with him began to mutiny as well. There was a campaign against the “Mallians” who are described as “the bravest people in India”, where he found himself running for his life. He decides then to take his men and go back along the coast to where he had come from.

The Ten Gymnosophists

One of the Indian princes who collaborated with Alexander was called Sabbas. He mutinied, and convincing him to mutiny were some Indian Philosophers (I like this much better than saying ‘Brahmins’ lol). Alexander captured ten of these philosophers. They are called ‘gymnosophists’ in Greek accounts, meaning ‘naked philosophers/wise men’.

Alexander knows their reputation for clever answers, and decides to test them. He gets the eldest of them to judge the answers of the rest, and the ones with impertinent answers were threatened with death.

He asks the first: “Which are most numerous, the dead or the living?”

The Sadhu answered, “The living, because those who are dead are not at all.”

He asks the second: “Is it the earth or the sea that produced the largest beast?”

The Sadhu answered: “The earth, for the sea is but a part of it.”

His question to the third: “Which is the cunningest of beasts?”

"That," said the Sadhu, "which men have not yet found out."

He asked the fourth to tell him what argument he used to Sabbas to persuade him to revolt.

"No other," said the Sadhu, "than that he should either live or die nobly."

He asked the fifth, “Which was eldest, night or day?”

The Sadhu replied, "Day was eldest, by one day at least." But perceiving Alexander not well satisfied with that account, he added, that he ought not to wonder if strange questions had as strange answers made to them.

He asked the sixth: “What should a man do to be exceedingly beloved?”

The Sadhu replied, "He must be very powerful, without making himself too much feared."

He asked the seventh: “How a man might become a god?”

The Sadhu replied, "By doing that which was impossible for men to do."

He asked the eighth, “Is life is stronger or death?”

The Sadhu replied, "Life is stronger than death, because it supports so many miseries."

He asked the last, “How long is it decent for a man to live?”

The Sadhu replied, "Till death appeared more desirable than life."

Then Alexander turned to the Sadhu he had appointed the judge, and commanded him to give a sentence.

"All that I can determine," said the eldest Sadhu, "is, that they have every one answered worse than another."

"No," said Alexander, "then you shall die first, for giving such a sentence."

"Not so, king," replied the eldest Sadhu, "unless you said falsely that he should die first who made the worst answer.".

These seem straight out of a Puranic tale in Amar Chitra Katha, or from a chapter of the Mahabharata, so I can believe this.

Impressed by this rhetoric, Alexander gave them all presents.

Kalanos

Alexander tried to persuade the Sadhus he was most impressed by to join him on his voyage. One of them, the Greeks called Kalanos.

Plutarch says “His proper name was Sphines, but because he was wont to say Cale, which in the Indian tongue is a form of salutation, to those he met with anywhere, the Greeks called him Calanus.”

This reminds me of Arrested Development, where they think their adopted Korean brother is named Annyeong. Over the course of the show, he swears revenge on the Bluths, and changes his name to “Hel-Loh”, which apparently in Korean means ‘One day’.

Anyway, I wonder what Indian name ‘Sphines’ is derived from. And which Indian language has ‘Cale’ mean hello? Please respond if you have any insight!

Philo says Kalanos was one among these ten who possessed the most endurance among his contemporaries. To quote, “By combining virtuous actions with laudable words, he gained the admiration not only of his fellow countrymen but also of people from other tribes and, what is most exceptional, of enemy rulers.”

So Alexander wanted to take Kalanos home to show off as a great example of ‘Barbarian philosophy’. When he tried to go talk with him, Kalanos arrogantly asked him to “strip himself, and hear what he said, naked, otherwise he would not speak a word to him, though he came from Jupiter himself”. Kalanos seems to have been from a branch of philosophy that eschews all material belongings, including clothes as well as the grandeur they bestow on the wearer.

Alexander tried to tempt Kalanos with presents, but he refuses them saying “Man’s desire cannot be satisfied by such gifts”.

He then compels Kalanos to accompany him by force, to exhibit him to the Greeks.

To this, Kalanos says “What will I be worth to you, Alexander, for exhibiting to the Greeks if, in the process, I am compelled to do what I do not wish to do?”

Another Sadhu, who the Greeks call Dandamis, was warmer to Alexander and was very interested when he talked of the thoughts of Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes. It seems like Dandamis and Taxiles convinced Kalanos to travel with Alexander.

Kalanos had this bit of advice for Alexander, much like the story of the old grandma and Maharana Pratap:

He threw a dry shrivelled hide upon the ground, and trod upon the edges of it. The skin when it was pressed in one place, still rose up in another, wheresoever he trod round about it, till he set his foot in the middle, which made all the parts lie even and quiet. The meaning of this similitude being that he ought to reside most in the middle of his empire, and not spend too much time on the borders of it.

Philo also talks about a letter Kalanos wrote to Alexander:

Your friends urge you to apply violence and compulsion to the philosophers of India. These friends, however, have never even in their dreams seen what we do.

Bodies you will transport from place to place, but souls you will not compel to do what they will not do, any more than force bricks or sticks to talk. Fire causes the greatest trouble and ruin to living bodies. We are superior to this; we burn ourselves alive.

There is no king, no ruler, who will compel us to do what we do not freely wish to do. We are not like those philosophers of the Greeks, who practise words for a festal assembly. With us, actions match words and words match actions. Actions pass swiftly and words have short-lived power. Virtues secure to us blessedness and freedom.

This has got to be a manifesto for all academics all over the world.

It’s time to go

Alexander’s trip to Persia was hard on everyone. There wasn’t much to eat or drink, as they passed by places with no agriculture by the sea, where even the sheep’s flesh tasted rancid as their diet was fish.

They got to better climes where they could feast more, and eventually made it to Susa in Persia, in the spring, where Alexander married Statira, the daughter of Achaemanid King Darius III. It seems like there were massive weddings here where many of his officers married Persian noblewomen as well. This however caused mutiny in his ranks again because some of his troops opposed the Persianization of the court.

Anyway. At this point, Kalanos had been suffering from some “disease in the bowels”, and decides he’s done with this life. He asks for a funeral pyre to be erected.

He comes to this pyre on a horse, chants some shlokas, and then gets on the pyre. He bids goodbye to the Greek soldiers who he had traveled with all this while, and he tells them to “pass that day in mirth and good-fellowship with their king, whom in a little time, he said, he doubted not but to see again at Babylon”.

Having said that, he covered his face and positioned himself on the pyre, and didn’t move a muscle as the fire consumed him.

Alexander receiving news of Kalanos’s immolation, a 1672 painting by Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, which is displayed at Versailles

Sure enough, the Greeks partied away as they returned from the funeral. And how!

Alexander invited a great many of his friends and principal officers to supper, and proposed a drinking match, in which the victor should receive a crown. Promachus drank twelve quarts of wine, and won the prize, which was a talent, from them all; but he survived his victory but three days, and was followed, as Chares says, by forty-one more, who died of the same debauch, some extremely cold weather having set in shortly after.

Babylon

Alexander departed Susa to go to Ecbatana, the summer capital and treasury of the Achaemanids. His intent was to retrieve the bulk of the treasure and take it back with him to Macedonia. They got there in autumn 324 BC, when there were festivals and games going on.

Alexander’s close friend and second-in-command, Hephaestion, however, caught a fever and passed away. Alexander was shattered. Plutarch says "Alexander's grief was uncontrollable" and adds that he ordered many signs of mourning, notably that the manes and tails of all horses should be shorn, the demolition of the battlements of the neighbouring cities and the banning of flutes and every other kind of music. Another source, Arian says, “until the third day after Hephaestion's death, Alexander neither tasted food nor paid any attention to his personal appearance, but lay on the ground either bewailing or silently mourning," and that he had the doctor, Glaucias, hanged for his lack of care”.

He declared a period of mourning throughout the empire, and sent messengers to the Oracle of Delphi asking if Hephaestion might be worshipped as a God. The answer came back that he may be worshipped as a divine hero, and so he was, with shrines and plaques.

From Wikipedia: Hephaestion was given a magnificent funeral. Its cost is variously given in the sources as 10,000 talents or 12,000 talents, about $200,000,000 or $240,000,000 in the early 21st century's money. Alexander himself drove the funeral carriage part of the way back to Babylon with some of the driving entrusted to Hephaestion's friend Perdiccas.^[88] At Babylon, funeral games were held in Hephaestion's honour. The contests ranged from literature to athletics and 3,000 competitors took part, the festival eclipsing anything that had gone before both in cost and in number of participants. Plutarch says that Alexander planned to spend ten thousand talents on the funeral and the tomb. He employed Stasicrates, "as this artist was famous for his innovations, which combined an exceptional degree of magnificence, audacity and ostentation", to design the pyre for Hephaestion.

The pyre was sixty metres high, square in shape and built in stepped levels. The first level was decorated with two hundred and forty ships with golden prows, each of these adorned with armed figures with red banners filling the spaces between. On the second level were torches with snakes at the base, golden wreaths in the middle and at the top, flames surmounted by eagles. The third level showed a hunting scene, and the fourth a battle of centaurs, all done in gold. On the fifth level, also in gold, were lions and bulls, and on the sixth the arms of Macedon and Persia. The seventh and final level bore sculptures of sirens, hollowed out to conceal a choir who would sing a lament.

So I’m not sure why they had to do all of this at Babylon, but that was why Alexander traveled to Babylon. Months later, in June 323 BC, Alexander caught a fever in Babylon, which worsened until he was unable to speak, and he passed away after twelve days of illness.

Kalanos’s prediction had come true.