The Battle of the Hydaspes, 326 BC: Alexander meets Porus

By 326 BC Alexander the Great had crossed the Hindu Kush into India. On the far bank of the swollen Hydaspes stood King Porus, with a powerful army and a line of war elephants that no Macedonian horse would face. To win, Alexander first had to get across.⁴

Part of Battles of India · Next: Second Tarain, 1192

Into the Punjab

By 331 BC Alexander had destroyed the Persian Empire, and by 328 BC he had fought his way across Central Asia. In 327 BC his army crossed the Hindu Kush into the Indian subcontinent. Many of the local rulers chose to submit and pay tribute. One of them, Ambhi of Taxila, known to the Greeks as Omphis or Taxiles, welcomed Alexander as a protector against a powerful neighbor east of the Hydaspes.⁵

That neighbor was Porus, in Indian tradition Paurava, king of the land between the Hydaspes and the Acesines, the modern Jhelum and Chenab. Almost everything known about him comes from Greek and Roman writers. Offered the chance to submit and pay tribute, he refused and gathered his army on the eastern bank to meet the invader.⁶ › Battle of Gaugamela, 331 BC

A river in flood

The Hydaspes, the Vitasta of Indian texts, is one of the five rivers of the Punjab. In late spring it was already running high with meltwater from the Himalayas, and early rains swelled it further. Arrian, writing from the accounts of Alexander's officers Ptolemy and Aristobulus, says the river was deep and fast, and that Porus lined the far bank with his whole army and his elephants. Horses will not face elephants they are not used to, and Alexander knew that cavalry put across under their eyes would bolt or drown.⁷

So he played on the king's nerves. He let it be known that he would wait for the river to fall. Night after night he marched cavalry up and down his own bank with shouting and trumpets, as if about to cross, and Porus moved his elephants along the far bank to meet each threat. When nothing ever came of it, Porus stopped answering the alarms. Meanwhile boats that had carried the army over the Indus were brought overland in pieces and reassembled out of sight.⁸

The night crossing

About 150 stades, roughly eighteen miles, upstream of his main camp, Alexander's scouts found a wooded headland where the river bent, with a thickly wooded island just in front of it. There he would cross. He left Craterus in the main camp with a large part of the army and orders not to cross until Porus had moved off against Alexander or was clearly beaten, and placed further troops at points between.⁹

Then, by night and well back from the river so as not to be seen, he marched the strike force upstream. According to Arrian it numbered about 5,000 horse and 6,000 foot, among them the Companion cavalry, horse archers, the hypaspists and two battalions of the phalanx. A violent storm of rain broke in the night, and its noise covered the sound of arms and orders. Alexander's own letter, as Plutarch reports it, spoke of lightning that killed some of his men.¹⁰

At first light, as the wind and rain eased, the boats and rafts made of stuffed hides pushed off. They passed the island and made for the bank, only to find that the "bank" was another island, cut off from the shore by a channel that the storm had filled. The men had to find a ford and wade across with the water up to their chests, Alexander's letter said, and the horses barely kept their heads above it. Porus's sentries saw them only when they were almost across.¹¹

The son of Porus

Porus could not be sure whether this was the real crossing or another feint, since Craterus was still in plain view opposite his camp. He sent one of his sons with a mobile force to find out. The sources disagree about its size. Some writers gave him sixty chariots; Ptolemy, whom Arrian follows, gave him 2,000 horse and 120 chariots. Alexander rode ahead with his cavalry, broke the force and took the chariots, which were too heavy for the soaked ground. About 400 Indian horsemen fell, and among them was the king's son.¹²

Porus draws up his army

Now Porus knew. Leaving a few elephants and a small force to watch Craterus, he marched with the rest of his army to meet Alexander, choosing a stretch of firm, sandy ground where his chariots could move. Arrian gives him 4,000 horse, 300 chariots, 200 elephants and 30,000 infantry; Plutarch speaks of 20,000 foot and 2,000 horse; modern accounts settle on ranges, roughly 20,000 to 50,000 infantry. He set the elephants across his front at intervals, with infantry behind and between them, and cavalry and chariots on the wings.¹³

The battle with the elephants

Alexander did not throw his infantry at the elephants. He rested his men first, then opened the battle on the Indian left with the horse archers and the Companions. He sent his general Coenus with two cavalry regiments toward the other wing, with orders to follow the Indian horse if it rode across to help. It did, and Coenus fell on it from behind. Squeezed between two Macedonian forces, the Indian cavalry broke back on the elephants.¹⁴

Only then did the phalanx go in. The elephant drivers drove their animals into the advancing ranks, and wherever the beasts could wheel round they broke into the dense ranks and trampled the men. But the infantry opened their files, hurled javelins at the drivers and struck at the beasts with their long pikes. Wounded and without their mahouts, many elephants turned and crushed their own side in the crowded space. Plutarch, again quoting Alexander's letter, says the fighting lasted until the eighth hour of the day.¹⁵

As the Indian army gave way, Craterus and the other commanders on the far bank crossed and took up the pursuit with fresh troops. The ancient casualty figures are far apart. Arrian puts the Indian dead at nearly 20,000 infantry and 3,000 horse, with two of Porus's sons among them; Diodorus gives more than 12,000 killed, over 9,000 captured and 80 elephants taken. For the Macedonians Arrian admits only about 80 infantry and some 230 cavalry, while Diodorus has 280 horse and more than 700 foot, and modern summaries speak of about 1,000.¹⁶

Treat me as a king

Porus fought on from the back of his elephant long after his army had collapsed, wounded in the right shoulder, and turned away only when the day was lost. Alexander sent riders after him, first his old enemy Taxiles, whom Porus nearly speared, and then a friend of the king named Meroes. At last Porus dismounted, drank, and was brought before Alexander. The Greeks were struck by his size; Arrian says he stood over five cubits tall, Plutarch four cubits and a span.¹⁷

Asked how he wished to be treated, Porus answered, in Plutarch's version, "As a king." Arrian's version is "Treat me, O Alexander, in a kingly way!" Pressed to say more, he replied that everything was included in that. Alexander gave him back his kingdom and added to it a larger territory, and Porus remained loyal to him. Near the battlefield Alexander founded two cities: Nicaea, for the victory, and Bucephala, for his horse Bucephalus, who died there of age and exhaustion at about thirty, though some authors said of wounds.¹⁸

The army that would go no further

Arrian dates the battle to the month of Munychion in the year of the Athenian archon Hegemon, which corresponds to April and May of 326 BC. It was the last great battle Alexander fought. He pushed on over the Acesines and the Hydraotes to the Hyphasis, the modern Beas, but there his men would march no further. Plutarch says the fight with Porus "took off the edge of the Macedonians' courage," and that the reports of the armies waiting beyond the Ganges finished it. Alexander sulked in his tent for days, then turned back.¹⁹

The rest of the story runs south and west: down the Indus to the sea and home through the desert, to Babylon, where Alexander died in 323 BC. His empire was divided among his generals. Some historians argue that the invasion helped persuade Chandragupta Maurya that India needed a strong united monarchy, and within a few years he founded the Mauryan Empire.²⁰ › War Elephants in History

Where was the battle?

No one is certain where Alexander crossed or where the armies met. Older scholarship looked downstream, near Haranpur or Jalalpur, where Arrian's 19th-century translator placed Bucephala. Jona Lendering points out that studies of the river's ancient course suggest the Jhelum ran far from those sites until about the 8th century AD, and he prefers the old crossing of the main road near the modern town of Jhelum, with the crossing upstream near the Mangla dam. Coins struck after the battle, showing a Macedonian horseman attacking an elephant and, on the other side, Alexander holding the thunderbolt of Zeus, are among the few objects that bear witness to it at all.²¹