Porus at the Hydaspes: The Elephant King Who Halted Alexander's March East

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In 326 BC, after destroying the Achaemenid Empire and taking the mountain fortress of Aornos, Alexander the Great reached the Punjab. King Taxiles submitted, but Porus, ruler of the lands along the Hydaspes, the modern Jhelum, refused and held the southern bank of a river swollen by Himalayan snowmelt and monsoon rain. Alexander marched his cavalry along the bank night after night until Porus stopped reacting. Leaving Craterus at the main camp with a body double in royal robes, he took a strike force 17 miles upstream and crossed during a thunderstorm on hay-stuffed hides and galleys cut into sections. Porus sent his son with chariots and cavalry, but the wheels sank in the storm mud and his son was killed.

Porus, over six feet tall and in mail, rode the largest war elephant to face Alexander with up to 50,000 infantry and 85 to 200 elephants spaced along his line. Alexander struck the Indian left with his Companion cavalry while Coenus swung round to the rear. The phalanx held the elephants off with sarissas 16 to 18 feet long as light troops blinded them with javelins and others cut their hamstrings with kopis blades, until the maddened animals trampled their own lines. Wounded and unbowed, Porus threw a spear at Taxiles when he came to demand surrender. Asked how he wished to be treated, he answered, as a king. Alexander restored and enlarged his kingdom.

• Sources put Indian dead between 12,000 and 23,000, including a second son of Porus.
• Porus finally dismounted only when Meroes, a personal friend, was sent to him.
• Alexander founded Nicaea and Bucephala, the latter named for his horse Bucephalus, who died around this time.
• At the Hyphasis, the modern Beas, the exhausted army refused to go farther, fearing the Nanda Empire, and Alexander turned back.
• Kautilya and Chandragupta's Mauryan Empire drew on the defeat to build a centralized standing army.