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their empire. With such queries, as well as such demeanor, he so aroused their admiration that they came to think that, after all, the cleverness of Philip, about which they had heard so much, counted but little in comparison with the energy and the nobility of purpose they discovered in his son."

Alexander was between twelve and thirteen years of age when Aristotle, then a man of forty, or one-and-forty, took him in hand. Aristotle's birthplace, Stagira, was in Thrace, very near Macedonian soil, and his father, Nicomachus, had been the court physician of Amyntas, Alexander's grandfather. His birth outside the pale of old Greece spared him the curse of provincialism, and made him the natural teacher of the one in whom the barriers of the old provincialism were to come to naught. It was indeed a most significant fate that brought the two in this relation together. In the words of Zell: "The one had the power and the call to master and rule the world. The other had discovered and subjugated a new world for the human mind and for science."

As a seat for Aristotle's school, the city of Mieza, in the Macedonian province of Emathia, southwest of the capital city Pella, near the boundaries of Thessaly, was selected; and there in the Grove of the Nymphs, hard by the town, the place where he taught, with its great chair of stone on which the master sat, and the shady paths in which he was wont, as in later years in the peripatoi of the Lyceum at Athens, to walk with his pupils, was shown as a "chief attraction" to visitors even in the days of Plutarch, five centuries later.

Aristotle remained here in all about eight years, i. e., from 344-343 to 335. Shortly after Alexander ascended the throne (336), Aristotle removed to Athens, and there, more or less aided by the favoring current of Macedonianism, established his famous school in the Lyceum, in the eastern suburbs of Athens. Of his eight years in Macedonia not more than four could have been given to the immediate personal instruction of the prince; from his seventeenth year on, Alexander became too much absorbed in military and political interests to admit of exclusive attention to study, but no particular date prior to 336 marked an abrupt cessation of his relations to his tutor. In these years the bent of his moral and intellectual life was set. To his father, he said, he owed his life; to Aristotle, the knowledge of how to live worthily.

Aristotle, though a valiant champion of

individualism in education, was a strong believer in the education of character to be attained through personal association. The cultivation of noble friendships among the young he held to be a most potent means of forming in them cleanliness and healthiness of character. Hence a group of young men, mostly noblemen's sons, was assembled to share with Alexander the school at Mieza. The great staple of the elementary education was evidently what we should to-day call a "thorough schooling in Shakspere and the English Bible." Alexander's literary training we should certainly not expect to be neglected in the hands of the author of the "Poetics." It evidently was not, as his later interest in literature, and particularly his enthusiasm for Homer, shows. Among the books sent him to relieve the tedium of the long campaign in the literary desert of Bactria were the tragedies of Euripides, Sophocles, and Eschylus, and the dithyrambs of Telestes and Philoxenus. But Homer was always his chief delight. The Iliad was the "vade-mecum of soldierly spirit," i. e., the soldier's Bible, and a copy of it was always placed under his pillow along with his sword. Achilles, the young champion of the West against the East, he loved to claim as his prototype, and when he paid honors to the hero's tomb, near Troy, he pronounced him "happy that in life he had found a faithful friend, Patroclus, and in death a mighty herald."

Probably we have in the "Poetics" a fair sample of some of the lectures that Alexander was likely to have heard in connection with his study of Homer and the tragedians. It appears from this that it was the esthetic or artistic side, rather than the moral or ethical, which Aristotle emphasized, and grammar we know he taught, not as an end in itself, but as a means to the interpretation solely. Neither emotional warmth nor a high degree of personal attractiveness or magnetism was to be expected of the matter-of-fact and rather cold-blooded savant-philosopher. He never had the reputation of being a very agreeable man: but he was in his best years; he was far in advance of the best learning of his days; he was thinking and constructing for himself; and he could not well help conveying to his pupils, however chilling his manner, an impression of that most genuine of all enthusiasms-that which attends the formation of new ideas and the uncovering of new truths. We cannot be sure how far Dion Chrysostomus may have relied on his imagination for his facts, but he cannot have

been far out of the way when, in his second essay "On the Kingship," he represents Philip, at the conclusion of his conversation with his son, as exclaiming, in admiration at what he had heard: "Verily not in vain have we honored Aristotle, and have allowed him to rebuild his native town; for a man is deserving of highest reward who has given thee such doctrine concerning the duties and functions of kings, be it that he gave this through the interpretation of Homer, or in any other way."

Among the special subjects of study in the school of Mieza, natural history certainly formed a part, as we may judge not only from the interests of the great author of the "Animal History," but from the later interests of Alexander, who at one time contributed eight hundred talents to forward his former teacher's investigations in zoölogy, placed at his disposal a thousand men throughout Asia and Greece, with instructions to follow out Aristotle's directions in collecting and reporting details concerning the life-conditions and habits of animals, and in every way made his campaigns serve the purposes of scientific investigation.

Alexander in later life, we find, had some repute as a medicine-man, and Plutarch gives Aristotle credit for it. The possession of some medical and therapeutic knowledge was an almost inevitable consequence of Aristotle's instruction, and the distinction of having studied under him naturally endowed one, like an old-fashioned college diploma, with universal learned right of way.

The influence of the teacher's philosophical teaching showed itself most markedly in the joint field of ethics and politics, for these are in Aristotle but two phases of one subject. Not that Alexander adopted his master's formal views on statecraft and government; his political experience in a new and a larger political world than even Aristotle had dreamed of made that impossible: but his career throughout is that of a practically trained philosophic mind-of an educated man, a man of ideas, guided by rational considerations. What he learned from his teacher concerning virtue was that it rested on deliberate choices conforming to temperance and good sense. We cannot expect his conduct to show that his education abolished natural impulses. He was a strong personality. Passions, impulses, ambitions, will, were all, in him, at the highest tension. All the more distinctly in the record of his actions does the philosophic Alexander stand out in relief against the natural Alexander. The

philosophic strand that runs through his life marks its presence in the breadth of his sympathies, in the wider scope and higher purpose of his plans, as well as in his noble aversion to every form of pettiness and meanness, his efforts toward moderation and self-control, and his quickened moral sensitiveness. Judged by the finest test of self-control, his treatment of woman and his attitude toward sexual morality, he was in advance of the best of his day. A statement we have from Plutarch seems also to imply that some metaphysics, and perhaps theology, was not excluded from the pupil's curriculum: "There can be no doubt that Alexander enjoyed the benefit not only of Aristotle's instruction in ethics and politics, but also in the secret and more profound branches of science which the teachers call acroamatic (esoteric) and epoptic (for initiates only), and which they do not communicate to the ordinary pupil. For after Alexander had gone abroad, on learning that Aristotle had published in book form certain treatises on these subjects, he wrote him a letter in philosophy's behalf, blaming him outright for the course he had taken. This is the text of the letter: Alexander to Aristotle, Greeting. You did wrong in publishing the acroamatic doctrines. In what shall we differ from others if the doctrines in which we were trained shall become the common property of everybody? I, for my part, had rather excel men by possession of the higher learning than by the possession of power and dominion. Farewell." Though our hero's naïveté presents him to us here as one of the earliest opponents of university extension, we cannot deny a certain grateful admiration for a man of affairs, and a stripling at that, whose academic enthusiasm was centered in something other than athletics.

Alexander had his first experience in public affairs in the year 340. In the summer of that year Philip set out on a famous enterprise, the attack on Byzantium, and left his sixteen-year-old son, as Plutarch puts it, “in charge of affairs and of the seal." The son, it appears, made a better summer of it than his father; for while Philip utterly failed of his purpose, and, what is more, drew a war with Athens down upon his head, Alexander, not wrapping his seal in a napkin, tried his hand at disciplining the insubordination of a restless mountain tribe on the Upper Strymon. He did it thoroughly. He took their chief town by storm, drove out the inhabitants, replaced them by loyalists, and named the place, after himself, Alexandropolis.

The year of our hero's initiation into practical affairs was a most critical one in international politics. In order to start fairly with him, we must review the political situation as it was when he first became a factor in it. The peace of Philocrates, concluded June, 346, ended for the time Philip's struggle with Athens, and removed an important and long-standing check upon his activity. In July he passed Thermopylæ, ended the Sacred War, and occupied Phocis. In August he was made a member of the Amphictyonic Council. In September he presided over the Pythian games. His claim to recognition as a Greek was no longer slight, seeing that he was now master of Delphi, the national sanctuary, held a seat in the most important state council, and had been arbiter at the national games. His influence steadily grew, and the sphere of his activity rapidly widened. Up in the north, where now are Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Herzegovina, the force of his arms was felt. Thessaly, to the south, became his political ally. The issue of Macedon and anti-Macedon crept into the politics of all the Greek cities. In Athens it had been since the peace of 346 the issue on which the party lines were drawn. The old conservative party, which during the Peloponnesian war had opposed the imperial or war policy of Pericles and Cleon, and, in consequence, had borne the odium of pro-Spartan tendencies, still held to its old platform of domesticity, a city government for city interests, -and preferred a friendly acceptance of Philip's leadership in the military and imperial affairs of Greece to a policy of imperial self-assertion or aggression, for which, it reasonably argued, the institutions of its city-state were not suited or intended. Though representing in general the more settled and respectable elements of the population, the conservative party had again to bear the odium of non-patriotism and even of treason, and was called the Macedonian party. The liberal party, with Demosthenes at its head, succeeding to the traditions of Pericles, was the party-according to the point of view of patriotism, or of Jingoism. From 342 on it was in full control of the state.

Steadily the Macedonian influence spread among the Greek cities, not by outward aggression, but by silent methods such as mark the onward flow of Russia's influence to-day in central Asia. In 345-344 Argos and Messene turned to Philip as an offset against Sparta's political aggressions. De

mosthenes's Second Philippic is an echo of the conflict. The next year Epirus was absorbed. In Elis the Macedonian party gained the day. In Megara it barely failed. In 342 two of the leading cities of Euboea, Oreus and Eretria, came under the control of political leaders, or "bosses," friendly to Philip.

In the summer of 342 Philip pushed his arms to the east through Thrace, and in the following year carried his conquests to the shores of the Black Sea and as far north as the modern Varna. Nothing separated him now from his goal, the Bosporus,-goal of conquerors ever since, -except Byzantium and the colonies that lined the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles. If he succeeded here, two supreme results were achieved: his route to Asia would be opened; Athens would be cut off from her food-supply in southern Russia, and robbed of one of her chief grounds for political importance, the control of the Chersonese. In 340 he laid siege to Perinthus and Byzantium, and war with Athens was begun. It was the war that ended two years later at Chæronea.

Philip would gladly have avoided war with Athens. His aim was the leadership of consolidated Greece against Persia. He wanted the coöperation of Athens as well as others, and he would have welcomed her as an ally. The concessions he offered to make to Athens in the affair of the Halonnesus show clearly his desire, even though we hear of his proposals only through the medium of Hegesippus's speech, delivered in the interest of rejecting them. Philip sought in and for itself no infringement upon the liberties of the Greek towns in things pertaining to their internal affairs; but his policy did mean that he was to be dominant in all matters pertaining to the relation of the towns to the outside world.

This the party of Demosthenes, and in consequence Athens, would not tolerate. It meant the merging of Athens in a governmental "trust," and that, Demosthenes was determined, should not be peacefully conceded. He was bent on war, for peace meant the ultimate success of Philip's plan. But so did unsuccessful war. Yet it is well that Athens fought. We know that the cause,- i. e., Greek particularism, as well as the war in its behalf,-was from the start hopeless, but we rejoice that the fight was fought, and that Athens did not suffer Greece to relinquish without a struggle that which had made her to be Greece.

During the year 339, as well as 340, Alex

[graphic][merged small]

ANTIQUE SCULPTURE IN THE UFFIZI GALLERY, FLORENCE, CALLED "THE DYING ALEXANDER."

ander probably remained at home, in charge of the government. His father was occupied before Byzantium and in the Chersonese the greater part of the year. History, at any rate, has nothing to tell of Alexander until his appearance in the battle of Chæronea (338). Here he made himself a name for his bravery, and won from Philip the highest approval. Plutarch says that "this bravery made Philip so delighted with him that he even took pleasure in hearing the Macedonians say, Alexander is the king, Philip the general," a thing they were very apt to say, seeing that for the two previous years Philip had been almost constantly away from home,

VOL. LVII.-3.

and Alexander had been the regent. Four or five centuries after the battle, travelers were still shown, as a reminiscence of Alexander's participation in it, an old oak standing out in the plain north of the battle-field, under which, tradition said, his tent had been pitched.

The battle had resulted in a most decisive victory for Philip. Thebes and Athens, with their Corinthian and Achæan allies, who had been arrayed against him, were the only states in Greece remaining hostile to him that had been able to express their opposition in terms of armies. These armies were now utterly crushed. Thebes made no further

17

[graphic]

TYRIAN HERCULES, AN ETRUSCAN STATUETTE IN THE CABINET DES MÉDAILLES, BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE, PARIS.

This type of Hercules wearing the lion's scalp, unfamiliar to early Greek art, was familiar to Thasos, the Ægean island, near Macedonia, in the fifth century B. C., through old Phenician

colonization, and thence penetrated Macedonia.

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