And now, less than a decade after the death of Aristotle, a philosopher ruled over Athens. Demetrius, following the prescriptions of his master, had little patience with the masses. Aristotle, anxious that the reins of state be held only by those with the time and money to be educated in the true nature of things, had wrinkled his nose at the thought of sailors – men more habituated to the rowing bench than to the philosopher’s salon – wielding influence over public affairs. ‘Such a mob should never rank as citizens.’40 Demetrius, despite his own upbringing in a port, had enthusiastically followed this prescription. Under his rule, the poor were disenfranchised. Property was defined as the qualification for having a vote. Assemblies were abolished, laws revised, spending cuts imposed. The machinery of government, no longer subject to the chaotic whims of the people, was set on a new and regular course. His labour of reform completed, Demetrius then settled back and devoted his attention to prostitutes and young boys. What else was there for him to do? Athens’ new constitution had not been crafted by a philosopher for nothing. Like the stars in their orbits, revolving with smooth precision around the earth, it was designed to be obedient to the eternal and unchanging laws that governed the cosmos.
A reflection certainly fit to delight philosophers – but not, perhaps, the vast mass of those who had little time for abstract speculation. To them, the deity enshrined by Aristotle at the heart of the universe, heedless as it was of humanity’s cares, remained as impersonal and colourless as it had ever been. A people with the rhythms of the Iliad in their minds still wanted glamour when they looked to the heavens. Sure enough, far beyond the walls of Athens, deeds were being achieved of what seemed to many a god-like order. In 334 BC, Alexander, the king of Macedon, on the northern periphery of Greece, and himself a one-time student of Aristotle, had crossed the Hellespont at the head of an army. By the time he died eleven years later, he had humbled the pride of the Persian monarchy and conquered an empire that stretched all the way to the Indus. The proud claims of Darius a century and a half earlier stood revealed as vain. The greatness of his dynasty’s dominion was not, after all, eternal. Carved up in the wake of Alexander’s death by predatory Macedonian generals, its provinces now funded the ambitions of men who cared nothing for Ahura Mazda. ‘The strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak must suck it up.’41 This grim parody of the law discerned by philosophers in the workings of the universe – formulated by an Athenian a century previously – was one which Demetrius too, in his heart of hearts, had little choice but to acknowledge. His regime was ultimately dependent, not on the approbation of his fellow citizens but on foreign spears. The true master of Athens was not Demetrius at all, but his sponsor, a Macedonian nobleman named Cassander who, in the wake of Alexander’s death, had seized control of Macedon – and with it the rule of Greece. Philosophers too, no less than women or slaves, might be dependents. Any weakening of Cassander’s position was liable to leave Demetrius as collateral damage.
And so it turned out. In the spring of 307, a large fleet appeared in the waters off Athens. A second Macedonian warlord was making a pitch for Greece. Demetrius, rather than stand and fight, promptly fled to Thebes. The Athenian people, in an ecstasy of delight, celebrated by felling his statues, melting them down, and converting them into chamberpots. Even so, they had hardly been liberated. One man named Demetrius had merely been exchanged for another. Unlike the Athenians’ previous ruler, though, the second Demetrius was at least an authentic hero. Young, dashing and handsome, he had palpable shades of Alexander. Far too restless to linger in Athens, he had no sooner captured the city than he was off again, fighting a series of epic engagements and winning for himself a splendid honorific: ‘the Besieger’. Time would see him outlive Cassander, murder his rival’s son, and make himself king of Macedon. Returning to Athens in 295, the Besieger assembled the people in the theatre of Dionysus, and then appeared to them on the stage, as though he were the hero of a drama – or a god. Five years later, when Demetrius made a further visit to the city, his claim to divinity could hardly have been rendered any more flamboyant. Stars embroidered on his cloak identified him with the sun. Dancers adorned with giant phalluses greeted him as though he were Dionysus. Choirs sang a hymn that proclaimed him a god and saviour. ‘For the other gods are far distant, or have no ears, or do not exist, or ignore us – but you we can see before us. You are not made of stone or wood. No, you are real.’42
Disappointment followed soon after. An unseasonal frost blasted the Athenian harvest; an altar raised to Demetrius was overgrown by hemlock; the Besieger himself, having been chased off the Macedonian throne, died in 283 the prisoner of a rival warlord. Nevertheless, the yearning of the Greeks for what they termed a parousia, the physical presence of a deity, did not fade away. The gods who had manifested themselves on the battlefield at Troy had been absent too long for kings of the order of Demetrius not to impress many as enticing substitutes. The Athenians were far from alone in feeling their smallness before the immensity of the world revealed by Alexander’s conquests. The descendants of his generals ruled from capitals so vast and multi-cultural that Athens, by comparison, could only seem diminished. The largest of them all, a city founded by Alexander on the coast of Egypt and named by him – with his customary modesty – Alexandria, was consciously promoted as the new heartbeat of Greek civilisation. When Demetrius of Phaleron, licking his wounds, looked around for alternative employment, it was to Alexandria that he duly headed. There, sponsored by a Macedonian general who had made himself pharaoh, he helped to establish what would endure for centuries as the greatest repository of learning in the world. For all the scope and scale of its research facilities, though, Alexandria was not solely a monument to the philosophy of Aristotle. Beyond its incomparable library, and the cloisters and gardens where scholars enjoyed a richly subsidised opportunity to catalogue the wisdom of the ages, the city served as a microcosm, not of the chilly perfection of the stars, but of the teeming diversity of the sublunar world. Planted where previously there had been nothing but sand and wheeling sea birds, Alexandria rested on shallow foundations. Its gods as well as its citizens were immigrants. Statues of Apollo and Athena stood in the streets alongside those of strange deities with the heads of crocodiles or rams. It did not take long, though, for new gods, distinctively Alexandrian, to emerge. One in particular, who combined the luxuriant facial hair of Zeus with echoes of Osiris, the Egyptian judge of the dead, had soon become the face of the megalopolis. Serapis – whose vast temple, the Serapeum, would come to rank as the greatest in Alexandria – provided its ruling dynasty with a patron that they avidly promoted as their own. Philosophers, alert to the source of their funding, proved happy to do their bit as well. When Demetrius of Phaleron, miraculously cured after going blind, wrote a hymn of thanks to Serapis, no mention was made of the motionless mover at the heart of the cosmos. Even a disciple of Aristotle might sometimes prefer a god with the personal touch.