When Alexander was thirteen, a succession struggle in Epirus, Olympias’ homeland, threatened feudal war. Philip intervened, setting on the throne her brother Alexandros (the Greek spelling will distinguish him from Alexander). It was a shrewd choice of a man who, in the Macedonian family disputes, could be trusted to see where his own interests lay; one of Philip’s most successful diplomatic coups. Not faulty judgment, but the convergence of unseen forces, was to make it the engine of his fall.
In the same year, he took another decision equally momentous. Alexander was ready for higher education. Athens being now virtually an enemy country, he would have to get it at home. Philip looked about for a tutor.
There was a rush of applications. Isocrates, now running up to his century, showed some pique at being passed over. Speusippus, Plato’s successor at the Academy, offered to resign and come; but Philip wanted the culture of Athens, not her politics. Only four years before, when Alexander was already nine years old, Plato had died, posing one of the great Ifs of history. His dream of the philosopher-king had not survived his own ruined hopes. By his teacher Socrates, and by him, the pattern of the silk purse had been devised. Ironic fate had handed a sow’s ear to each, the brilliant unstable Alcibiades, the vain shallow Dionysius II; while in Macedon the silk was being spun for Aristotle.
Legend has Philip booking up the wisest man of the age on the day of Alexander’s birth, like a peer putting his son down for Eton. In fact, even thirteen years later he did not know the value he was getting. Aristotle in his early forties was a scholar with a rising reputation, and the important asset of having studied some years with Plato, whom, it was said, he had hoped to succeed at the Academy. But it is most unlikely that his academic status was decisive in Philip’s choice. Aristotle was the son of his father’s family doctor, a certain Nicomachus. He must have treated the childish ailments of Philip himself and his two dead elder brothers, who had probably known Aristotle himself as a boy. His native city, Stagira, in coastal Thrace, had been destroyed in the wars while he was studying in Athens; and, being homeless, he had formed connections of great use to Macedon.
After Plato’s death he accepted the invitation of a former fellow student, Hermias, a eunuch governor who had seceded from Persian rule and established a despotate, albeit a benign one, in Atarneus, which commanded the strait between the mainland and Mytilene. He had gathered round him a little court of philosopher friends, conferring the hand of his niece and ward on Aristotle, who thus had influence in a state of great strategic value to Philip. By him the philosopher was welcomed with the courtesy he always showed to distinguished Greeks, and offered a country house where, away from court and family distractions, the prince was instructed with a chosen group of friends.
Aristotle’s extant works date from later years when he had founded his own university, the Lyceum, in Athens. His Macedonian period must have been one of transition from Plato’s teachings, and we have no firm evidence of what he taught there; but Alexander’s later life provides many clues. Plato was a metaphysical philosopher whose work is suffused with the poetry he renounced for its sake in youth. His own mystical experience was one of the premises from which his logic constructed his universe. In him, Alexander’s glowing imagination would have found an interpreter and a guide. Aristotle’s whole temper was that of the inductive scientist. It is one of the great open questions of history, whether the gain balanced the loss.
He made an instant appeal to his pupil’s practical and inquiring intellect, to his passion for exploration and discovery. Botany and zoology fascinated Alexander all his life. So did medicine. He concerned himself closely with his soldiers’ wounds or sicknesses, and prescribed personally for his friends; and in this he must have been well taught, for all Greek doctors passed on their art to their sons. On campaign he studied the animal and plant life, having records kept and specimens sent to Aristotle; and is said to have released ringed stags to learn their life span (Plutarch romantically gives them gold collars, hardly an aid to their conservation). The Middle Ages had a whole collection of spurious epistles from him on these matters, chief source of the Romances’ fantastic fauna; his real observations, which would have been a treasure to more than biology, have disappeared.
He also learned philosophy. In the Greek world, this was central to all adult studies. It had not then become an abstruse specialization, absorbed in the minutiae of its own grammatical inflections. Its language was comprehensible to the lay ear, and its subject was ultimate human value judgments. Its conclusions on these were brought to bear in debate upon law, statecraft, and personal ethics.
Aristotle’s ethics were high principled, rather than profound. He would have agreed with Socrates that he who would be esteemed must buy it with reality whatever it costs to achieve; “be what you wish to seem.” But the prayer Plato gives to Socrates is, “Make me to be beautiful within; and may outward things chime with the inward.” Aristotle conceived the “great-souled man” as an image first; a superb role for which the man who would enact it must fit himself, below which he must never fall. Intellectual giant though he was, in giving this teaching to a man like Alexander he was a sorcerer’s apprentice. Plato, in his middle years, might have been the sorcerer. Aristotle unleashed a force beyond his own conceiving.
Alexander’s need for self-assurance was equal to his genius and strength of will. If he ever consciously resolved to be greatest among men, it was probably in his schooldays. As this dream became realized he would exult in it. And here it is vital not to think anachronistically. Modesty was not admired in the Greek world, but thought mean-spirited; the lying boast, only, was despised. That a man is entitled to his earned esteem is the kingpin on which the plot of the Iliad turns. The dying words of Euripides’ Hippolytus, “Pray that your lawful sons may be like me,” offended no Greek audience; he had earned the right. It was inevitable therefore that Alexander should in due course become one of the vainest men in human history. The secret of his magnetism, to those around him and to posterity, is that his vanity was redeemed by pride. To be truly what he wished to seem was his passion till his last breath. On the occasion when he sank below his own forgiveness, the shame of it almost killed him.
His course in law and civics was no doubt of use to him early in his campaigns, while he dealt with the old Greek colonies; he would have been taught the nature of Greek regimes: tyranny (then a technical term) through extreme and moderate oligarchy to democracy. The lessons would have taken for granted a homogeneous body of citizens (slaves, women and most immigrants being unenfranchised); all, at least by assimilation, Greek. Once outside such societies he would have to improvise. His tutor was explicit about the function of lesser breeds; Greeks were men, barbarians sub-men, created for men’s use, like plants and animals. It was the conventional view of the time; and if Aristotle did not rise above it, he had some excuse. While he was in Macedon his friend and kinsman Hermias was lured by treachery into Ochus’ hands, tortured to make him reveal his allies’ plans (which he did not do) then crucified.
During one of the civics lessons, the students were given some hypothetical situation and asked how they would meet it. Alexander, who probably knew the “right” answer well enough, said that when it happened, he’d see. It was prophetic. He would do what he did by being flexible steel in an age of iron.
Among Aristotle’s biological theories was that woman is an imperfect form of man. Himself a heterosexual, in the man’s world of Greece he took for granted, no less than Plato, that a man’s vital relationships would be with other men. Where Plato exalted love, he extolled friendship, wherein each should desire and promote the highest good in the other. Whatever reservations Alexander had about his civics course, to this precept he responded wholeheartedly. Whether they met in childhood or adolescence, by now he had the company of Hephaestion.