A willingness to refine or contradict previous doctrines and opinions; to pose questions to which he did not know the answers; to wrestle with his own ideas—in all these ways, Aristotle transformed the methodology of thought. His surviving works do not make easy reading. They are mostly fragments, used as notes when he lectured at the academies he established on his travels and at the Lyceum, the covered garden in which he taught on his return to Athens. The school of philosophy that Aristotle founded—the Peripatetic school—is believed to have been named after the Lyceum’s walkway (peripatos), where he delivered his lectures with lucidity and wit. Greece’s brightest youth flocked to learn from him.
This wealthy dandy, who sported jewelry and a fashionable haircut, championed the mind above all else. Aristotle’s philosophy insisted on thought as man’s greatest attribute. Philosophical speculation implied civilization: only when a person had secured everything else could he afford the luxury of pure, untrammeled thought. In his works on ethics Aristotle came to the conclusion that human goodness derives from rational thought—that “the good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence”; it is an assertion of the uniqueness of mankind that has influenced our understanding of civilization ever since.
The reputedly lisping logician established a new vocabulary of thought. Aristotle made logic an independent branch of philosophy. Struggling to express his meaning more precisely, he coined new terms for his concepts: substance, essence, potential, energy. He argued that as language is a distinctively human trait, it is therefore an expression of the soul. He developed the idea that analysis of our words is the key to understanding our thought. His system of syllogistic logic (e.g. “All men are mortal; Greeks are men; therefore Greeks are mortal”) was the cornerstone of logical analysis for over 2000 years.
At the age of forty-two, Aristotle returned to his homeland to tutor the Macedonian king’s thirteen-year-old son Alexander. Aristotle tried to instill in his charge two of Greece’s greatest contributions to civilization: epic heroism and philosophy. How much of Aristotle’s political theory he absorbed is open to debate. Aristotle’s ideas were based on the belief that Greeks were superior to other races. While he recognized that governments must be chosen in accordance with their citizens’ needs and capacities, he favored the city-state ruled by an enlightened oligarchy as the best form of government. Such ideas may not have had much impact on Alexander as that autocratic ruler forged his empire. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s beliefs were a vast advance on contemporary political concepts and they fundamentally influenced the development of Greek civilization.
In his Poetics Aristotle established the fundamentals of tragedy that would long be observed in drama: unity of action and a central character whose tragic flaw, such as hubris (excess of pride), brings about his downfall. Aristotle also identified a process of cleansing or purification (catharsis) in which the audience’s feelings of pity and fear are purged by experiencing them vicariously through the actions played out on stage.
The death of Alexander in 323 BC released a wave of anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens, forcing Aristotle to flee the city. Referring to the death of that other great thinker Socrates, Aristotle reportedly said he feared the Athenians would sin twice against philosophy. He withdrew to his mother’s estates on the island of Euboea but died of a stomach complaint just one year later.
Aristotle was reputedly kind and affectionate and his will was generous both to his children and servants. It makes reference (as his philosophy implies) to a happy family life. He described man as “a monument of frailty,” but the ultimate conclusion of his philosophy is optimistic. According to Plato, the soul is trapped in the body, desperate to escape the world of change and illusion. Aristotle argued instead that the soul is an inherent part of the body and that life is desirable for its own sake.
Aristotle’s world view, like so much of his thought, delighted in man and celebrated his potential. He believed that “All men by nature desire to know,” a statement which offers a fitting testimony to the enduring thirst for knowledge that drove him throughout his life.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
356–323 BC
He would not have remained content with any of his conquests, not even if he had added the British Isles to Europe; he would always have reached beyond for something unknown, and if there had been no other competition, he would have competed against himself.
Arrian, The Anabasis (c. AD 150), translated as Alexander’s Expedition, 7.1
Alexander of Macedon stretched the limits of the possible. In little more than a decade of brilliant military campaigning, he forged the most extensive empire the world had seen, stretching from Greece and Egypt in the west to India in the east and taking in all or part of seventeen modern states. It is said that he wept that there were no more worlds to conquer. With some justification, the statue erected to him after his death bore the legend “I hold the Earth.”
Alexander was one of the greatest military commanders who has ever lived. Julius Caesar, a superb general in his own right, was plunged into deep despair whenever he pondered Alexander’s achievements. Alexander was distinguished by his personal beauty, grace and courage and above all for his tolerance and chivalry, but he was also ruthless in battle and in court politics, a hard drinker who personally murdered one of his top commanders.
Within two years of inheriting the Macedonian throne on the assassination of his remarkable warrior-king father, Philip of Macedon, the 4ft 6in (1.35m) twenty-two-year-old had united Greece’s disparate city-states under his leadership in order to wage war on the mighty Persian empire. It was the Hellenic world’s most prized dream, and a goal Philip had spent his life working toward.
Alexander set out on his mission in 334 BC. Within two years the Persians had been totally defeated in victories such as that at Issus, which showed Alexander’s military genius and tactical virtuosity. He went on to establish himself at the head of his own empire, one that included not only Greece and Macedonia but also the entire Middle East, from Egypt and Asia Minor to Mesopotamia, Persia and beyond, into Afghanistan, parts of central Asia and, on the far side of the Hindu Kush mountains, the rich valley of the Indus. Only the final, stubborn refusal of his Macedonian army to breach the limits of the known world prevented him from going further. When he died in Babylon, at just thirty-two years old, he was planning the conquest of Arabia and may have had designs on the western Mediterranean.
Alexander’s rule united East and West for the first time. Perhaps influenced by his boyhood tutor, Aristotle, Alexander was determined to govern well. He ordered his ministers to “break up the oligarchies everywhere and set up democracies instead.” He forbade his armies to plunder conquered lands, and he founded new cities galore—usually named Alexandria. The greatest of these, at the mouth of the Nile Delta, became for many centuries the intellectual and commercial center of the Mediterranean world. Alexander wanted to create an empire fusing the best of both Greek and Eastern cultures. He recruited Persians into his armies and assigned Persian wives to his generals, sending back to Europe any Macedonians who resisted this enforced equality. He himself married the daughter of the dethroned Persian king.
Alexander was revered as a god in his own lifetime. He was reputedly a descendant of Achilles on his mother’s side, and rumors of Alexander’s supernatural abilities abounded, reinforced by his unnatural speed and apparent personal invincibility in battle. Described by a friend as “the only philosopher whom I have ever seen in arms,” he loved poetry and music. As a boy he declared that if he could only save one possession it would be Homer’s Iliad. He was always alert to symbolism. On first setting foot on the shores of the Persian empire, in Asia Minor, his first act was to make a pilgrimage to Troy to honor his ancestor Achilles. He named Bucephala, a town on the Indus, after his beloved horse Bucephalus, which had died in battle.