Texts in Context:
Aristotle and Alexander
By Gabriel Blanchard
In less than twenty years, Alexander the Great transfigured the world and its future.
“By the Barbarous King So Rudely Forced”*
It is useful at this point to recall the vague patchwork quilt of peoples around the Ægean Sea, especially the outlying, sometimes quasi-Greek nations: Epirotes, Phrygians, Thracians, etc. Above all, there were the Macedonians, led by their king, Philip II. More specifically, King Philip II led them to conquer Greece—it was more complex than that, but we’ll round it up to “conquest”—during the middle of the fourth century BC. The Greeks, whether out of war-weariness or because Macdeon was after all quasi-Greek, seem to have been less disgusted by foreign rule and more merely annoyed. Even Sparta, which had been beaten but not assimilated by Philip, mostly minded its own business.
Conquest-ish notwithstanding, Philip was a great devotee of Greek culture. When his son Alexander reached the age of 13, he even went to the lengths of scooping up a tutor for him from the Academy, then the absolute cutting edge of Hellenic learning—and not just anyone, but the prize pupil of the Academy’s founder, one Aristotle of Stagira. (Notably, Aristotle had been passed over for headship of the Academy after Plato’s death; it had instead gone to the founder’s nephew Speusippus. Philip II, on the other hand, considered Speusippus, but passed him over in favor of Aristotle.)
At the king’s behest, the philosopher and polymath ran a sort of boarding school for select Macedonian youths: alongside Alexander, fellow scions of the nobility attended—Cassander, Hephæstion, Ptolemy**—and would gain prominent roles in Macedon’s next administration. The education Aristotle offered was as comprehensive as his expertise. Grammar, prosaic and poetic, was taught via the great works of Hellenic literature, or at least, via some of them. (In accord with a widespread custom, those who still lay in the future—Zeno, Euclid, Archimedes, Galen, Claudius Ptolemy, etc.—were excluded from the syllabus.) This meant authors like Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Solon, Pindar, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Logic and rhetoric, as shown in the Organon and the Rhetoric, were fields Aristotle was more than competent to tackle; he also trained his students in philosophy, ethics, and medicine—along Hippocratic lines, presumably—and would most likely have covered the subjects of law, mathematics, astronomy, and music as well. The syllabus of the seven liberal arts had begun to coalesce, and so had even the three graduate faculties of the later Medieval university: medicine, which we would probably refer to as “natural science“; law, which embraced human affairs in general, thus including topics like history and economics; and theology. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We still have a world to conquer.
The Son of a God …
One of Aristotle’s less impartial traits was his utter contempt for the Achæmenid Persians. Philip II prepared an invasion of Anatolia, and might have gone on to annex it, if he had gotten the chance; in Alexander, Aristotle fostered a still stronger avidity for conquest. And the philosopher may not have been alone. The prince’s mother Olympias was an ambitious woman, and had had a dream before her son’s birth in which a thunderbolt fell on her womb. She took this to mean he was in truth the son of her god, Zeus-Ammon.† Olympias’s theory of her son’s paternity, though not accepted by most modern scholars, was widely known in antiquity; it is harder to say what Alexander himself thought of it. (He began publicizing the idea after he conquered Egypt; he may have believed it from that point on, or since before then, or not at all.)
Philip of Macedon subdued the Greeks after they had knocked themselves out in the Peloponnesian War and appointed himself Captain General so that he could uphold the ideals of Hellas. The main ideal of Hellas was to get rid of Philip, but he didn't count that one.
Philip II became the uncontested master of Hellas after the Battle of Chæronea in 338 BC. Unluckily, he only got to enjoy it for about two years before being abruptly assassinated by a member of his bodyguard, in an incident so strange that neither ancient contemporaries nor modern scholars have felt entirely able to account for it. Either way, in 336, Alexander became the King of Macedon.
… And the King of Kings
One of Alexander’s first moves was to pursue his father’s invasion of Anatolia. He departed in April of 334 BC. Assimilating the Greek city-states of Ionia in a few months, he moved inland when winter came, and continued east in the spring (the famous “Gordian knot” episode‡ dates to this period). A year and a half after beginning his campaign, he defeated Darius III at the Battle of Issus (near the modern Turkish-Syrian border), after which he turned south. Sweeping through the Levant in the spring and summer, he had reached Egypt by the winter of 332, where, greeted as a liberator from the Persian yoke, he was accepted peacefully as the new Pharaoh and crowned at Memphis in January the following year.
By the summer, he had returned to northern Mesopotamia, where he trounced Darius III a second time at the Battle of Arbela. Darius fled his capital of Susa, and would survive for almost another year, but Achæmenid power had been broken irrecoverably. In the space of just four years, the King of Macedon had become the Pharaoh of Egypt and Shahanshah (“king of kings”), and destroyed not just a, but the only, state of its day with a serious claim to be a world power. In fact, with the exception of some small farming or merchant city-states to the west, Scythians to the north, Arabs and Ethiopians to the south, and the unseen land of India eastward, Alexander was the master of the known world.
It is probably just as well to note at this juncture that becoming (even merely to the best of one’s knowledge) the literal ruler of the earth is the sort of thing that might send someone a bit funny.
The Edge of the World
To his immense credit, Alexander went only a very little bit funny, if that—always supposing we are willing to overlook about a dozen cities he named after himself, scattered from Anatolia and Egypt all the way to modern Tajikistan. (Alexandria in Egypt, or Al-Iskandariya, is the best-known. Others are still standing: some are even still called “Alexandria,” allowing for pronunciation shifts, e.g. from Alexandria through Iskandar to “Kandahar.”) Indeed, he was in some ways surprisingly balanced and good-natured. When Darius’s mother Sisygambis came before him to plead for the lives of Darius’ family, and she instead knelt to his inseparable friend Hephæstion—she had assumed he was Alexander because the two were similarly dressed, and Hephæstion was the taller—he consoled the terrified woman, telling her, “You were not mistaken, Mother; this man too is Alexander.”§
The story about him sitting down and crying at the Indus River because he had run out of planet Earth, on the other hand, is (as you can probably guess) fanciful. Among other things, Alexander could simply look across the Indus and notice that there was a good deal more planet on the far bank. But he and his army had already conquered Central Asia when they came into India, and had at that point been on campaign for eight years. (There had even been a revolt back in Greece several years earlier, at Sparta’s instigation, which Alexander’s viceroy Antipater had put down.) The soldiers mutinied against any further conquests, but did not attack Alexander’s person or leadership, insisting only that everybody be at last allowed to go home.
As far as Alexander was concerned, home was now Susa. He reached the city in 325. It was around this time, or a little earlier, that he began to attempt something unprecedented: a deliberate fusion of Hellenic and Achæmenid culture, extending to extensive intermarriage between prominent Greeks (himself included) and the Persian aristocracy. He saw clearly that he could not rule Persian territories without understanding, and making some concessions to, Persian culture. Hephæstion was with him on this ambitious project, but many others were not, and made their displeasure known. Aristotle seems to have broken with his former pupil completely over the matter; his official historian Callisthenes expressed the view that this was the corrupting influence of the decadent East; Alexander even killed a close friend, who had saved his life in battle, in a drunken quarrel widely attributed to the conflict over Persianization.|| But this conflict proved short-lived.
The End of a Classical Age
The following year, in the city of Ecbatana (the capital of Media before Cyrus had conquered it), Hephæstion became ill with a fever, probably typhoid or malaria. After a week, he died. Alexander was inconsolable; it seems strangely fitting that this took place in the lands where Gilgamesh is supposed to have mourned Enkidu. The very next year, in the spring of 323, Alexander in turn was taken ill. The same diseases have been blamed as in Hephæstion’s death, plus a few others; poisoning is also possible, perhaps with arsenic or white hellebore; whatever the cause, by the morning of June 11, Alexander the Great was gone. He was thirty-three years old.
By an odd coincidence, Aristotle himself died the next year. After Alexander’s demise, opportunistic anti-Macedonian sentiment sprang up in Athens: as (effectively) a former employee of the Macedonian royal family, Aristotle was a natural target. The philosopher stated that he “would not allow Athens to sin a second time against philosophy,” and made himself scarce. He went to his family’s estates about eighty miles north; there he died, of natural causes, asking in his will to be buried beside his wife.
With these two gone, the political and intellectual golden age of Hellas (though not its influence) was over. The “wars and rumors of wars” in the Near East, on the other hand—these had scarcely begun.
*This line comes from T. S. Eliot’s most famous poem, The Waste-land (ll. 97-101):
_Above the antique mantel was displayed
_As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
_The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
_So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
_Filled all the desert with inviolable voice …
“Philomel,” “the barbarous king,” and “the nightingale” are allusions to the ugly myth of King Tereus of Thrace, his wife Procne, her sister Philomela, and Tereus and Procne’s son, Itys.
**Generally pronounced kà-sân-dŕ, hĕ-fīst-yøn, and tŏ-lĕ-mē, respectively (see our pronunciation guide). This Ptolemy is not Claudius Ptolemy the astronomer: the latter lived about five centuries later.
†Zeus-Ammon was a syncretic deity, a fusion of the Greek Zeus with the Egyptian creator god Amun (both heads of their respective pantheons); Amun was also often syncretized with the sun god Ra as Amun-Ra. Later, Jupiter-Ammon was recognized as a variant of Zeus-Ammon.
‡A famously complicated knot was located in the city of Gordium in Phrygia, for reasons which need not detain us; an oracle had foretold that whoever undid the knot would conquer Asia. Alexander, noticing the distinction between the words “undo” and “untie,” simply cut it with his sword.
§He also didn’t kill Sisygambis or the rest of Darius’s family (as most conquerors likely would have); that probably helped. On the contrary, he continued to treat Sisygambis with affection, and married one of her granddaughters—brief though the marriage was.
||All accounts agree Alexander was immediately stricken with remorse. Arrian of Nicomedia, a historian of the second century after Christ, wrote that Alexander nearly used the same weapon against himself, “thinking that it was not proper for him to live who had killed his friend under the influence of wine.”
Gabriel Blanchard studied Classics at the University of Maryland, and serves as CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, you’d probably enjoy our whole Texts in Context series, designed to provide background for the books and people of CLT’s Author Bank and for our previous series on “the Great Conversation.” You might also like our podcast, Anchored, hosted by our founder, Jeremy Tate; follow us on X (formerly Twitter) @CLT_Exam. Thank you for reading the Journal.
Published on 29th July, 2024. Page image of The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529) by Albrecht Altdorfer; this battle (fought in 333 BC) was Alexander’s decisive victory over Persia, which would not rise to the status of a world power again for five hundred years. Today’s map was created with the assistance of Atlist.