Examined Lives_ From Socrates to Nietzsc - By James S. Miller Page 0,40

sources explain that the woman Aristotle married was Pythias, the niece and adoptive daughter of Hermias, who blessed the union in hopes of binding the philosopher more closely to himself by ties of kinship as well as of friendship.

Sometime around 345, another one of Aristotle’s former colleagues at the Academy, Theophrastus (372–287 B.C.), convinced him to leave the court of Hermias and join a new philosophical colony located in Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, just off the coast of Asia Minor. To judge from the number of fauna native to the northern Aegean mentioned in his several treatises on animals, Aristotle continued to conduct a great deal of research into zoology at Mytilene, as he had done at Assos.

Less than three years later, Aristotle and his wife and daughter moved again—this time to Macedonia. The ancient biographers say that King Philip had invited Aristotle to tutor his son Alexander, then thirteen years old. At the time, of course, neither Aristotle nor Alexander loomed large in human affairs. Still, for anyone preoccupied by the union of knowledge and power—as Aristotle obviously was—this was an extraordinary opportunity, though it also carried certain risks.

Never before had a philosopher been invited by a king to mold the character of a young man being groomed to govern the most powerful kingdom of its day. And never before had a philosopher of Greek ancestry been asked to put himself in the service of an alien empire. As the modern German scholar Werner Jaeger justly remarked, “That [Aristotle] undertook the work is more significant of his character than all of his political theories.”

For centuries, the most widely read version of the encounter between Aristotle and Alexander was that of Plutarch in his Parallel Lives:

Now, Philip could see that although Alexander was stubborn when it came to resisting compulsion, he was easily led by reasoned argument to the proper course of action, so he not only tried for his own part to use persuasion rather than order him about, but also, because he did not entirely trust the teachers of … the usual curriculum to take care of him and educate him well (since education was, in his opinion, a matter of considerable importance and, as Sophocles puts it, “a job for bridles a-plenty and rudders too”), he sent for the most famous and learned of the philosophers, Aristotle.

Most modern scholars doubt that Aristotle was yet that famous. But Philip would presumably have known that Aristotle’s father had been a doctor and confidant to his own father. And if he needed an additional reference, he could have turned to Hermias, who had coincidentally struck up a secret partnership with Philip, offering Macedonia an important and powerful ally in Asia Minor, in return for the promise of military aid if Persia attacked Atarneus.

With the blessings of Hermias and a liberal wage from Philip, Aristotle took up the challenge of making a good king out of a headstrong young man, by bridling him with reasoned argument. Plutarch asserts that “Alexander not only received from Aristotle his ethical and political doctrines, but also took in his more profound, secret teachings, which Aristotle’s successors used to call the ‘oral’ and ‘esoteric’ teachings and did not offer to the public.”

In return, according to Plutarch, Philip promised to let Aristotle rebuild and resettle Stagira. At the same time, “Philip gave Aristotle and Alexander, as a place of resort where they could go and study, the sanctuary of the Nymphs at Mieza, where even now people point out the stone seats and shady walks Aristotle used to frequent.”

Shortly after Aristotle had started to tutor Alexander, disaster struck his old friend Hermias. In 341, the Persians lured Hermias to a parley under false pretenses. Placed under arrest, the Greek ruler was questioned under torture about his treaty with the Macedonians. His resolute silence earned him a crucifixion. According to the legend, his last wish was that his colleagues be told that “I have done nothing weak or unworthy of philosophy.” Aristotle in turn commemorated his philosophical friend in an impassioned panegyric:

Virtue, greatly striven for by mankind,

noblest quarry in life,

for your form, maiden,

to die is an enviable fate in Greece …

Elsewhere in Greece, however, the news about Hermias produced a very different reaction. In Athens, Demosthenes had revealed, and then denounced, the secret alliance between the king of Macedonia and the tyrant of Atarneus. Macedonia was viewed with growing alarm as a barbaric usurper of traditional Greek liberties; the death of her most prominent Greek ally