Alexander nor rushed to defend Callisthenes. On the contrary, Plutarch recounts how he criticized his nephew’s lack of prudence, or “common sense,” and in this context, it is telling that Aristotle’s capital virtue of phronesis seems synonymous with expedience, as if common sense suggests that Callisthenes should have found some way to acquiesce in his sovereign’s erratic and increasingly destructive behavior. (If Socrates were to have exercised “prudence” in this sense, he presumably should have escaped into exile rather than drunk the hemlock.)
Some say that Alexander planned to keep Callisthenes in prison until he was able to bring him back to Greece for a public trial so that Aristotle could witness, and participate in, his protégé’s ritual humiliation. But before that could happen, in 327, “Callisthenes died a vastly overweight, louse-ridden man,” writes Plutarch, who (like Aristotle in his account) apparently thinks this fate was a just desert for Callisthenes’ frank criticism of Alexander’s imperious conduct.
Less than four years later, in 323, while planning a voyage by sea around Arabia, Alexander died suddenly. He was thirty-three years old. The cause was probably a fever. But Plutarch also reports a rumor (which he doubts to be true) that “Aristotle put Antipater up to the deed, and that the collection of the poison was entirely Aristotle’s doing.”
This sort of rumor shows how biography had become a political football in the ancient world. In matters of life and death, calumnies were answered tit for tat. Some scholars speculate that later Aristotelians, hoping to dissociate Aristotle from the most sensational charges of his ancient biographers and the infamous acts of his most famous student, spread the rumor that Aristotle and his best friend in the Macedonian court had ultimately turned on and killed the tyrant. But this seems unlikely, since Aristotle had continued to depend on Alexander and the Macedonian regime for support and protection after the death of his nephew.
In any case, Alexander’s death left Aristotle in an exposed position. When news of the king’s death reached Athens, it unleashed popular outrage and violent demonstrations against Macedonian rule. Aristotle had made a number of enemies in the city, from his estranged former friends in the Academy to patriotic politicians like Demosthenes, who had never ceased to inveigh against the Macedonian usurper. Aristotle’s enemies in Athens lost no time in cobbling together an indictment against him. He was of course suspected of treason, because of his ties to Alexander and Antipater. But the main charge (as usual in ancient Athens) was “impiety.” The evidence in support of this accusation included Aristotle’s paean to Hermias, and possibly as well a passage in which he is alleged to have said that prayers and sacrifices to the gods were of no use. The problem with his panegyric to Hermias was that Aristotle had lauded the tyrant alongside Heracles, Achilles, and Ajax—an insulting juxtaposition, at least to pious democrats.
According to the ancient biographers, Aristotle’s honorific inscription at Delphi was torn down and thrown into a well. (In the twentieth century, archaeologists in fact found fragments of a tablet honoring Aristotle at the bottom of a well in Delphi.) “As for the honor which was voted me at Delphi and of which I have now been stripped,” Aristotle wrote Antipater in a fragment of a letter (perhaps authentic) that survives, “I am neither greatly concerned nor greatly unconcerned.”
He was, however, concerned for his physical safety. So he took the step that Socrates, in the same circumstances, had defiantly refused to take: exile. Facing a trial by democratic jury, he fled from Athens to Chalcis, a city safely garrisoned by Macedonian troops under the control of Antipater. “I will not allow the Athenians to wrong philosophy twice,” he wrote Antipater in another fragment of a letter that survives. Even if this passage is a forgery, it effectively anticipates, and tries to forestall, an unfavorable comparison between Aristotle and Socrates.
In 322, less than a year after he arrived in Chalcis, Aristotle died, probably of natural causes (though early Christian writers spread the rumor that he had been so mortified at his inability to explain the ebb and flow of a river that he hurled himself into its waters, and so drowned).
In his will, Aristotle named Antipater executor of his estate, “in all matters and in perpetuity.” To Herpyllis, the common-law wife he took after the death of Pythia, he left a house of her choice, several slaves, a great deal of silverware, and a dowry, should she wish to remarry. He