120 GREEK PHILOSOPHY. 



over, he is said, although neither the time nor the occasion is specified, 

 to have rendered services to the Athenians as ambassador to the court 

 of Macedon. 1 But if this letter be genuine, how are we able to 

 account for the absence of the philosopher from his charge during the 

 thirteen years which elapsed between its professed date and the second 

 year of the 109th Olympiad, in which we know for certain that he 

 entered upon his important task ? For that it was not because he 

 considered the influences exerted upon this tender age unimportant, is 

 clear from the great stress he lays upon their effect in the eighth book 

 of his ' Politics,' which is entirely devoted to the details of this sub- 

 Alexander's ject. 2 And although Alexander was only thirteen years old when his 

 early masters connex j on w ith Aristotle commenced, yet the seeds of many vices 

 had even at that early period been sown by the unskilful hands of 

 former instructors ; and perhaps the best means of estimating the value 

 of Aristotle's services is to' compare what his pupil really became with 

 what he would naturally have been had he been left under the care of 

 these. Two are particularly noticed by Plutarch, 3 of totally opposite 

 dispositions, and singularly calculated to produce, by their combined 

 action, that oscillation between asceticism and luxury which, in the 

 latter part of his life especially, was so striking a feature in Alexander's 

 Leonidas. character. The first was Leonidas, a relation of his mother Olympias, 

 a rough and austere soldier, who appears to have directed all his 

 efforts to the production of a Spartan endurance of hardship and con- 

 tempt of danger. He was accustomed to ransack his pupil's trunks 

 for the purpose of discovering any luxurious dress or other means of 

 indulgence which might have been sent by his mother to him : and, 

 at the outset of Alexander's Asiatic expedition, on the occasion of an 

 entertainment by his adopted mother, a Carian princess, he told her that 

 Leonidas's early discipline had made all culinary refinements a matter 

 of indifference to him ; that the only cook he had ever been allowed 

 to season his breakfast was a good night's journey ; and the only one 

 to improve his supper, a scanty breakfast. 4 An education of which 

 these traits are characteristic might very well produce the personal 

 hardiness and animal courage for which Alexander was distinguished ; 

 it might enable him to tame a Bucephalus, to surpass all his con- 

 temporaries in swiftness of foot, to leap down alone amidst a crowd of 

 enemies from the ramparts of a besieged town, to kill a lion in single 

 combat ; 5 it might even inspire the passion for military glory, which 

 vented itself in tears when there was nothing left to conquer ; 6 but it 

 would be almost as favourable to the growth of the coarser vices as to 

 the development of these ruder virtues ; and we learn that, to the day 

 of his death, the ruffianly and intemperate dispositions which belong 



1 Diog. Vit. sec. 2. 



2 See especially p. 1334, col. 2, line 25, et seq.; p. 1338, col. 1, line 5, et. seq. 

 ed. Bekker. 



3 Vit. Alex. sec. 5. 4 Plutarch, Vit. sec. 22. 5 Ibid. 640, &c. 

 6 Unus Pellaeo juveni non sufficit orbis. Juv. Sat. x. 168. 



