188 THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF MICHAEL SCOT 



necromancer. He spent his time upon Arabic 

 texts, and, with the fanatical clergy, not to speak 

 of the common people whom they taught, the Moors 

 and all their works were accursed. No one could 

 meddle much with them save at the cost of such 

 accusations of diabolic dealing. Nor was it merely 

 the language but also the very subject of Scot's 

 studies that was suspicious. Since the days of the 

 Alexandrian school there had grown up round the 

 name of Aristotle a strange legend which represented 

 him as a magician ; none other than the great 

 sorcerer Nectanebus of Egypt, the true father, by 

 an infamous sleight, of Alexander of Macedon.^ 



Nectanebus, so the tale ran, was King of Egypt, 

 and learned in all the magic arts of that mysteriou^ 

 land. When Avar threatened he would fill a vessel 

 with water and float upon it enchanted ships of 

 clay. Thus could he divine the success or failure 

 of his country's arms. One day, however, as he 

 was busy in this spell, the old gods appeared to 

 guide the craft he had designed as models of the 

 hostile fleet. Nectanebus gave up all for lost, 

 shaved his head, and in the disguise of a philo- ^ 

 sopher, fled to Pella in Macedonia, where he lived 

 by practising the arts of an astrologer and prophet. 

 Olympias consulted him to know whether she might 

 hope to give an heir to her husband Philip, then 

 absent from his capital. Nectanebus bade her 



^ Nectanebus, sometimes spelt Neptanebus, is perhaps the 'Naptium' 

 of the Picatrix (iii. 8). See also on this curious subject the Pancrates 

 of Lucian, the verses of Adalberone or Ascelin (a.d. 1006) in the Recueil 

 des Hist, des Gaules (Bouquet x. 67), the Enirlish romance of Alisaundre 

 (Early English Text Soc. 1867) and the Alexander of Juan Lorenzo 

 Segura de Astorga. In this last poem, which belongs to the thirteenth 

 century, the hero's arms are said to have been forged by the fairies. 

 There is an article on 'Nectanebo' by D. G. Hogarth in the Eng. Hist. 

 Review, Jan- 1896. The same mystic fame attached itself to Pythagoras. 



