Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/239

 Nay, Alexander himself, in the letters which he wrote soon after to Craterus, Attalus, and Alcetas, tells them that the young men who were put to the torture, de- clared they had entered into the conspiracy of themselves, without any others being privy to, or guilty of it. But yet afterwards, in a letter to Antipater, he accuses Callis- thenes. " The young men," he says, " were stoned to death by the Macedonians, but for the sophist," (meaning Callisthenes,) "I will take care to punish him with them too who sent him to me, and who harbor those in their cities who conspire against my life," an unequivocal decla- ration against Aristotle, in whose house Callisthenes, for his relationship's sake, being his niece Hero's son, had been educated. His death is variously related. Some say he was hanged by Alexander's orders ; others, that he died of sickness in prison ; but Chares writes he was kept in chains seven months after he was apprehended, on pur- pose that he might be proceeded against in full council, when Aristotle should be present ; and that growing very fat, and contracting a disease of vermin, he there died, about the time that Alexander was wounded in India, in the country of the Malli Oxydracaa, all which came to pass afterwards.

For to go on in order, Demaratus of Corinth, now quite an old man, had made a great effort, about this time, to pay Alexander a visit ; and when he had seen him, said he pitied the misfortune of those Grecians, who were so un- happy as to die before they had beheld Alexander seated on the throne of Darius. But he did not long enjoy the benefit of the king's kindness for him, any otherwise than that soon after falling sick and dying, he had a maguifi-