Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/83

 and now, with courage as boundless as his ambition, he bettered the instruction. In 338 he defeated the Athenians at Chæronea, and saw at last a Greece united, though with chains. And then, as he stood upon this victory, and planned how he and his son should master and unify the world, he fell under an assassin's hand.

Alexander, when Aristotle came, was a wild youth of thir- teen; passionate, epileptic, almost alcoholic; it was his pastime to tame horses untamable by men. The efforts of the philos- opher to cool the fires of this budding volcano were not of much avail; Alexander had better success with Bucephalus than Aristotle with Alexander. "For a while," says Plutarch, "Alexander loved and cherished Aristotle no less than as if he had been his own father; saying that though he had received life from the one, the other had taught him the art of living." ("Life," says a fine Greek adage, "is the gift of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.") "For my part," said Alexander in a letter to Aristotle, "I had rather excel in the knowledge of what is good than in the extent of my power and dominion." But this was probably no more than a royal-youthful compliment; beneath the enthusiastic tyro of philos- ophy was the fiery son of a barbarian princess and an untamed king; the restraints of reason were too delicate to hold these ancestral passions in leash; and Alexander left philosophy after two years to mount the throne and ride the world. His- tory leaves us free to believe (though we should suspect these pleasant thoughts) that Alexander's unifying passion derived some of its force and grandeur from his teacher, the most synthetic thinker in the history of thought; and that the con- quest of order in the political realm by the pupil, and in the philosophic realm by the master, were but diverse sides of one noble and epic project—two magnificent Macedonians unify- ing two chaotic worlds.

Setting out to conquer Asia, Alexander left behind him, in the cities of Greece, governments favorable to him but popula- tions resolutely hostile. The long tradition of a free and once