The Assembly reached an impasse. The citizens would not throw their orators to the wolves, but they also would not court destruction by defying Alexander. A compromise was needed, and it was the notoriously supple and corrupt Demades who provided it. Demades, perhaps paid off by Demosthenes and the others on the list, proposed that an embassy, led by himself and Phocion, be sent to negotiate with Alexander. Perhaps the king would rescind his demand if approached by men who had treated his father’s regime with reverence and had even, in the case of Demades, collaborated.
The Assembly enacted Demades’ proposal, and the compromise succeeded. Mollified by the words of trusted envoys, Alexander revoked his proscription. He demanded only that one man from the ten on his list go into exile. Demades and Phocion returned to Athens in triumph; the political capital they had won made them the new leading lights in the Assembly. Demosthenes and his partisans were saved, but their policy failure left them weakened. Their voices grew more muted than before and less eagerly heard by their fellow citizens.
Thus, in 335, the question of how to deal with the Macedonians had been settled on Phocion’s terms, not those of Demosthenes. The new superpower was not to be defied but bargained with, deferred to, accepted. And so it had gone for the twelve years following. When the Spartans, following in the path of Thebes, went to war in 331 to destroy Macedonian control, Athens stayed neutral, and Demosthenes stayed silent. Without the support Athens could have provided, Sparta’s armies were soon crushed.
Phocion grew old, and his city grew wealthy. In 323, after twelve years of the Pax Macedonica, Phocion could look back with satisfaction at the course he had charted. He had steered his countrymen away from the shoals on which first the Thebans, then the Spartans, had wrecked themselves. Now in his late seventies, he had good hopes of finding an honorable grave in his native soil, rather than a grim pyre on some Balkan battlefield. But then the news arrived that Alexander was dead, and everything changed.
3. ARISTOTLE (ATHENS, JULY 323 B.C.)
Phocion was only one of many in Athens who had linked their fortunes to Macedonian power. The philosopher Aristotle had made Athens his home for the past twelve years, arriving, not coincidentally, just after the affair of Thebes. Under the leadership of pro-Macedonian politicians, Athens had been a congenial place for Aristotle to pursue his studies, for he was known to be the former teacher of Alexander and a close friend of old man Antipater, Alexander’s surrogate in Europe. Now Athens would likely go to war against Antipater, and Aristotle would be on the wrong side.
Nicomachus, Aristotle’s father, had cast his family’s lot with the Macedonians many decades earlier, when he became court physician to the Argead royal family. He was a Greek doctor living in Stagira, a Greek city close to Macedon’s borders, when King Amyntas learned of his skills and brought him to Pella, the Macedonian capital. Aristotle likely spent much of his childhood in Pella; he may well have played there with Philip, a boy just his own age, and formed a bond with the future king that would one day lead to the most famous tutoring assignment in history.
In 367, when Aristotle was seventeen, he left Macedonia and moved to Athens, to study at Plato’s renowned philosophic institute. He stayed in Athens for the next two decades, years that saw growing Athenian mistrust of Macedon—mistrust that spiked in 351 when Demosthenes launched a series of vitriolic speeches against Philip, by then the Macedonians’ king. Aristotle, as a noncitizen, could not enter the Pnyx, where the Assembly met, but he could listen from an adjoining hillside as the man he had grown up with was vilified. Athens’ mistrust of Philip turned to rage in 347, after the Macedonians destroyed its ally Olynthus, a northern Greek city that stood in their expansionist path. Plato died that same year, and Aristotle left Athens, partly because leadership of the Academy had changed but also because the city had become an uncomfortable place for friends of Philip’s regime.
Aristotle crossed the Aegean to Atarneus, a Greek city in western Anatolia, where a man named Hermias, an admirer of Plato and a patron of philosophy, had come to power. Hermias helped support Aristotle’s scientific work, and a warm friendship sprang up between the philosopher and the potentate—a bond greatly strengthened after Aristotle married Hermias’ niece and adopted daughter, Pythias. Aristotle, now forty, had reached what seemed an ideal haven for his studies, surrounded by fellow scientists and protected by a powerful father-in-law, in a land far from the tensions of Europe. But Macedonian power was still growing, and reaching toward Asia. Philip, by now the most powerful ruler in Europe, was laying plans for an attack on the Persian empire (the plans that would later be executed by his son Alexander). Hermias, whose territory lay in the path of this invasion, made a secret pact to aid Philip. Quite possibly he colluded with his son-in-law Aristotle, whom he knew to be a fellow supporter of the Macedonian cause.
The Persians somehow got wind of Hermias’ machinations. They captured him by trickery and tortured him to get information. Aristotle, perhaps fearing he would be named as a co-conspirator, had by this time gone to Lesbos, safely offshore, to study marine life in the lagoons there. Eventually he received a message from Hermias, who by then was dead, saying that in his last hour he had done “nothing unworthy of philosophy,” meaning he had not implicated others, even on the rack. Aristotle was deeply grieved by his father-in-law’s fate and moved by his courage. He composed a hymn in honor of Hermias’ virtue and had a cenotaph put on display at the religious center of Delphi, where it would be seen by visitors from all Greece—reverent tributes that, he little guessed, would come back to harm him long afterward.
Aristotle spent several years completing field research on Lesbos and then returned to Macedonia, at King Philip’s express invitation, to become tutor to Prince Alexander. So began a student-teacher pairing that would become enshrined in Western myth as a longed-for alliance of supreme power and supreme intellect. But whatever the truth about this relationship—evidence suggests it was in fact slight—a warm friendship grew between Aristotle and Antipater, Philip’s trusted general and right-hand man. Antipater was at this time in his fifties, already the father of ten children, author of a historical treatise, hero of many wars, and an accomplished counselor and diplomat. To Aristotle, about fifteen years younger, he must have looked like an ideal soldier-statesman, a man whose noble nature was written in his loyal service to King Philip. In later life Aristotle maintained a warm correspondence with Antipater, and a few snippets of their letters survive, speaking, in the words of the great Aristotle scholar Werner Jaeger, “the language of unhesitating mutual trust.”
In 340 Aristotle’s royal teaching commission ended, but just what he did for the next five years—the years that saw Philip’s defeat of Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea and Alexander’s total destruction of the latter city—is unclear. Perhaps he remained in Macedonia and used his influence to soften anger against Athens, for the Athenians at some point honored him with a stone inscription thanking him for advocacy at Philip’s court. It was one of two such inscribed tributes Aristotle is known to have received. Much later he went to Delphi with his grandnephew Callisthenes and conducted a remarkable research project: together, the two men compiled a list of victors in the quadrennial Pythian Games going back as far as records existed. The gratitude of the governing board of Delphi was recorded on a splendid engraved stone, along with instructions that their list, an invaluable chronological resource, be publicly displayed in a temple. This honorific stone was found in the nineteenth century, in fragments, lying in an unlikely place, at the bottom of an ancient well.