After the crushing of Thebes and the cowing of Alexander’s opponents, Aristotle returned to Athens, where in his twenties and thirties he had studied with Plato in a grove sacred to the hero Academus. Now reaching his fifties, he was ready to become the kind of teacher and guide Plato had been for his younger self. But leadership of the Academy was already spoken for; and in any case, Aristotle was no longer entranced by the abstractions he had once debated there, the Forms of things like Goodness and Justice shining down from a distant realm. Increasingly, he wanted to focus on the world around him, the world accessed by experiment rather than Zen-like contemplation. Aristotle set up a new school in a different grove, the Lyceum, and started lecturing to different students. In time, he had a building constructed there and filled it with maps, specimens, and documents—a place to study things that are, rather than those that could or should be.

For twelve years Aristotle lectured in the Lyceum, addressing his students in the morning and the general public in the afternoon. He taught biology, geography, political science, rhetoric, physics, and the science of the human soul. Once he even spoke on comic and tragic drama, art forms invented by the Athenians, explaining how they worked and how to perfect them. He spoke from outlines, and it is these notes that have come down to us as his “writings,” for he had long before this ceased to write for publication. The written word, as far as Aristotle was concerned—in this he agreed with Plato—was powerless to convey knowledge.

During these twelve years, while the Athenians followed Phocion’s policy of entente with Alexander, Aristotle had not needed to worry that he was, in Athenian eyes at least, a Macedonian. The dark looks he must have received from Demosthenes’ partisans did not matter, for he was a friend of Antipater and anyone who harmed him would have to answer to that powerful general or even to Alexander himself.

But now Alexander was dead, and Aristotle’s umbrella of security was deteriorating. His friendship with Antipater was now a mark against him, and those active in politics were quick to use it. Dark charges were flung at him in the Assembly: it was alleged that more than twenty years earlier, he had informed on wealthy citizens of Olynthus and had thus given Philip a pretext to seize their estates. An Athenian named Himeraeus, a fierce anti-Macedonian, took it upon himself to ascend the Acropolis, wrench up the stone tablet recording the city’s gratitude to Aristotle, and hurl it down onto the rocks below. In Delphi, meanwhile, the stone inscribed with praises for Aristotle and Callisthenes was similarly destroyed, broken up and tossed down the well from which it was eventually recovered.

Aristotle wrote to Antipater about the annulment of his Delphic honors, and, by purest chance, a quotation from that letter survives. “I don’t care too much, but I don’t notcare,” Aristotle told his oldest friend. It is the candid confession of a thoughtful man, near the end of life, watching his reputation get systematically destroyed.

One other quotation survives from Aristotle’s letters to Antipater, also (to judge by the content) from the period following Alexander’s death. “It’s dangerous for an immigrant to stay in Athens,” Aristotle wrote.

4. HYPERIDES (ATHENS, JULY 323 B.C.)

But there were others in Athens, among them the fiery rhetorician Hyperides, in whose eyes Alexander could not have picked a better time to die. Athens was ready for war as never before. Better yet, from Hyperides’ perspective, the leadership of the city had recently changed, leaving himthe sole head of the anti-Macedonian cause. His former partner Demosthenes had been drummed out months before, denounced by Hyperides himself at a sensational corruption trial. After decades of standing in Demosthenes’ shadow, Hyperides would finally get to call the shots—and those shots would be aimed right at the heart of Macedon.

Events seemed to have come together as if guided by gods who were favoring the city’s fortunes. Both resources and opportunity for revolt had arrived at just the same moment, without Athens doing anything to summon them. To understand how this happened, to see the moment of Alexander’s death as Hyperides saw it, requires us to look back about two years from July 323. The chain of events that seemed to promise total victory for Athens began then, when Alexander, forced to halt by the mutiny of his troops, had begun his long trek back from the far-off land of India.

Harpalus Arrives in Athens

By invading India, Alexander seemed to many to have left the known world behind, and during his absence some of his satraps acted as though he would not return. Alexander had given them small armies, but many began to hire Greek mercenaries as well, an obvious effort to build power. They extorted money from their subjects to pay for these troops, or skimmed off cash from imperial treasuries. Alexander returned from India very displeased by what he found. He ordered all satraps to release their mercenaries and took steps to punish abuses. Those who had committed the worst offenses fled before Alexander’s agents arrived, and among these was one who was in especially grave trouble, an old and close friend of Alexander’s, a highborn Macedonian named Harpalus.

Harpalus is a unique figure in Alexander’s inner circle, no soldier but a hedonist, a sensualist, and a lover of women. Disabled from birth, he was useless on the battlefield but nonetheless stood high in Alexander’s affections. Even after Harpalus stole imperial funds and ran away from the Asian campaign, in its early stages, Alexander forgave his old friend, sent envoys to cajole him back to Asia, and put him in charge of the empire’s largest treasury, in Babylon. Here, in a city famous for loose morals and sensual delights, Harpalus lost his bearings. He spent wildly on his own pleasures and on gifts for imported Greek courtesans. When Alexander returned from the East, Harpalus was terrified. Once before he had obtained pardon, but this time escape was his only hope.

Because he had sent them grain during a shortage years before, Harpalus had received honorary citizenship from the Athenians, and so, in the spring of 324, he fled Babylon for Athens. He sailed for Piraeus, the Athenian harbor, with a fleet of thirty warships, a powerful force of six thousand mercenary soldiers, and a fortune in embezzled money. He let it be known by messengers that he would use this army and these funds to help Athens revolt from Macedonian control.

But did Athens want to revolt? As Harpalus and his fleet waited off Attica for permission to dock, the Assembly met to consider its options. Debate proceeded along familiar lines: the war hawks spoke in favor of admitting Harpalus, while the entente party, Phocion and his ilk, argued that the danger to Athens would be too great. Demosthenes, unaccountably, switched sides from his customary alignment. The man who had roused his countrymen to fight at Chaeronea fifteen years before, and who had urged them to fight at Thebes, now said that the time was not ripe for war. He said that Harpalus should be sent away, and his support carried the motion.

Hyperides and the other hawks were aghast at this seeming betrayal, and at the thought that Harpalus’ flotilla, with its fabulous cargo of military might, would be allowed to pass Athens by. As Harpalus raised sail and headed for Taenaron, at the tip of the Peloponnese, it must have seemed to Hyperides that Athens was destined always to be under the thumb of Macedon and never regain its former glory. But there were other reasons, arising from just the place Harpalus was heading, for Hyperides and his partisans to live in hope.

Leosthenes at Taenaron

Alexander’s order disbanding personal armies produced a wave of unemployed Greek mercenaries. Alexander intended to hire many himself, but before he could do so, some crossed the Aegean and landed in Taenaron, where sheer distance from Macedonia, and the buffer provided by Sparta, placed them beyond Alexander’s control. Mercenaries returning from all parts of Asia found safe haven in this no-man’s-land. In a short time Taenaron was bustling with thousands of them, enough for a sizable army, were they to come together under one leader. And just such a leader emerged in Taenaron in 324: a swashbuckling captain named Leosthenes, an Athenian who had spent his life among the Macedonians—his father had been exiled from Athens decades earlier and had gone to the court of King Philip—but who had, for reasons unknown, become a die-hard foe of Alexander.