Empty-headed Aristotle built this empty tomb.

                He honored the lawless ways of the belly, and so moved his home

                From the Academy to rivers running with filth.

The second two lines ostensibly describe Hermias but are framed ambiguously so as to refer to Aristotle as well. Theocritus knew a good smear opportunity when he saw one. He neatly grafted onto Aristotle—hardly intemperate in his personal habits—a caricature of Hermias as a corpulent, depraved barbarian.

Aristotle’s other tribute to Hermias, a fourteen-line poem celebrating the courage of his dead father-in-law, brought even more trouble down on the philosopher’s head. The poem took the form of a hymn addressed to Virtue, personified as a goddess, the shining ideal for which Hermias, according to the final two lines, had died. Like all such hymns, the poem was set to music, and Aristotle saw that it was regularly performed, on some anniversary perhaps, by students at his philosophic school. But such a ritual was easily distorted by enemies into a weird, cultic rite of worship. One such attacker, a religious official named Eurymedon, used the poem to indict Aristotle for impiety, claiming it showed a belief in new gods. The charge was eerily similar to the one the Athenians had used to indict Socrates, and put him to death, nearly eight decades earlier.

Aristotle wrote a defense speech for his trial—the first Greek known to have done so, rather than relying on a hired speechwriter—but in the end chose not to find out whether Athenian juries were more enlightened than in the days of Socrates. Writing to his friend Antipater that he “would not let the Athenians sin twice against philosophy,” he gathered up his family and left. He headed for an estate on the island of Euboea that had once belonged to his mother. It was a place he had seldom if ever seen, but the city that had been his childhood home, Stagira, had been destroyed long before, a casualty of Macedon’s imperial ambitions. Why he did not go to Macedonia itself, where Antipater would have gladly received him, is unclear.

The Lyceum, his students, his researches, all he had built over the past twelve years, Aristotle left in the hands of Theophrastus, a brilliant botanist who had studied with him since his time in Asia Minor. He could only hope that this young man, who like him had lived well off the patronage of Hermias, would escape calumnies and racial hatred, the dark forces now making his own life in Athens impossible.

7.

THE HELLENIC WAR (NORTHERN GREECE, AUTUMN 323 B.C.)

Leosthenes’ primary objective was the pass at Thermopylae, the narrow corridor between mountains and sea that connected central Greece with the North. The place was not only strategically but symbolically important. Here, more than 150 years earlier, the Greeks had fought off for days a huge Persian invasion force led by King Xerxes. After all hope of holding the pass was lost, most of the Greeks pulled out, but a band of three hundred Spartans, along with eleven hundred allies from other Greek cities, remained and fought until almost all were slain. Thermopylae had thereafter become a shrine to Hellenic freedom. The monument erected there reminded the Greeks of the high cost of standing up to aggressors. Now, it seemed, they were prepared once again to pay that price.

To underscore what was at stake, the Greeks dubbed their fight against Antipater “the Hellenic War.” The name cast the fight as a sequel to that glorious struggle against the Persians. Once again, the Greek cities were in league, fighting to defend their shared Hellenism. Their opponents, by simple logic, must be “barbarians.” No matter that the Macedonians too had cloaked themselves in the mantle of Hellenism, portraying their invasion of the Persian empire as retribution for the invasion by Xerxes. The coming war, the Greeks hoped, would redraw the racial boundaries that recent decades had blurred.

Just as in the war against Xerxes, however, the Boeotians, those dwelling in the region around Thebes, held aloof from the Greek cause. They had benefited from the destruction of the regional superpower and now occupied its former land. Were the Macedonians to be defeated, Thebes would be refounded, and the Boeotians would forfeit their spoils. Leosthenes had to fight these holdouts first in order to effect a juncture with Aetolian forces to their north, a sizable contingent of seven thousand men. Once this was accomplished, the combined Greek armies moved into position at Thermopylae. It was the most potent force assembled in Greece since the time of the Persian Wars—more than thirty thousand soldiers, and many of them, unlike in earlier fights against the Macedonians, battle-hardened veterans.

On came Antipater, with a force much smaller than that of the Greeks, perhaps only thirteen thousand. His manpower had been badly drained over the years as Alexander, from Asia, had several times demanded fresh recruits. His best hope lay in his cavalry, always Macedon’s most potent striking weapon, and in the similarly powerful cavalry of the Thessalians, the stalwart Greek allies on his southern border. On his march through Thessaly, Antipater levied enough cavalrymen that he was satisfied he could beat Leosthenes with his horse. Then he hastened to Thermopylae to seek battle.

Movements of forces in the first phase of the Hellenic War, resulting in the siege of Lamia (Illustration credit 3.2)

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But Leosthenes had been in secret contact with the Thessalians, urging them to throw their support to the Greek cause. They were Greeks too, his messengers argued, despite their long alliance with Macedon. They could swing the fortunes of war at the critical moment and crush Antipater for good. As the two armies formed their lines and made ready to join battle, the Thessalians declared who they were. Their cavalry galloped over to Leosthenes’ side of the field, defecting to the Greeks.

Leosthenes now held the upper hand, and both sides knew it. Antipater tried a ruse to make his forces appear greater, filling the back lines of his cavalry ranks with troops mounted on donkeys, but such measures could only buy him time. After a brief trial engagement, Antipater bowed to necessity. He led a retreat to a nearby Thessalian city, Lamia, and took it by surprise attack. Then he shut himself and his troops behind its formidable walls.

Lamia was too strongly fortified for the Greeks to storm, though they made several attempts. Its walls were thick and topped by batteries of the Macedonians’ superb missile-firing weapons. Some Greek troops, including the Aetolians, became discouraged and departed for home. But Leosthenes’ fallback strategy was a promising one. Building a perimeter wall and a ditch around the town, he settled in for a siege. He would wait for hunger to take its inevitable toll on the men inside. It was not a glorious tactic but routine and reliable. All Leosthenes had to do was finish his wall, hold his position, and interdict all supplies, and within a few months the war would be won.

8. DEMOSTHENES (SOUTHERN GREECE AND ATHENS, WINTER 323 B.C.)

Back in Athens, Leosthenes’ victory was celebrated with festivals and sacrifices to the gods. The city’s new general had achieved a coup that had eluded the Greeks for three decades, the intimidation of a Macedonian army in open battle. Antipater had flinched, and had now put himself in a very tight spot indeed.

Those who had supported the war crowed over the success of their policy. One of them twitted Phocion for his caution, asking whether hewould be pleased to have done what Leosthenes did. “Naturally I would,” said the old warrior, unshaken, “but I’m also pleased with my former advice.” Phocion had a more skeptical view of Leosthenes’ position than the rest of the city. In reply to the buoyant dispatches that kept arriving from Lamia, he is said to have asked, with weary irony, “I wonder, will we everstop winning?”