The will contains detailed arrangements for Aristotle’s property, including his slaves, many of whom were to be freed. For Herpyllis, the ex-slave who had become his consort, Aristotle made generous provisions. He instructed Nicanor to look after her well, “because she cared for me sincerely,” and to provide her with a home, new furnishings, and, should she choose to marry, a dowry and a staff of servants. At the same time he asked that the bones of his wife, Pythias, interred long before at Athens, be exhumed and reburied beside him. This, he points out, had been Pythias’ instruction in her own will.

As chief executor of these arrangements Aristotle appointed Antipater, the great Macedonian soldier-statesman whose friendship had been so important to him. He had paid dearly for that friendship, losing his home of twelve years and his precious Lyceum largely because of it. Now, in his last days, he relied on it as a safeguard for the family he was leaving behind. He seems to have been unconcerned that Antipater, at that time penned up in Lamia with supplies running out, had scant hope of living much longer himself, unless one of Alexander’s generals returned from Asia in time to save him.

5. LEONNATUS (MACEDONIA AND POINTS SOUTH, LATE SPRING 322 B.C.)

Leonnatus’ entry into Pella, the Macedonian capital, must have been a magnificent event. Riding proudly in the vanguard of a splendid cavalry corps, his hair flipped back at the forehead, Leonnatus looked like a second Alexander—precisely what he hoped to be. His own horse, a rare Nesaean, had its bit and bridle cast from glittering gold and silver, testimony to the wealth won in the conquest of the Persian empire. The Macedonians must have gaped. This was the first great general, and some of the first troops, to return to the homeland, of all the tens of thousands that had left it over the past twelve years.

To Leonnatus, by contrast, the royal seat of the Macedonians must have seemed hopelessly provincial. The palace he hoped soon to inhabit was far smaller than the one he had slept in the previous summer, the Southern Palace of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, and that had been only one of several palaces in that grand metropolis. Pella was but a town by comparison with the great Asian cities, and the wealth won by Alexander had only just begun to filter back to it. Yet it was from this modest center that the Macedonians had gone forth to conquer the world. Leonnatus could rule that world, if he could gain control of this center.

The princess Cleopatra, Alexander’s sister, must have been among those welcoming Leonnatus home, but what passed between the prospective bride and bridegroom we do not know. There was little time for courtship, since Antipater’s position in Lamia had become desperate. Leonnatus mustered the overdrawn native troops and levied more from neighboring Balkan peoples, raising an impressive force of twenty thousand infantry. With cavalry, however, he had less success, since the Thessalians, who had most of the horses and trained riders in the region, were supporting the Greek side in the war. Leonnatus had to proceed with only fifteen hundred horsemen, less than half what the Greeks had at Lamia.

With these forces Leonnatus marched south, determined to break the Greek cordon and link up with Antipater. The Greeks, for their part, were determined to prevent any such link. They abandoned their siege and went to meet Leonnatus, hoping to deal with his army before it could join Antipater’s. They did not have enough manpower to maintain their guard over Lamia while also fighting Leonnatus. Several contingents had gone back to their home cities, wearied by the long winter siege or pressed by the needs of farms and businesses.

The Greeks hoped for a cavalry battle against Leonnatus to maximize their advantage, and they got what they hoped for. The horsemen from Thessaly, fighting now on the Greek side, came forward to meet Leonnatus, with a commander named Menon leading the attack. They drove Leonnatus’ cavalry into a marsh where his horses had little traction. Leonnatus fought fiercely, but cut off from his infantry and mired in swampy ground, he found his position hopeless. Wounded many times by the thrusts of Thessalian lances, he fell, and his comrades carried him back toward the baggage camp. He died before he got there.

Having prevailed in this cavalry engagement, the Greeks hoped also to defeat the infantry phalanx Leonnatus had brought south with him. But the trained Macedonian pikemen knew how to prevent a minor loss from becoming a crushing one. They drew back onto high ground difficult for cavalry operations, holding out their sarissasto form a barrier against a charge. The Thessalian horsemen made a few sallies but soon saw these were useless. The Greek infantry, with shorter spears and far less experience than their adversaries, did not even bother to engage. Thus the battle ended.

By any reckoning the day belonged to the Greeks, who collected their dead and set up a monument on the field, traditional markers of victory. But the huge Macedonian phalanx remained unvanquished and undiminished in numbers. The very next day, it linked up with the army of Antipater, which, while the Greeks were otherwise occupied, had broken out of Lamia. Together these two forces escaped north to Macedonia. The Greeks would have to face Antipater all over again.

With the retreating forces, almost certainly, went the body of Leonnatus, on its way to a state funeral instead of a royal wedding. In his glorious career as a cavalry officer, Leonnatus had beaten Persian noblemen, Indian mahoutsatop elephants, and Scythians who could fire arrows backward while riding at a gallop, but he was finally unhorsed by his own former allies, the Thessalians. Perhaps he had gained too much confidence from sharing Alexander’s victories, for he accepted a fight against a corps more than twice the size of his own. Thus, from not having the brilliance of Alexander, perished the first of Alexander’s top generals.

6. HYPERIDES (ATHENS, LATE SPRING 322 B.C.)

While in the field at Lamia, the Greeks, following long-standing traditions, cremated their dead, then sent the ashes to the home cities of the fallen for burial. Many such shipments arrived at Athens during the Hellenic War, including the charred bones of Leosthenes, the great mercenary captain felled by a hurtling stone. According to their city’s unique custom, the Athenians chose a leading citizen to give a public oration honoring the courage of those who had died. The speaker they chose during the Hellenic War was Hyperides—fittingly enough, for this was hiswar, and Leosthenes had been hischosen general.

Hyperides’ speech was delivered outside the city walls, in a section of the Cerameicus, the Athenian graveyard, reserved for war dead. It was early spring, a time of rainy and gray weather in Athens. A sober procession of eleven wagons passed through the city and out the northwest gate; each wagon bore a cypress-wood chest containing commingled ashes of the dead, one for each of Athens’ ten tribes and an extra one, empty, for those whose bodies had not been recovered. Accompanying these wagons came the families of the fallen. Arrived at the Cerameicus, the chests were unloaded and interred in the earth, and the crowd gathered around a speaker’s platform to hear Hyperides. Grief over personal loss was combined with unease at the course of the war, for, with the siege at Lamia broken and a new Macedonian army in the field, Athens’ chances of victory, once so promising, were now no better than even.

Hyperides mounted the platform to give what was to be the last speech of the golden age of Athenian oratory. It was totally unknown to the modern world until 1858, when a copy was recovered, truncated, though otherwise intact, from the scrap papers used to wrap an Egyptian mummy.