The sad end of this aspirational despot throws light on the seriousness with which educated Greeks pursued intellectual inquiry. Philosophy was a new discipline that transformed the world, ferreted out the secrets of the universe, and solved the mystery of life. How could any rational human being resist its allure?
Aristotle retreated to the greater safety of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos and wrote an ode in Hermeias’s memory. Then after a few years he was summoned to Macedon to tutor Philip’s teenaged son, Alexander. In 335 he returned to Athens and started teaching at the gymnasium in the Lyceum, a grove sacred to Apollo Lyceus (“belonging to a wolf”). Apparently he lectured to his students in the morning and the public at large in the evening. The venue was a covered walk or peripatos and from this came the name given to his style of philosophy—peripatetic.
Aristotle disagreed with Plato in that he favored observation over abstract speculation. In his pioneering History of Animals he sought to catalogue, describe, and explain the biological world. He included in it human beings, both their physical characteristics and, in other books, their social and political arrangements.
He was extraordinarily productive and four hundred works were attributed to him, of which about one fifth have survived. They fall into three categories. These comprise, first, polished popular books of philosophy for a general readership, often in dialogue form, which have all been lost; collections of historical and scientific data, often assembled in partnership with research assistants, such as lists of victors at the Olympic and Pythian games, records of theatrical productions at Athens, and analyses of some 158 Greek states, of which only a study of the Athenian constitution survives; and, finally, philosophical and scientific texts, frequently in the form of lecture notes that were not intended for publication and are mostly extant.
These texts cover rhetoric (again in opposition to Plato, he included this in the curriculum of his school at the Lyceum); a group of works (what we call the Organon) on logic and the science of reasoning; metaphysics (he disagreed with Plato’s doctrine of the forms, believing them to be immanent in objects and without an external reality); natural science, ethics, and politics; dramatic and literary theory (the Poetics, in two books, the second of which is lost).
Aristotle’s influence in the Middle Ages in almost every field of inquiry was absolute; his work on logic retained its validity until the development of mathematical logic in the nineteenth century.
The schools of Athens were the city’s main cultural achievement in the fourth century.
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While the Greeks were indulging in their customary internecine feuds, the young Philip returned to his native Macedon from being a hostage in Thebes. His two elder brothers died violently, one by assassination and the other in battle, and in 359 he assumed the regency of his younger brother’s son, Amyntas IV, then a child of less than ten years.
There was no reason to suppose the monarchy’s traditional pattern of murderous incompetence was to be broken or that Philip would fare any better than his predecessors on their slippery throne, but he turned out to be bright, determined, and ruthless.
The kingdom was lucky to have him, for enemies were circling. The Illyrians in the west were planning an invasion; the Paeonians were launching raids across the northern frontier; the Thracians in the east were plotting to replace Philip with a pretender to the throne; and, as always, the Athenians were anxious to strengthen their position in Chalcidice and were promoting a pretender of their own.
Philip was a master of the art of divide-and-rule. By a mixture of crafty statecraft and military force he confronted, outwitted, and finally defeated in the field each of his foes one by one. In 356, once his people had gotten his measure, they elected him king in his own right. He took the cruel precaution of hunting down and (eventually) liquidating three stepbrothers on the grounds that they were potential rivals for the throne, although he kept his prepubertal predecessor at court and treated him kindly. He was pitiless, but, if he felt unthreatened, not bloodthirsty.
Now that he had secured the kingdom and calmed the untamed barons of Upper Macedonia, he gave Lower Macedonia access to the sea by taking control of the poleis of the Thermaic Gulf. This brought him into conflict with Athens, which wanted nothing to impede the free flow of maritime traffic from the Black Sea to Piraeus along the Greek and Thracian coastline, but one by one the great independent city-states of the region—among them, Methone—fell to the king or came over to his side, as Olynthus did. Athens had lost Amphipolis to the Spartan commander Brasidas in 422, and ever afterwards yearned to get it back. But Philip won it by a typical combination of force and deceit.
He picked a quarrel with its government and laid the city under siege. When it applied to the Athenians for help, he promised to hand it over to them in exchange for Pydna on the Thermaic Gulf, a member of the Athenian League. But once he had taken Amphipolis in 357, he kept it for himself. To add insult to injury, he proceeded to capture Pydna too. To reduce the influence of Athens in the region, he made advances to the Chalcidian League, which was a potential threat to Macedonian interests and uncertain which side to favor.
The Athenians declared war on Philip, but were powerless to do much about it, for their hands were full at the time with the War of the Allies. In any case, the treasury was bare and they did not have the money to send a major expeditionary force to prize Philip’s ill-gotten gains from his grasp. Nevertheless, hostilities dribbled on for a number of years.
Philip was now the most successful and popular monarch Macedonia had ever seen. All that he lacked was a reliable income to pay for his soldiers. He looked towards Thrace and, seizing a pretext for intervention, marched east and in 356 founded the city of Philippi inland from the island of Thasos. It was no accident that it lay in the neighborhood of highly profitable gold mines. Philip expropriated them and they contributed to his treasury the huge annual sum of 1,000 talents. He now had his own copious counterpart to the silver mines at Laurium.
Never satisfied, the Macedonian king looked for fresh conquests. By now, if not before, he guessed at the dizzying prospect of uniting Hellas under his leadership. As a first step, he accepted an invitation to intervene in northern Greece on behalf of Thessaly’s feudal barons against the tyrants of Pherae. They were horse lovers like the Macedonians and found him a congenial ally, so perhaps as early as 352 they elected him as their Archon, or commander-in-chief for life.
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There were two parts to the Macedonian constitution—the warrior king and an assembly of soldier citizens. For most of the time the former ruled absolutely and embodied the state; he owned all the land, commanded the army, was the supreme court of appeal and, as high priest, presided over daily sacrifices that ensured the well-being of the realm. However, the assembly was the king-maker. It elected the monarch by acclamation (it also presided over trials for treason). The men wore full armor and clashed their spears against their shields to show their approval.
Philip knew that this approval could be withdrawn and that continuing popularity depended on success in battle. He was interested in power and not its trappings; he never described himself as king in any official document. People called him Philip and he wore no royal insignia.
He was a man of great personal charm and had a dry sense of humor. He often deployed these qualities to mislead. He lied to and tricked his opponents with a smile on his face.