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took up his abode with his wife at Mitylene, where he lived two or three years, until he was invited by Philip of Macedon to become the tutor of Alexander, then a boy of the age of thirteen. That Aristotle, the prince of philosophers and supreme master of the sphere of knowledge, should be called upon to train the mind of Alexander, the conqueror of the world, seems a combination so romantic, that it has come to be thought that it must have been the mere invention of some sophist or rhetorician. This, however, is an unnecessary scepticism, for antiquity is unanimous in accepting the tradition, and there are no circumstances that we know of which are inconsistent with it. Aristotle’s family connection with the royal family of Macedon made it natural that now, when he had acquired a certain reputation in Greece, he should be offered this charge. Unfortunately no information has been handed down to us as to the way in which he performed its duties. History is silent on the subject, and we cannot even gather from any of Aristotle’s own writings his views as to the education of a prince; the treatise on education, which was to have formed part of his ‘Politics,’ has reached us as an incomplete or mutilated fragment. Nothing that is recorded of Alexander tends to throw any light on his early training, except, perhaps, his interest in Homer and in the Attic tragedians, and his power of addressing audiences in Greek, which was, of course, to a Macedonian an acquired language. It is reasonable to suppose that Aristotle instructed him in rhetoric, and imbued him with Greek literature, and took him through a course of mathe-