Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/32

Antipater, who was acting as viceroy in Macedonia, he is represented as having maintained a friendly correspondence. Cassander, the son of Antipater, appears to have attended his school. As time went on, the character of Alexander became corrupted^[1] by unchecked success, Asiatic influences, and the all but universal servility which he encountered. His mind became alienated from those Greek citizens around him who showed any independence of spirit. He quarrelled with Antipater, who was faithfully acting for him at home. On a frivolous charge he cruelly put to death Callisthenes, a young orator whom, on the recommendation of Aristotle, he had taken in his retinue. On this and other occasions he is said to have broken out into bitter expressions against “the sophistries” of Aristotle,—that is to say, his free and reasonable political principles. The East, conquered physically by Alexander, had conquered and changed the mind of its conqueror. And he had now fallen quite out of sympathy with his ancient preceptor and friend. But the Athenians seem to have been unconscious of any such change. Aristotle had come to Athens as the avowed favourite and protégé of Alexander, and that, too, at a moment when Alexander (335 B.C.), by sacking the city of Thebes, and by compelling Athens with the threat of a similar fate to exile some of her anti-Macedonian statesmen, had made himself the object of sullen dread and covert dislike to the majority of the Athenian citizens. Some portion of this feeling was doubtless reflected upon Aristotle, but during the life of Alexander

1. See Grote’s ‘History of Greece,’ xii. 291,301, 341.