ALEXANDER THE GREAT
ALEXANDER III., commonly called “The Great,” son of Philip II., king of Macedonia, and of Olympias, daughter of the Molossian chief Neoptolemus, was born at Pella, 356 b.c. His father was a man of fearless courage and the soundest judgment; his mother was a woman of savage energy and fierce superstition. Alexander inherited the qualities of both his parents, and the result was the combination of a boundless ambition with the most sober practical wisdom. The child grew up with the consciousness that he was the heir of a king whose power was rapidly growing; and the stories told of him attest at the least the early awakening of a mind formed in the mould of the heroes of mythical Hellas. Nay, the blood of Achilles was flowing, as he believed, in his veins; and the flattery of his Acarnanian tutor Lysimachus, who addressed him as the son of Peleus, may have strengthened his love of the immortal poems which told the story of that fiery warrior. By another tutor, the Molossian Leonidas, his vehement impulses were checked by a wholesome discipline. But the genius of Alexander, the greatest of military conquerors, was moulded in a far greater degree by that of Aristotle, the greatest conqueror in the world of thought. At the age of thirteen he became for three years the pupil of a man who had examined the political constitutions of a crowd of states, and who had brought together a vast mass of facts and observations for the systematic cultivation of physical science. During these three years the boy awoke to the knowledge that a wonderful world lay before him, of which he had seen little, and threw himself eagerly, it is said, into the task of gathering at any cost a collection for the study of natural history. While his mind was thus urged in one direction, he listened to stories which told him of the great quarrel still to be fought out between the East and the West, and learnt to look upon himself as the champion of Hellas against the barbarian despot of Susa.