Plutarch: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans
restraint, to sup with him. He had better live and converse with
barbarians and slaves who would not scruple to bow the knee to his
Persian girdle and his white tunic. Which words so provoked
Alexander, that not able to suppress his anger any longer, he threw
one of the apples that lay upon the table at him, and hit him, and
then looked about for his sword. But Aristophanes, one of his
life-guard, had hid that out of the way, and others came about him
and besought him, but in vain. For breaking from them, he called
out aloud to his guards in the Macedonian language, which was a
certain sign of some great disturbance in him, and commanded a
trumpeter to sound, giving him a blow with his clenched fist for
not instantly obeying him; though afterwards the same man was
commended for disobeying an order which would have put the whole
army into tumult and confusion. Clitus still refusing to yield,
was with much trouble forced by his friends out of the room. But
he came in again immediately at another door, very irreverently
and confidently singing the verses out of Euripides's Andromache, --
In Greece, alas! how ill things ordered are!
Upon this, at last, Alexander, snatching a spear from one of the
soldiers, met Clitus as he was coming forward and was putting by
the curtain that hung before the door, and ran him through the
body. He fell at once with a cry and a groan. Upon which the
king's anger immediately vanishing, he came perfectly to himself,
and when he saw his friends about him all in a profound silence,
he pulled the spear out of the dead body, and would have thrust it
into his own throat, if the guards had not held his hands, and by
main force carried him away into his chamber, where all that night
and the next day he wept bitterly, till being quite spent with
lamenting and exclaiming, he lay as it were speechless, only
fetching deep sighs. His friends apprehending some harm from his
silence, broke into the room, but he took no notice of what any of
them said, till Aristander putting him in mind of the vision he
had seen concerning Clitus, and the prodigy that followed, as if
all had come to pass by an unavoidable fatality, he then seemed to
moderate his grief. They now brought Callisthenes, the
philosopher, who was the near friend of Aristotle, and Anaxarchus
of Abdera, to him. Callisthenes used moral language, and gentle
and soothing means, hoping to find access for words of reason, and
get a hold upon the passion. But Anaxarchus, who had always taken
a course of his own in philosophy, and had a name for despising
and slighting his contemporaries, as soon as he came in, cried out
aloud, "Is this the Alexander whom the whole world looks to, lying
here weeping like a slave, for fear of the censure and reproach of
men, to whom he himself ought to be a law and measure of equity,
if he would use the right his conquests have given him as supreme
lord and governor of all, and not be the victim of a vain and idle
opinion? Do not you know," said he, "that Jupiter is represented
to have Justice and Law on each hand of him, to signify that all
the actions of a conqueror are lawful and just?" With these and
the like speeches, Anaxarchus indeed allayed the king's grief, but
withal corrupted his character, rendering him more audacious and
lawless than he had been. Nor did he fail by these means to
insinuate himself into his favor, and to make Callisthenes's
company, which at all times, because of his austerity, was not
very acceptable, more uneasy and disagreeable to him.
It happened that these two philosophers meeting at an
entertainment, where conversation turned on the subject of climate
and the temperature of the air, Callisthenes joined with their
opinion, who held that those countries were colder, and the winter
sharper there than in Greece. Anaxarchus would by no means allow
this, but argued against it with some heat. "Surely," said
Callisthenes, "you cannot but admit this country to be colder than
Greece, for there you used to have but one threadbare cloak to
keep out the coldest winter, and here you have three good warm
mantles one over another." This piece of raillery irritated
Anaxarchus and the other pretenders to learning, and the crowd of
flatterers in general could not endure to see Callisthenes so much
admired and followed by the youth, and no less esteemed by the
older men for his orderly life, and his gravity, and for being
contented with his condition; all confirming what he had professed
about the object he had in his journey to Alexander, that it was
only to get his countrymen recalled from banishment, and to
rebuild and repeople his native town. Besides the envy which his
great reputation raised, he also, by his own deportment, gave
those who wished him ill, opportunity to do him mischief. For
when he was invited to public entertainments, he would most times
refuse to come, or if he were present at any, he put a constraint
upon the company by his austerity and silence, which seemed to
intimate his disapproval of what he saw. So that Alexander
himself said in application to him,
That vain pretense to wisdom I detest,
Where a man's blind to his own interest.
Being with many more invited to sup with the king, he was called
upon when the cup came to him, to make an oration extempore in
praise of the Macedonians; and he did it with such a flow of
eloquence, that all who heard it rose from their seats to clap and
applaud him, and threw their garland upon him; only Alexander told
him out of Euripides,
I wonder not that you have spoke so well,
'Tis easy on good subjects to excel.
"Therefore," said he, "if you will show the force of your
eloquence, tell my Macedonians their faults, and dispraise them,
that by hearing their errors they may learn to he better for the
future." Callisthenes presently obeyed him, retracting all he had
said before, and, inveighing against the Macedonians with great
freedom, added, that Philip thrived and grew powerful, chiefly by
the discord of the Grecians, applying this verse to him:--
In civil strife e'en villains rise to fame;
which so offended the Macedonians, that he was odious to them ever
after. And Alexander said, that instead of his eloquence, he had
only made his ill-will appear in what he had spoken. Hermippus
assures us, that one Stroebus, a servant whom Callisthenes kept to
read to him, gave this account of these passages afterwards to
Aristotle; and that when he perceived the king grow more and more
averse to him, two or three times, as he was going away, he
repeated the verses, --
Death seiz'd at last on great Patroclus too,
Though he in virtue far exceeded you.
Not without reason, therefore, did Aristotle give this character
of Callisthenes, that he was, indeed, a powerful speaker, but had
no judgment. He acted certainly a true philosopher's part in
positively refusing, as he did, to pay adoration; and by speaking
out openly against that which the best and gravest of the
Macedonians only repined at in secret, he delivered the Grecians
and Alexander himself from a great disgrace, when the practice was
given up. But he ruined himself by it, because he went too
roughly to work, as if he would have forced the king to that which
he should have effected by reason and persuasion. Chares of
Mitylene writes, that at a banquet, Alexander, after he had drunk,
reached the cup to one of his friends, who, on receiving it, rose
up towards the domestic altar, and when he had drunk, first
adored, and then kissed Alexander, and afterwards laid himself
down at the table with the rest. Which they all did one after
another, till it came to Callisthenes's turn, who took the cup and
drank, while the king who was engaged in conversation with
Hephaestion was not observing, and then came and offered to kiss
him. But Demetrius, surnamed Phidon, interposed, saying, "Sir, by
no means let him kiss you, for he only of us all has refused to
adore you;" upon which the king declined it, and all the concern
Callisthenes showed was, that he said aloud, "Then I go away with
a kiss less than the rest." The displeasure he incurred by this
action procured credit for Hephaestion's declaration that he had
broken his word to him in not paying the king the same veneration
that others did, as he had faithfully promised to do. And to
finish his disgrace, a number of such men as Lysimachus and Hagnon
now came in with their asseverations that the sophist went about
everywhere boasting of his resistance to arbitrary power, and that
the young men all ran after him, and honored him as the only man
among so many thousands who had the courage to preserve his
liberty. Therefore when Hermolaus's conspiracy came to be
discovered, the charges which his enemies brought against him were
the more easily believed, particularly that when the young man
asked him what he should do to be the most illustrious person on
earth, he told him the readiest way was to kill him who was
already so; and that to incite him to commit the deed, he bade him
not be awed by the golden couch, but remember Alexander was a man
equally infirm and vulnerable as another. However, none of
Hermolaus's accomplices, in the utmost extremity, made any mention
of Callisthenes's being engaged in the design. Nay, Alexander
himself, in the letters which he wrote soon after to Craterus,
Attalus, and Alcetas, tells them that the young men who were put
to the torture, declared they had entered into the conspiracy of
themselves, without any others being privy to, or guilty of it.
But yet afterwards, in a letter to Antipater, he accuses
Callisthenes. "The young men," he says, "were stoned to death by
the Macedonians, but for the sophist," (meaning Callisthenes,) "I
will take care to punish him with them too who sent him to me, and
who harbor those in their cities who conspire against my life," an
unequivocal declaration against Aristotle, in whose house
Callisthenes, for his relationship's sake, being his niece Hero's
son, had been educated. His death is variously related. Some say
he was hanged by Alexander's orders; others, that he died of
sickness in prison; but Chares writes he was kept in chains seven
months after he was apprehended, on purpose that he might be
proceeded against in full council, when Aristotle should be
present; and that growing very fat, and contracting a disease of
vermin, he there died, about the time that Alexander was wounded
in India, in the country of the Malli Oxydracae, all which came
to pass afterwards.
For to go on in order, Demaratus of Corinth, now quite an old man,
had made a great effort, about this time, to pay Alexander a
visit; and when he had seen him, said he pitied the misfortune of
those Grecians, who were so unhappy as to die before they had
beheld Alexander seated on the throne of Darius. But he did not
long enjoy the benefit of the king's kindness for him, any
otherwise than that soon after falling sick and dying, he had a
magnificent funeral, and the army raised him a monument of earth,
fourscore cubits high, and of a vast circumference. His ashes
were conveyed in a very rich chariot, drawn by four horses, to the
seaside.
Alexander now intent upon his expedition into India, took notice
that his soldiers were so charged with booty that it hindered
their marching. Therefore, at break of day, as soon as the
baggage wagons were laden, first he set fire to his own, and to
those of his friends, and then commanded those to be burnt which
belonged to the rest of the army. An act which in the
deliberation of it had seemed more dangerous and difficult than it
proved in the execution, with which few were dissatisfied; for
most of the soldiers, as if they had been inspired, uttering loud