Titans of History (6 page)

Alcibiades was a mass of contradictions, a fascinating, duplicitous meteor capable of brilliance one moment and dark recklessness the next. At its times of greatest need, Athens could not trust him enough to make use of his colossal talents, leading finally to his own destruction and that of his city.

c.
428–347
BC

Courage is knowing what not to fear
.

Plato

Pupil of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, Plato showed such vision and originality in his thinking that he stands as the second and central figure in the great triumvirate that laid the foundations of Western thought.

Born to a noble Athenian family, Plato could trace his ancestry back to the last kings of Athens. He was a disciple and fervent admirer of the plebeian Socrates, whose refusal to toe the line and temper his ideas brought about his enforced suicide for impiety and corruption of youth in 399
BC
.

Disappointed by the demagogic democracy of Athens, Plato traveled abroad, to Italy and to Syracuse. On his return to Athens he founded the Academy in 387
BC
, an institution that trained the greatest thinkers of the next generation, of which Aristotle was the brightest star. Teaching at the Academy until his death forty years later, Plato wrote his greatest works, including the many Socratic dialogues featuring his inspirational tutor and the monumental
Republic
, in which he outlines the ideal state.

It has been said that Western philosophy exists as footnotes to Plato. An extreme rationalist, Plato was a proponent of the philosopher-ruler of the
Republic
, who would reign only according to reason. But as experience suggested that no man was capable of such restraint, he proposed that laws must rigidly circumscribe a
ruler's actions. He adopted the ideas of Socrates in arguing that the good is an immutable and fundamental concept or “form.” While opinion may shift, Plato argued, knowledge is eternal and unchanging; goodness is objective, inextricably linked to justice and personal well-being.

Plato was the first major thinker to express the idea that the higher functions of the mind (
psyche
) are, or should be, in control of the base passions and appetites of the body. His belief that the soul is a prisoner inside the body was countered by Aristotle's view that it is an inherent part of the body. However despite these differences in their philosophy, his disciple Aristotle so esteemed Plato that he considered it “blasphemy in the extreme even to praise” such a genius.

384–322
BC

Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding
.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Aristotle was the philosophical giant who, along with Plato and Socrates, laid the principal foundations of Western thought. He was the ultimate polymath: ethicist, physicist, biologist, psychologist, metaphysicist, logician, literary and political theorist. Being tutor to Alexander the Great ensured that his feet stayed firmly on the ground.

The son of Macedonia's court physician, Aristotle spent twenty years studying under Plato at his Academy in Athens. His unquenchable thirst for knowledge prompted his tutor to comment that he needed “a bridle,” and Aristotle's enthusiasm shines through in his
scientific works. His
History of Animals
, begun in the decade he spent traveling after Plato's death, is a complete record of every species of animal known to the Greek world; he charts innumerable organisms, using his minute observations to explain their structure. There are of course some errors (a bison, for instance, is unlikely to defend itself by projectile excretion), but this work of genius and tireless energy nevertheless paved the way for the science of zoology.

A willingness to refine or contradict previous doctrines and opinions; to pose questions to which he did not know the answers; to wrestle with his own ideas—in all these ways, Aristotle transformed the methodology of thought. His surviving works do not make easy reading. They are mostly fragments, used as notes when he lectured at the academies he established on his travels and at the Lyceum, the covered garden in which he taught on his return to Athens. The school of philosophy that Aristotle founded—the Peripatetic school—is believed to have been named after the Lyceum's walkway (
peripatos
), where he delivered his lectures with lucidity and wit. Greece's brightest youth flocked to learn from him.

This wealthy dandy, who sported jewelry and a fashionable haircut, championed the mind above all else. Aristotle's philosophy insisted on thought as man's greatest attribute. Philosophical speculation implied civilization: only when a person had secured everything else could he afford the luxury of pure, untrammeled thought. In his works on ethics Aristotle came to the conclusion that human goodness derives from rational thought—that “the good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence”; it is an assertion of the uniqueness of mankind that has influenced our understanding of civilization ever since.

The reputedly lisping logician established a new vocabulary of thought. Aristotle made logic an independent branch of philosophy. Struggling to express his meaning more precisely, he coined new terms for his concepts: substance, essence, potential, energy.
He argued that as language is a distinctively human trait, it is therefore an expression of the soul. He developed the idea that analysis of our words is the key to understanding our thought. His system of syllogistic logic (e.g. “All men are mortal; Greeks are men; therefore Greeks are mortal”) was the cornerstone of logical analysis for over 2000 years.

At the age of forty-two, Aristotle returned to his homeland to tutor the Macedonian king's thirteen-year-old son Alexander. Aristotle tried to instill in his charge two of Greece's greatest contributions to civilization: epic heroism and philosophy. How much of Aristotle's political theory he absorbed is open to debate. Aristotle's ideas were based on the belief that Greeks were superior to other races. While he recognized that governments must be chosen in accordance with their citizens' needs and capacities, he favored the city-state ruled by an enlightened oligarchy as the best form of government. Such ideas may not have had much impact on Alexander as that autocratic ruler forged his empire. Nevertheless, Aristotle's beliefs were a vast advance on contemporary political concepts and they fundamentally influenced the development of Greek civilization.

In his
Poetics
Aristotle established the fundamentals of tragedy that would long be observed in drama: unity of action and a central character whose tragic flaw, such as
hubris
(excess of pride), brings about his downfall. Aristotle also identified a process of cleansing or purification (
catharsis
) in which the audience's feelings of pity and fear are purged by experiencing them vicariously through the actions played out on stage.

The death of Alexander in 323
BC
released a wave of anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens, forcing Aristotle to flee the city. Referring to the death of that other great thinker Socrates, Aristotle reportedly said he feared the Athenians would sin twice against philosophy. He withdrew to his mother's estates on the island of Euboea but died of a stomach complaint just one year later.

Aristotle was reputedly kind and affectionate and his will was generous both to his children and servants. It makes reference (as his philosophy implies) to a happy family life. He described man as “a monument of frailty,” but the ultimate conclusion of his philosophy is optimistic. According to Plato, the soul is trapped in the body, desperate to escape the world of change and illusion. Aristotle argued instead that the soul is an inherent part of the body and that life is desirable for its own sake.

Aristotle's world view, like so much of his thought, delighted in man and celebrated his potential. He believed that “All men by nature desire to know,” a statement which offers a fitting testimony to the enduring thirst for knowledge that drove him throughout his life.

356–323
BC

He would not have remained content with any of his conquests, not even if he had added the British Isles to Europe; he would always have reached beyond for something unknown, and if there had been no other competition, he would have competed against himself
.

Arrian,
The Anabasis
(
c.
AD
150), translated as
Alexander's Expedition
, 7.1

Alexander of Macedon stretched the limits of the possible. In little more than a decade of brilliant military campaigning, he forged the most extensive empire the world had seen, stretching from Greece and Egypt in the west to India in the east and taking in all
or part of seventeen modern states. It is said that he wept that there were no more worlds to conquer. With some justification, the statue erected to him after his death bore the legend “I hold the Earth.”

Alexander was one of the greatest military commanders who has ever lived. Julius Caesar, a superb general in his own right, was plunged into deep despair whenever he pondered Alexander's achievements. Alexander was distinguished by his personal beauty, grace and courage and above all for his tolerance and chivalry, but he was also ruthless in battle and in court politics, a hard drinker who personally murdered one of his top commanders.

Within two years of inheriting the Macedonian throne on the assassination of his remarkable warrior-king father, Philip of Macedon, the 4ft 6in (1.35m) twenty-two-year-old had united Greece's disparate city-states under his leadership in order to wage war on the mighty Persian empire. It was the Hellenic world's most prized dream, and a goal Philip had spent his life working toward.

Alexander set out on his mission in 334
BC
. Within two years the Persians had been totally defeated in victories such as that at Issus, which showed Alexander's military genius and tactical virtuosity. He went on to establish himself at the head of his own empire, one that included not only Greece and Macedonia but also the entire Middle East, from Egypt and Asia Minor to Mesopotamia, Persia and beyond, into Afghanistan, parts of central Asia and, on the far side of the Hindu Kush mountains, the rich valley of the Indus. Only the final, stubborn refusal of his Macedonian army to breach the limits of the known world prevented him from going further. When he died in Babylon, at just thirty-two years old, he was planning the conquest of Arabia and may have had designs on the western Mediterranean.

Alexander's rule united East and West for the first time. Perhaps influenced by his boyhood tutor, Aristotle, Alexander was determined to govern well. He ordered his ministers to “break up the
oligarchies everywhere and set up democracies instead.” He forbade his armies to plunder conquered lands, and he founded new cities galore—usually named Alexandria. The greatest of these, at the mouth of the Nile Delta, became for many centuries the intellectual and commercial center of the Mediterranean world. Alexander wanted to create an empire fusing the best of both Greek and Eastern cultures. He recruited Persians into his armies and assigned Persian wives to his generals, sending back to Europe any Macedonians who resisted this enforced equality. He himself married the daughter of the dethroned Persian king.

Alexander was revered as a god in his own lifetime. He was reputedly a descendant of Achilles on his mother's side, and rumors of Alexander's supernatural abilities abounded, reinforced by his unnatural speed and apparent personal invincibility in battle. Described by a friend as “the only philosopher whom I have ever seen in arms,” he loved poetry and music. As a boy he declared that if he could only save one possession it would be Homer's
Iliad
. He was always alert to symbolism. On first setting foot on the shores of the Persian empire, in Asia Minor, his first act was to make a pilgrimage to Troy to honor his ancestor Achilles. He named Bucephala, a town on the Indus, after his beloved horse Bucephalus, which had died in battle.

Alexander also had a more brutish side: he drunkenly killed one of his officers in a row at a banquet, a crime he deeply regretted. His own death is said to have resulted from too much carousing. “Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal,” he reportedly declared. He had several wives and mistresses, but his great love was his boyhood friend Hephaistion.

Alexander could be merciless. On succeeding to the throne after his father's assassination, he executed all rival claimants, including his infant half-brother. He executed one of his greatest friends for treason, and also the friend's blameless father, his veteran general,
Parmenion: Alexander refused to run the risk of paternal vengeance. He enslaved or crucified all the Tyrians after they resisted his siege of their city and razed Thebes to the ground, a warning to the restless Greek city-states of what they could expect from rebellion. Toward the end of his life he became increasingly despotic.

Alexander's treatment of his enemies, however, often demonstrated his nobility of spirit. When an Indian king demanded to face him in battle, Alexander fought and defeated him, but rewarded him with the restoration of his kingdom and that of a less fortunate neighbor as well. He treated the wives of Darius, the defeated Persian king, with “the utmost delicacy and respect” and allowed the Jews, Persians and others to worship as they wished.

Alexander changed the face of the world by making Hellenism—the Greek way of life—into the global culture. When asked on his deathbed to whom he would leave his kingdom, Alexander replied: “To the strongest.” After his death, his empire, which had spanned half the world, disintegrated. No one could match him.

c.
259–210
BC