Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son ... - Historia Antigua

ARGEAD DUNASTEIA 155
Plato and his students had a demonstrable desire to put their
ideas into practice, a desire that sometimes led to practical experience
and knowledge of Greek politics, even Macedonian politics.
Plato was intensely interested in bringing the notion of the philosopher
prince to reality in Syracuse—a hope that seems to have lingered
throughout the writing of his Laws and down to his death in
348. Plato and his associates seem also to have had other kings and
tyrants in mind for the political infl uence of philosophy, 23 including
Hermias of Atarneus (to whose court two Platonists, Erastus and
Coriscus, had traveled to attract that eunuch tyrant to Platonic
studies, even before Aristotle befriended him, married his niece,
and wrote to his memory a famous paean). Even Macedon had experienced
Platonic interest in the 360s, as Plato’s disciple, Euphraeus,
was known at the court of Perdiccas III, where he convinced the
king to designate some territory to be commanded by the king’s
younger brother, Philip (Speusippus, Epist. Socrat. 30, 12), from
which Philip seems to have mounted his counterattack after
Perdiccas’ death. Plato himself was up on Macedonian court gossip,
probably through Euphraeus ( Grg. 471 a–c), so it is very likely that
Aristotle knew a great deal more about the north and Macedonia’s
institutions than he reveals in his writing.
I think it is quiet likely that Aristotle handled Macedon as he did
in the Politics because no matter what more he might have said
openly about the kingdom, his words would have involved personal
risk, living where and when he did as it was being composed. The
Politics are usually dated to the period between 335 and 322 when
the mature Aristotle was in Athens and enjoying a subsidy provided
by Alexander to undertake his myriad interests. 24 The risks to
Aristotle during this period were twofold had he chosen to be too
forthright: fi rst, since he was enjoying Alexander’s favor for at least
a signifi cant part of this period but living in democratic Athens when
the local attitude to Alexander was lukewarm at best, a favorable
discussion of Macedonian kingship would have been indelicate to
say the least. But even after a growing rift between Alexander and
Aristotle occurred, surely widened by Callisthenes’ fate, an honest
appraisal of Macedonian customs (if he felt any needed to voice any)
would have been dangerous. As for the Macedonians, any less-thanfulsome
praise of their mores would have marked Aristotle as a traitorous
enemy at a time when their infl uence in some way overshadowed
the entire Hellenic world.
One does not have to go so far as to think that Aristotle was an
important Macedonian political agent throughout his long life, 25 to
believe that Aristotle was well informed as to the nature of the