Alexander   

into acclamations of applause; and his father shedding tears, it is
said, for joy, kissed him as he came down from his horse, and in his
transport said, "O my son, look thee out a kingdom equal to and worthy
of thyself, for Macedonia is too little for thee."
After this, considering him to be of a temper easy to be led to
his duty by reason, but by no means to be compelled, he always
endeavoured to persuade rather than to command or force him to
anything; and now looking upon the instruction and tuition of his
youth to be of greater difficulty and importance than to be wholly
trusted to the ordinary masters in music and poetry, and the common
school subjects, and to require, as Sophocles says-

"The bridle and the rudder too,"

he sent for Aristotle, the most learned and most celebrated
philosopher of his time, and rewarded him with a munificence
proportionable to and becoming the care he took to instruct his son.
For he repeopled his native city Stagira, which he had caused to be
demolished a little before, and restored all the citizens, who were in
exile or slavery, to their habitations. As a place for the pursuit
of their studies and exercise, he assigned the temple of the Nymphs,
near Mieza, where, to this very day, they show you Aristotle's stone
seats, and the shady walks which he was wont to frequent. It would
appear that Alexander received from him not only his doctrines of
Morals and of Politics, but also something of those more abstruse
and profound theories which these philosophers, by the very names they
gave them, professed to reserve for oral communication to the
initiated, and did not allow many to become acquainted with. For
when he was in Asia, and heard Aristotle had published some
treatises of that kind, he wrote to him, using very plain language
to him in behalf of philosophy, the following letter. "Alexander to
Aristotle, greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of
oral doctrine; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those
things which we have been particularly instructed in be laid open to
all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the
knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and
dominion. Farewell." And Aristotle, soothing this passion for
pre-eminence, speaks, in his excuse for himself, of these doctrines as
in fact both published and not published: as indeed, to say the truth,
his books on metaphysics are written in a style which makes them
useless for ordinary teaching, and instructive only, in the way of
memoranda, for those who have been already conversant in that sort
of learning.
Doubtless also it was to Aristotle that he owed the inclination he
had, not to the theory only, but likewise to the practice of the art
of medicine. For when any of his friends were sick, he would often
prescribe them their course of diet, and medicines proper to their
disease, as we may find in his epistles. He was naturally a great
lover of all kinds of learning and reading; and Onesicritus informs us
that he constantly laid Homer's Iliads, according to the copy
corrected by Aristotle, called the casket copy, with his dagger
under his pillow, declaring that he esteemed it a perfect portable
treasure of all military virtue and knowledge. When he was in the
upper Asia, being destitute of other books, he ordered Harpalus to
send him some; who furnished him with Philistus's History, a great
many of the plays of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, and some
dithyrambic odes, composed by Telestes and Philoxenus. For a while
he loved and cherished Aristotle no less, as he was wont to say
himself, than if he had been his father, giving this reason for it,
that as he had received life from the one, so the other had taught him
to live well. But afterwards, upon some mistrust of him, yet not so
great as to make him do him any hurt, his familiarity and friendly
kindness to him abated so much of its former force and
affectionateness, as to make it evident he was alienated from him.