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to use it. Dark charges were flung at him in the Assembly: it was alleged that more than twenty years earlier, he had informed on wealthy citizens of Olynthus and had thus given Philip a pretext to seize their estates. An Athenian named Himeraeus, a fierce anti-Macedonian, took it upon himself to ascend the Acropolis, wrench up the stone tablet recording the city’s gratitude to Aristotle, and hurl it down onto the rocks below. In Delphi, meanwhile, the stone inscribed with praises for Aristotle and Callisthenes was similarly destroyed, broken up and tossed down the well from which it was eventually recovered.

Aristotle wrote to Antipater about the annulment of his Delphic honors, and, by purest chance, a quotation from that letter survives. “I don’t care too much, but I don’t not care,” Aristotle told his oldest friend. It is the candid confession of a thoughtful man, near the end of life, watching his reputation get systematically destroyed.

One other quotation survives from Aristotle’s letters to Antipater, also (to judge by the content) from the period following Alexander’s death. “It’s dangerous for an immigrant to stay in Athens,” Aristotle wrote.

4. HYPERIDES (ATHENS, JULY 323 B.C.)

But there were others in Athens, among them the fiery rhetorician Hyperides, in whose eyes Alexander could not have picked a better time to die. Athens was ready for war as never before. Better yet, from Hyperides’ perspective, the leadership of the city had recently changed, leaving him the sole head of the anti-Macedonian cause. His former partner Demosthenes had been drummed out months before, denounced by Hyperides himself at a sensational corruption trial. After decades of standing in Demosthenes’ shadow, Hyperides would finally get to call the shots—and those shots would be aimed right at the heart of Macedon.

Events seemed to have come together as if guided by gods who were favoring the city’s fortunes. Both resources and opportunity for revolt had arrived at just the same moment, without Athens doing anything to summon them. To understand how this happened, to see the moment of Alexander’s death as Hyperides saw it, requires us to look back about two years from July 323. The chain of events that seemed to promise total victory for Athens began then, when Alexander, forced to halt by the mutiny of his troops, had begun his long trek back from the far-off land of India.

Harpalus Arrives in Athens

By invading India, Alexander seemed to many to have left the known world behind, and during his absence some of his satraps acted as though he would not return. Alexander had given them small armies, but many began to hire Greek mercenaries as well, an obvious effort to build power. They extorted money from their subjects to pay for these troops, or skimmed off cash from imperial treasuries. Alexander returned from India very displeased by what he found. He ordered all satraps to release their mercenaries and took steps to punish abuses. Those who had committed the worst offenses fled before Alexander’s agents arrived, and among these was one who was in especially grave trouble, an old and close friend of Alexander’s, a highborn Macedonian named Harpalus.

Harpalus is a unique figure in Alexander’s inner circle, no soldier but a hedonist, a sensualist, and a lover of women. Disabled from birth, he was useless on the battlefield but nonetheless stood high in Alexander’s affections. Even after Harpalus stole imperial funds and ran away from the Asian campaign, in its early stages, Alexander forgave his old friend, sent envoys to cajole him back to Asia, and put him in charge of the empire’s largest treasury, in Babylon. Here, in a city famous for loose morals and sensual delights, Harpalus lost his bearings. He spent wildly on his own pleasures and on gifts for imported Greek courtesans. When Alexander returned from the East, Harpalus was terrified. Once before he had obtained pardon, but this time escape was his only hope.

Because he had sent them grain during a shortage years before, Harpalus had received honorary citizenship from