Ghost on the Throne - James S. Romm [43]
6. ARISTOTLE (ATHENS, AUTUMN 323 B.C.)
While Athens was bustling with mobilization for war, a quieter scene was taking place in the Lyceum outside the city’s east gate. Aristotle was making ready to leave.
The wolf pack of Athenian public life, those who advanced or got rich from denouncing others, had been drawing ever-tighter circles around him. Now that Alexander was dead, they were snarling and baying for his blood. They hated Aristotle for his ties to old man Antipater and the Macedonian elite, ties recently revealed by the fact that Nicanor, Aristotle’s adopted son, had been chosen to read out the Exiles’ Decree. But they chose to attack the philosopher on private and religious, not political, grounds. It was Aristotle’s devotion to his father-in-law, Hermias, the petty king tortured and killed by the Persians almost twenty years earlier, that gave his enemies the means to blacken his name.
Hermias was easily demonized by Athenian gossip. He was rumored (perhaps falsely) to be a barbarian and a eunuch, and a former slave, yet he had philosophic ambitions and was friends with many of Plato’s former students. He thus conjured up stereotypes of both the effeminate Asian and the effete, high-minded intellectual, a grotesque combination. Above all, he had taken the Macedonian side when war loomed between Philip and the Persians. Aristotle’s marriage to this man’s daughter, Pythias—long dead, but called to mind by their daughter, also named Pythias—could be exploited as proof of moral baseness and philo-Macedonian tendencies.
Aristotle had set up a cenotaph for Hermias in Delphi, inscribed with verses of his own composition. A cruel parodist by the name of Theocritus, an inveterate Macedonian hater, now came forward with a mock epitaph in the same meter:
For Hermias the eunuch, the slave of Eubulus,
Empty-headed Aristotle built this empty tomb.
He honored the lawless ways of the belly, and so moved his home
From the Academy to rivers running with filth.
The second two lines ostensibly describe Hermias but are framed ambiguously so as to refer to Aristotle as well. Theocritus knew a good smear opportunity when he saw one. He neatly grafted onto Aristotle—hardly intemperate in his personal habits—a caricature of Hermias as a corpulent, depraved barbarian.
Aristotle’s other tribute to Hermias, a fourteen-line poem celebrating the courage of his dead father-in-law, brought even more trouble down on the philosopher’s head. The poem took the form of a hymn addressed to Virtue, personified as a goddess, the shining ideal for which Hermias, according to the final two lines, had died. Like all such hymns, the poem was set to music, and Aristotle saw that it was regularly performed, on some anniversary perhaps, by students at his philosophic school. But such a ritual was easily distorted by enemies into a weird, cultic rite of worship. One such attacker, a religious official named Eurymedon, used the poem to indict Aristotle for impiety, claiming it showed a belief in new gods. The charge was eerily similar to the one the Athenians had used to indict Socrates, and put him to death, nearly eight decades earlier.
Aristotle wrote a defense speech for his trial—the first Greek known to have done so, rather than relying on a hired speechwriter—but in the end chose not to find out whether Athenian juries were more enlightened than in the days of Socrates. Writing to his friend Antipater that he “would not let the Athenians sin twice against philosophy,” he gathered up his family and left. He headed for an estate on the island of Euboea that had once belonged to his mother. It was a place he had seldom if ever seen, but the city that had been his childhood home, Stagira, had been destroyed long before, a casualty of Macedon’s imperial ambitions. Why he did not go to Macedonia itself, where Antipater would