seek out a kingdom 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 endeavored
to persuade rather than to command or force him to any thing; 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
exercises, 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. To tell 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 with that sort of learning.

Doubtless also it was