to Aristotle, that he owed the inclination he had,
not to the theory only, but also to the practice of the art of medicine.
For when any of his friends were sick, he would often prescribe for 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.

While Philip went on his expedition against the Byzantines, he left
Alexander, then sixteen years old, his lieutenant in Macedonia,
committing the charge of his seal to him; who, not to sit idle, reduced
the rebellious Maedi, and having taken their chief town by storm, drove
out the barbarous inhabitants, and planting a colony of several nations
in their room, called the place after his own name, Alexandropolis. At
the battle of Chaeronea, which his father fought against the Greeks,
he is said to have been the first man that charged the Thebans' sacred
band. And even in my remembrance, there stood an old oak near the river
Cephisus, which people called Alexander's oak, because his tent was
pitched under it. And not far off are to be seen the graves of the
Macedonians who fell in that battle. This early bravery made Philip so
fond of him, that nothing pleased him more than to hear his subjects
call himself their general and Alexander their king.

But later on, through an unfortunate marriage of Philip with Cleopatra,
the niece of Attalus, an estrangement grew up between them. And not long
after the brother of Alexander, Pausanias, having had an insult done to
him at the instance of Attalus and Cleopatra, when he found he could
get no reparation for his disgrace at Philip's hands, watched his
opportunity and murdered him.

Alexander was but twenty years old when his father was murdered, and
succeeded to a kingdom beset on all sides with great dangers, and
rancorous enemies. Hearing the Thebans were in revolt, and the Athenians
in c