He reached into a fold of his tunic and brought out a small scroll, which he offered to Arrhidaios, who stared at it a long moment before accepting it. The scroll was closed with a daub of wax impressed with the seal of Macedon. When Arrhidaios broke it open he could see that the parchment was covered with a loose, flowing script that was unmistakably Philip’s.
“I will leave you now,” Aristotle murmured, somehow contriving to sound as if he had just made the decisive point and was savoring his triumph. “Doubtless you are anxious for privacy.”
Yet Arrhidaios had been alone for some time before it occurred to him to read this letter from the king of the Macedonians—for perhaps a quarter of an hour he simply held it in his hand and looked at it, as if the mere fact of its existence were sufficiently astonishing to prevent him from inquiring further. There was even a sense in which he almost dreaded to know what it said.
At last, however, he unrolled the parchment.
“My beloved friend and brother,” Philip began—a promising start, Arrhidaios thought; at least it did not begin like a writ on condemnation—“I wish you to hear from me what I hope you would have understood without being told, that you are at liberty to return to Pella without fear. You will of course have to present yourself before the assembly, since it is not within even a king’s authority to set aside the indictment that stands against you, but everyone knows that you had no hand in Alexandros’s death and I have only to say, ‘This man was falsely accused and enjoys my full confidence in his innocence,’ and the matter will be dropped forever. Have no fear on that point, since your trial will be no more than a form, but the forms of the law must be respected. Once that is done, your property will be returned and you will be free to resume the life to which your rank entitles you. I would make what amends are in my power for the injustice you have suffered.”
Arrhidaios put down the scroll for a moment, glad there was no one present to witness the tears that were welling up in his eyes as he seemed to feel, and as if for the first time, the weight of his eight long years of exile burdening his soul. To resume the life to which your rank entitles you.
He could hardly imagine what that life might be like. He had been little more than a child when his brother Archelaos had roused him from his bed in the small hours of the morning with the astonishing news that they had to flee for their lives. Lord Ptolemy has already spoken of us as rejoicing in the king’s death. It is but a short step now to an accusation of treason and murder, and to be accused from that quarter is to be condemned.
Poor Archelaos, who had died of a fever in Corinth during that first wretched year of exile. Who would make amends to him? Arrhidaios found all at once that his heart writhed with anger against the whole House of the Argeadai, against the living and the dead, who had so despoiled his life.
His eyes fell on the last few lines of Philip’s letter.
“Come home, my brother, for I have need of you. The wolves are circling and I will be easier in my mind for having those about me whom I can trust.”
Trust. What a sentiment—what a sickening jest! In a family that writhed with conspiracies like vipers in a sack, who but Philip could ever have been naive enough to use that word to a kinsman? Among the sons and grandsons of Macedon’s kings, the trusting ones were all dead.
Yet it did not enter Arrhidaios’s mind to doubt the genuineness of Philip’s offer. The only question was how best to make use of it.
Arrhidaios’s mother, Gygaia, had been Amyntas’s first wife, but for many years she had proved barren and the old king had married a Lynkestian princess who bore him a son, Alexandros, followed by a daughter. Then Gygaia, her lord’s favorite but long since despaired of, had unexpectedly borne three sons in four years. Had Alexandros not outlived their father, Archelaos would have been king in his place and the line of succession would have run to Arrhidaios, since, although Menelaos, the eldest of the three, had died before reaching manhood, Archelaos had been a year older than Perdikkas, just as Arrhidaios himself was two months older than Philip. Thus had chance been the arbiter of all their destinies, so that Philip was now king and Arrhidaios was an exile, suffered at last to return to his homeland as a useful and harmless instrument, when there was not a hair’s breadth of difference between their claims by birth.
It had not mattered when they were children, neither able to imagine any life for themselves except that of subject, minor princes fit to fight in the king’s wars and, perhaps, sit at council with the other nobles. Then they had loved each other, never giving a thought to the obscure quarrel that divided their elders. But the Fates had intervened and swept away almost all of the whole of the House of the Argeadai, leaving them to their unequal destinies. Now it did matter.
Now, it seemed to Arrhidaios, the world was no longer quite big enough to hold both him and Philip. It appeared a cramped place, where they must constantly be disagreeably rubbing shoulders, making the presence of each a grievance to the other. Perhaps Philip felt this as well as he, but a king will always have the means to make himself comfortable. Philip, probably, hardly even noticed.
Arrhidaios did not believe his brother to be guilty of condescension—he was not small-minded enough to injure him with that accusation, not even in his private heart—but that the offer proceeded from a genuine affection and was meant to redress an injury that Philip took almost as his own somehow made it worse. It galled Arrhidaios thus to have his birthright returned to him as a favor, to see himself offered up as an example to posterity of Philip’s generosity and sense of justice. What claim, superior to his own, did Philip have to be the dispenser of magnanimity? Who was Philip that he enjoyed the power to pardon or condemn while Arrhidaios, a king’s son as he was, in no way his inferior—was not Arrhidaios the elder, and had not his mother been the great-granddaughter of Alexandros the First, called the “Philhellene,” when Philip’s mother was a mountain barbarian, hardly better than a savage?—was made to feel so utterly at his mercy? It was simply intolerable.
Such was his frame of mind when, in the afternoon of that same day, he received another visitor, this time his friend Demosthenes.
Philip was not the only one who had prospered since the three of them had met on the steps of Aristodemos’s house all those years ago. Demosthenes had flourished in the law courts, accumulating a considerable personal fortune and, more importantly, at least to him, had come to be thought of as one of the prime movers of the Athenian state. He had never lost his air of dissatisfaction, however, and as he sat on a bench in Arrhidaios’s reception room he looked, for all the gold thread in the border of his tunic, as if life had somehow cruelly disappointed him.
“I am informed you are to be congratulated,” Arrhidaios said to him when it looked as if his visitor would never speak, so busy he seemed in counting over his grievances. “Everyone is talking about your prosecution of Androtion. I hear your speeches quoted everywhere.”
“The man is a fool,” Demosthenes answered as if the statement were simultaneously an incontestable fact and the flaw that robbed his victory of its sweetness. “He imagines, after all these years, that we should still follow a policy of hostility toward the Persians—can you credit such a thing? One day I will succeed in driving him from public life.”
“One wonders what you will do then.” When the great statesman raised an eyebrow, perhaps as much an expression of astonished inquiry he was capable of, Arrhidaios smiled and went on. “It is simply that your life seems fueled by your hatreds, my friend. What will become of you when you have vanquished all your enemies?”
Demosthenes acknowledged the justice of the observation with a faint smile of his own.
“Then I will take Athens’s enemies as mine and vanquish them—as a nation we seem to have enough to last me.”
“Well, it is possible you may soon have one less.”
But if Arrhidaios had expected the pleasure of surprising his guest twice he appeared to have been disappointed, for Demosthenes’ features underwent no
t the slightest alteration. For a moment Arrhidaios couldn’t even be sure if he had heard him.
“I take it, then, that you have received some word from your brother the king of Macedon.”
Demosthenes’ voice expressed a certain resigned boredom, as if the world had grown so predictable that he could hardly bear to live in it, but of course someone had told him of Philip’s letter. Arrhidaios was not stupid enough not to have guessed long ago that his servants were paid to inform on him—it simply hadn’t occurred to him that they were paid by Demosthenes.
“Did he invite you to return home? What did he promise you? Whatever it was, you would be a fool to accept it.”
“You are rather too fond of calling everyone a fool today,” Arrhidaios replied, not really offended—not even by the fact that his friend had apparently placed a spy in his household. “Yet I am curious. Why would I be a fool to accept it?”
“Because at the moment Macedon has too many enemies ranged against her, and no powerful friend to keep them at bay. It is obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to look that Philip’s reign will not last out another year. And if you go home, you will most assuredly share his fate. Provided, of course, that he does not have you killed the first hour you are inside his borders.”
“And why would he have me killed?”
At first the only answer was a cruel little laugh.
“My dear Arrhidaios, I should have thought that point would not need to be explained to a member of your family.” Demosthenes shook his head and seemed about to break into another fit of laughter, but suddenly he became quite sober. “What king can bear the presence of a rival, and how can your brother, in his precarious position, afford to leave you alive when your claim to the throne is as good as his? No, no, my friend—if you go home you are as good as dead.”
For the first time since he had received Philip’s letter, Arrhidaios felt a stab of fear in his bowels. Yet it could not be true …
“I have known Philip all my life,” he said, his face a grim mask. “He loves me. And, besides, he is not treacherous. It is simply not in his character to betray me.”
“You remember him from when you were boys together. He is not a boy now. He is a king. And kingship changes a man—it makes him see things differently, which is why Athens has long since put aside her kings. You cannot trust your life to the impressions of childhood. Besides, he has already had your cousin Pausanias put to death.”
Yes—Arrhidaios had heard the story. But certainly that was different. That was …
“Pausanias had committed treason. Already in Alexandros’s time, Pausanias had declared himself the rightful king and had called upon the people to revolt. And besides—”
“And besides, Pausanias was not Philip’s dear brother and friend,” interrupted Demosthenes, his expression one of contemptuous pity. “Yet the kings of Macedon are not famous for honoring the ties of affection. And remember that Philip sits uneasily upon his throne—he is unlikely to be so precise in his understanding of what constitutes treason.”
A servant came into the room with a tray bearing a pitcher of wine and two cups. Guest and host sat across from each other in silence as the slave girl set the tray on the table between them and padded away soundlessly on bare feet. The interruption lasted no longer than half a minute, but, like a break in a storm, it was long enough for Arrhidaios to look about him and survey the wreckage of his life.
He did not know if he trusted Demosthenes or not, but trust, in this instance, was not a precondition for belief and he believed it was possible that Demosthenes, for reasons of his own, might be speaking the truth. In any case, he could see that he had been naive to imagine he could simply return to Macedon and resume his old life.
He did not know if he believed Philip capable of so calculated a treachery as to invite him home and then have him murdered. He did not think so. Yet he recognized that it was in his interest to believe it—he wanted to believe it. He wanted an excuse to avoid submitting himself to the will and fortunes of his brother. He found he had no desire to be Philip’s loyal subject, so perhaps after all Philip had really forfeited any claim on his loyalty. It was almost a relief to suppose that his brother might have put a dagger in some assassin’s hand.
Sometimes it takes no more than half a minute for the pattern of one’s whole life to reveal itself.
“So what would you have me do?” he asked when once more the two men were alone—Demosthenes, he noticed, was watching him from the other side of the table the way a fox watches a chicken. “If I stay in Athens, if I do not accept this invitation, then certainly Philip will number me among his enemies.”
“That he almost certainly does already.” Demosthenes smiled as if at some private triumph. “But I am not recommending that you stay in Athens. I think you should return to Macedon.”
At first Arrhidaios could only stare blankly at his guest, as if he had been posed an insoluble riddle, and then, quite suddenly, he grasped the full significance of the suggestion.
“I wonder, my friend Demosthenes,” he said at last, “if you might be able to stay for dinner.”
* * *
Although still officially a student, Aristotle had ceased attending lectures. He kept his rooms at the academy and made abundant use of its library, pursuing his own inquiries in biology and politics, but there was hardly anyone there under whom he felt it would profit him to study. And this was not simply the vanity of a self-consciously brilliant youth. Plato was old now and took little part in discussions, and the intellectual tendencies among the younger men who were destined to succeed him were not much to Aristotle’s taste. Speusippos, for instance, whom everyone thought likely to fill the master’s place one day, was so in love with geometry that he imagined all philosophical questions could be reduced to mathematics. Art, law, medicine, the management of governments, the nature of society—to men like Speusippos these things were little more than vulgar shadows. No, when Plato was in his burial urn it would be time to go.
But in the meantime there was the library, perhaps the finest in Greece, and Athens itself was an education to anyone who took the trouble to look about him. During a single evening Aristotle might learn more in the houses of the mighty, houses that were always open to bright young men from the academy, than he would in a month of pondering over dusty old scrolls. He did not mind the dusty old scrolls—in fact, he rather liked them—but knowledge of a practical character had its uses too. For one thing, it gave him something to put into his letters to Philip, who, since becoming king, had paid him a regular stipend to be his eyes and ears among his enemies in that city.
There was nothing secret about the arrangement. Everyone knew that he had grown up with the lord of the Macedonians, and Aristotle was just as willing to be bribed for information about Philip as he was to take Philip’s silver for spying on the Athenians. He would never have sold out his friend, but the rulers of Athens were generally fools who imagined they had learned something of significance if they heard that Philip, whose very name none of them had ever heard even half a year since, could quote Homer, was an excellent horseman, and cared nothing for the sexual attentions of little boys. Simply by virtue of the fact that he could describe the new king of Macedon, Aristotle had become a popular guest at the tables where political discussions were fashionable.
Beyond this, one gathered that the great men of the city, opposed as they probably were to monarchy as an instrument of government, took a certain pleasure in the thought that their names might appear in a letter that would be scanned by the eyes of a king. No doubt it raised their sense of their own importance to know they had been mentioned as one of those belonging to such-and-such a party advocating such-and-such a policy. And, besides, it was always remotely possible that this young and unknown king might outlast the first year of his reign. It was not unthinkable that his influence might one day count for something in the obscure power struggles of the northern barbarians—one or two of the more farsighted among Athe
ns’s democratic rulers had even offered Aristotle gifts of no negligible value if he could make their views known in Pella.
But Demosthenes was not among them, and no doubt he would have been happy to decline the honor of being reported as both a frequent visitor in the house of Arrhidaios and an advocate of a more active and hostile policy against the weakness of the Macedonian state. After all, Philip was likely to see some connection between the two.
“There is much talk of some sort of expedition,” Aristotle wrote to him. “I do not know if it will lead to anything—there is always talk of expeditions, but the Athenians do not spend their money willingly—yet I believe you must assume that Arrhidaios is lost to you. It has been a week since I delivered your letter and I have heard nothing from him. If he had any thought of returning home, surely he would have given me some message for you. Not wishing to force him into declaring himself, I have not visited him again, but there is nothing to suggest he contemplates a journey. He still accepts invitations, and he has not notified the owner of his house that he intends to vacate. If Demosthenes’ plots ever come to anything, I think you will find your brother ranged against you.”
Aristotle sealed the letter with a blob of hot wax and put it in a drawer. There was a ship leaving for Methone in the morning, and one of the crew members was a Macedonian who could be trusted. In a week Philip would know that he was betrayed.
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Philip was at dinner when he received word that an envoy had arrived from Lynkos and craved an audience at the king’s earliest convenience. He kept the ambassador waiting for half a month. There was no hurry. Waiting, after all, was every ambassador’s true profession, and relations with his uncle Menelaos, who had signed a treaty of alliance with the Illyrians, could hardly be worse. Besides, Philip had already guessed what the man would have to say to him.
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