Alexander the Great as a Philosopher-King By Donald Joseph Broussard King Alexander III of Macedon, besides being a general par excellence, was also a philosopher. His early life was like that of his hero Achilleus; his education consisted both of lessons from one of the time’s greatest philosophers as well as “uneducated” barbarians. Alexander became king on the death of his father, Philip II of Macedon, in 336 B.C. He was prepared for this awesome responsibility partly because Aristotle, himself a Macedonian and student of Plato, was secured as teacher to tutor prince Alexander; the fourteen-year-old prince probably owed his desire to pursue the unknown geographic areas of his time to Aristotle (Bosworth 1988, 21). In youth, Alexander learned passion from his mother, Olympias, a “devotee of the orgiastic cults of Dionysus” (Hamilton 1974, p 29). His father, Philip II, “has sometimes been contrasted with Olympias as supplying the Apolline or rational aspect of Alexander’s character” (Hamilton 30). The prince’s reading consisted of Euripides, who fled to the court of Archelaus I of Macedon in 406 B.C. and whose plays he knew by heart (Bosworth 26). Also standard reading was Homer, from which Alexander styled himself after Achilleus, and his best friend, Hephaestion, as Patroclus (Lipsius 1974, 41). Alexander would become familiar with the historian Philistus and the dithyrambic poets Telestus and Philoxenus (Bosworth 20). Alexander saw himself as destined to topple the mighty Persian empire, which had, under Xerxes I, antagonized Greece 150 years before (Benoist-Mechin, 1966, 28). It was conventional Greek thought to seek revenge; proof of this is the traditional maxim lex talionis – law of retaliation (Benoist-Mechin 40) in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Greece remembered the invasion in 480 B.C. by Xerxes (ibid 22); this led to demands of retribution.