Alexander | 
Aristotle | 
Pericles | 
Plato | 
Socrates | 
Solon |
Alexander the Great (356-332 B.C.E.)
Alexander the Great was born at Pella, Macedonia in 356 B.C.E. His father was King Phillip II and his mother was Olympias, a deeply spiritual woman who taught her son that he was a descendant of Achilles and Hercules. From the earliest age, then, Alexander was conditioned for conquest and kingly glory. He, thus, became focused on being a great ruler.
At the age of thirteen, Alexander was tutored by the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle for several years. Under Aristotle’s tutorship he gained an interest in philosophy, medicine and science. However, Aristotle’s concept of small city-state government would not have gone down well with the young prince who was bent on world domination. Aristotle did, however, cultivate Alexander’s interest in reading and learning.
At the age 16, Alexander proved himself to be an incredible military commander. In his first battle against the Persians at the Granicus River, he proved his skills. Alexander was called to Macedonia to put down a Thracian rebellion while his father was away. Distinguishing himself immediately, Alexander quelled the rebellion, stormed the rebel’s stronghold and renamed it Alexandroupolis, after himself.
In 336 B.C.E. Phillip was assassinated and 20 year old Alexander took the throne of Macedonia. Within two years he had embarked on his campaign of conquest. Although Alexander may have resented his father because he neglected his mother, Olypias, for another wife, he had no part in his father’s murder.
Alexander’s army consisted of 30,000 foot soldiers and 5,000 cavalreymen. His army was small but efficient. Along with his army he took engineers, surveyors, architects, scientists, and even historians. Alexander is greatly known for conquering the Persians even though is army was out numbered 13 to 1. He humiliated the Persians by burning their great palace at Xerxes. By the third encounter with the Persians, Alexander had the entire Persian domain under his control.
After an eight year campaign Alexander was now ruler of a massive empire. He was keen to push further west but his men were weary and intent on returning to their families. Reluctantly he complied with their wishes. Alexander was a caring military leader. He would visit his men after the battle, examining their wounds and praising them for their valiant efforts. He would also arrange extravagant funerals for the fallen. He would arrange games and contests for his men. The affection for their leader was what galvanized his troops.
Returning to Babylon Alexander assumed the role he had coveted for so long – The great Conqeuror. Eventually, however, he gave way to a licentious lifestyle of excessive drinking. He also gave way to fits of rage and paranoid suspicion. One night he even murdered his closest associate, Clitus, in a fit of rage. This act was to haunt for the remainder of his short life. In June, 332 B.C.E Alexander fell victim to malarial fever. He never recovered. The man who no man could defeat died on June 13, 323 B.C.E. He was just 32 years and 8 months old.
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE. in Stagirus, a Greek colony and seaport on the coast of Thrace. His father Nichomachus was court physician to King Amyntas of Macedonia, and from this began Aristotle's long association with the Macedonian Court, which considerably influenced his life. While he was still a boy his father died. Aristotle was a philosopher, politician, botanist, and zoologist.
At the age 17 his guardian, Proxenus, sent him to Athens, the intellectual center of the world, to complete his education. He joined the Academy and studied under Plato. With Plato and the Academy he began to lecture on his own account, especially on the subject of rhetoric. When Plato died in 347 B.C., the pre-eminent ability that Aristotle carried, designated him to succeed to the leadership of the Academy. But his divergence from Plato's teaching was too great to make this possible, and Plato's nephew, Speusippus, was chosen instead. The invitation of his friend Hermeas, ruler of Atarneus and Assos in Mysia, Arstotle left for his court. He stayed there for three years, and during his stay he married Pythias, the niece of the King. Later in life he was married a second time to a woman named Herpyllis, who bore him a son, Nichomachus. At the end of the three years Hermeas was over taken by Persians, and Aristotle went to Mytilene. Philip of Macedonia, invited Arstotle to come and tutor his 13 year old son Alexander, and he did this for the next five years. There in Macedonia, Arstotle received high honor by Philip and Alexander.
After the death of Philip II, Arstotle’s student, Alexander succeeded to kingship, leaving Arstotle’s work being finished, leaving him to return to Athens in 335B.C. In Athens he founded a school, the Lyceum. Here he organized and conducted research on many subjects, and built the first great library of antiquity. The death of Alexander in 325 anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens, caused Aristotle to retire to Chalcis where he died on the Aegean island of Euboea, now Ewoia in 322 B.C.
Aristotle's lectures were collected into nearly 150 volumes and represent almost a one-man encyclopedia of the knowledge of the times, much of it representing the original thought and observation of Aristotle himself. Nor was it confined entirely to science, for Aristotle dealt with politics, literary criticism, and ethics. Altogether, of the volumes attributed to him, some fifty have survived. Many of his manuscripts were found in a pit in Asia Minor about 80 B.C. by men in the army of the Roman general Sulla. They were then brought to Rome and recopied.
Aristotle's most successful scientific writings were those on biology. He was a careful and meticulous observer who fascinated by the task of classifying animal species and arranging them into hierarchies. He dealt with over five hundred animal species in this way and dissected nearly fifty of them. His mode of classification was reasonable and, in some cases, strikingly modern. He was particularly interested in sea life and observed that the dolphin brought forth its young alive and nourished the fetus by means of a special organ called a placenta. No fish did this, but all mammals did, so Aristotle classed the dolphin with the beasts of the field rather than with the fish of the sea. His successors did not follow his lead, however, and it took two thousand years for biologists to catch up to Aristotle in this respect.
His formation of a hierarchy of living things led him irresistibly toward the idea that animals represented a chain of progressive change, a sort of evolution. Other Greek philosophers groped similarly in this direction. However, barring any knowledge as to the physical mechanism whereby evolutionary changes could be brought about, such theories invariably became mystical. A rational theory of evolution had to await Darwin, 2200 years after the time of Aristotle
Pericles was born into an aristocratic family. He was the most accomplished statesman of Ancient Greece. His father was that Xanthippus who won the victory over the Persians at Mycale, 479 B.C., and his mother Agariste, the niece of the great Athenian reformer, Clisthenes. Pericles received an elaborate education, but of all his teachers, the one he most reverenced, and from whose instructions he derived most benefit, was the philosopher Anaxagoras.
Pericles was a statesman and a general of Athens. He was determined to complete democratic reforms, giving full political power to the general assembly. He instituted for public service and jury duty. He is also famous for the rebuilding of the Acropolis.
Pericles was conspicuous all through his career for the singular dignity of his manners, the "Olympian" thunder of his eloquence, his sagacity, probity and profound Athenian patriotism. When he entered on public life, Aristides had only recently died, Themistocles was an exile, and Cimon was fighting the battles of his country abroad. Although the family to which he belonged was good, it did not rank among the first in point of either wealth or influence, yet so transcendent were the abilities of Pericles, that he rapidly rose to the highest power in the state, as the leader of the dominant democracy. In 465 B.C., through the agency of his follower, Ephialtes, he struck a great blow at the oligarchy, by causing a decree to be passed which deprived the Areopagas of its most important political powers. It is unnecessary to give a detailed account of all that he did to make his native city the most glorious in the ancient world. Greek architeture and sculpture under his patronage reached perfetion. To Pericles Athens owed the Parthenon, the Propylae, the Odeum and numberless other public and sacred edifices; he also liberally encouraged music and the drama, and, during his rule, industry and commerce were in so flourishing a condition, that prosperity was universal in Attica.
At length in 431 B.C., the long foreseen and inevitable Peloponnesslan war broke out between Athens and Sparta. With the circumstances that led to it we have not here to do, but as it terminated most disastrously for Athens, it is but right to say that Pericles was not to blame for the result. Had the policy that he recommended been pursued, one can scarcely doubt that Athens, with her immense resources, would have been the victor, and not the vanquished, in the struggle. Pericles himself died in the autumn of 429 B.C., after a lingering sickness.
The son of wealthy and influential Athenian parents, Plato began his philosophical career as a student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens where Aristotle studied. Plato was raised in a moderately well-to-do aristocratic family. His father was named Ariston, and his mother Perictione. Plato’s given name was Ariistocles, whereas his wrestling coach, Ariston of Argos, marked him with the nickname Platon, meaning broad on the account of his robust figure. Diogenes mentions alternative accounts that Plato derived his name from the breadth (platutes) of his eloquence, or else because he was very wide (platus) across the forehead. According to Dicaerchus, Plato wrestled at the Isthmian games.
Plato’s learning and ability was that the ancient Greeks declared him to be the son of Apollo and told how, in his infancy, bees had settled on his lips and prophecy of the honeyed words which were to flow from them, from then on. Plato was an immensely influential ancient Greek Philosopher. Plato lectured extensively at the Academy, and wrote on many philosophical issues, dealing especially in politics, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. The most important writings of Plato are his dialogues, although a handful of epigrams also survived, and some letters have come down to us under his name.
Plato’s dialogues of Plato were lively, often humorous or ironic, full of memorable characters and humble details. It is generally agreed that Plato is the most enjoyable of philosophers to read. Plato was also deeply influenced by a number of prior philosophers, including: the Pythagoreans, whose notions of numerical harmony have clear echoes in Plato's notion of the Forms; Anazagoras, who taught Socrates and who held that the mind, or reason, pervades everything; and Parmenides, who argued for the unity of all things and may have influenced Plato's concept of the soul.
Socrates was one of the most famous philosophers of ancient times. He was the son of the statuary Sophroniscus and of the midwife Phaenarete. As a youth he received the customary instruction in gymnastics and music; and in after years he made himself acquainted with geometry and astronomy and studied the methods and the doctrines of the leaders of Greek thought and culture. He began life as a sculptor. But he soon abandoned art and gave himself to what may best be called education, conceiving that he had a divine commission, witnessed by oracles, dreams and signs, not indeed to teach any positive doctrine, but to convict men of ignorance mistaking itself for knowledge, and by doing so to promote their intellectual and moral improvement.
Socrates presence was mean and his countenance grotesque. Short of stature, thick necked and somewhat obese, with prominent eyes, with nose upturned and nostrils outspread, with large mouth and coarse lips. He seemed embodiment of sensuality and even stupidity. Inwardly he was as his friends knew, “so pious that he did nothing without taking counsel of the gods, so just that he never did an injury to any man, whilst he was the benefactor of his associates, so temperate that he never preferred pleasure to right, so wise that in judging of good and evil he was never at fault - in a word, the best and the happiest of men.” “His self-control was absolute; his powers of endurance were unfailing; he had so schooled himself to moderation that his scanty means satisfied all his wants.” “To want nothing,” he said himself, “is divine; to want as little as possible is the nearest possible approach to the divine life “; and accordingly he practiced temperance and self-denial to a degree which some thought ostentatious and affected.
Socrates was a true patriot. Deeply sensible of his debt to the city in which he had been born and bred, he thought that in giving his life to the teaching of sounder views in regard to ethical and political subjects he made no more than an imperfect return; and, when in the exercise of constitutional authority that city brought him to trial and threatened him with death, it was not so much his local attachment, strong though that sentiment was, as rather his sense of duty, which forbade him to retire into exile before the trial began, to acquiesce in a sentence of banishment when the verdict had been given against, him, and to accept the opportunity of escape, which was offered him during his imprisonment. Yet his patriotism had none of the narrowness which was characteristic of the patriotism of his Greek contemporaries. His generous benevolence and unaffected philanthropy taught him to overstep the limits of the Athenian demus and the Hellenic race, and to regard himself as a “citizen of the world.”
Socrates' frequent references to his “divine sign” were, says Xenophon, the origin of the charge of “introducing new divinities” brought against him by his accusers, and in early Christian times, amongst Neoplatonic philosophers and fathers of the church, gave rise to the notion that he supposed himself to be attended by a “genius” or “daemon.” The very precise testimony of Xenophon and Plato shows plainly that Socrates did not regard his “customary sign “ either as a divinity or, as a genius. According to Xenophon, the sign was a warning, either to do or not to do, which it would be folly to neglect, not superseding ordinary prudence, but dealing with those uncertainties in respect of which other men found guidance in oracles and tokens; Socrates believed in it profoundly, and never disobeyed, it, According to Plato, the sign was a” voice “ which warned Socrates to refrain from some act which he contemplated; he heard it frequently and on the most trifling occasions; the phenomenon dated from his early years, and was, so far as he knew, peculiar to himself. These statements have been variously interpreted.
Solon was a famous Athenian lawmaker and lyric poet. He was the son of Execestides. He worked as a merchant in the export-import trade, and he considered himself relatively poor. He did not worship money, as is evident from many of his poems.
The man whose riches satisfy his greed Is not more rich for all those heaps and hoards Than some poor man who has enough to feed And clothe his corpse with such as God affords. I have no use for men who steal and cheat; The fruit of evil poisons those who eat. Some wicked men are rich, some good men poor, But I would rather trust in what’s secure; Our virtue sticks with us and makes us strong, But money changes owners all day long
Poetry was for Solon a way to entertain himself, and he also used poetry to give his ideas easy access to the minds of the Athenians.
Solon was appointed to be the lawgiver. He is responsible for several measures: for example, he decreed that no Athenian would be sold into slavery and that magistracies were open to all rich people (diminishing the power of the aristocrats). He also took economic measures and founded the Heliaia, the people's law court. The result was that people for the first time began to define themselves as Athenians. After Solon had written these laws, he left Athens for some time. He is said to have visited Egypt and king Croesus of Lydia. Later, he returned home, where he was forced to see how Athens got its tyrant: Pisistratus. Solon is reckoned among the Seven sages. After the measures of Solon, factional struggle was destabilizing Athens. Pisistratus was accepted as tyrant because he promised law and order. His tyranny, which lasted from 546 until his death, was the first period of Athenian glory. He broke the power of the aristocracy, strengthened the city institutions, improved the economy, built temples, and stimulated cultural life. When he died in 527, he was succeeded by his son Hippias, whose reign was resented by many people.
Image References:
1. Alexander the Great
2. Aristotle
3. Pericles
4. Plato
5. Socrates
6. Solon
