PLINY’S STORY IS charming. Alexander, no mere kohl-eyed sensualist or megalomaniacal conqueror, loves plants and animals too, and, recalling his old tutor’s interests, affectionately lays the biological booty of an empire at his feet. Writing a century or two later, Athenaeus says that Alexander gave Aristotle 800 talents for his research, and so turns the King into a Macedonian National Science Foundation. There is a whiff of romance about these tales. Eight hundred talents was several times Macedon’s annual GDP; and in his biological works Aristotle says nothing about subsidies, a zoo nor
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