In 336 Philip was murdered. Alexander became king. He began by reducing Thebes, second among Greece’s cities, to rubble. In a letter Aristotle counsels him to be a leader to the Greeks and to look after them as if they were ‘friends or relatives’, but Alexander sold Thebes’ citizens into slavery. He later crucified all of Gaza’s men. That was a bit more Aristotelian: in the same letter he tells Alexander to be a despot to barbarians and to ‘treat them as if they were beasts or plants’. As the young general rampaged across the known world, he carried with him a copy of the Iliad in Aristotle’s
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