Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.4, 1865).djvu/236

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ALEXANDER.

was only to get his countrymen recalled from banishment, and to rebuild and repeople his native town.^[1] ²Besides the envy which his great reputation raised, he also, by his own deportment, gave those who wished him ill, opportunity to do him mischief. For when he was invited to public entertainments, he would most times refuse to come, or if he were present at any, he put a constraint upon the company by his austerity and silence, which seemed to intimate his disapproval of what he saw. So that Alexander himself said in application to him,

That vain pretence to wisdom I detest,
Where a man's blind to his own interest.^[2]

³Being with many more invited to sup with the king, he was called upon when the cup came to him, to make an oration extempore in praise of the Macedonians; and he did it with such a flow of eloquence, that all who heard it rose from their seats to clap and applaud him, and threw their garland upon him; only Alexander told him out of Euripides,

I wonder not that you have spoke so well,
'Tis easy on good subjects to excel.

↑ Olynthus, which Philip had destroyed, and for which Callisthenes hoped to obtain from Alexander the same favor which Philip showed for Aristotle's sake to Stagira.
↑ A fragment from a lost play of Euripides. In the original it is, "I hate the sophist who is not sophos for himself." The word sophist, however, is far from expressing to us the original Greek meaning. Knowledge that does not know its own good, or cleverness that is not clever for itself, would be phrases more nearly equivalent. Sophistes, which at first meant one who professed superior knowledge and cleverness, had passed by this time into the common name for lecturers and teachers in logic and (less properly) in rhetoric. It was used, much as our word doctor is for physician, as the familiar and half-disparaging term for the higher class of reasoners rather than arguers, the philosophers, the moralists, who at this time exercised among the Greeks, as may be seen just above in the story of Clitus, a sort of clerical function.

[1] Olynthus, which Philip had destroyed, and for which Callisthenes hoped to obtain from Alexander the same favor which Philip showed for Aristotle's sake to Stagira.

[2] A fragment from a lost play of Euripides. In the original it is, "I hate the sophist who is not sophos for himself." The word sophist, however, is far from expressing to us the original Greek meaning. Knowledge that does not know its own good, or cleverness that is not clever for itself, would be phrases more nearly equivalent. Sophistes, which at first meant one who professed superior knowledge and cleverness, had passed by this time into the common name for lecturers and teachers in logic and (less properly) in rhetoric. It was used, much as our word doctor is for physician, as the familiar and half-disparaging term for the higher class of reasoners rather than arguers, the philosophers, the moralists, who at this time exercised among the Greeks, as may be seen just above in the story of Clitus, a sort of clerical function.

[1]

[2]