Book 5
1.5
But when Callisthenes talked with too much freedom to the king and disregarded his own advice, Aristotle is said to have rebuked him by citing the lineHom. Il. xviii. 95.: Short-lived, I ween, wilt thou be, my child, by what thou sayest. And so indeed it fell out. For he, being suspected of complicity in the plot of Hermolaus against the life of Alexander, was confined in an iron cage and carried about until he became infested with vermin through lack of proper attention; and finally he was thrown to a lion and so met his end.
1.5
To return to Aristotle: he came to Athens, was head of his school for thirteen years, and then withdrew to Chalcis because he was indicted for impiety by Eurymedon the hierophant, or, according to FavorinusAs in ii. 78, iii. 19 and v. 77, Favorinus is curious to state the names of the accusers of philosophers put upon trial. in his Miscellaneous History, by Demophilus, the ground of the charge being the hymn he composed to the aforesaid Hermias,
1.6
as well as the following inscription for his statue at DelphiAnth. Plan. iii. 48.: This man in violation of the hallowed law of the immortals was unrighteously slain by the king of the bow-bearing Persians, who overcame him, not openly with a spear in murderous combat, but by treachery with the aid of one in whom he trusted.
1.6
At Chalcis he died, according to Eumelus in the fifth book of his Histories, by drinking aconite, at the age of seventy. The same authority makes him thirty years old when he came to Plato; but here he is mistaken. For Aristotle lived to be sixty-three, and he was seventeen when he became Plato’s pupil.
1.6
The hymn in question runs as follows:
